Well in my drug-induced down time I’ve been fiddling with my Gentoo server some more… I added Wake-on-Lan support to the kernel so that I can power the system up from upstairs or across the country. It’s nice because I don’t tend to leave it on all the time and even when I’m home, it’s a pain to hit the power button since I keep the system squirreled away in a cabinet.

In addition however, I also added OpenVPN support to the server. I punched a hole in the firewall and set up Ethernet bridging in order to give me full access to the entire network when I’m away from home. It works amazingly well. It wasn’t quick to set up but it was kind of fun. Basically you create an Ethernet bridge between a “real” network adapter and the virtual OpenVPN adapter and assign that bridge the IP address of the old “real” network adapter. I like.