Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

I have noticed a post called \”Two internet connections: how is better\” I posted two years ago in the \”This week last year\” box on the right of my blog. That time I did two firewall and so on (as explained in the that post), but now everything has changed and I am glad.

First of all I got a server with 3 ethernet cards and put all the ends into it (two WANs and one LAN). Then I setup load balancer and line failover which works really great. All of the above was done with pfSense firewall (which I really love and have installed at many places, including three places I maintain, plus my computer supplier office as well as two offices of Kean factory). pfSense works just great and has a lot of functionality free of charge :)

Currently I have tested all basic things like DNS forwarder, DHCP, filtering and so on, plus IPSec (static-to-static, static-to-mobile_client), PPTP, Load Balancer,  Traffic Shaper, Failover and ntop module.

Having a lot of trips (around 1000km/week), low budget and nice people around, I got myself a better car :). This time I got Subaru 16GL (1986 year built) in almost perfect condition with low overall trip (~80000km).

Good things about this car:

• Very good condition
  • Engine works like new, though I will do full inspection and maybe some renovations just make it completely perfect
  • Saloon in perfect condition
  • All buttons and whatever is inside works perfectly well
  • Paint is like brand new
• Low fuel consumption. It needs less fuel than any of the cars I used before
• Fully equipped with fancy stuff like
  • Central door lock
  • Electrical windows control
  • Electrical mirrors control
• Very comfortable seats (which is very important if you have to drive smthing like 200km/day)
• I got it completely free (thanks to Alexey)
• Quite cheap to fix if any problems (as people tell on the web)
• Very reliable (again as people tell on the web)

So now only few things I wanna do about this car:

• Give it for complete service/inspection in order to find out what needs to be changed (if anything) and make it perfect
• Change audio (I have this, just need to put it in)

Now just some interesting points about this car:

• Spare wheel/tire is under hood in the engine room and don\’t ask how they do it :)
• Handbrake blocks front wheels instead of rare ones (important to know before trying to do a police turn involving handbrake)
• It is not a racing car and does not have fast acceleration, though can go pretty fast on highways
• Very nice noise isolation inside, which will dramatically improve the quality of the sound :)
• Engine is 6 cylinders horizontally 3 on each side going outwards. Very balanced one.

I don\’t have my own photos of the car yet (coming very soon) , so for the time being here is how it looks like (found on images.google.com), but red color:

that\’s it for now

Some time ago I used to have LinkedIn account which I have later deleted (don\’t ask me why). Yesterday I recreated it and this time it will stay there :), so if you are there as well, feel free to get in touch (http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmamchenkov/).