I went with the Western Digital My Book Live 3 TB Home Network Attached Storage Drive via Amazon.  The unit supports Gigabit networking, file sharing via CIFS and NFS, and media sharing via TWonky.  The current version does NOT allow the unit to be joined as a member of a windows domain, and the NFS side is utilitarian.

It does work brilliantly as a media share point and quite acceptably as a home storage device for windows and *nix devices.  The current (12JUL2011) price of $188.68 for 2.7 usable terabytes across a 1Gb/Sec network is a reasonable price for a very useful tool.

Time to update!

So, a new TV.
Based on space restrictions (an existing AV cabinet), I had to keep overall width under 36″. Went with the VIZIO E370VA.

Hmm.  HD.  Time to upgrade the receiver as well, so I went with the Onkyo TX-NR509 since we’re only set up for 5.1 surround sound (architectural) but do have networking.

Oh yes, and a source of HD.  Upgrade the DirecTV account (and DVR) to HD versions.

Set up was reasonably straightforward. Hardest part was re-cabling and helping the DirecTV installer get the newer bigger dish installed. Programming the remote (Onkyo’s) for all three devices was also a minor chore, but only a minor one.

The cool geeky bit is that there’s an Android App for this as well.  As I write this I’m playing Donald Fagan’s Nightfly album wirelessly from my Droid through the receiver and surround speakers.

The next challenge will be getting the whole MP3 library on network storage accessible from the receiver across the network.

Here are direct links to the hardware discussed:

How I got it all working can be found beneath the fold…

Last things first.  The Cradlepoint MBR1200 does not differentiate between Phase 1 and Phase 2 authentication.  Thus it will use whatever set of protocols are selected for both, whereas the Netscreen 5gt does allow for different protocols between Phase 1 and Phase 2, which proved to be a bit of an issue in getting this configuration to work.

Network Details

User1 (Office Side)

Internet Provider: AT&T

Provider Hardware: DSL Modem

IP 66.126.***.130

Office Hardware: Router/Gateway Netscreen 5gt (replacing old Linksys router)

Internal Network: 192.168.144.0/24

User2 (Testbed)

Internet Provider: DSL Extreme

IP 66.159.***.151/24 (255.255.255.0)

Provider Hardware: DSL Modem

Home Hardware: Cradlepoint MBR1200 Router

(Verizon Wireless for failover)

Internal Network: 192.168.192.0/2

User3

Internet Provider: AT&T Uverse

IP 99.41.***.181/22 (255.255.252.0)

Provider Hardware: 2WIRE Router/DSL Modem (2Wire 3800HGV-B)

Home Hardware: Cradlepoint MBR1200 Router

(Verizon Wireless for failover)

Internal Network: 192.168.45.0/24

Configuration of Office NetScreen5gt

We start here as it’s the most complicated part of the configuration and the most remote.

1. Create “address book” entries for the Office network and the remote network(s).Important Note: All networks must be unique.  If more than one of the networks is using the default 192.168.1.0/24 network, you will have to change the local networks!

   

2. Next, we create the VPN Gateway(s) which lead to these networks.



Note that the Pre-Shared Key (PSK) is set on this screen. It will be obscured once typed, so be sure you have a written copy of your PSK during set up and as part of the final documentation.



And then under advanced settings



Note (again) that the Phase I settings here must match the Phase II settings as the other end of the tunnel doesn’t support differentiated Phase I and Phase II settings.

3. Now we’ll set the Phase II settings under the /VPN/AutoKeyIke menu:





Then on to the Advanced Tab



4. Now we create a Bi-Directional VPN Policy to create the tunnel between the networks.

This is accessible from the Policies menu item, starting from the trusted interface filter.

That does it for the NetScreen side, now on to the Cradlepoint MBR1200, where it is all done from a single screen:

Hardware Costs:

NetScreen5gt                          $400.00ea
Cradlepoint MBR1200 x 2     $300.00ea

Total                                      $1,000.00

Many thanks to Michael Dale and his How To: Site to Site VPN with Netscreen 5GT and Netgear DG834G

Click for full resolution images.

Taken with my Droid.

The argument eventually solidified into one camp that was torn between a Tacitean treatment of Iraq and a soft (American in the Philippines and Cuba) Empire.  The second camp were those who favored what they preferred to call “Nation Building.” I was actually in favor of soft Imperium, to give it its rightful name, as opposed to the Tacitean approach of building a desert and calling it peace. My concern was that the left would not stay the course and see the job completed.

I captured the exchange in four parts:
Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4

I was certainly vindicated in that the left did not stay the course, though I was proved wrong in terms of the troop strength required to achieve our goals. I was also proved right as regards the long borders of Iraq and the temptation of the neighbors to foment and support terrorist forces.

The surprise for me, and it was a pleasant one, was that the faithlessness of the American left did not, this time, result in defeat.

That having been said, the account and the way it is told seem credible to me.

Since I don’t know when I’ll sleep (it’s 4 am now) I’ll write what happened (the abbreviated version…..the long one is already part of the investigation with more to come). I’ll not write about any part of the investigation that I’ve learned about since (as a witness I know more than I should since inevitably my JAG brothers and sisters are deeply involved in the investigation). Don’t assume that most of the current media accounts are very accurate. They’re not. They’ll improve with time. Only those of us who were there really know what went down. But as they collate our statements they’ll get it right.

I did my SRP last week (Soldier Readiness Processing) but you’re supposed to come back a week later to have them look at the smallpox vaccination site (it’s this big itchy growth on your shoulder). I am probably alive because I pulled a ———- and entered the wrong building first (the main SRP building). The Medical SRP building is off to the side. Realizing my mistake I left the main building and walked down the sidewalk to the medical SRP building.

As I’m walking up to it the gunshots start. Slow and methodical, but continuous. Two ambulatory wounded came out; then two soldiers dragging a third who was covered in blood. Hearing the shots but not seeing the shooter, along with a couple other soldiers I stood in the street and yelled at everyone who came running that it was clear but to “RUN!”. I kept motioning people fast. About 6-10 minutes later (the shooting was continuous), two cops ran up, one male, one female. We pointed in the direction of the shots. they headed that way (the medical SRP building was about 50 meters away). Then a lot more gunfire. A couple minutes later a balding man in ACU’s came around the building carrying a pistol and holding it tactically. He started shooting at us and we all dived back to the cars behind us.

I don’t think he hit the couple other guys who were there. I did see the bullet holes later in the cars. First I went behind a tire and then looked under the body of the car. I’ve been trained how to respond to gunfire…but with my own weapon. To have no weapon, I don’t know how to explain what that felt like. I hadn’t run away but stayed because I had thought about the consequences or anything like that. I wasn’t thinking anything through. Please understand, there was no intention. I was just staying there because I didn’t think about running. It never occurred to me that he might shoot me. Until he started shooting in my direction and I realized I was unarmed.

Then the female cop comes around the corner. He shoots her (according to the news account she got a round into him. I believe it, I just didn’t see it, he didn’t go down.) She goes down. He starts reloading.

He’s fiddling with his mags. Weirdly he hasn’t dropped the one that was in his weapon. He’s holding the fresh one and the old one (you do that on the range when time is not of the essence but in combat you would just let the old mag go). I see the male cop around the left corner of the building.

(I’m about 15-20 meters from the shooter.) I yell at the cop, “He’s reloading, he’s reloading. Shoot him! Shoot him!) You have to understand, everything was quiet at this point. The cop appears to hear me and comes around the corner and shoots the shooter.

He goes down. The cop kicks his weapon further away. I sprint up to the downed female cop. Another captain (I think he was with me behind the cars) comes up as well. She’s bleeding profusely out of her thigh. We take our belts off and tourniquet her just like we’ve been trained (I hope we did it right…we didn’t have any CLS (combat lifesaver) bags with their awesome tourniquets on us, so we worked with what we had).

Meanwhile, in the most bizarre moment of the day, a photographer was standing over us taking pictures. I suppose I’ll be seeing those tomorrow. Then a soldier came up and identified himself as a medic. I then realized her weapon was lying there unsecured (and on “fire”). I stood over it and when I saw a cop yelled for him to come over and secure her weapon (I would have done so but I was worried someone would mistake me for a bad guy). I then went over to the shooter. He was unconscious. A Lt Colonel was there and had secured his primary weapon for the time being. He also had a revolver.

I couldn’t believe he was one of ours. I didn’t want to believe it.

Then I saw his name and rank and realized this wasn’t just some specialist with mental issues. At this point there was a guy there from CID and I asked him if he knew he was the shooter and had him secured. He said he did. I then went over the slaughter house that was the medical SRP building. No human should ever have to see what that looked like. And I won’t tell you.

Just believe me. Please. There was nothing to be done there. Someone then said there was someone critically wounded around the corner. I ran around (while seeing this floor to ceiling window that someone had jumped through, movie style) and saw a large African-American soldier lying on his back with two or three soldiers attending. I ran up and identified two entrance wounds on the right side of his stomach, one exit wound on the left side and one head wound. He was not bleeding externally from the stomach wounds (though almost certainly internally) but was bleeding from the head wound.

A soldier was using a shirt to try and stop the head bleeding. He was conscious so I began talking to him to keep him so. He was 42, from North Carolina , he was named something Jr., his son was named something III and he had a daughter as well. His children lived with him. He was divorced. I told him the blubber on his stomach saved his life. He smiled. A young soldier in civvies showed up and identified himself as a combat medic. We debated whether to put him on the back of a pickup truck. A doctor (well, an audiologist) showed up and said you can’t move him, he has a head wound. We finally sat tight. I went back to the slaughterhouse. They weren’t letting anyone in there. Not even medics.

Finally, after about 45 minutes had elapsed some cops showed up in tactical vests. Someone said the TBI building was unsecured. They headed into there. All of a sudden a couple more shots were fired. People shouted there was a second shooter. A half hour later the SWAT showed up. There was no second shooter. That had been an impetuous cop apparently. But that confused things for awhile. Meanwhile I went back to the shooter.

The female cop had been taken away. A medic was pumping plasma into the shooter. I’m not proud of this but I went up to her and said “this is the shooter, is there anyone else who needs attention…do them first”. She indicated everyone else living was attended to. I still hadn’t seen any EMTs or ambulances. I had so much blood on me that people kept asking me if I was ok.

But that was all other people’s blood. Eventually (an hour and a half to two hours after the shootings) they started landing choppers. They took out the big African American guy and the shooter. I guess the ambulatory wounded were all at the SRP building. Everyone else in my area was dead.

I suppose the emergency responders were told there were multiple shooters. I heard that was the delay with the choppers (they were all civilian helicopters). They needed a secure LZ. But other than the initial cops who did everything right, I didn’t see a lot of them for a while. I did see many a soldier rush out to help their fellows/sisters. There was one female soldier, I don’t know her name or rank but I would recognize her anywhere who was everywhere helping people. A couple people, mainly civilians, were hysterical, but only a couple. One civilian freaked out when I tried to comfort her when she saw my uniform. I guess she had seen the shooter up close. A lot of soldiers were rushing out to help even when we thought there was another gunman out there. This Army is not broken no matter what the pundits say. Not the Army I saw. And then they kept me for a long time to come. Oh, and perhaps the most surreal thing, at 1500 (the end of the workday on Thursdays) when the bugle sounded we all came to attention and saluted the flag, in the middle of it all.

This is what I saw. It can’t have been real. But this is my small corner of what happened.

Name and Phone Number of Author redacted

Closing thought: Time and past time that all Commissioned Officers and NCO’s of the Armed Forces be required to be armed (with at least a sidearm) at all times. The War on Terror has no front lines.

Are We Witnessing the Collapse of Liberalism?
By J. Robert Smith
American Thinker

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama’s world grows bleaker. Liberalism’s world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism?

Remember, at the beginning of the 1980s, no one would have predicted that by the decade’s close the Berlin Wall would fall, communism would be discredited and the Soviet Union would be less than a couple of years away from dissolution.

Though no conservative worth his salt is surprised by liberalism’s shortcomings, the rapidity of its failure is surprising. More importantly, it’s alarming, for though the effects of liberalism’s failure are damaging to us at home, they may prove terrible to us abroad.

Better the corpse be laid to rest than allowed to continue shambling about.

Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people
Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent
Telegraph.co.uk

The al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating home-made liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and Canada. The plot had the potential to be three times as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

The convictions followed Britain’s largest counter-terrorism operation and two criminal trials which, in total, cost an estimated £60million.

All three men convicted on Monday had been found guilty at an earlier trial last year of conspiracy to murder, but prosecutors said it was vital to secure a conviction on another charge of conspiring to blow up the aircraft in order to prove that the threat to air traffic was genuine.

The bad news? It took two trials and a hellfire strike.

Part of the reason is why lawfare (as apposed to war crimes tribunals) is a bad idea.

Western Courts of Law, being primarily concerned with their own citizens, make it very difficult to introduce secret evidence. From a civil liberties point of view, and with regards to one’s own citizens, this is a good thing.

War Crimes Tribunals, charged with enforcing the Customary Laws of Warfare, are more concerned with discouraging violations of the Customary Laws of Warfare and have no bars against secret evidencce.

The key to the successful second prosecution of the three terrorists in this case were e-mails electronically intercepted by the National Security Agency. The NSA was, as a matter of policy and law, interested in frustrating the plans of the terrorists while preserving the source of that intelligence.

NSA-Intercepted E-Mails Helped Convict Would-Be Bombers
By Kim Zetter
Wired

The three men convicted in the United Kingdom on Monday of a plot to bomb several transcontinental flights were prosecuted in part using crucial e-mail correspondences intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to Britain’s Channel 4.

The e-mails, several of which have been reprinted by the BBC and other publications, contained coded messages, according to prosecutors. They were intercepted by the NSA in 2006 but were not included in evidence introduced in a first trial against the three last year.

That trial resulted in the men being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; but a jury was not convinced that they had planned to use soft drink bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up seven trans-Atlantic planes — the charge for which they were convicted this week in a second trial.

According to Channel 4, the NSA had previously shown the e-mails to their British counterparts, but refused to let prosecutors use the evidence in the first trial, because the agency didn’t want to tip off an alleged accomplice in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf that his e-mail was being monitored. U.S. intelligence agents said Rauf was al Qaeda’s director of European operations at the time and that the bomb plot was being directed by Rauf and others in Pakistan.

The NSA later changed its mind and allowed the evidence to be introduced in the second trial, which was crucial to getting the jury conviction. Channel 4 suggests the NSA’s change of mind occurred after Rauf, a Briton born of Pakistani parents, was reportedly killed last year by a U.S. drone missile that struck a house where he was staying in northern Pakistan.

Students of history will recognize this as the same dilemna which confronted Prime Minister Churchill when the Allies intercepted German messages presaging the fire bombing of Coventry. The only reason the intelligence was subsequently released in this case was that the source had been eliminated by military action, thus obviating the clear advantages of protecting the source of the intelligence.

Wired’s article continues:

Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.

It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas. If the former, it’s possible the interception was part of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a surveillance program aimed at intercepting foreign correspondence as it passed through domestic internet switches. Such interception was previously illegal unless conducted with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. After news stories revealed that the NSA was conducting such surveillance without a warrant, however, Congress legalized such collection activities last year in its passage of the FISA Amendments Act.

(Hat Tip: The Lede)

A hat trick: Vindication of Warfare vice Lawfare and of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Hat Tip: Gabriel Malor at Ace’s Place, who comments: “…Democrats wished they hadn’t.”

I am brought to these ruminations today by an essay from Hot Air’s Green Room:

The Eff Word
Fascism
By Doctor Zero
HotAir

It’s the ultimate political epithet, the atomic blast that ends calm and measured debate. This makes those who seek to be reasonable and persuasive understandably reluctant to use the word… and those who aren’t interested in either reason or persuasion eager to hurl it at their opponents. There is nothing surprising about the visceral emotions conjured by the mention of its name. The history of fascism is written in the blood of innocents, on a scale that challenges the limits of human imagination.

Indeed it is. That it should be so is something of an irony of history. Fascism is without question an ideology whose history is written in blood. Yet for all its manifest evils, Facism is not the most blood soaked ideology in history. That distinction belongs to Communism, which killed nearly two orders of magnitude more innocents in the 20^th century.

More ironic is the common misperception of Fascism as a creature of the politcal “right.”  It was no such thing.  Fascism was an outgrowth of Socialism and Progressivism.  It’s current assignment in the political spectrun is a testament to the effectiveness of Communist Propaganda (no enemies to the left) and the leftward tilt of the modern academy.

Doctor Zero continues…

Our natural repulsion from the concept of fascism, coupled with the way it has been cheapened by decades of use as a casual insult by the Left, makes it difficult for us to study it dispassionately. It is important to make that study, because fascism was not a mystical phenomenon, a curse inflicted on the Axis nations through the supernatural charisma of Mussolini and Hitler. Too many people recall the garish and horrifying trappings of Nazi Germany, and think “it couldn’t happen here.” It has happened here. It’s happening again now. We do ourselves no favors by refusing to see it, any more than we would be helping ourselves by throwing around baseless accusations of fascism where it does not exist.

Indeed. Those who have not yet read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would do well to pick it up and read it. Goldberg’s thoroughly document book is a critical look at the roots and history of a systemic evil that needs to be understood. Nor is the accusation by Doctor Zero of an incipient Fascist moment in our current political environment misplaced.

Fascism, like communism and socialism, is a form of collectivist politics. As the great author H.P. Lovecraft put it, when describing the dark gods of his horror stories: “Many names, one nightmare.” These philosophies share a belief in the supreme power and virtue of the central State. Under communism, government owns the means of production – there is no private industry. In a socialist system, the State is nominally separate from private industry, but it siphons large amounts of money from the private sector to fund the socialist agenda. Fascism maintains private industry, but places it under the direct control of the government. Private industry still exists, but the State sets production goals, directly controls economic activity, and dominates the management of corporations. Industry becomes enslaved to political goals.

And those political goals inevitably become the goals of improving the lot of the political class.

Modern audiences, raised on a steady diet of movies about World War II, think of fascism as either inhumanly horrifying, or completely absurd, and wonder how anyone in their right minds could have fallen for the fascist sales pitch. In fact, fascism did not seem absurd at all to the intellectuals of the early twentieth century. They thought a wise and all-powerful State, run by the most brilliant minds, would be able to engineer a more advanced society, much as engineers were designing increasingly advanced scientific marvels. The pioneering author of modern science fiction, H.G. Wells, was an outspoken advocate of authoritarian control by a benevolent government of geniuses and academics. His novel The Shape of Things to Come envisions such a government seizing control of the entire world to create a global utopia, called “The Dictatorship of the Air” because the government controls the technology of air travel – which it occasionally uses to drop bombs on those who resist. Here are some excerpts from a famous speech Wells gave to the British Young Liberals Society at Oxford in 1932, reprinted in Jonah Goldberg’s indispensable Liberal Fascism – a phrase Wells actually coins in the speech:

We have seen the Fascisti in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea… I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis… And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you… These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions… the days of that sort of amateurism are over-they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of democracy. The world is sick of parliamentary politics…

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

America’s Founding Fathers designed a system that would both feel the pressure of the People and the moment (the House of Respresentatives, which stands for election every two years), and be resistant to transient passions (The Senate, elected to six year terms, only one third of whom stand for election in any Federal Election, and an Executive standing for election every four years). They also went to great pains to make the Constitution difficult to amend, and impossible to amend quickly.

The world is sick of parliamentary politics. This is an idea that occurs in every strand of collectivist thought. Collectivists only revere democracy until it has voted them sufficient power… then democracy becomes a cumbersome inconvenience that allows selfish, ignorant fools and corporate shills to interfere with the brilliant work of great men. The Democrats fleeing from town hall meetings are also sick of parliamentary politics, as is the President who defiles American government with dozens of unelected, unconfirmed, unaccountable “czars.” Parliamentary politics proved very inconvenient for the President’s health-care takeover and cap-and-trade bills, and have been driving global-warming cultists mad with frustration for years.

Indeed they have, just as designed.

Why is fascism bad? It seems like a ridiculously understated question, similar to asking why cancer is bad, but the answer is important. The grisly ornaments fascism has worn in the past should not distract from the deeper reality of what it is, and why it fails. The essential flaw of fascism is that it elevates the State to control of its citizens, because controlling the economy requires control of the people. A corporation is a voluntary association of people, not an inanimate machine that can be reprogrammed painlessly by wise government advisers. The people who comprise corporations must be kept alienated from the government’s supporters – fascism requires enemies, and turns feral quickly. The government does not require a majority of the people to support it, in order to maintain power. It can make do with much less than fifty per cent, if they are sufficiently motivated and obedient. In fact, maintaining control through an energized minority is much easier than keeping the majority of the population on board, especially in a large country.

The end state of all the child ideologies of Progressivism (Socialism, Communism, and Fascism) is inevitably a dictatorship by a very small ruling class, and a sub-majority of strong supporters. The process may be fast or slow, but once the “parliamentary impediments” are removed the end state is inevitable.

Hie thee to the Green Room, and read the whole thing.