Some Notes on the Machines

This works very well:

https://www.wagnardsoft.com/

No keys of course, but ISO media indeed, and very helpful for DISM and other fixes:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/15088/windows-create-installation-media

This site creates a new one for you by random generation, as is the recommended standard:

simpledns.com/private-ipv6

Try LinSSID. Graphical, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and works very nicely. It is in many distro default repositories.

Recently acquired advice. Better speed, less wear on the drive. It is a Windows service by that name.

From the extraordinary Mike Hunsinger:

Today I learned something fascinating. You can run linux as a Windows Subsystem w/o using a vm or dual-boot. All you have to do is run PS as admin, execute this:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

reboot when prompted and then you can use the windows store to install just about any Linux distro you want.

This article describes folks running Linux GUI apps talking to Windows-native X Windows. Ponderworthy hasn’t tested this yet, but the following X server looks like a very worthy candidate:

sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/

A number of Internet tools use DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) and retrieve them by HTTP/HTTPS. Here are a number of good resources for this.

www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/7s3ug9/pfblockerng_recommended_lists/

forum.it-monkey.net/index.php?topic=17.0

supratim-sanyal.blogspot.com/2017/04/pfsense-pfblockerng-ultimate-list-of-ip.html

Get the portable version here:

http://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows_repair_all_in_one.html

1. Unpack it
2. Run Repair_Windows.exe as administrator
3. Click “Jump to Repairs”
4. Click “Open Repairs”
5. Uncheck all of the fixes except “Repair Internet Explorer”
6. Do it, and reboot.

Works very nicely.

A little amusement for the IPically inclined:

[jeb@jeb-pc ~]$ nslookup
> www.facebook.com
Server:		192.168.2.1
Address:	192.168.2.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.facebook.com	canonical name = star-mini.c10r.facebook.com.
Name:	star-mini.c10r.facebook.com
Address: 157.240.19.35
Name:	star-mini.c10r.facebook.com
Address: 2a03:2880:f134:83:face:b00c:0:25de
> 

with the right router/firewall. I’ve had at least three different Netgears at home over years, all mid- or mid-high range in their consumer range at purchase. Every time, I tested using OEM up-to-date firmware, and tested with DD-WRT, many tweaks on both. DD-WRT gave a little improvement. On a little divine inspiration, I just did this:

• Took a ten-year-old quad-core Vista box with three gigs of RAM
• Put in a $40 quad Intel server NIC I bought from Amazon.com
• Installed pfSense and set it up in very default fashion, exceptions being use of 192.168.2.0/24 as LAN subnet, 192.168.2.1 as LAN IP. Not using the motherboard NIC, just two on the Intel card so far.
• Set my current DD-WRTed Netgear to do DHCP forwarding instead of serving, set it static to 192.168.2.2, left it otherwise alone
• Connected one LAN port of the Netgear to the LAN port I set up in pfSense
• Disconnected the WAN port of the Netgear, plugged Internet directly into the WAN port in pfSense

Suddenly WWW and Roku respond much faster, much less latency and jitter and other delay, and most unexpectedly, Internet download speed is much, much faster, even though the wifi is still running through the Netgear. And after a bit of performance tweaking, pings are lower, from 28ms down to 22 wired and 24 wireless.

Haven’t tried Squid proxying yet, or IPv6, but will be!