That said, it was with both hopeful optimism and well-deserved skepticism that I started playing around with Mint.com a few months ago.  Mint.com is a free online financial management application with the ability to automatically connect to over 5,000 financial institutions to import transactions and help you manage your financial life.  Desperately wanting some solution to make managing my finances easier, I put aside the inherent security concerns of having all of your financial life located on some company’s servers, and dove in.

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Dell PowerEdge 2950
Dual Quad Core Xeon CPUs (3GHz)
16GB RAM
2x 300GB 15000rpm HDD, RAID-0

Test Client

Dell PowerEdge 2550
Dual Xeon CPUs (933MHz)
4GB RAM
2x 18GB 10000rpm HDD, RAID-1

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From the website:

Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing “w Windows Vista” will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia!

http://brandontools.com/content/StartPlusPlus.aspx

• In an age where globally route-able IP addresses are treated as a precious commodity, your residential Internet Service Provider happens to give you three as part of the basic package, but all over DHCP.
• You want the flexibility provided by having those three global IPs, but the safety and security of a router/firewall, or you happen to have more than three devices that need to use the Internet.

Solution: Build your own Router!

• How to build your own router is more than well documented on the web, and I won’t re-invent the wheel here. Most solutions involve a cheap PC, two network cards, and a Linux distribution.
• Assigning more than one static IP address to a single Network Interface Card is common practice for certain applications like Web Servers, and is accomplished in Linux using aliases (e.g., eth0:0) or in Windows by editing the Advanced TCP/IP properties for your network connection.
• The tricky part is getting those addresses via DHCP.

But how do I get more than one IP address on the same NIC via DHCP?

The way I discovered was by using a DHCP client for Linux called dhcpcd, which is available in many distributions’ package managers. dhcpcd has an option -I that allows you to specify your “Client ID” to the DHCP server. If not specified, the DHCP client sends your MAC address as the Client ID. For instance:

/sbin/dhcpcd -I 00:0B:20:21:22:23 eth0
/sbin/dhcpcd -I 00:0B:20:25:22:24 eth0:0
/sbin/dhcpcd -I 00:0B:20:25:22:25 eth0:1

You’re not spoofing your MAC address to the network itself, but just to the DHCP server.  From here, you can go on to create iptables rules to do whatever sort of NAT or Port Forwarding you wish. For instance, you might want to enable Remote Desktop to two different computers on your home network. With an off-the-shelf router, you would have to assign 3389 to one internal computer and a non-default port (e.g., 3390) to another. With the flexibility of more than one address, this is not necessary.

• From the Start Menu search box, type Local Security and allow yourself to elevate.
• The Security Settings window should appear: Navigate to Local Policies, Security Options.
• On the bottom of the right hand side, double click the setting User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation, Disable it, and you are good to go.

I’ve found the User Account Control prompts to be considerably more tolerable when disabling this feature. While this will not protect you from a malicious coder attempting to spoof the UAC prompt, I am OK with that level of risk.