Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

26Nov/120

Workaround: Multi-column footers in OpenOffice.org Writer

This is not going to become another "How to Use OpenOffice" blog. I promise.

Still, while I've been trying in recent years to move away from Lotus SmartSuite (where I can, after all, just "get things done") to OpenOffice (and why must we write it as "OpenOffice.org, anyway?), I still find even the simplest of things in legacy applications all too often to range form painful to nearly - or totally - impossible. (N.B.: This post deals with OpenOffice Writer 3.2.0.)

8Sep/120

Multiple default routes / public gateway IPs under Linux

I recently had the need to configure a server for a client with multiple public IPv4 addresses routing to the internet and the requirement to switch between them at will while browsing (http traffic only).

There are a number of articles available on the net dealing with this type of situation, mainly focused on using iproute2, ToS tagging, and Squid (see references, below). However, I bumped into an issue with openSUSE 12.1 where it would stubbornly refuse to accept certain (otherwise valid) ToS (DSCP) values (see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=770785 for my bug report). This severely limited the number of possible values I could use, and thus, the number of possible public IP addresses.