Soekris net4521 Single Board Computer
I got my net4521 a few days ago, and after borrowing a CF card (’cause I stupidly forgot to get one of my own), I had it up and running Pebble Linux (from Tor Amundson) in no time. A few days later the CM9, miniPCI 802.11a/b/g card, arrived.
I’ve been poking at getting the 802.11 card up-and-running, and met with some success. Right now a kind soul is helping me learn how to use buildroot to build a Linux from the ground up for use on this box. We’ll see how that goes, and I’ll try to post the steps here.
Damned Hotlinkers
I discovered that the vast majority of the bytes I was serving was due to sites that hotlink, that is, sites that use image src URIs that refer to my site (thereby stealing my bandwidth), rather than copying the image to their own site and serving it themselves. Using Apache’s RewriteEngine, as described in this article, allows me to refuse to serve images referred by any page not my own.
Hopefully this will put a stop to the practice. I currently only FORBID the request, but I may serve up some obnoxious image instead. Not yet sure.
