·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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Less than two days went by before my little friend was back setting up a whole new shop in the dryer vent. Apparently, the belly of the Sarlacc did not deter him one bit. Chicken wire is pretty flexible and it looked like he had just muscled his way through it and bent it to his liking. I consoled myself in the fact that my hack job kept him away for a solid day, at least.

I removed the vent cover and played with a few ways that I might be able to stretch chicken wire tightly across the opening, but I didn’t like any of the options. I decided that it had been nearly 24 hours since I had been to Lowe’s, so I should go have a look around.

I came home with a completely new weapon: a vent with a flapper, a hood and a screen.

Now, I knew when I picked this thing up that I was going to have to make some modifications to get it to work. Fortunately, I come from a long line of crazy people that will rig stuff up to fit whatever situation arises, plus I am a man and our specialty is screwing things up, so I was up for the challenge!

The first hurdle was the lip on the back of the vent. I needed to remove it the same way that had been done to the poor old deflect-o SUpurr-VENT. The vent pipe is simply a little bent and is a smaller opening than the lip, so I would have to mount it flush against the brick.

Using my favorite pair of snips, I made cuts into the lip and bent the pieces until they snapped off.

For tougher ones, I used a utility knife to score them, then cleaned the edge up with the knife and a file. A much cleaner job than what was done to the old vent, I say!

Now came the really fun part. The holes for the new vent didn’t line up at all with any of the existing anchors in the brick. I busted out my masonry drill bits and goggles and prepared to drill some new ones. Here, you can see two new blue anchors below the old green ones at the bottom corners of the vent pipe along with a spot where I started to drill the brick near the top right.

If you have ever tried to drill into brick, there’s pretty much no doing it without a hammer drill or a really long stretch of time on your hands. That’s why you see most things anchored in the mortar. But, the size of the new vent wasn’t going to allow for holes that were all lined up in the mortar. Once I had the bottom two holes drilled, I had an idea.

Among the things I keep around “just in case I ever need it” is some metal pipe strapping. There’s no limit to what you can mount up with that stuff. I cut a section of strap and used it to tie down the top edge of the vent to anchors in the mortar above.

I even slipped a bead of caulk along the top edge where the mortar was uneven and might allow water to get in. Now that bird is going to have to tear off the screen and lift open the flap to get in!

Let’s see how long this keeps him out!

A few mornings over the last couple of weeks, we heard what sounded like a small animal scratching on the back of the house. Sitting in the living room, we’d hear this strange clawing noise and I would go look out on the deck. There always seemed to be a couple of birds prancing about (and defecating) on the deck rails, so I wrote it off that they were somehow making that noise.

In a seemingly distant part of my world, our clothes dryer was on the fritz. It was just taking way too long to dry things. I hadn’t devoted any time to investigating the problem yet, but it was in the back of my mind to give it a look.

These two unrelated events suddenly collided when I finally saw a bird wiggling out of the dryer vent on the back of the house. The scoundrel was probably building a nest in the vent pipe, which would explain the noises we were hearing, and the nest was probably blocking the dryer from properly venting, which would explain the dryer not working. So we had ourselves a squatter!

Step 1 – Kick the squatter out

Every good landlord knows you wait until a squatter is gone before you make your move. Then, you throw out all their crap and clean the place up. Here’s the tools I needed for the job. This photo makes it look like I was organized in advance. It was actually taken once the job was done and after I’d made at least a dozen trips back and forth to the garage.

First things first, I took off the vent cover. There are four external screws and four internal screws that can be accessed by holding the vent flaps open.

Once the cover was off, it was clear this guy had been busy making himself at home. I used a broom and a brush to remove what I could get to easily.

This next scene was just too good not to take a picture of. If you don’t own a Shop-Vac, I suggest you stop reading right now and go buy one. Mine hangs in the garage and gets a lot of use cleaning crap out of the floorboards of our cars. Luckily for me here, it has a twenty foot hose.

I had to jiggle the hose back into the tube over and over to get past a ridge a few feet inside where two sections of pipe connect. Several times, I had to pull the hose back out and remove some debris from the end or from the opposite end that connects to the tank. The mixture of lint and long pieces of straw were clogging it up.

Finally, I had a clean vent pipe. The flash on the camera treated me well for seeing further inside than with the flashlight.

Now, how could I keep that deadbeat from coming back?

Step 2 – Change the locks on the doors

My first plan was to wrap some chicken wire around the end of the plastic tube part of the vent cover that sticks back into the pipe. I chose chicken wire because it has bigger holes that hopefully won’t get clogged with lint too easily. However, upon inspecting the vent it was clear that the chump who installed it made a slight, uh, modification to it by cutting off the tube piece that would normally fit back into the pipe.

I thought about running to Lowe’s and picking up a new one, but seeing as this was a deflect-o SUpurr-VENT I figured I’d better try and hang on to it for the sheer amusement of the name.

I decided to roll up a small piece of chicken wire and stick it into the tube with lots of jagged edges pointing forward. I figured that no bird in its right mind would try to poke its way in with something like the Sarlacc Pit facing it. I attached some of the loose wires around the screw anchors in order to prevent a bird from just pushing the wire back into the tube.

Feeling like a macho man for having rigged up such a contraption, I decided to put the vent cover back on and test it out. I bossed the wife on the walkie-talkie and told her to fire up the dryer.

It was at this point when I discovered what was probably so inviting to the bird in the first place. A couple of the vent flaps weren’t flapping properly and would stick open once the dryer was off.

Again, I’m trying to hold on to a quality piece of material here, so I played with it for a bit and discovered that the pins on the ends of the flaps were somewhat warped, probably from all the ragged sun and heat that hits the house all summer long. I scraped them down a little and bored out the holes on the sides of the vent where they fit in, and that got them flapping much better.

Nothing left but the clean up at this point. That bird had been pretty busy. I will give him credit for making some good selections on evergreen pieces and rubber bands. There’s a little more crap in the pile because I raked a few leaves while I was at it.

In retrospect, I wonder if maybe the Sarlacc Pit was not what I should be going for with the chicken wire since things “slowly digest over a thousand years” in there. I’ll have to keep an eye on the vent and make sure a bird doesn’t get its stupid self stuck in there.

I have NetReg 1.5.1 (along with my personal customizations to it) running in a Fedora Core 6 Xen VM and using the Nessus 3.0.5-fc6 rpm. Here’s the skinny:

• Get NetReg from http://www.netreg.org
• Get the Nessus RPM from http://www.nessus.org
• yum install httpd for Apache.
• yum install mod_ssl for https communications.
• yum install dhcp for the DHCP server.
• yum install bind for the DNS server.
• yum install php to support PHP for my modifications.
• yum install php-pear for an easy way to obtain PHP packages.
• pear config-set http_proxy http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3128 for me, since I’m behind a firewall and using a proxy.
• pear install HTTP_Request to get a PHP class required by my code.
• rpm -i Nessus-3.0.5-fc6.i386.rpm to install the Nessus rpm.
• yum install gcc for the GNU C compiler to build Perl modules.
• yum install openssl-devel for SSL libraries required by some Perl modules.

Now you have everything you need to set up NetReg and Nessus. You can follow the NetReg install guide for the most part, changing only your approach to the Nessus section since you downloaded an rpm instead.

In place of the DNS configuration that allows certain names to be looked up for real, my situation warrants a completely bogus DNS. I have reused DNS configuration from older versions of Netreg, namely:

/var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf looks like this:

server 172.16.1.21 {
bogus yes;
};

options {
directory “/var/named”;
recursion no;
};

zone “.” in {
type master;
file “db.root”;
};

and /var/named/chroot/var/named/db.root looks like this:

. IN SOA netreg.someplace.org. root.netreg.someplace.org. (
1 10800 3600 604800 86400 )
IN NS netreg.someplace.org.
netreg 86400 IN A 172.16.1.21
*. 86400 IN A 172.16.1.21