I really need to blog more often. This every 2 or 2 1/2 days thing isn't working, it takes me ages to remember the things that happened, and then the order that things happened.

While still in a slumber, I thought about taking my laptop to the Cafe with me, then I can try to diagnose the SDSL connection with something a bit more useful than windows that just says "DHCP server unreachable".

I woke up, starting watching tivo (this Robot Wars marathon is filling it like nothing else), I got called up by a woman who's network I support. When she tries to use the browser to cause the firewall to dialup to the internet, it's saying "connection refused" hmm. She'd already tried rebooting. Bugger. OK, I'll come look in a bit.

I watched more tv.

I got called up again, the wife of the guy who's laptop I tried to fix/salvaged data from. They wanted to know about getting MYOB setup, and also about getting the laptop fixed. I spoke to the guy I work for sometimes, he wants me to come and look at setting it up for him, and also running cables for his speakers/projector. OK, I'll come look tomorrow.

I watched a bit more tv. Got up, ate breakfast, hmm, the dvd burning light is still on.wtf? I turned the monitor on, BSOD. D'oh.


The machine was still up, I could copy files across the network to it, but the local interface was buggered. I reset it. Popped the DVD out, half burned. hmm.

When it rebooted, I tried to format the disc. Nothing will seem to let me format it. the format button/function is greyed out in everything, Nero/DiscJuggler, and something else I tried to use. Great, that was a waste of $2.60. I should invoice M$ for it.

I looked at the spec sheet for my burner, apparently DVDRW is only at 1/2/2.4X, and I burned at 4X, making it DVDR, that's probably why I can't format it.

I took off for the Cafe, dropped in to see the woman, I plugged the monitor into the firewall machine, it normally sits there headless. the login prompt was there, I logged in, everything looks ok, could ping the windows workstation, could connect to the port that causes the dialup to occur, what's going on here?

I went back to windows, and confirmed that it was saying "connection refused", hmm, maybe it's trying to go through the proxy, and squid is broken.

I was able to telnet into the firewall, that's a good sign. Telnet localhost 3128: connection refused. Aha. I tried restarting squid, no such luck. Checked the log files, something about disk write error, device full. OK.

I rm -rf the squid partition, and then squid -z to rebuild it, restart squid, away it goes. groovy.

I took off again, got to the Cafe about 11am, realised I had forgotten to bring my laptop. Bugger.

I started on sorting out the network. I don't remember exactly what I went through, but I basically got the dhcp server configuration all sorted, and the bind server sorted out, so both subnets resolve and reverse lookup.

I also managed to get Source NATing working, so the mail on the other subnet will work.

I collected the SDSL router from downstairs, tried testing it locally, along with the spare, nothing will work. the link will come up, but no traffic goes across.

I managed to get my mate to bring in another router when he went to get some monitors, and after some fiddling around, I found 2 out of the 4 would connect. So I took a working one back downstairs, plugged it in, bang, network up. great. Added the MAC of the machine downstairs into the dhcp conf so they get a proper IP too.

I found the guy from the supermarket, had a look at theirs, for some reason they had an IP on the wrong subnet, a disable/enable fixed that, crappy Windows. Their mail worked too.

It was now about 4pm, everything is sorted. It only took me 2 days to get the network sorted.

I fiddled around trying to get the time server working, and then I started looking at all the domains hosted on one of our servers, most of them are crap, a waste of money. If any of them are still registered, I don't think I'll bother renewing about 40/50 of them.

Closed the Cafe about 5pm. I intended to take both the stuffed SDSL routers with me, to see if I could reset/reconfigure them, but I forgot them.

I went around to my mate's place (who I have dinner with). We've a machine in the Cafe I need to configure as a dialup router for a Senior's club, so he dropped that off at his house, and went to teach a guy.

I got the PC setup, found a floppy, looked around for linux floppy router distributions, started looking at LRP, which I use here at home, but it's now officially dead, and it was a mungrel to get setup.

I found "freesco" which looked ok. DNS, DHCP, DynDns, Web Interface all built in. I downloaded it, made up the floppy. Put it in the old 486: "Boot failed" Bugger!

I tested it in another machine, booted fine. I configured it. While I was doing this, my mate with the new cpu/mobo/disk etc called me, he still couldn't get his network going. OK, I'll come look when I finish here.

I tried the floppy in the other machine again, still no go. I tried putting the "safe" syslinux boot on. No good.

My mate came back from teaching about now.

I tried booting the machine with a dos floppy, fine. Hmm, the drive works then. I tried loading freesco with loadlinux, that worked somewhat, but I didn't pass the right boot parameters.

I got the right parameters, made a batch files, and was able to successfully boot it up. OK, good, but it's not acceptable to have to boot a dos disk, change it for the freesco disk, and run a batch file. Too hard.

I tried getting the latest version of syslinux, tried both normal and safe boot modes, still no good. Getting frustrated.

I went back, and tried to see if I could make it dos bootable. Nope, only 41kb free, and the dos boot files are ~300k at best.

I went looking for "freedos" maybe it's smaller. Yeah, but not 41kb small.

Hmm, what am I going to do.

Around this time my mate came back from picking up some pizzas, so I stopped and ate dinner. I thought about it, I seem to recall older versions of syslinux having better compatibility than new versions. I went and found version 131 of syslinux, ancient, loaded it on the floppy, and guess what, it booted. Hoo Fscking Ray.

I grabbed a modem, performed the modem config, it detected the network card. Groovy. I mucked around for a while, I though about testing it, but I couldn't be bothered installing nics/cables. I'll just do it when I put it into production next week.

Freesco was a hell of a lot easier to configure than LRP (besides the booting issue, which LRP would have had anyway).

I left, dropped in at my mate's place to look at his network. Just as I arrived, he told me he'd fixed it, it was a crappy network cable. I stayed and chatted for a while, about ISPs and things, and whether we still want to do one.

I'm waiting to see what happens with my friend's ISP first. I'm not starting up until it's sold or shutdown, it would just be wrong. I know I was going to start up in competition back in August last year, but that's a completely different situation. They need me to run this one. I would feel so guilty if I walked away, let this one fall down because no one else can run it, and then start another one up.

Anyway, he told me he's decided he wants a tivo, so now I'll chase up getting one for him, and setting it up.

I left, came home, and started blogging. I've now been sitting here for 75 minutes blogging. Time to watch some Robot Wars.