I was woken by the phone this morning (why do I keep having to type this?) at about 9am.

My mate I go to dinner with, "What are you up to?", "uh, mm, ah, sleeping". "Will I see you at the meeting this morning?", "Yeah, when's that?" "10am", "OK, see you there, bye".

I've got a really sore throat.

I checked my dvd rendering. Uh oh, BSOD, "Error Writing to Disk" "Unable to Write to Disk D:" "Data or Files may be Lost".

Bugger. Pressed enter, it came back ok, it was just starting on the second video file. It continued going.

I ate some breakfast (toast, no cereal left, I need to go to the shops).

I headed into Gosford, had a meeting with the network guys, and we had a chat about the situation, and what we need to do to sort it out.

We went and looked at the equipment we've installed, I need to get a camera, so I can get some pictures, and put them in here.

After that, someone from the Cafe called us, problems with internet access for some shops in the centre or something. "I'll look at it when I get there".

It was now about 11:40. I went to the shops, bought food, brought it home, unpacked it, checked my dvd rendering, it was on the next video file.

Some mail had arrived, a couple of 8 tracks I bought recently, "Greatest Hits of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass" (why did I bid on this?), and "Meet the Beatles".

I grabbed my mp3 player, and took off to the Cafe.

I had a quick look in next door where they were having problems, some weird network range setup, what's going on here.

The gateway address did not respond to pings, maybe the machine on the roof is having issues.

I found a cleaner, had to go to centre management to get access to the roof, removed the machine and wireless antenna that's not used anymore, dragged it all back downstairs.

The solicitor arrived while I was on the roof. Talked to him for a while, got things sorted out somewhat. I was going to find some details of the customers, plans they are on etc, but then I remembered the busted machine.

Once the solicitor left, I was able to look at the server. I plugged the machine in, booted up ok, I could ping the machine in next door, but none of the stuff on the proper network. wtf is going on. Tcpdumping, no help, this is just weird. Tried mucking around with the network configuration, taking interfaces up/down, couldn't get anything out of it.

I eventually (about an hour later) went and checked the rest of the physical network, found that an rj45 with a busted tab had slipped out of the uplink port on the switch slightly, disconnecting the hub I had the server plugged into from all the machines on the network range I couldn't ping. Aha!

Network traffic was flowing, I went back next door, they were fixed.

I went to check the florist downstairs that has an sdsl link through the telephone system in the plaza to us upstairs, I fiddled around here for ages, the link on the sdsl comes up, but no traffic goes across. I went back and forth between here and the Cafe about 10 times. Could not get it working. I even tried a different SDSL router, the link wouldn't even come up then.

The guy from IGA came to talk to me, they were having issues too, I told him to change back to the previously working network range, which should now work. It did, but only when using the proxy. Any direct connections to the internet failed. I decided that ip forwarding must be having issues, but then discovered that it's more likely caused by the non routable network range being routed through another non routable range, to the ADSL router, which when it tries to reply, thinks that the originating non routable range is on the internet, and sends the traffic back out to the internet. dumb.

I tried mucking around with forwarding/nat/routes etc, but no good.

I put a static route in the ADSL router, and the stupid thing got hung up claiming it was busy. I had to come back to the Cafe, and power cycle the dumb thing.

I then played around with different static routes. I also setup DMZ forwarding, and dyndns setup. Groovy, I can get in from home, it works.

I could not get the routing to work though. no matter how I tried putting the static routes in, with network ranges or specific IPs, different metrics, it just ignores them and sends the traffic out to the internet. Spastic thing.

I think I need to try to get IP Masquerading working on the router machine now, so I won't have to try to get routing working on the dumb ADSL router.

It was now after 5pm, I tried to get the stupid printer working that stopped last week. Finally the 172mb driver had finished downloading (why the F does a driver need to be 172MB??? What are you doing HP??), after clearing some disk space so the installer would not fail (there's 500mb free, how much do you need? shit driver). After all that, there is still no printer installed.

Oh forget it. We left the Cafe.

I'll be back in on Thursday, so undoubtedly, between now and then, someone will fiddle with the network settings on everything, and I'll have to spend 5 hours changing them back, before I can even start trying to find why there are problems.

I went back to my mate's place. Chatted for a while, had dinner, and then I came home.

I just started fiddling with the DVD stuff again. It finished rendering. Hmm.. I waited I don't know how many hours, and the video files ended up exactly the same size they started (if not bigger) even though I told it to recompress them so 120 minutes (6 episodes) would fit on a DVD.

Maybe the recompression settings were lost when I had to restart the procedure after it crashed.

I'm now running the rendered dvd files through dvd shrink, hopefully I will get a working filesystem, and then I can install the dvdr drive, and burn it. There's 20 minutes left on the analysing, i wonder what it does next.

If the video ends up too nasty (it should be ok, they're being recompressed to 80% something, or 700mb from 900mb) but if they aren't, I'll at least now know I can only get 5 episodes/dvd nicely.

Oops, I've got 6 hours of Robot Wars to watch now, and tomorrow I need to find the laptop hard disk adapter I've got somewhere, and extract some files off this laptop that won't run for more than 3 seconds without turning itself off.