Today was a long day as I expected.

I got up, found that my sat tv was all stuffed up, after watching a channel for 3 seconds it would say "E38 service is not currently running", and I could fix it by changing channel up/down, but that gets a bit tedious having to do that constantly, and sort of makes the tivo a bit useless.

I tried changing some details on the card, but it made no difference. I gave up, I was now late anyway.

I went and got some fuel, I realised I had forgotten to bring my pen, and also my torch, I would need the torch.

I decided to get the mail, and then stop in at home and get the torch, and then go up to he shop for the appointment I have this morning. I immediately forgot what I was doing, and went the wrong way. So I came home, got my pen and my torch, then went and got the mail, the letter we wanted was there, so that was ok, then I headed north.

I got to the real estate about 20 minutes late, it turns out they have been dealing with the other computer shop, not terribly impressive. I went in and got the dolt from there, he was trying to find a password recovery tool to get the password out of the adsl gateway machine.

We went back, I booted it up.. "Where's the adsl device?", "Oh, I moved it over here". "Ok, so put it back here", "but the line is over here". Great, ok, shut it down, unplugged it, dragged it over the other side, started plugging it back in, some guy from another office came in and had a cry because I'd parked behind him.

I went down and moved my bike, when I came back, the dolt had plugged the machine all in, and booted it. The keyboard and mouse didn't work. they were some dumb wireless thing. I went to get the other ones that were in it before. "Oh, I put the plugs in around the wrong way" says the dolt.

Fixed that, rebooted, connected, I downloaded my password tool, got the password out.

I left there, and went up to the Cafe. If the real estate had still been using us for their IT services (we installed the ADSL for free) then it would have been ok, but the fact they've gone elsewhere.. they will be receiving an invoice from me.

I burned a Knoppix cd to take with me to recover the machine at Wahroonga, chatted for a bit, arranged to order a motherboard and ram for my mate who we'd just unsuccessfully replaced his failed cpu.

I left, got on the freeway, and raced down to Wahroonga.

I started having a look a the machine, it seems ok, nothing wrong. Tried to change the root password, stupid Red Hat, can't do anything. I tried to boot my Knoppix cd.. the cdrom drive is stuffed. Great.

I had a user login, so I used that, started poking around, couldn't see any issues.

I called our tech guy, and he gave me the root password, I knew it, but had forgotten, there are too many bloody passwords to remember.

Ok, I started tcpdumping the interfaces, couldn't see any issues.

I then decided to work out the wiring. I found a bunch of cables doing nothing, so I started ripping them out.

I found about 100 powerboards all chained together, so I shut the machine down, pulled that out, and recabled all the power. When I put the power back on, I noticed that one length of cat5 going into the hub didn't have a link light, I traced it, it went out the window, up the wall, over a door, up and in an open window.

Maybe the internet source is in there. I tried to work out what that was, there's just empty offices up there. Maybe someone moved and took some equipment they shouldn't have.

I went back and examined the telephone lines, I found an active onramp with nothing plugged in, an active onramp home highway, connected to a netjet card in the server. Aha! maybe this is the data feed, but I thought it was a cable modem, but it's not here anymore, maybe it's not.

I poked around on the server, I couldn't find any config for the netjet stuff, I've no idea if this was used.

I went and spoke to the Chemist, he seemed to know some of what was going on. I went out the back of his place, and I ripped out all the coax network cable that's not used anymore, about 200m worth.

I found a length of cat5 running out his vent, around the corner, around a carport, on to the roof, across the roof, and then I found it strung across the road. I couldn't see where it went, but I assumed down under the bookshop where the rest of the stuff is.

I spoke to the chemist, he told me to speak to the guy in the Chicken Shop, he might know. I spoke to him, he said that my friend's stuff was in the flat upstairs, that they don't use anymore. He then gave me bad directions, and I went into the wrong place asking about our telephone service.

They didn't know anything about it.

I went back to looking at cables again, I went around in the alley, found some stairs, and saw a suspect bit of cable hanging over the edge. I went up the stairs, and saw some dodgy bits of cable, hmm, maybe I'm on to something.

I spoke to the guy in the flat upstairs, he told me there was some stuff on the roof.

I climbed on the roof, went along. I found the remains of a plastic container that the sun had destroyed, the lid had collapsed, and the thing was half full of water, with a cable modem floating in it.

So much for being back at the shop at 2pm, it was now just after 2pm.

I pulled it out, shook the water out of it. Maybe I've found the problem here. I tried to move the container, it just completely disintegrated. I started tracing cables again. I found an Optus Cable install on the wall, with a cable running out of it under the flashing and along, it must go into the modem. I traced the power for the modem, it ran down and was plugged in near the cooling units for the butcher's coolroom.

I then started tracing the cat5 out of the cable modem, and found 3 lots of 20 pair cable scotchlocked to the end of a 100 pair cable, it ran under the flashing along, then came out, and was strung across the road, with the cat5 cable tied to it.

I traced the 20 pair cables, they ran down and into a telstra mdf on the wall, ok, here's where our phone lines come from.

I went back to the cable modem, the power should still be active, I plugged it in again, it powered up, the ethernet link light came up, and the activity light was flashing, but it would not go "online". I shoved it under the airconditioner, hopefully it will be sheltered enough, and won't get full of water again (the corrugated roof should give it good drainage).

Ahh.. I remember someone calling us a few days ago about an Optus bill. I'll bet it's for this cable modem, and no one's paid it, and it's been cutoff.

I surveyed the situation. We've got a 100 pair cable and some cat5 strung across the road, then it comes back again, going to the other side of the lane.

When I was down here yesterday, I found a bit of cat5 strung across the lane on the other side, it goes into an office over there.

I knew what was going on now, and I couldn't fix anything from here. I got off the roof, cleaned up, and got some lunch.

The Chemist found me, it was his office across the road, we went to look at the cable modem. About this time, I was called.. there had been a blackout in Gosford, and now it was slow. "I'll be there in an hour or so".

I went over to the office and looked in there, then I saw the 30 pair cable that also runs across the street and the lane, it's telephone lines patched into his pabx apparently.

I had a discussion with him about what we might do in future with this setup.

I need to take pictures of all this stuff, it's brilliant.

Anyway, I ate my lunch, and sat down to make some documentation. Got called a bunch of times, eventually was able to leave.

I got abut halfway up the freeway, there had been an accident, and it was slowed to a stop. I stopped for a second, decided bugger it, and rode several kilometres up the outside of the lanes, get's a bit tight in a few spots. I kicked one of the reflectors it was so tight.

I managed to get across to the inside, and got a few more ks in there, before I came across a truck I couldn't squeeze past, so I just waited there for a couple of minutes.

I got annoyed there, and went up the newly made lane that's not open yet, where the emergency vehicles had been travelling. Good enought for them.

I rode up there as possibly far as I could, before the concrete barrier started, and I had to get back in the lane, or end up in the roadworks.

I could see emergency vehicles from here, so I didn't want to get too close, in case the cops got me.

I was trying to get back in the lane, people weren't having a bar of me fitting in there, so I pulled over, put the stand down, took off my helmet, and waited. This way, I won't get busted if cops come up.

I made a phone call, told the guy in Gosford where I was and what was going on, got off the phone and sat for a minute, saw some movement up ahead, so I whipped my helmet back on, got started again, and squashed into the lane. Got a bit closer, they were merging everyone into 1 lane, which took a bit of time, and we were past it.

I saw a totally destroyed Commodore, sucked into some Bogan, he'd run up the back of something very hard, nothing else left around here. We were back to 110km/h now, groovy. I went past the weight station a bit down the road, and a tow truck was carrying another destroyed car, a Bogan spec Ute in, maybe it was part of the prang.

Anyway, I got back to Gosford, went in to where our equipment is, and started having a look. One server hadn't come back up at all, and another had come up with firewall rules stopping everything from running (and dns wasn't running, but I forgot about that, I really should have updated that script I said "yeah, ha ha" about recently). I fixed that, everything looked like it was working, so I left.

I came home. It was now just after 6pm, a long day.

My sat tv was still stuffed, E38 error constantly.

I fiddled around a bit, read some forum posts, changed to channel stacking, and it was then working ok. I didn't notice, but the channel order was all mixed up.

About this time I got a call to tell me there were problems with people logging on. I logged into the server, and saw some people failing to logon. When I tried to check other things, everything would segfault. Must be memory issues. I said I would look in the morning, I'm not going back to Gosford now, at 9.30pm. I waited 1/2 hour, and then logged in, I was able to run top, and sort by memory, there were a bunch of spamd processes running, one of them was chewing 85.1% of the memory (450MB worth), and it belonged to me. Oops, I must be getting spammed. After a minute or so, it went away, and there was 450MB free ram.

I sat and watched some tv, deleted all the recordings from today that were just half an hour of the E38 error message (about 8 hours worth), and then I was just about to go to sleep, about 11pm, I noticed the tivo recording, I went to check.. it thought it was recording comedy channel, but the history channel was there. What's going on? then I realised the channel order was all screwed up.

I used the channel sorting stuff to manually sort them, that was ok, I found there's a few new channels, instead of the 52 standard ones, there's now repeats of some that are offset by 2 hours, and other stuff that my card can't decrypt. It took about 20 minutes of button pressing to sort things, and I almost got RSI pressing up and down about 4000 times.

Anyway, it was now sorted, and all the channels worked.

I had a look at all the new channels, most are scrambled, there's a couple of crappy channels like country music, but I also found abc and sbs, so now I want to rechannel the tivo to use the sat abc/sbs instead of the nasty terrestrial ones. Oh, and I found some channel that I assume is widescreen, and the data rate seems to be too high for my box to decode it properly.

it's now midnight, I'm watching an episode of the Simpsons, and going to sleep.