I woke up, got up.

at 9.30 I was fiddling around on the computer when I got called up, I didn't have to go and see that lady, her phone line is stuffed. What a surprise.

Ok, I've got an hour and half between now and having to leave to go to the Cafe.

I fiddled around with the wireless again, downloading different network tools and trying them, nothing worked.

I went and looked at netstumbler, and saw the list of supported devices.

I went over to eBay, and started searching for the supported devices. I want an Orinoco gold card, they are supposed to be great, or you can get a Silver and flash it with the Gold firmware to upgrade it.

I found one lot of silvers that could be bought for $25, emailed the guy.

I found a cheap device, a Dell TrueMobile which is a Gold card, bid on it, I had a couple of hours left.

I went back to trying more network sniffers and stuff, everything either doesn't work or is for linux, which I don't have on the support laptop (yet).

I packed the laptop up, I'll need it in the Cafe today. Took the SDSL routers and powersupplies I was fiddling around with a couple of days ago, and took off.

I got in, checked my auction, I'd won.

Then a guy we sell lines to in Sydney who's been trying to get his radius server IP address changed in our RAS called up, so I had to go about sorting that out.

I found the login details in an email, I worked out how to change the settings in the RAS, it should work.

Some more SDSL routers had turned up, so I set the laptop up and used it to configure them, they both linked up, and worked, groovy, now we have a backup pair.

I went back to fiddling with the RAS, and noticed that I lost connectivity to it, and also to all our other equipment, in Gosford and Sydney. Must be a major issue.

My friend's De Facto had brought in his laptop, I need to go through it and find things we might need, emails, back records etc. I booted it up, started fiddling with it.

The phone started going off it's head, people couldn't browse, what's going on etc. I was terribly interested, they're only paying customers.

I told the tech support woman to call our provider, she got put on hold, got through after a few minutes, and was talking to someone, but she wasn't sure what they were saying, so I spoke to them. Apparently they'd made some changes for upgrades to ADSL, and it had bunged up the whole network. They had 3 guys working on it, and would be fixed ASAP.

Fine, change the outgoing voicemail message to something like the same, and unplug the phone.

The guy with the lines in Sydney called again, I told him what was going on.

I went back to the laptop, it had shut off. Hmm. It wouldn't come back on. I decided to just remove the hard disk and extract all the files like I did recently with the other laptop. I started pulling it apart, got the keyboard out, couldn't work out where the disk was, undid all the remaining screws (most are already missing, I don't know how this thing holds together, magic I think), and then I found a little side cover that came off, and the disk was sitting in underneath there, and just slid out. So I only had to undo one screw. D'oh.

I put the whole thing back together, then I found the power socket is dodgy, I got that working, tried to boot it up, the screen doesn't come on now. Hmm.

Oh well, I've got the disk, I'll just get all the files off and go through it that way.

My friend's De Facto showed me some pictures on her phone, of the plane after it was crashed, there wasn't anything left, it just looked like scrap metal, and you wouldn't know it was a plane.

Anyway, I started fiddling around with the wireless stuff after that.

I found a few wlans in the Cafe, one I was running, 2 I was not. I could get on to one, and get an IP address from DHCP, but the default gateway didn't work, I couldn't get out to the net.

I put a port scanner (nmap) and some other software on, so I could fiddle around on this wlan and try to find a way out.

The guy with the lines in Sydney called again, still not working. I got back in and fiddled around again, called him back. Left a message, he's not called me back, so it must be working now.

I packed up, left. Went to my mate's place.

I started fiddling around with the laptop again, I could get on to both of those wlans I found in the Cafe from his place.

I started snooping around on the onne that gave me an IP address. Found a bunch of hosts up, with lots of open ports, ooh, this'll be fun.

I tried incrementing the default gateway, in case a machine had IP forwarding enabled, and had a working gateway, no such luck, wasted too much time on this.

There were webservers, that gave me some idea of what this network is, there was even a machine running VNC. It took me 3 guesses to get the password. Hint: don't make your password the same as your domain name.

Now I had admin access to a Windows 2000 server. I quickly fiddled around with the software running on it, a web interface to some sort of management tool for certain basic services provided to people that live in a certain area.

Around this time my mate came back from picking up his wife, and the pizzas for dinner, so I hoed into that.

I got back on the laptop after that, but I made the mistake of moving it to a different spot, where I thought I would have better reception.

Unfortunately both wlans I could see had the same SSID, so it would always connect to the stronger one, which doesn't give an IP (and I can't sniff to find one). No amount of reboots or reinstalling the driver would help. I gave up, and moved back to the table again. Bang, straight back on.

Once I tired of the the web interface tool, looking at pictures, status reports, maps, weather station details, I brought up a command prompt to check the network settings, same default gateway as I was being issued, didn't work on this PC either. This LAN must not have access to the web. How boring.

I used the computer management thing to enable the guest account, with no password, and make it a member of the admin group. I then connected to all the other machines on the lan, and did the same, except for the domain controllers, because they don't use "local groups and users". I found a way to access the domain controller, but just as I was in the middle of enabling the guest account, VNC bunged up.

I tried to get back on, but I couldn't. SMB was still working on that machine, so I went through all the files on the disk, nothing terribly interesting. A printer I could have used, that could have been funny.

I tried port scanning other machines I knew about, to try to find VNC running on something else, but no such luck. It was now abou 10.30, and I was tired.

I packed up the laptop, took what was left of the pizza, and came home.

I emailed the guy I won the wireless card from, to say I was in Aus, would he ship to me etc.

On irc, someone mentioned that TiVo is collecting private data. I'm not worried, this will only affect people with subscriptions, who dialup and collect guide data from Tivo's servers. I'm happy to give away info from my Tivo, that's why I've got MRTG and Big Brother running across it, providing the data to a globally accessable webserver.

I clicked around watching tv for a while, and then went back and checked my mail.

A couple of hours later the guy I emailed replied and said he had cancelled my bid and offered it to the next bidder. Bloody discriminating ass clown.

I went back to looking for another one, all "Ship to US only". I tried emailing them to find out if they would ship to me, and eBay said "Unable to send message" everytime. Useless.

I started whinging on irc about it, and someone in there said they had a card (Orinoco Gold) they didn't want anymore, so after a bit of haggling (not much) I agreed to buy it, for a little bit more than they go on eBay, but it was worth it to know that I didn't have to go through all the hassle, and that the card would get sent out in the next couple of days.

I clicked around watching tv again for a while. Went to bed about 4am.