I got out of bed about 11am I think.

My mate I got to dinner with rang me, he said he was going to the funeral this morning, and then he would come and see me after that.

I mucked around on the servers, I copied all the stuff across onto the webserver, reconfigured the stuff to make it boot off SATA/RAID, and then rebooted it, it came up fine.

I removed some of the stuff I won't need on it (squid etc), and made small changes to it. This box is different to the other 2, it doesn't need much done to it, it's already got Apache/PHP/MySQL on it, so there's not really much I have to do to it.

I was getting a bit hungry about 1pm, and I should probably go and pay the insurance/sort out the rego on my other bike.

I started wondering where my mate was. If I go out, he'll turn up, so I just kept mucking around on the servers.

I dragged the Tigris out, plugged it all in, and got ready to start configuring it.

It sounds like a bloody jet engine, I couldn't hear the tv over it.

I plugged the network into it, a crossover cable to one of the servers, running tcpdump on the interface hoping I would find what IP it was configured to, but it didn't broadcast anything.

I found my null modem adapters, plugged them into the rear console port, and into one of my pcs. I couldn't get anything out of it.

I read the book for the Tigris, it mentioned a front console port as well. Yeah, there it is, on the front of the control card, but it's an 8 pin DIN connectors, not a db9.

I looked through the cables I've got, and found the console cable.

I plugged it in to the front, and then I had to find something to use as a terminal.

I grabbed my old 486 laptop, booted it up, couldn't find hyperterminal I'd been using to test the tivo serial cables with it.. oh, I was running hyperterminal over the network, from a different machine.. the one that's down with the dead motherboard. D'oh!

At this point, about 3pm, my mate turned up. After the funeral, he'd gone to see someone, and then gone somewhere else on the way.

We sat and chatted for a while, about where I was up to with stuff.

He mentioned he'd recently seen an episode of Oprah, where she gave everyone in the audience a TiVo, heh, I've heard about that episode.

He was here for a while, and told me he wasn't sure if he wanted the blank CDRs I was supposed to get recently, because I can get them at the fair tomorrow. He said he would let me know tomorrow, depending on what happened, because his wife wanted to go to Manly.

He'd gone and investigated pamphlet printing prices, not too bad, I'll get a few thousand made up, once everything it up and running very smoothly.

I got back to work after he left (about 3.30pm).

I downloaded serial terminal linux, a bootable disk that just starts up minicom.

About 4pm. I remembered I still had some biscuits in the cupboard, so I ate them for lunch.

I then had to find a floppy disk, and floppy drive, that would work.

Eventually I managed to (I really need to buy some new floppy disks), and tried to boot it up, failed. The kernel on there is compiled requiring a Pentium CPU, and the laptop is only a 486, so the kernel panics.

Hangon.. My games machine is sitting right here, it's a Pentium 133 (or a 120 overclocked to 133 or something), and it's got a working floppy drive.

I plugged it all in, put the console cable into it, booted it up.

It worked. I had a prompt on the Tigris.

I went through, I was trying to work out who I could reconfigure the network interface. to give it an address on my network (or to at least find out what it was currently configured to, since I could just start up a virtual interface on one of the servers on the same range).

I found the IP, setup the server similarly, but I couldn't get anywhere. I could ping, but nothing else.

I couldn't make any changes either, you have to be logged in, even on the console, to do anything.

I wanted to back the configuration up before I factory reset it, it's probably a really good example of things I will need to put in to set the thing up, I don't want to lose it, and I don't want to spend ages writing it all down.

Hangon.. there must be a way to log the screen in the terminal emulator. I had a poke around, yep.

I installed minicom on one of the servers, and moved the console cable over there (I don't know why I didn't just do this in the first place, instead of wasting about 45 minutes with machines/cables/floppies).

I logged in, set it to log, dumped the configuration on screen, and then I went about factory resetting the device, since I didn't know and couldn't guess the password.

After the factory reset, you get a wizard to put the basic settings in. After that, you can configure it locally on the console if you want, or remotely, via a web interface, or some flashy java web interface.

I went through, and put the network settings in.

Whenever I tried to save the settings, it wouldn't let me, since I still hadn't logged in. I tried logging in with the default username/password, but they didn't work. WTF?

Dad came in, asked if I wanted any dinner. I went and had some chicken rice thing he'd made, it's supposed to have potatoes with it, instead of plain rice, so it wasn't great, but it was food, and I'm sick to death of frozen stuff.

While I was in there, I noticed their sat tv was really bad for blips and blops. The P200 I've got running the card stuff really struggles, and the fact they have a router and a 10mb network link in between probably doesn't help.

I came back to the Tigris again.

I factory reset about 10 times, it made no difference. I was getting really frustrated now.

There is no support on Ericsson's page, and the ACC pages seem to be gone. I couldn't even find the updated version of the firmware anywhere, thinking maybe serially loading the firmware again over the console connection might fix the password.

I had a CD, with the stuff, it was an older version, but I was getting desperate.. but it only had documentation on it, no actual software. Damn.

I pulled the control card out, looked for a jumper or something, maybe stopping the password from getting reset. Nothing. I even took the flash card out, and tried booting the Tigris without it to see what it would do. Not much.

In the end, I worked it out..

I have to factory reset it, then reboot. When the Express Setup Wizard thing runs, abort it. I'm then at a prompt, and the Tigris has no configuration.

I then set the password, it worked. I then ran the wizard, setup the basic settings, and was able to login remotely, and use the web interface to set some things up.

I spent the next few hours putting the configuration in, with both the console interface, and the web interface. I was trying to find documentation for the commands, but the doco on the CD is really bad, there are about 600 different pdf files, and they are named with single words, and those words aren't really descriptive of what the file documents.

I ended up just looking at the old config, guessing what the commands do, and then loading them back in, modified to suit my environment.

I really need to know what live IPs I can use, and what telephone numbers will be on the lines attached.

I pinged around a bit, and found some empty IPs on the live network (I hope they are empty) and I reconfigured my servers to use those IPs, and put virtual interfaces on for the development work, that I will remove when the gear goes in properly. (On Sunday hopefully, but we'll see).

The guy on IRC who helps me with stuff all the time had seen me whinging in IRC about not being able to reset the password, he'd sent me an email with details of how to reset the passwords on a lot of Ascend equipment, it was interesting, too bad this is a piece of Ericsson gear.

It looked like it was working, I eventually got the RADIUS settings in, there's no real way to test that that I can find unfortunately.

I gave up about 2am. I think I've done all I can without the stuff being installed, and with everything setup and plugged in properly, and trying to run live.

I was about to go to bed, when ICQ popped up, it was my mate who's overseas. He'd chatted to me earlier in the say, and told me that he was going to be putting some pictures up on the web. I'd just been looking, and had found that he'd put them up.

We chatted briefly, and I said I was going to bed because I had to buy a new mobo in the morning.