I got up about 10am, I have to make up a tivo serial cable, get ready, and go and meet my mate in Gosford, that shouldn't be too hard.

I bummed around, I made up the serial cable, it took a lot longer than I had thought. I finished it, tested it etc, at about 12.15pm. There's no time for a shower now, and I'll be a couple of minutes late.

The guy who wants to start an ISP called me, apparently the linux box I built for him years ago isn't working again, and it's because the powersupply has blown in it again.

He wanted to know if there was a computer fair on tomorrow. I checked, no, it said cancelled. I said that my mate was going to the wholesaler today, and might be able to get one. I was on the phone for a few minutes, at which point I said i had to go.

I left about 12.25. Sure, I'll be there in 5 minutes.

On the way in, my phone started ringing. Not much I can do about it.

I rode to the seniors centre to meet my mate, he was waiting out the front.

I parked near his car, chucked my helmet and stuff in his car. Normally I would just lock it on to the bike, but the sun was blaring down, and I hate putting a red hot helmet on.

We wandered over to the building where the gear is, went in, and I showed him around.

I checked the server that seemed to have hung.. it was, but during the kernel booting, because they have issues with the IDE controllers on the motherboard, that for some stupid reason you can't disable (I don't need them, I'm using the SATA controller, and there is nothing attached to the IDE/floppy controller in any of the machines).

I reset it, and then it came up fine.

We where in there for a few minutes, I gave him the cash for my monitor, and asked him to see if he could get a power supply. I doubt they would have AT powersupplies, but it doesn't hurt to check.

We came out again, wandered back over. I said I was going to see the colo guy, to find out about a phone number.

My mate took off, I took off too.

I went to the post office, and I mailed the serial cable. The woman tried to put it through as a letter (which would have been nice) but it was just too fat.

I left there, and I went and had KFC for lunch.

I went out to Erina to see the guy.

He was in trying to setup a laptop for a customer.

I told him that I was getting there, had worked out the network issue (with the interface in the gateway machine being set to the broadcast address etc) but that I still needed a phone number (i thought you could just pick any, but I wanted to be sure), and that I would have issues with routing to his network.

I also mentioned that I had noticed my machines rebooting for no reason. He said he had noticed that years ago, and it's why he put the UPS in there. Apparently someone in one of the other offices in the building where the equipment is had complained to him that their computers always reboot during the night.

That must be what it is. He told me to put my stuff on the UPS instead of running it off the wall.

I hadn't done this, because I wasn't sure of the UPS status, how much load it had, and the batteries etc, because it was complaining and beeping saying "replace batteries" while I was in there on Tuesday racking the gear.

He told me he had replaced the batteries, but that the UPS hadn't worked it out, and that it only had 20% load on it.

He also told me about the E1 I could use, where it was etc.

He said he would be going over there later, because he had an issue with one of his machines.

I said I would go home, get my gear (crimping tool, cable etc) and head in there.

I went home, got the stuff, and went in there.

I took 15m of cable with me, it took about 10m of it to run from my rack, through the conduit on the floor, up the wall, across the conduit on the wall, down, and to the ISDN termination on the wall.

I crimped both ends.

I traced the E1 I could use, it was a single run to a second terminal server he runs.

I pulled the cable out, put mine, after a few seconds the WAN signal light came on, cool.

I wanted to use the rest of the cat5 I took with me to run the second network interface on the RAS into his LAN, but it wasn't long enough. I traced a spare cable running to the next rack, that's now empty, and went about pulling it out to use.

The way they had put the cables into the racks, up through a hole in the bottom where the adjustable height feet sit, meant that I couldn't get the terminated cable out, because the rj45 wouldn't fit.

I didn't realise this until I tried to get it out for a few minutes, pulling the piece of gear out of the rack so I could get in and see what was going on. In the end, I just cut the end off, pulled the cable out, put the gear back in the rack, and crimped a new end on.

I ran this bit of cable from my ras, through the conduit, and into the switch on his LAN.

I then went to configure the second interface on the ras, only to receive an error about trying to have 2 interfaces on the same subnet. D'oh.

I removed the IP address from the interface connected to my network, I was then able to set the IP on his network. Just before I did that however, I went around and turned off his ras, because I was configuring mine with the same IP address, so no changes would have to be made to his radius server.

It came up, I could ping his radius server, it should work.

On the console, I was able to see people dialling in.

I called my mate, and asked him to try dialling in, it didn't work.

I then realised I hadn't changed the radius server settings in the ras, to match the new ip address since I had to change the IP address on the interface to my network, to avoid the subnet error.

I fiddled around a bit, changed those settings, still no good, after I called my mate and got him to try again.

I thought about, chances are, he's hitting the other ras, with the 4 E1s attached, and trying to authenticate against the other guy's radius server.

I fiddle around a bit more, and then I got another phone call. It was the guy who was supposed to be coming over, apparently a few customers had complained about not being able to get on. Oops.

We arranged to muck around with the stuff tomorrow morning, about 8.30am.

I pulled the E1 out, put it back into his ras, I pulled the ethernet from my ras to his network out, and I booted his ras back up.

I didn't get any more calls, so I assumed any problems went away.

I collected all my stuff, turned off the monitors, and I left.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got some food, and I came home.

I called my mate, told him what had happened, and said I might get him to do some testing for me in the morning.

I tidied up in here a bit, well, I just sort of moved the junk around, to try to make it look a bit tidier, I didn't really succeed.

I pulled out my new monitor, and set it up.

I wanted to finally boot up my new mobo/cpu/ram job cobbled together with my old disks and the new power supply I bought recently.. Then I realised I had no video card for it. D'oh. I've only got a couple of PCI video cards here, and it refuses to boot off them, it either displays nothing, or just beeps at me.

I dragged out the woman's pc I'm supposed to fix, and I plugged it in. It booted up, and ran. I can't see anything wrong with it. What the hell do they want done to it? I'll just wait until she nags at me again about it, because I don't really have time to do anything with it, I need to get this ras configured.

How annoying. I should have asked my mate to get me some useful things at the wholesaler, like a cheap video card (I thought about buying one when I bought the rest of the parts, but thought I would make do with the old geforce2 from the mobo that died), or a cheap cash to put what's left of my other machine into.

I think he mentioned something about going down near there next week, I might see if I can get him to get the stuff for me then.

I watched a bit of tv, I looked at the ras configuration, and the manual. I watched a bit of tv.

I made a few changes to the config, I'm not really sure what it is that I need to do to make this thing work.

I did this for a few hours, and eventually went to bed about 12.30am.