i had set the alarm to get up about 9.30am this morning, to get the gear in and sorted fairly early.

I slept right through the alarm.

I woke up about 10.40am. I got up.

I started getting the gear organised to go.

Dad wasn't here, the car wasn't there. Great.

I continued sorting stuff, finding cables, tools I would need.

Dad came back, we loaded the gear in the car, servers, RAS, cables, tools, and the couple of rack shelves I pinched recently.

I took the door off the rack, and dragged it over near the door, I want to make it as easy as possible when my mate helps me move it later.

Ok, that should be everything. I jumped in the car, and we went in.

Found a park around the back, in 10 minute parking.

Moved all the gear upstairs, and dumped it in the room.

Dad went to find a different parking spot.

It was now about 11.50am.

I went to call the guy whose colo it is, I only had the shop number, he wasn't there, I spoke to his wife, and said I would call his mobile.

I got off the phone, realised that his mobile number was written on a card.. in the pocket of my jacket.. that's on the chair at home.

I called the office again, asked for his mobile number, and then I called him.

I said I was in here, and when he was available to give me a network link it would be cool. He said he could be in here about 1pm.

I asked him to bring the 3 wheeled trolley he's got, (that he offered yesterday) since it might make getting the rack up the stairs a bit easier.

I started plugging the gear in, I can get it setup on the floor here, the guy can come in and give me the network link, then I can get the rack in here, and move all the stuff into the rack.

I realised I had forgotten the swtich, D'oh. It was on the floor where I put it when I unplugged all the leads, and went about getting them untangled.

Dad said he would go and get it, since we now had an hour to kill anyway.

I said I would go down the road, and buy 2 plugs to go on the rack (since the powerstrips in them had no plugs on them. They are supposed to have big industrial plugs on them, but I'm not paying $50 or so for connectors that there's no power point for anyway).

I wandered across the road, to the cheapy shop, that collects cash for the business I got screwed over by. I asked if they had plugs (it was a long shot, but I thought they might have them, and cheap, and it saved me walking for ages to go to the hardware shop). They guy didn't have any, and he didn't seem very happy to see me, very cold. Someone might have got in his ear and told him nonsense, or maybe he was just in a bad mood.

He suggested I try the supermarket.

I went over there, went in, all they had were these ugly side mount plugs, that would have been a mingrel anyway.

I ended up walking all thew way down to the hardware shop.

I bought the plugs, and a can of drink, and I wandered back.

I decided to get something to eat (I'd only killed about 15 minutes). I went into the shopping centre where the supermarket is again.

I was going to go to McDonalds in there, but there were tons of people there (now 12.20pm, no real surprise) I thought stuff it.

As I was exiting, near where I can get back to the colo, I went past a doughnut place, so I decided to get some. Mmm, breakfast.

As I was wandering across the road, I thought I could hear someone calling my name, nah, can't be me, and I kept going. Then I saw someone waving. Ah, it's the wife of the guy I've done plastering for, who I saw recently, when I went to a woman's place to fix her computer that wouldn't let her login. The woman whose computer I fixed was there too.

I went over, and started chatting to them, I told them I was in there installing all the gear, and getting ready to start up.

The woman whose computer I fixed wandered off, she had an appointment to get her hair cut. She came back a short time later, saying they were running 20 minutes later.

We continued chatting for a while, about the startup, and other things, when at about 12.40pm. I noticed Dad, and my brother wandering around.

I said I had to get back to work.

I wandered over, and we went back into the building.

I put the switch in, plugged everything in.

I had to finish reconfiguring the network on some of the servers, to get rid of the stuff to make them work on my home network.

The other machines weren't up, weird.

I plugged the monitor in to each one, they were complaining of no keyboard errors. Oops. I haven't tried to boot them up without keyboards before.

I reconfigured the bios to ignore that issue (or any issue) and that fixed that.

I reconfigured the network settings, fiddled around with ssh keys so I can login to each server without passwords, (otherwise I'll spend all day typing bloody passwords, and it makes writing backup scripts difficult). One of the machines wouldn't do name resolution properly.

I mucked around, trying all different things. In the end, I gave up, and put entries in the hosts file. Very nasty, but I was sick of it. I'll google around later, and come back to this.

Local short name resolution wouldn't work properly either.

Very weird, this probably has something to do with me skipping networking steps when I did the debootstrap after building the kernel with SATA support. Maybe I should have bought some floppy disks that worked, made a rescue disk, and installed it properly, and allow the setup to configure the network, I've obviously missed something.

I also took the extra network card out of one of the machines, I have decided against doing that, it leaves my network susceptable to a single point of failure, and I don't want that, it sort of makes redundant disks and network scripts a waste of time, if the default route dies.

The guy turned up about 1.30pm, he was late, because when he went to get the trolley, he found it had been left outside, and was full of water (rain). It had leaked out everywhere when he moved it, filthy water getting all over him (his shirt and hands were a bit grubby), and spilling all in the boot of his car, over a switch, and a manual for some of the telco termination in the colo.

He left the trolley behind, it didn't even fit in the car after all that.

We went about putting in a network link.

We tried to startup the second network card in a machine, but it wouldn't recognise it.

We ended up pulling the card out, putting the spare I had just pulled out in, and then trying to configure it.

Very strangely, the output from the machine was still on the screen, after turning it off and back on again, maybe it just suspended or something.

I pulled the video cable out of the machine. The display was still there. Uh oh, I think we're on the wrong machine.

Yep. That's why the machine refused to recognise the second card, it only has one.

We went to the machine we had just changed the card in, and tried to configure it, it hadn't detected my card we put in there (well, it did, and ran some redhat hardware change thing, but we didn't see it because we were looking at the wrong machine).

We were about to force load the module for my card, when we decided to put the original card back. We did that.

We reconfigured the second card to give me a feed. Then the guy realised the second card we had just changed was his link to the internet, and that we needed to add another nic to connect to me anyway.

He didn't backup the config file for the card either, or comment the old lines and add new ones. He couldn't remember the original config either.

I didn't see the original config, I was around the other side of the rack fiddling with the machine.

He rang his wife to find out what the settings were, since they were written down somewhere, she couldn't find them.

We tried resetting the file to what we thought it was, but it didn't work, got no traffic.

He rang the upstream network provider (that the nic with the settings we had just trashed connected to), to find the settings/default route.

While he was on the phone, his wife tried to ring him back, he didn't get a chance to answer in time.

I gave him my phone, and he called back to the office, he was now on hold to the provider, and talking to his wife, she couldn't find the settings, and people were complaining, oh oops. it's the live internet feed.

The provider came back, and gave him the settings, he forgot he was on my phone to his wife in the office, until I thought I could hear something through it, as he held it behind his back. Oops.

I put the original settings back in, we were close, but not right with the settings, and it still didn't work.

When I looked closely, the second network card had no link lights on it.

We checked the other end, plugged into the fiber transceiver, it was fine. Hmm.

We decided the card must be dud. We took it out, and moved it to a different slot. I powered the machine up, the link came up.

I shut the machine down again, and put my nic in the machine. Powered it up, the dodgy card didn't come up.

Hmm, I think I know what's going on here. The guy suggested I take my nic out again, but I said "hangon, let me try something", I turned the machine off, and then I turned it on again. The dodgy card came up immediately.

As I suspected, sometimes the card doesn't start, it just requires a power cycle, and then it will come up. Once it is up, it will stay up.

The machine booted up, found my card in it. It asked to do the network setup, but we didn't trust redhat to do it.

We loaded the module, it went in fine.

We configured the interface, and brought it up.

I plugged in my network, but I couldn't get any traffic.

Oh yeah, I'll need to put in a route to use my nic to get to my network. I did that, added a static host route. I still couldn't ping my machines.

There's subnetting going on here, and I really don't understand how that works. (I do now however, somewhat).

It was a subnetted address, and the address we had given to the card in the gateway box was outside the subnet I had used on my equipment.

I had no idea what I was doing here, no understanding how subnetting works. The guy suggested we put the fiber transceiver straight into a switch, instead of the routing machine, which may bypass the subnetting issue.

He said he had tried it before, but couldn't get the connection to work, I suggested he might need to use a crossover cable, since the transceiver is probably designed to go into a pc.

I grabbed my switch, unplugged everything. Took my short crossover cable (that I use to connect the gigabit interfaces on 2 of the servers together), and went over to the fiber transceiver.

I put the crossover cable in the uplink port on my switch (since it has a button to change MDI/MDI-X), and then I pulled the live ethernet out of the transceiver, put it in the switch, put my cross over cable into the transceiver. The link didn't come up. I was about to change the mode of the uplink port on the switch, when I noticed an MDI/MDI-X switch on the transceiver. I changed it, and the link came up, and traffic flowed.

We then realised that wouldn't work anyway, because there are only 4 IPs in the subnet provided by the upstream provider. I assumed he meant 4 usable IPs.

It turns out there are 4 IPs.. the range, 2 usable (our end, and their end), and the broadcast address. So that achieved nothing. I put it all back together, as it was before.

I setup a virtual interface on one of my machines, in the correct subnet, and then I could ping.

The guy said to do it that way temporarily, and we would sort it out after that, he'll change his ips, and we'll get it all tidy.

That'll get done on a weekend when it doesn't really effect people.

It was now about 2.30pm, the guy said he had to get back to doing his tax, told me to the change the root password on his gateway box, so I could continue configuring it later/remotely whatever.

My phone rang, it was my mate, wanting to know if I wanted to move the rack, he said he would be there shortly.

I enabled IP forwarding on this machine, added static host routes for my other machines, and then everything was working.

It's not a pretty way to do it, routing out one subnet, and then routing it back to different addresses again. At least it avoids the issue of a single point of failure (somewhat, since I can bring up a virtual interface on a different machine and stuff will keep going), and it allows me to control the firewall pretty well.

It's only a temporary setup, we had decided to reorder the network range, and put a /16 subnet in for me, instead of trying to use part of the /32 that is there. Unfortunately it seems that the size of the subnets has to go in order, for me to have a /16, it has to be the first IP addresses in the network range.


I kept fiddling with the routing, this was when I got everything properly working.

My mate called again, he would be outside shortly.

I came out, Dad did too, he had to move the car again (he was in time limited parking, had already had to move once, an hour ago). He decided to take my brother home.

I locked the door, left everything as it was, I'll be back shortly.

I jumped in with my mate, went to his parents' place, and unloaded all the tools (for airconditioning stuff).

We went to my place, put the rack, front and back doors in the van, and came back to Gosford.

Dad came back too, along with my brother.

My mate and I dragged the rack in, up the stairs, and into the room.

We dumped it in there.

Dad brought the doors up.

My mate looked around a bit, suggested having lan games in the front room, that's not a bad idea, it's separate unit, and it can be locked off from the unit with all the gear in it.

I'd only have people I knew in there anyway.

It would be pretty cool actually, go in the pub across the road, then come in here and play lan games, even on the internet, I could patch it into my network, and use some of my bandwidth for the customers, if they don't need it.

I'll talk to the guy who's colo it is, see what he thinks.

I'm interested in making use of the office anyway, it could be handy for doing PC repairs, setups etc, I don't want to be doing it at home.

The office is a bit scundgey, but it could be made ok, tidy up, a few posters or something. "It's got potential".

I'd be willing to pay a bit more rent in order to be able to use that space. As I said, I'll talk to the other guy, see what he thinks, he may not want people in there.

My mate left, and I got back to work.

I fiddled with the routing a bit more, got everything setup properly, default routes and everything.

I noticed the network link to one machine/the switch going up and down, and then it stayed off. I thought it was software issues, investigated the cable, and found one end to be faultly, so I replaced it.

Dad was putting the door back on the rack.

I thought I had the routing working, but then it broke again. I fiddled around, and found issues with the network settings, it doesn't like the default route if I specify the network range properly (and subnet). I think I need to learn how subnetting works more.

I put settings in I thought were wrong, and it started working, so I left it. I'll work out what I'm doing and fix it later.

We put the shelf in the rack, I shut all the gear down and started moving it in.

Then I realised I had put the shelf about an inch too low, and I couldn't get the bottom server in.

Bugger, pulled them out again, moved the shelf, put the servers back in again.

The shelf is sagging slightly, with the weight of the 2 servers on it, so they lean together at the top.

I found some junk mail, folded it up tightly (and fatly) and put it between the tops of the servers, that held them apart, I wouldn't have worried, but they have fans in the sides, and it makes them sort of pointless if they are jammed together.

Dad rack mounted the switch, my brother and I ran all the cables, patched everything in.

Oops.. the network cable to go from the gateway machine to my switch isn't long enough.

I found a longer cable coiled up in the other unit, with the junk in it, and put that in, fine.

Uh oh, where's the dud cable I pulled out? I think we found it, but I'm not sure. If a machine disappears off the network, I'll know why.

We rack mounted the ras power supply, and then went to put the ras in, but there are no screws left.

I think I have some floating around on the desk here.

I did a network test, I could pull about 155k/sec out, that was ok, that's about a 1.2mbit connection, sweet.

I might have to put my spare CDR drive in one of the machines, and download stuff remotely, burn it remotely, then just pop in and pickup the cd (and put a new blank in the drive :-)

It was now about 6pm. Dad wanted to leave.

I realised I had recieved an SMS on my phone several hours earlier, it was from my mate, wanting to know if I was coming up for dinner, and at what time.

Dad and my brother had already packed everything up, so we left.

Dad went to the supermarket, instead of coming home, I asked how long he was going to be, since I was supposed to be going for dinner, he said about half and hour, and asked if I wanted to go home first, I said I would prefer it, since it was now about 6.15pm, and we usually go for dinner about 7pm, and the place is about 25 minutes away.

We came home, I called my mate, he hadn't gone to dinner yet, said he would be in about 25 minutes when his wife gets off the trains (about 6.50pm) I said I was leaving now, and would probably be there about the same time, so I would go straight to the club.

I got my stuff, and rode up there. I still haven't charged my mp3 player batteries.

I went near the station on the way, to see if my mate was waiting there, I didn't see him. Either he's not here yet, already been, or is on the other side of the station, I kept going, and went to the club.

The carpark was full, I eventually found a place to squeeze in.

I went in, I asked the receptionist if my mate was there yet, she said she thought he was, but wasn't sure.

I said I would look.

I went in, looked around, didn't see him.

I grabbed a drink, I wanted a Rum and Coke, they didn't have any in a can, they asked if I wanted mixed, I said whatever, they then asked if I wanted Bourbon and Coke in a can, yeah, whatever. They then asked something else, I couldn't make it out, "freeze" or something, and again, I said whatever. She got an ordinary looking can of Bourbon and Coke out, and said it was very popular.

Whatever she was on about.

I paid, and went and sat down, started drinking. I think I worked out the thrid thing she asked "frozen?". The can wasn't frozen, but it was very cold, and felt weird when I tipped it, like it had a big block of ice in it.

Just then I saw my mate's wife, they had just got there.

We went into dinner, they were with a young Chinese guy.

We sat and ate dinner, I went through some of the stuff that had gone on during the day.

During dinner, my mate who helped me move the rack called. He wanted to know why one of his machines had a much smaller ping time to game servers than his other machine, and something about network collisions. I chatted to him for a bit.

We finished dinner, I thought about coming home, to continue setting up the servers, domain names etc, but I decided to go back to my mate's place, have a chat, and a cup of tea or something.

We chatted for a while, my mate rang me again, asking more about network collisions, and I tried to work out what was going on. He's got 2 switches around there, maybe they've got connected together with 2 network cables, and the traffic is looping around or something.

I said I was leaving shortly, and would come and have a look on my way home.

My mate tried to get on the internet, to do some online banking, but he couldn't get on. The company that screwed us over made him pay for his internet access after we got screwed, he's now a few days late on paying for the next month, and they've cut him off.

I setup my internet connection (with the other isp I have an account with, that I've been using at home since I got screwed by them, and they locked out my account) on his computer, so he could do his banking, pay his bill or whatever.

He tried to check his email, that should work, since the email accounts are on a different machine (the mail server that came from the isp I worked for back in 98/99, that my friend bought about 6 months before he was killed), and were never put in as part of the automated system that may have cut my mate off for his payment being overdue.

He couldn't access either of his email accounts. They've gone through and manually locked out his email accounts, without warning, and he's only a few days overdue of paying too. That's the thanks you get for volunteering your time obviously.

Oh well, I've got my gear up now, at least the servers.

As soon as I park a domain on them, I can start setting up mail accounts, he can have a new email account, and email everyone to let them know he's changed addresses. I might do that tomorrow, oops, today, it's after 2am. (Blogging takes too much time, I spend hours doing it).

Anyway, I left, I headed back to my mates place (who helped me move the rack). I had a look at the network, he'd ripped the extra switch out, plugged everything in to one.

He was still complaining about the collisioning, coming from the ADSL router. I looked at the switch.. it's not collisioning, this cheap switch has shared Full Duplex and collision LEDs, and the ADSL router is running full duplex.

We fiddled around, and tried to get everything else set to full duplex, in case that fixed the ping time issue. Nope.

it was weird, one machine (laptop) would rip out the ADSL router onto the telco's backbone with 11/12msec delays, yet the other 2 machines (normal desktops) would get 22/23msec to his the same hosts, that's just weird.

I had suggested that my mate try using the gigabit interface on the mobo (he bought the same board as I used in the servers) but he couldn't find the drivers, and couldn't get it going.

They were cryptically placed on the motherboard driver cd.

I installed them, but didn't seem to do anything, no new lan device turned up.

I checked the mobo jumper settings, tried disabling the gigabit interface, booting, shutting down, reenabling the gigabit interface, booting up, but it made no difference.

I tried checking bios settings, resetting the bios, updating the bios, all no good.

I tried installing the drivers again, no change. I put the virtual cable tester application on, and it claimed it couldn't find the adapter.

Hmm, this is just weird. I'll just blame windows. I had no issue on my servers, build the yukon network driver module, load it. back, the interface came up, and worked.

My mate put on an episode of the Sopranos, he and his housemate have been buying/watching all the seasons of them recently.

I sat and watched it with them, giving up on the pc.

While I was there, I typed in the IP address of one of my servers, and the home page came flying up, that's groovy, excellent connection.

When it finished, they were going to bed, so I left, came home, and started blogging.

That was like 2 1/2 hours ago. Damn.

The place looks a bit emptier in here no, with no rack/3 servers/ras/ras power supply/switch.

It's still a total mess in here, at least I have room to move the stuff around in an attempt to organise it now.

Ok, later today I have to park some domains on my machines, get the routing sorted, and then plug in an E1 to the RAS, so I can get people dialling in.

I really hate the way blogger defines days, making me have to fiddle with the time this was posted.

For me, the end of a day is somewhere between 5 and 6 am, not midnight. If I go to bed at 1am, it's an early night.