I woke up about 11am.

Got up. had a shower, breakfast.

The guy who owns the aircon place tried to call when I was in the shower (my message service called when I was getting dressed).

He wanted me to call him.

I didn't have time right now, about 11.50am. I was going to my mate's place, for a barbeque.

I'll call him when I get up there.

I rode there, forgot to ring the guy. D'oh.

Sat round for a short while waiting for everyone to turn up.

When everyone got there (a fair few people, maybe 20 total), we fired up the barby, cooked everything, ate everything.

The guy called me again. I chatted to him, apparently the people running my friend's isp had sent out an email saying that ex employees (ie my mate and myself) were slandering the company, and not to speak to us, that sort of rubbish. I asked him to send me a copy. I told him I'm getting pretty close to being ready to start (end of this week hopefully) and I got off the phone.

I went back, told my mate what was going on, he wasn't too impressed. I knew they'd lost the plot completely, when he went into the Cafe a few days ago to get a driver CD (that they've got about 50 of) and they refused to help him.

I sat around chatting for a short while more. Everyone started to leave about 3.45pm, so I did too, because there were some dark clouds coming over, and it was getting cold. I didn't want to ghet caught in the rain on the way home, expecially with the state of my back tyre (it's not bald, but past the wear indicators I think).

I stopped in at a bottle shop on the way home, bought some Vat69 that one of my mates recommended to me the other night when we were down the club. It said "$26.99" on the shelf, the guy asked for $30. I couldn't be bothered arguing over $3, so I just paid it.

Got the bottle, chucked it in the saddle bag, and came home.

I started working on the servers again.

I wanted to get quota working. Something simple ended up taking a couple of hours, I'd missed compiling quota V2 support into the kernel, so I recompiled it, tested it, copied it across to the other server, installed it.

I watched some tv, had some dinner.

I saw the email the guy I worked for was talking about. He exagerated a bit, it didn't go into detail about us supposedly slandering them. It was just a bit of a sob story, about how they're having problems, doing everything they can to sort it out.

I'd put the verbatum contents of the email here, but even though it was an email sent to all customers, that's probably questionable, seeing as I have done nothing wrong so far, so I'll just put a couple of bits out of it and make some comments on it.

It claimed that customers had been approached, and "vexatious allegations made", but it didn't claim who was making the allegations. That's unfortunate, I was hoping it would claim that I was, so I could sue them, seeing as it would have been a complete lie.

It then went on a bit, about the problems they were having, and it then said that customers should not contact "previously employed staff members", because "they are not aware of what we are doing and the changes being made. They are unable to assist you.".

Oh, we're aware of what you're doing (or trying to). Customers have already been contacting us (and still, after this email was sent), as a result of the amount of issues they are having, and because they've contacted us before, and been assisted.

I don't think they want the customers to contact us, because they are worried that we will tell the customers the true story of how we were exploited, used, abused, until we were of no use anymore.

Anyway, enough of that rubbish. Whetever they're doing is their problem, and I don't care anymore.

I started looking at freeside again.

One of the cars turned up outside, I could hear my sister's voice. She must be up from Melbourne again.

The guy on IRC that helps me greatly all the time recommended I look at configuring radius to work with a mysql database behind it, instead of system accounts.

I started looking at this. Managed to get that working, without any pain. Typical, the simple stuff ends up taking hours and being totally frustrating, but something I expect to be that way, is quick and painless.

I then went about setting up replication between the 2 servers. It wouldn't work. Oops, I put the wrong IP in here, and it was trying to replicate to itself.

I fixed the settings, but they wouldn't update. I had to shut the database down, trash some files/logs it had created, and restart it. Then it was trying to update, but still wouldn't.

Ah.. the default config is to not bind to any network interfaces, and only allow local access through the unix socket, that's why replication can't connect across the network.

I had just found how to fix that, with a bind-address setting in my.cnf, and was just about to restart mysql when my video editing machine went off. That's detailed in the next blog.

I think I'll leave this stuff for now, get to sleep.

I'm heading down to the club for some snooker in the morning, then I'll go down the freeway and get a new power supply.

Then I might get to finish setting up mysql replication.