Mum came in this morning to ask if the woman who I'm supposed to be doing the networking for in a while had tried to call me.

I've still got a PC of theirs here to fix, that I haven't had time to do. No, she hasn't called me.

A short while later she rang me, wanting to know if the pc had been fixed. I said it hadn't, and after checking what day it is, I said I may fix it tomorrow or over the weekend.

I don't think I'll charge them for fixing it, it's been here for like 3 weeks. I wouldn't have accepted the work, but they didn't ask me to do it, the machines just turned up here, and I was expected to fix them.

I got up after that, checked the cordless phone. The handset was totally flat. I had checked the battery last night, there's a little bit of corrosion on one of the terminals, I'd put the connector on and off a few times to clean it.

The guy who I was going to start the ISP with last year messaged me on icq, and I chatted to him for a bit, he's been in Thailand for the last 3 weeks, and he got back a couple of days ago.

He wants to start and ISP. Hmm, he's not aware of the fact that I pretty much already have.

He wanted to ring me, I told him the phone was broken. He rang anyway, the base station of the cordless phone started ringing, I have no way to answer it.

He then called me on my mobile.

I chatted with him for a while.

While I was on the phone, I pulled the cordless phone handset apart, took the battery out, grabbed my meter and measured the voltage from the battery, about 1/2 volt, it's supposed to be a 3.5v battery. Must be stuffed.

I spoke to him on the phone, he was wanting to start an ISP, do web hosting, and other stuff. I was fairly quiet, I didn't know what to say. He wants a proposal from me for a contract to set it up and run it for him.

I got off the phone. I didn't know what to do.

I sent Dad an email about it.

Ok, I need to get this stuff sorted today.

I went into see the gear, and I turned the ras on.

I spent a few minutes fiddling with some routing stuff, and then I left it, I'll do it remotely.

I went to the electronics place nearby, to see about a replacement battery.

I also bought the db9 shells I needed to make the serial cables I'm supposed to send out tomorrow.

The guy there found me a replacemet battery. $28 they wanted. Bugger off, I bought a cheap and nasty phone for $20. I didn't want the cordless phone anyway, I hate them.

The db9s were more expensive than the other place I go to get parts, these serial cables will end up costing me money this time.

I went to McDonalds to get some breakfast. I had about $2 on me now, after buying the phone and the db9 backshells.

It's ok.. I'll just put it on eftpos. Wait.. no I won't, when my credit card wore out, and I got a new one, I got a new pin with it, and I have no idea what my pin is.

I asked if they took credit, they do (what a joke, credit for like $6). I put the credit transaction through.

I waited several minutes, and eventually the chick serving me came back, with a serviette for me to sign on. What a joke.

She was about to get my fries, when some other chick said that they were for her order.

The chick serving me said that there would be a couple of minute wait on the fries, and she would bring them to me. Fine, at least that way they are hot, unlike the ones I just missed out on, presumably.

I grabbed a newspaper, went and sat outside.

I got a crappy local newspaper which is just full of ads.

The burger was luke warm, and by the time the chick came out with my fries, the burger was cold.

I ate my food. I didn't bother to look at the newspaper, or take it back when I chucked my rubbish away and took off.

Hopefully that crappy newspaper will blow away, and I'll save someone the wasted brain capacity of going through it looking for something worth reading.

I went up to see they guy I had been speaking to on the phone. I'll see him in person, and let him know, and sort something out from there. I thought he would be annoyed.

I went in, saw his wife, she was cleaning out the cupboards, apparently a few moths have got in while they were on their holiday, and she was trying to clean that up.

I chatted to her briefly about their trip, and then I went down to see my mate.

I told him that I was fairly vague on the phone for one reason.. that I'd already set the ISP up.

He said that it was good that I was doing something, and he wanted to start one up anyway.

I suggested that he may want to buy some visp ports off me once all my stuff is configured, he seemed more keen to continue with the original plan from last year, of setting the gear up at his place.

I said I would have to work something out, and get back to him, since getting mine sorted out and running is my priority.

I also have a bunch of work that needs to be done otherwise, pcs to fix, and that network will require installing, probably next week some time, and there are a couple of clubs that want me to give talks.

After that, my mate told me about his trip, showed me a ton of photos he'd taken, with a digital camera, his digital video camera, and his new winblows phone/camera/pda/pocket virus machine.

He gave me a small leatherman style tool, about half the normal size, it's really cool. I'll use it as a keyring.

I was there for about an hour and a half, I've got a couple of old pcs around at his place I left then when I was setting up stuff for the ISP last year, I might get a couple of them at some point, maybe sell them.

My ps2 extension cables were there too, that I went there looking for about 6 months ago and couldn't find, so I grabbed them.

We came back upstairs, and I had a chat with him and his wife for a bit.

They gave me a really cool Tshirt they'd bought for me over there, it's got a big M on it, and it says "McShit". They said they saw it, and immediately thought of me, that's really cool.

I'll have to wear it the next time I go and get some McShit, especially considering my experience from a short time previously.

I came home again, and set to configuring the ras.

I mucked around and plugged my new phone in first.

I couldn't get it to route to the other guys network, so I could see his radius server, for his customers that will be dialling into my ras.

Eventually I worked it out, but it was a pain in the arse, and it meant have several network addresses assigned to the ethernet interfaces, and setting up static routes.

I think I may have been better off with my original idea, of putting one ethernet interface into my network, and the other interface into his network, and configuring the addresses accordingly, avoiding all the routing issues.

I think I just need to get all the IPs sorted, I might chase the guy up tomorrow, and see if that can be done on Sunday, I'd really like to get this thing off the ground.

Dad had sent me an email, he'd uploaded the website, but it wasn't working.

I had a look, couldn't work out what was wrong, and why the browser wanted to download something, instead of executing the php.

i restarted apache, moved some files around, and then it started working, it was weird.

My mate I go to dinner with rang me again while I was watching tv (about 6pm). I didn't recognise the phone ringing at first, because I'm not used to the ring.

We chatted for a bit, I arranged to meet him in Gosford tomorrow after lunch, I'll show him the gear, and then I'll give him some cash, because he's going down to the wholesaler, and he can get me a new monitor.

Dad came in a while later, the sat tv was stuffed up apparently. I checked the card server, it seemed to be working. I just pressed the "connect" button on th server, and then it started working again. More weirdness.

He said that he couldn't get to the website.

I looked, no, I couldn't get their either, or SSH in.

I was able to get into the ras however, it couldn't ping the web server, but it could ping the other machines. It must have hung for some reason, or maybe the dodgy network cable from the other day got put into the rack, and connected to that server.

I haven't written the redundancy script yet, so the other machine didn't work out the first was down, and bring up a virtual interface and enable ip forwarding which would have kept the other machines on the net.

If I had telnet on the machines, then I would have been able to fix it too, because the ras is on the same network range (so the subnet routing on the machine that is down doesn't matter) could have telnetted in, but I don't have telnetd running on any of them.

I might have to put it on, and limit it to local logins.

I watched tv and played solitaire on my palm after that.

There's not much I can do at this point, the machines have fallen off the net, and I've got those routing issues.

I need to make up those serial cables, and post them out tomorrow, some guy paid me for one over a week ago.