Here we go for another day late blog entry.

You're lucky when I do this a day late, half the details are missing, so it's not so "incredibly boring" as I saw my blog described in a different blog recently. Hey, the warning's there, just look to your right, for the inset bit.

Anyway..

I got up about 8.45 after lying in bed for a bit, I had a shower, and some breakfast.

I left about 9.30am.

I got down the freeway, and to the place, about 10.25am.

I went in, and asked what was to be done.

Not much at this point in time.

The laptop I was supposed to fix was there, but I hadn't seen the guy who owns the place.

I started explaining file sharing to the woman there, but she picked up that I wasn't very happy (hey, I was tired, it was a cold trip down, and I really wasn't in the mood for explaining basic stuff). She asked me if I was ok, and I just whinged about being tired.

I went in and made a coffee while she was talking to someone about something.

I shared some stuff, showed her how it worked.

The other woman, who was supposed to be bringing her pc in (and I was originally going to go to her house to fix today), stuck her head in, and said that she hadn't brought her pc, because her husband needed to use it, and they couldn't be without it for a day.

I said I would have to arrange to fix it one day next week then.

The guy came back, and gave me his laptop to fix.

I booted it up, errors with lsass.

I installed avast on his laptop, ran a scan, it found sasser on it, and it also found some other malware, not netsky, a different one, nachi or something I think it was, I didn't pay much attention.

I managed to clean it off.

I got a phone call, it was the colo guy.

Apparently he'd changed the radius settings in the cisco back to the original, going direct to his radius server, and bypassing my proxy, because my proxy had stopped working properly, and his customers weren't being authenticated.

I said I would have a look at what had happened, and I would get back to him.

I downloaded putty, ssh'd in, and had a look to work out what the problem was.

I was able to resolve the hostname of the radius server the requests are supposed to be getting proxied to, that still worked.

I was unable to ping the radius server. Hmm..

I tried tracerouting to the server.. I received a host unreachable (!H) error, but from a strange IP address, I was also unable to ping the server.

The IP address returning the host unreachable error, was one of the virtual interfaces I setup last night.

Uh oh. I think I know what's happened..

I checked the routing table on the server, yep.. when I setup the virtual interfaces, on the other subnet, so that dns would work (because the registrar has not effected my changes to the name servers for the domain), it added in a route for the network the virtual interfaces were on, and also the radius server I was supposed to be proxying to, but that server and subnet are only accessable through the gateway machine.

Oops.

I added in a static route for the radius server, did a couple of radtests, and worked out it was back working again.

I sent an email to the colo guy explaining the situation.

I got back to work, I finished cleaning virii off the laptop, and I installed a few windows updates at the same time.

The woman with the other pc I was supposed to fix (who I thought was the woman who called me, but it wasn't), wasn't there, and didn't turn up, so I didn't have to fix her pc either.

My phone rang again, it was my mate who wants me to setup his ISP. We chatted for a minute, and he asked me about work on Monday, confirming that I am on contract for the next couple of weeks. Cool.

The guy came back again, and I spoke to him for a bit.

He wanted to change away from using LookOut Express, woo, cool.

I told him about Thunderbird, he seemed happy with that, and got me to change them to that.

I downloaded it, installed it on the three pcs, and the laptop.

I was so easy, install, import settings, import mail, import address book.

Sort the mail folders, move some messages, move the addresses in the addressbook, done.

I showed them how to use it.

The guy had to go somewhere, so I sat and showed him how to use Thunderbird.

He was on the phone, and was working it all out for himself, as I watched, so I didn't have to do anything there, that was good.

He left.

It was now about 1.30pm, and I had been in the parking lot for 3 hours now (it's 3 hour parking, that's why I got a ticket for being in there for 7 hours), so I had to go move.

I asked them where the next parking was, because a couple of them had already been to move their cars, and they said I should park in the shopping centre.

I got up, took my helmet with me, and went and moved my bike into the shopping centre.

I went to some fast food place and got a burger, and I ate it on my way back to the office.

I got back, fiddled around for a bit, they'd worked out how they were going to deal with their files, they wanted 2 of the machines to have all the files backed up to cd, and then removed from the machines, and setup to use a single set of the files, on one of the other machines.

I showed the chick at reception how to burn the files, and left her watching it.

I called in to the colo guy, spoke to his wife, told her to let him know I had sent an email to him.

I downloaded a demo of some cd burning software on the other pc, and set it to backup.

The demo was limited to single speed burning, so it was going to take about 1/2 hour.

I watched it for a bit, it got to about half way through, and I decided I might as well get going.

I left.

I got just outside, and I realised I didn't have my pen.

I'd seen it floating around, I noticed it on the floor earlier in the day, and I put it on the desk where I was working.

I went back, and had a look around, no sign of it. Hmm.

I checked the other desks, and a couple of drawers, but I didn't find it.

I asked them to keep an eye out for it for me.

I might call them on Monday to see if they've found it.

I went back to the shopping centre, and my bike.

I checked the street directory for how to get to my mate's place.

I took off.

I rode towards his place, got to a place where I had to turn, but thought I was going the wrong way, from the signs.

I cut through traffic, and headed the other way, ended up going the totally wrong way.

As I waited at some lights, I saw some emergency vehicle lights flashing up the top of the hill, looks like something good.

As I waited still (took ages here), tow truck came down the hill, and the car it was towing, was totally wrecked.

It looked like it had driven under something, and the bonnet was all crumpled up, the windscreen smashed, and the left half of the car pretty much crushed. No idea what had gone on.

I rode around a bit, looking for a place to pull over to check the street directory, I didn't find one, and ended up heading back up towards where I turned the wrong way.

I then started to see signs telling me the distance to where I was trying to get to, so that was a good sign.

I folled that around, then worked out where I was, and had no difficulty finding my mate's place from there, it just took a while because of peak hour traffic.

I got there, it took me an hour to get there, instead of about 20 minutes.

I went in, saw my mate, his brother, and his sister's husband, and their (the sister and her husband) daughter.

We chatted for a bit.

A friend of the family turned up, and they chatted for a bit.

We went across to McDonalds, got some food, and sat and chatted for about 45 minutes.

The family friend left, to pick up his and his wife's dinner and go home.

We went back to the house.

We found the house was locked up, and my mate's brother in law and daughter had gone out.

We went around the back, to climb in the window.

My mate told me about the fire they had had a couple of days before, the pool filter pump had caught on fire, and had fire blowing out of it, because it was still running.

We had a quick look at it, it was just all black, and stank.

We couldn't really see much, because it was so dark.

I helped my mate get in the window.

He had a bit of diificulty, because his wrist (which is now mostly healed), gives him some pain.

He got in, and went and opened the front door.

We sat and played a video game for a bit.

Another guy turned up, I think he's a friend of theirs, that they are getting to do some of the work for the funeral.

He been called and asked to come over by my mate's other brother, who had turned up, collected the brother in law, and the daughter, and they had left, he must have forgotten he asked the guy to come over.

My mate tried calling his brother, but only got through to his message service.

We chatted to the guy for a bit, he was there for about 45 minutes.

My mate mentioned the funeral will be on Wednesday, and that it's taking a fair length of time, because his Mum is an organ donor (and mentioned that 7 people will be helped by her), and they want to do some investigations to work out why she died.

About 7pm, my phone rang, it was the colo guy, he'd got my emails, and said I could change the cisco settings back to using my radius if I wanted (since he had given me the passwords). I said I wouldn't be near an internet connection for the next few hours, so I may do it later.

I remember that something was going on tonight, I think tonight was when we were planning to see the Hoodoo Gurus, I went through my phone, checked my sms, yeah, it's tonight, starting at 8pm, I don't think I'll be there somehow.

My mate told me that his sister's video camera (which had a tape in it they wanted to process) had run flat, and they couldn't charge or use it, because the charger is designed for 120v. (It probably has a switch mode transformer and will work on both 110 and 240 now I think about it). I said I would bring my stepdown transformer down on Monday, after I do the contract work, so they could use the camera.

My mate asked me to see if I could fix his sister's computer, since it had a lot of pictures of his Mum on it, they wanted to get off.

I had a look at the machine, my mate told me that it just didn't come on. I disconnected everything, and shorted the atx power switch wires on the atx connector, and it seemed to be working, so it wasn't the power supply.

I plugged it back on to the mobo,and it fired up.

I put the disks back on again, and the machine booted up fine.

We spent about an hour and a half going through the machine, collecting all the pictures.

I sorted it out, and we found 650mb worth, so I burned a cd of them.

I took the hard disk and cd burner out of the machine, and I put them into the other pc. That took us about 1/2 hour.

I wasted more time here, because I put the hard drive from the other machine in, set as master, and didn't think about the cdrom in the machine, also set to master, so I had to pull the whole machine apart, and fix that.

I tried to copy the cd again in windows xp, but it's just dumb. The built in cd burning software is rubbish, it wants to cache the whole cd on the hard driver first, and there was not room, and there's no way to tell it to put the files in a different place.

I waseted a bit of time on that, tried running nero from the other disk, but it just complained about missing files, and once I fixed that, it complained the demo was expired, and I couldn't get it to run.

It was about 11pm when I finished mucking around with this stuff.

My mate's sister and her husband/daughter along with my mate's brother came back from wherever they had gone.

His sister was happy to see me, and was appreciative of me going through and collecting all her photos from her machine.

I was wanting to get going soon, before it got too late.

I went back across the road to McDonalds again, with my mate.

We had a chat, while we ate.

We came back from there about midnight.

I started getting my stuff together.

My mate lent me his bike overtrousers, and some thicker gloves, because he was worried about me getting cold.

I put my bag on my bike, and noticed the hard disk sitting in it, with all the music on it, bugger, I forgot to do anything with it.

I ended up leaving his place about 12.20am.

I rode some of the way back, and pulled into a servo before I got on the freeway, because I only had about 30km worth of fuel left, and home was still 50km away.

I filled up, went to go in and pay, and found that the servo was locked, and they were serving through the little pay window.

I paid, came back to my bike, put all my gear on again, and started off.

I got on the freeway, and headed for home.

It was very foggy on the freeway, and at some points, the visibilty was almost zero.

I was fine to start with, some idiot came and drove right up behind me, with his high beams on, next thing, my visor fogged up, and then I hit a really bad patch of fog, and couldn't see a thing.

I ripped the visor open, got out of the lane, and the idiot went flying past me.

I had to ride the rest of the freeway with my visor up.

We hit some roadworks, reducing the whole freeway back to one lane.

I ended up in front of the idiot with the high beams again, because as soon as he went shooting past me, he found why I was only going 100km/h, the fact there was no visibility.

We got past the roadworks, it opened back to three lanes, and we were off again.

The visibility was about 1m here, and I was just following the lines and reflectors on the road, because it was just invisible.

The cars dropped right back, they must have had even worse visibility.

The next 30km or so of the freeway that were left, were shocking. The visibility was poor all the way, and dropped back to nothing again a few times.

At some points, it was so thick, that it felt like someone was spitting in my face.

I got off the freeway, and there was smoke mixed in with the fog here, that was fun. Not only could I not see, but I couldn't breathe.

I came down the hill, and headed towards home.

I got home, about 1.45am. As I put the bike down on the stand, a ton of water went running off the mirror, it must have been collecting there.

I came inside, and went to the bathroom, I was soaking wet, my face, and hair and everything, from having the visor open.

My clothes were all wet, my jacket had water all over it.

I started getting undressed, and I found that the trousers my mate lent me had ice on the front of them. I'm glad he lent them to me, and the winter gloves.

I went to bed.