I was woken about 10.20am by the phone ringing.

I thought it was the alarm going off at first, so I pressed the snooze button on my alarm, but that didn't stop the noise.

I answered the phone.

It was a woman from the college I was at on Monday (who called me last week, while I was in the colo guy's shop), she wanted to know if I was going to be fixing her pc tomorrow.

I said I thought I had arranged with her on Monday, to bring her pc down on Friday. Nope.. it was a different woman, who had been told to bring her pc in on Monday, but had forgotten.

I told her that I had arranged with the owner of the college to go down tomorrow, to finish off the network (oops, I needed to buy more rj45s, I should have done this today, I forgot all about it), and to fix a pc, who I thought was hers.

I said that if she was to bring her pc down there tomorrow, I would fix it there, otherwise I don't know when I will have time.

She said she would probably do that.

Ok, so now I have to finish the network (difficult, seeing as I need to crimp up cables, using rj45s I don't have), fix a laptop (remove sasser crap), and fix 2 pcs, with problems I have no idea about.

I watched some tv, got up about 12.30pm.

I sat on the internet for a bit.

I wasted time compiling an ntp app for a guy on the tivo mailing list. it had an issue with "getservbyname", of which there is a work around in some "libtivohack" file.

I tried to find how to compile against this library, but I didn't, I ended up finding gimmicky things to install on the tivo. I put jpegwriter on, and put a few jpegs on the tv screen.

I then came across "TCS", or Tivo Control Station. It looked pretty cool, so I wasted about an hour and a half installing and configuring that.

I learnt how NFS works in the process, and successfully used it for the first time.

I then decided I really should be making use of this time to try to get dialin working.

I googled around, trying to find info about DNIS with freeradius, or proxying.

I found some info, went about configuring freeradius to do it. It should work now..

I had a shower (about 4.15pm). I thought about calling the colo guy to see about playing with the radius settings on the nas, and see if I had it right, but then I thought it was a bit late.

I decided to call anyway. I rang up, and spoke to his wife, she said he would be in there until 5 or so.

I rushed to get dressed, and I took off.

The traffic was useless on the way out there, people going half the speed limit everywhere.

It only took me about 15 minutes to get there, but it felt like about 30.

I went in, the guy was busy on a machine.

He was finishing off a machine for a guy, it had sasser and stuff on it.

There was another machine he was working on, had removed Lotus Smartsuite from it, and then the customer complained they couldn't open any of their files. Oops.

The phone rang, and he was kept busy there, so I finished off the virus scan on the guy's machine, it had just found some adware. What is the point of a virus scanner looking for porn diallers and adware? The colo guy put adaware and a couple of other apps on, and then we finished the machine off.

The colo guy was busy on the phone again, so I helped the guy move his pc out to his car.

I went back and had a look at the Lotus machine, finished installing it, tested it.. the files complain they were made with a newer version, and won't open.

We finally got a chance to look at the nas/radius stuff.

I went and added my nas to his naslist, since assumedly it will rewrite the auth requests to appear to come from my nas.

We then changed the radius definition in the nas, and requests started proxying through.. only halfway there though, it started coming up with "request from unknown client".

Hmm, I had edited the naslist, but not the clients file, so I fixed that.

It then started working. Woohoo.

His customers dialin, and if they use a plain username, or their email address, or hopefully based on the number they called, they get sent to his radius, and if they log in on my dialin number, or login with an email address on my domain, they go to my radius.

I let it run like this for a minute, and was working fine.

I then went in, and changed the configuration, to test if it was proxying based on the telephone number.. nope, because when I disabled sending all plain usernames to his radius server, they were trying to authenticate against mine, and failing, so I changed that back.

I tried to login as my test user a few times, but everytime, I ended up hitting the first nas, with the 4 E1s in it, which was still configured to go straight to his radius server.

We left it at this point. The second nas, with the single E1 in it, was the one we were testing, it seemed to be working fine.

The guy gave me all the nas passwords, in case something stuffed up, and I had to change it back.

I said I would probably end up doing testing around 2/3am, and he said that I could do anything then.

It was now a bit after 6pm, and we left.

The guy mentioned again about the radio restriction being removed recently, and that he was thinking about putting an aerial up on the roof, with a radio on it, to see if he could get to the nearby retirement village. I said I would help with that if he wanted, because I'd previously put a 15m aerial up, but the job never got finished, because no one got permission to put the aerial up (over 6m requires council permission, and on the roof requires strata permission).

Apparently the guy in the office next door had just put an air conditioning unit on the roof, and it was no drama.

I said, "oh well, you've got power for your radio then", in reference to all the dodgy things my friend used to get up to, and the installs he did, before he was killed, and we both had a bit of a chuckle about the idea of pinching power off the airconditioner.

I miss my friend. Every couple of days something reminds me of him, and I feel a bit sad. Perhaps in a few months, when I have a bit of time, I might go down and visit his grave or something.

I took off, and rode to the pizza place near home, I got there just after 7pm.

I sat in there, and while I was waiting for my pizza, I was able to relax for a minute.

I wasn't near a computer, I wasn't riding somewhere, I didn't have a hundred things going on at the same time. I was just sitting at a table, waiting, doing nothing at all. It's the most enjoyable time I've had for a few weeks.

My pizza arrived, I ate it, they've changed it from the last time I was here, it was still good though, then I paid, left, and came home.

I mucked around, dragged out the old laptop, to test dialling in, as one of my customers.

This was not as easy as it could have been.

I finished off the half a glass of wine left in the bottle.

I put the modem/ethernet card in, that was fine, it detected the modem part, and installed it as a normal modem.

D'oh, no dialup networking on here.

The ethernet's not working either (with no drivers) so I can't get to the cab files (even I can even find the cab files for winblows 95). The supported network card is the one in the other laptop.. in the rack, where the gear is.

I found the drivers for the card on the internet, less than a meg, ok, now I just need to find a working floppy disk to move them onto the laptop. Easier said than done.

I went through some of those mongrel floppy disks that don't work again.

I still have them all hanging around, because I was intending to try fixing them with norton disk doctor or something, but I never got around to it.

As I came across a disk, I tried formatting it in 2 different machines/os, when it failed that, I screwed it up, chucked it across the room.

Eventually I got a bit more carried away, and I bent the sill little metal catch out, so it would act as a stand, and hold the disk standing up. I then stomped on the disks, and smashed them.

I ended up going through 8 floppy disks before I found one I could actually format successfully.

I got the drivers on to the laptop, and installed them.

The network didn't come up.

I went in and removed the devices from device mangler, including the pcmcia slot, and the card services, when I refreshed, it didn't find anything.

I rebooted, windows had an error reading drive c, uh oh. Windows started, complained the registry was corrupt, restored it, and rebooted. Windows came up, and found the card, I pointed it at the drivers, and then everything seemed to start up.

When I put the network dongle in just the right place (because it's all broken) the connect light would come on, and when I requested settings with DHCP, I could see the traffic light flash a couple of times, but it still would not work. I tried the other dongle I've got, it's in worse condition, and the link light didn't even come on on it.

In the end, I rebooted, and it immediately started working. argh.

I found a cd with the 95 cab files on it, installed dial up networking on the laptop.

I tried dialling in as one of my customers. Almost every time I went on to the nas that still had the original configuration, so I didn't have a chance of it working properly.

When I eventually got it to try authenticating against my radius server, it failed.

I did a bit of fiddling, generating requests with radtest, and found that it was proxying them across to the other guys radius server, and then remembered I had to use email addresses.

It then tried authenticating against my server, but was failing.

I discovered it was because the realm stripping was working properly, and the mysql requests were trying to pull email addresses as usernames from my radius database.

I found a reference to the string used to query the database, and I changed to strip the realm, restarted radius, but it was still failing.

I changed the entry in the database to have an email instead of a username, and it worked, ok, stripping is still not working.

I poked around the other radius files, tried configuring my local radius server as a remote one in the proxy file, in case it was skipping the stripping procedure because it was accessing a local radius server, but it was still no good.

I decided to try turning on the debugging for the sql commands, and when I edited the file to do that, I found the changes I had made before, to query using the stripped username, had not saved for some reason.

I changed it again, made sure it was saved, and then it started working.

I changed the entry in the database back to the username, instead of the email, and it started testing successfully.

I went back to try dialling up, and about the 4th go, it went on. Hooray!

I sat and poked around for a bit, checking the network settings, and that the changes I had made in the sql database had been replicated (to see that replication was still working). It was.

Just then, my mobile rang. It was my mate who broke his wrist recently, and whose Mum passed away a couple of days ago.

He wanted my landline number, so I gave it to him, then I ripped it out of the laptop, and put it back in the phone.

He called me back, and I chatted to him for a few minutes.

I said I was sorry to hear the news, I couldn't really think of much to say about it.

I told him I would be in Hornsby tomorrow, so I could come and see him after that, and he seemed happy with that idea.

I mentioned I had just got dialin working a few minutes before, so we chatted about that for a bit.

He told me he was getting close to 10 minutes on the phone (after that it costs more), so I said I would call him tomorrow before I headed over, and we got off the phone.

I sent an sms to my mate I play snooker with, to let him know the dialin was working.

I blogged, I think I'll go to bed now, I have to be back up in a few hours to head down and fix all those PCs.