I woke up about 10.30am. Watched some tv, got up about 11.30am.

I didn't really do much today.

I had the worst headache.

I had a shower, breakfast (about midday now).

I called up the woman at the neighbourhood centre, I arranged to go and sort out the ADSL connection there.

I tried to call the woman in the computer group there (that I spoke to on Monday, at the bowling club), but there was no answer, so I just left a message.

I took the serial cables, (after getting the addresses they had to be sent to from my email), and the ADSL cd, (and my mp3 player).

I took off, went down to the post office, and I mailed the tivo serial cables out.

Someone was waiting for the parking spot I was in when I came back, so I just took my time putting my earbuds in, and my helmet and gloves etc on.

I took off, and I rode out to the neighbourhood centre. No parking, so I parked up on the grass. I should take advantage of things like that more often, but I'm worried about getting more parking tickets.

I went in, and went about fixing up the ADSL connection.

I used the cd to update the firmware in the ADSL router, it created a proper pppoa connection in the router, instead of needing the stupid pppoe client software.

Strangely, the username@realm had a different syntax to the install from the other day (and it's the same provider). This one was just the domain name, whereas the one from the other day was the fully qualified domain name. It would be nice if they had some sort of a standard, instead of making me waste my time fiddling around.

I sorted it in the end.

I put Avast on the machine, scanned it, it was clean. It claimed to have Norton Antivirus on the machine, stopping Avast from installing its resident shield thing. I removed Norton, it looked like some really dodgy version of Norton, I haven't seen it before.

I went to the next machine, and went about setting it up. Hmm, can't see the other machine on the network.. ah, someone's been fiddling in the network settings, and fixed an ip address in here. I set it back to DHCP and left it.

Bang, I had an IP, default route, DNS, could see the other machine, everything was set.

I installed Avast, and kicked off a scan.

I went to the third machine, and I reconfigured it.

I could get an IP with DHCP, and ping, but couldn't actually use the network connection, nothing worked, telnet, web, smb, nothing.

I thought maybe the tcp stack was stuffed up.

I removed some "Miniport Scheduling Device" or something that I found in the network adapters section of device mangler.

There was a second one, but it refused to remove it.

Still no good. I removed the network adapter, and reinstalled it. Still no good.

I rebooted, still no good.

Hmm. Getting desperate now.

I ran SFC, to check all the files.. it kept asking for the win 2000 SP3 cd.

I asked the woman if they had a 2000 cd, yeah, she said she would get it..

Went into the storeroom, and opened the safe.. to get the winblows 2000 cds out.

As if you would keep them in a safe, it's not like they would be safe from fire or anything, they would just melt.

Anyway, I put the CD in, it said it was wrong. I put it in the other CDROM drive, it still said it was wrong. OK, stuff this.

I googled around on one of the working machines.

I eventually found something on a forum, with a similar problem. They guy went through and showed a bunch of screen shots, going into the adapter, TCPIP, the advanced settings, optionsm, IP security, properties.

He showed setting it to "Do not use IPSEC", and also into the properties of "TCP/IP filtering", making sure "Enable TCP/IP Filtering" was not set, and that all the options were set to "Permit all".

I went back to the dodgy machine, and had a look.

Ah.. "Use this IP security policy" was selected, along with one of the options from the dropdown box. I changed that to "do not use IPSEC".

I checked in the filtering thing, it had "enable filtering" selected, so I deselected it.

Immediately the network started working, smb, web, telnet, everything.

Only took me about 1/2 hour to fix that.

I installed Avast on this machine, and started a scan. Both of the other 2 machines had finished scanning now, and were both clean. Surprising, considering the pppoe client bridges the connection, and puts a routable IP directly on the windows machine, that's just asking for trouble.

I went out, told the woman I was finished. I told her that they could file share, and print etc, trying to get out the door.

No such luck. "How do you share files?". ugh, here we go.

I really didn't have the patience for this today, expecially not when there's xp on one of the machines, that just makes it an excrutiatingly painful experience.

I showed her how to use "shared documents" to share things, it's a useless pain in the ass principle.

She asked me how I had moved the window so you could 2 at the same time. Uhh, how to move a window??

Instantly I felt like I was back at my mates place, where he sat and typed a sentencealllikethis because I hadn't shown him the spacebar.

I showed her how to move the window, and how to share a file.

I then had to resetup all the printer sharing, because I had renamed the windows machine from having some stupid name like" asi-srjiufeiubfaeuier" which I had great difficulty trying to remember and type into the other machines, because the dumb network browser didn't work as usual.

I printed a file over the network for her, and then I made my escape.

I told her I hadn't billed her for the last work, because I haven't got my ABN yet. (WTF is going on with that?).

I said I would drop the invoice in at some point when I was sorted, for the previous work, and for todays.

I left, I rode over to McDonalds, got some lunch (just before 5pm now).

I then went into check the gear, and work out what I had buggered up when I changed the network settings the other day..

Nothing! it wasn't my fault. The machines were up, and were working. One wasn't, because of that dumb issue with the kernel and the IDE controllers again. I don't know what to do about that.

I reset the machine, and it booted up, rebuilding it's RAID array again. I wish they wouldn't do that everytime they get shutdown improperly.

While the machine was booting, I had a look around. The 32amp cable was in, the guy had wired a massive switch box thing on to the line, and then the ups was hard wired to the 32amp cable. I would have thought the guy would have wired the 32amp socket on to the end of the cable, and then just plugged the ups in.

I noticed my rack's power had movied. It previously had it's own IEC -> standard socket cable going from the UPS, to the cable to my rack, but now it was moved into a powerboard. Hmm, assumedly my gear was down at the time I was trying to fix the stuff the other day, and that's why I thought I'd buggered up the network settings.

I hadn't tried to access it since, or I would have found that it was back (except for the mail server, with the dumb kernel issue).

The machine took 18 minutes to boot up and become network accessable, because the startup was delayed by the RAID arrays rebuilding. Not terribly impressive.

I think I might need to put the remote power switch thing in I built ages ago, and I'll need a pc to run it, since I can't trust any of these machines to boot up properly.

Maybe there's a bios update I need to apply, or something dumb. Bugger, I'll have to put floppy drives in the machines.

As soon as the machine was up, I left, and went to the supermarket.

I bought a couple of crappy froxen pizzas, and came home.

I watched tv for a while.

I drank most of the rest of the bottle of wine.