The phone rang and woke me up about 9.30am.

A guy whose computer I'd fixed a few weeks ago, apparently AVG had come up saying it was a trial, and what did he want to click on.

Ugh, can't people work things out for themself. I said he should go to the website, and download the free version.

I fell back asleep. I didn't wake up until 11.20am. Bugger.

I got up, I had a shower, had some breakfast.

My phone rang again, it was my mate who was in Thailand recently (and wants me to start an ISP for him).

Apparently the place he's contracting to at the moment, where I worked a couple of days, a few weeks ago, have a bit of work for me, at least 2 weeks worth, maybe a month.

Great, just what I need, more work. I mentioned to him that I didn't think I had been paid for the couple of days work I did there previously, and I'll need to chase that up.

Anyway, he said he wanted me to try to find some time to make up a proposal for setting up his isp, and some sort of an arrangement to look after it. I said I would have to see, based on the amount of work I have at the moment (and that he's just lined up more), and the fact that mine isn't even running yet, so I don't even know what is involved with running mine.

I got off the phone with him, and I left, about 12.30pm.

I went to the electronics shop, and got the parts I need to make the tivo serial cables.

I went across the road to where the colo guy's shop is.

It was now about 1.30pm. He wasn't in, he'd gone to a job a bit up the coast, would be leaving in about 10 minutes, and so wouldn't be back for probably an hour.

I worked out that would make it about 2.30pm he'd be back, and I'm supposed to be going to see the accountant at 3pm, so I said I would come back after that, she told me they would be open until either 5 or 6 tonight.

I went around the corner to the shopping centre, I went in to get some lunch. I had a look at the DVDs in the music shop first, nothing worth buying.

I got some food, and sat and ate.

I was about 3/4 through my meal, when my phone rang.

It was my mate who broke his wrist on his bike a while ago.

He wanted to know what I was up to, and how I was going, I chatted for a bit about what's been going on.

He asked me if I had heard what was going on in his life, and I told him that I hadn't heard anything.

Apparently his Mum had suffered some sort of a brain injury, and wasn't in a very good way at the moment. They expect she will make a good recovery, but that it will take a while.

He's going to start looking after his brother, and his wife, who's over in the US still, is coming out in the next month to help out.

I spoke to him for quite a while in the end, maybe 20 minutes, and then I got off the phone, finished my meal, and decided to go home, to start looking at the cisco stuff I needed to do to get the dialin working.

I forgot about the stupid traffic lights again, 20 minutes to get through them again.

On the way home, as I got into the roundabout near the club we always end up at (and where I play snooker), I saw some guy about to come blasting into the roundabout without looking.

I put my brakes on, enough so that I could pull up and he would just go flying across in front of me, but he noticed me at the last second and locked up his brakes to stop.

I then just shook my head at him (what else can you do, really?), and took off.

I got home about 2.45pm, Dad asked what I was doing, and I said I was just dumping my stuff, and then going to the accountact.

I put my stuff inside, went and jumped in the car.

We went down to the accountant, as I got out of the car my phone rang, it was message service, a message from Dad asking what I was doing. useful. delete. hangup.

We went in and saw the accountant, it was pretty much a waste of time for me to be there, nothing really concerned me.

We were in there for maybe 1/2 hour, and then we left.

We came back home, I got my stuff.

I chatted with Dad for a minute, about trying to get things working, and then I took off.

I went back out to see the guy, he was there. After about 20 minutes of him dealing with customers and phone calls, we got into actually looking at configuring his cisco ras.

We fiddled around, dumping the exsiting config to a file, then we tried to work out how to add in extra modem pools, radius server settings, didn't really get anywhere.

We looked at a few different documents on the subject, but there's nothing really clear, that tells you the basic idea of how to configure it.

In the case of my ras, you put in "contexts", where you define an incoming number, ip addresses to assign to connections, and what radius servers to use for calls coming in on that number, it's easy (if only the damn thing worked!), but over in cisco land, it's a pain in the bum, because everything's backwards.

You have to add a modem pool, with a calling number, this just allows you to limit connections, not specify different radius servers or anything.

You then add in "dialler" settings, which refer to ip addresses to assign (which you then set up separately again), and it seems you can only have a single radius server configured globally.

While going through the config, my phone rang again.

It was the guy from the senior's club that I'm supposed to be giving a talk to on Monday, he just wanted to know that I was still going to do it, and some details about getting a network card for one of the machines at the club.

He also mentioned that one of their overhead projectors is very blue looking, he tried changing the settings, and factory resetting it, but it didn't change anything.

He called up Sony, and they told him it may be caused by the unit getting bumped or dropped, and the mirrors getting out of alignment.

The unit is not in warranty anymore, so I said I would have a look at it first, to see if the mirrors just need adjusting, before they send it off to be fixed (because Sony don't even fix their own stuff).

He asked if I wanted to ride to his place on Monday morning, and jump in the car to go to the meeting, I said I would think about, if it was raining or something.

I said I would talk to him on Sunday night, or see him on Monday at the meeting, and I got off the phone.

We tried setting up an extra dialler config, so that we could limit my lines so I don't take all his, but that didn't work either, because when we dialled in on the number we had configured as "my number" it was randomly assigned to one of the lines on one of the E1s attached to the other ras.

After a couple of hours, it was now after 6pm, we decided to investigate setting both of his ras up to query my radius servers, because I'm using freeradius, and within freeradius on my machine, I can setup fallthroughs to proxy the request to his radius servers, rather than just failing.

If that works, then at some point I'll build him a new radius server, using freeradius, instead of the cistron stuff he's running now, and also change him to freeside, and get rid of the accounting thing he's got now, that he says isn't great.

He grabbed a pc out of the office to give me (I suppose I would have just strapped it on the back of the bike), then decided he would get a pc from home for me, so we'll work that out next week.

I asked him about opening in the office up in Gosford, to collect payments or whatever, for a couple of hours one day a week, and he said something like that would be fine.

I got on my bike, remembered I had to get fuel, and I took off.

I went to the service station. I filled the tank, damn, $15.75 worth of fuel, I don't think I've ever spent that much on a fuel up before.

I came towards home. I realised I had nothing to eat for dinner, so I went to the supermarket.

I went in, got some crappy frozen dinner thing, and decided to get a personal pizza too, since I'm always hungry again, and I got a bottle of Coke.

I was lucky enough to find an empty checkout, paid, and left.

As I was putting the stuff in my bike, a couple of bogans outside the pub in the carpark of the supermarket were shouting at each other, then they started shoving each other.

I watched for a bit, then I put the stuff in my bike, watched a bit more, then I sat on my bike and just watched it.

I think they had been thrown out of the pub for arguing, and now they were just continuing to argue with each other outside.

There was a fair bit of shoving going on, but no real fighting.

Some teenybopper guys turned up to the car in the spot next to me, they started watching it and laughing.

One of the guys arguing went away, and a woman came out, so the guys in the car thought it was all over. They started the car up.

I saw the flanno wearing guy come back again, so I told them, and they turned the engine off again, to watch a bit more.

A car turned up looking for a parking spot in the aisle between us and the fight, they saw it, and stopped to watch.

Some woman came out, and started getting in here car, she saw what was going on, and stopped to watch.

There was now about 8 people in my close area all watching these idiots carry on.

The woman came back to try to talk to them again, and then it just turned into a three way argument, before the flanno wearing bogan went away again.

One bogan and the woman remained talking, then arguing, and the bogan shouted "go away you fat c***" to woman, and the flanno bogan came back again.

He shoved the other bogan down on to a seat, and that was pretty much the end of it.

The guys in the car next to me had seen enough, so the driver said "see you later mate" to me, and he shut the door.

I took off, they took off a bit after me, and I came home.

My phone just rang again, it was the lady I put a new hard drive in for a little while ago, apparently when they try to play music cds is says there is no cdrom drive attached.

Perhaps I forgot to attach the IDE cable back to the cdrom drive after I replaced the hard disk.

I said I would call her when I find some time (yeah, right, I'm not booked up until like halfway through June).

The alarm woke me up at 9.30am this morning. I lay in bed for a while, I watched some tv.

They got rid of the morning episodes of The Simpsons, now there is nothing to watch, and the tivo guide data has been wobbly all week, so it's not been recording anything.

Jerry Springer came on, I watched some of that, it's a hideous show, then I got up and started getting ready, at about 11am.

I started blogging yesterday, at about 11.15am, I realised I had to leave it, because I have to be out of here shortly, to get to the club.

I received an SMS on my phone, I didn't bother to check it.

I had a shower, got ready. I was going to leave about 11.28am, I decided to have some breakfast, and then I got my mp3 player stuff together, and I left about 11.35am. I shouldn't be too much later than midday.

I checked the SMS on my phone, it was from Dad, he'd arranged to go and see the accountant at 3pm tomorrow.

I rode up to the club, uneventfully. No police chases today.

I got to the club at 12.02pm. Good timing.

I wandered in, had a chat for a bit, they brought me lunch and a cup of tea.

I just started eating it when the guy from telco turned up to do the install.

The guy who asked me to come to the club spoke to the telco guy, and kept him busy for the first few minutes with details of a telephone line they wanted moved in here, and because the ADSL had been provisioned on a line that didn't come into this room.

He went away, came back, and found the line not working.

He connected some device to the line in here, where we were going to have the ADSL router connected. I had a look at it, it was some sort of oscillator.

I followed him, and had a look at the other end. He was using a probe to try to find the other end of the cable he had attached the oscillator to, that's pretty groovy.

We worked it out in the end.. when the little rack had been put in the computer room, and they had run the cables to the phone, they'd done a bit of a dodgy job. They'd separated the 4 pairs in a bit of cat5, terminated it as 4 different phone lines, and where they were kroned in to the lines from the street, instead of terminating them on their own krone block, and then jumpering the krone blocks together, they had just kroned the cat5 straight into the krone block with the lines from the street.

The asked me if I knoew anything about the work that had been done when the rack was put in, and I said it was done before I had anything to do with the club, and that they get me to do everything for them now, because he wanted me to complain to whoever had put the rack in, that the cable termination they had done was dodgy.

I mentioned that I was starting an ISP, and he told me that there are a lot of government grants available to organisations that make helping aged and disabled people a prioritym, and that I should look at putting a business plan together that expressed that, and see if I could get some grants to help. That's probably not a bad idea.

He also mentioned about VOIP stuff, and I told him that I had experience with VOIP gear, both software and hardware, like the VOIP system I went down to Melbourne to move.

My phone rang, it was the guy from the college wanting to know when I was going to fix his computer.

I wandered outside where I could here him, because there was bad reception inside the club, and they had music going because some of the oldies were dancing.

Oops, that's the computer I keep meaning to fix. I told him I hadn't done anything on it yet, I had intended to, but I didn't know that the problem was. Apparently it had a virus on it, and he wanted me to reinstall windows. ok, fine.

I told him that I had scheduled to come down there to install their ADSL/network on Monday, but last night realised I've already got something on on Monday, so I'll have to make it Tuesday, that was fine.

He told me that there was a stack of network cable up in the roof, because it was all hanging down when they moved in there, apparently a computer place was in there previously, and they had just cut the ends off when they left, and he just shoved it all up in the roof. He reckoned there was about 100 metres up there.

Bugger, wish I'd known that before organising the box of new cable. I might rip it out and take it anyway.

I said I would see them on Tuesday, and get everything sorted.

I went back inside.

We found the spare pair, and the guy kroned it in to move the fax line, with had the ADSL service on it.

Part of the phone cabling was this ancient wire wrap terminal, the guy ripped something off that, apparently the fax line was also wired on to it, and it was crackling.

We went back in the computer room.

The guy was just wanting to plug the router into a single pc, and configure it (which is all he's supposed to do), I managed to get him to install it in the rack, and patch it through the patch panel to a single pc.

He ran the setup software on the pc. It wanted the account details, username/password etc.

He rang up the exchange, to get them. Apparently the telephone number the service was on wasn't on record.

He went to his car to check something, and came back.

Apparently the service hadn't been provisioned (although I thought I saw the sync light come on on the router), so he went through getting that done.

Maybe it was like my mate's problem, just before he went to the US, where they patched his phone into the dslam, but didn't bother to create any accounts, so he couldn't "logon" as such.

The guy spoke to someone on the phone, and got the account created.

He put the details in the setup program. It complained it couldn't find the router, and then all of a sudden it just did. Apparently it's a bug in the setup program.

The guy tested it, it appeared to work.

I asked him if the PPPoE client was being used anymore, and I could immediately tell him from his expression that he was familiar with it, and knew exactly what I was getting at.

I mentioned how it was in use at a different site, and that it was a pain in the ass, because the dialup networking connections kept getting corrupt and stuff. I asked him if I could run the setup cd from this install on the other router, or if it would stuff things up.

He said it might stuff things up, based on the version of the firmware, but then I said that they had the same router, and he said that it should be fine then, and couldn't understand why there would be a setup using one of these routers, with the PPPoE client.

He left, and it was now up to me to get the connection working on the LAN.

I thought about it. The guy from the telco turned up, was there for about an hour (he was expecting less, like 20 minutes, to just put the router in), charges them $100. I turn up, and do hours of work, and I get lunch and cup of tea. Oh well, that's how it works, I'm a generous person, and they're an evil corporation.

I had a look at setting up the email for them first, they are using an ancient version of Eudorka that doesn't support multiple email accounts. I didn't want to screw up the settings.

I went about changing the ADSL username from the cryptic default one, that was fine, it said it would take an hour or so. I changed the settings in the router to match.

I then tried to change the password, but I was unable to get to the page to do it, because they use these stupid hostnames, rather than fully qualified domain names, so the machine couldn't resolve it properly.

It didn't work when I tried to access it via IP address either.

Maybe I should have put an entry in the hosts file, now I think about it.

Anyway, I said I would look at that next week, because I have to come back to run some cat5 into the next office, to connect their pc to the ADSL connection.

My phone rang again. It was the guy with the wireless ADSL connection I went and saw a week and a bit ago. Apparently he had changed some settings, and now his internet connection didn't work. I told him where I was (basically around the corner) and that I would come and see him when I finished here shortly.

I wanted to check the website of my ISP from here, to see what the speed was like. Hmm.. it's not working by domain name. When I access the webserver by it's IP address on the network range attached to the gateway machine, it was fine (and fast), hmm, maybe IP forwarding has fallen over on it or something.

I said I may be available next Wednesday or Thursday to put the cat5 in, and I would work it out closer to time.

I borrowed the setup cd, I'll take it with me when I go to the council place with the setup with the dodgy PPPoE client next.

I took off, it was starting to sprinkle with rain a bit now.

I rode to the guys place, got there about 2.30pm. Went in, had a look at the computer.

He showed me it was saying "working offline". I just went "file|work online" and it was fixed.

He had a few questions for me while I was here.

He wanted to know about copying DVDs. I told him to get DVDShrink, use it, and then burn the result.

I was thinking I wouldn't charge him for the visit, but I didn't want to be here for too long.

I figured he might have some difficulty, so I decided to give him a few more minutes. I downloaded DVDShrink for him, that only took a minute on his ADSL connection.

I installed it, and said I would show him how to run it. He went and got a DVD, and I showed him how to use it.

He then wanted to know about changing his username and password, apparently it's recommended as part of the ADSL setup that you change it once you are connected. (He's got ADSL from the same telco where the club just installed theirs).

I said there was no point changing the username, and to just change the password. Oh look, the password change screen with it's stupid hostname works on this connection. Weird.

We changed the password.

I changed the settings in the router.

The guy wanted to know if the wireless adapters could be installed directly in the pcs, instead of using the usb extension cables they were on. I said that the one right next to the router would be fine, because it will make no difference, but that the one downstairs would be something to play with.

I moved the wireless adapter, and it kept working.

We went downstairs, and had a look at the other pc.

I moved the wireless adapter, and it worked fine in the pc. The reception issues we had must have been caused by the stealthed SSID.

When he checked his email downstairs, it launched lookout, rather than lookout express, that they wanted to use, so I fixed that.

lookout express then complained that the email account was not working (prompting for username/password). We put the password in, but it didn't work. When I checked the error, it said user unknown. The account must not exist anymore.

I went into the account webinterface, to change the username, but you can only have between 4 and 8 characters for the username, so her email address username (this was the guy's wife's email account) was too long to fit. We picked a different one, and I changed it.

I changed the mail settings to match, but apparently the changes don't take effect for an hour or something.

I had a look at the Symantec tool he complained wasn't autoupdating, I couldn't see why. "LiveUpdate" crashed halfway through running, and then claimed it was already running when I tried to run it again. Useful Symantec rubbish.

We went back to the PC upstairs, DVDShrink was nearly finished, I showed him how to burn it once it was done (he had no blank DVDs anyway), and said he could call me if he wanted me to help him with that.

He asked me what he owed me, I said I had been there about 1/2 hour (a bit more, but who cares), and how much I wanted (about 1/3 of normal hourly rate).

He paid me, and I left.

It was raining a bit heaver now.

I rode over to see the colo guy, and see if he had worked anything out with the dialin.

As I pulled into the carpark, I noticed a cop car. There was a guy in blue overalls in the carpark, I assume he was the cop, I think he just came out of the colo guy's shop.

I went in, he wasn't there, he'd gone to the bank. His wife and daughter were there, so I chatted to them for a bit.

They had one of those puzzle IQ tests they were trying to do. There were a couple they couldn't work out, one was "LNIONELION" or something, I had no idea what that was. Another, the word blouse with a C written over it, I guessed was perhaps "see through blouse"? the third they were having problems with, was 4 capital Ds, with one of the letters WEST written inside each D. No idea on that one.

An old lady came in to speak to them, they saw her turning up, and said how she couldn't drive anymore, I had a look at the reflection in the window while she parked, and I could see what they were talking about, it looked like she had no idea.

She came in, and they spoke to her for a few minutes. Apparently she was trying to get drivers for some device from the manufacturer, and they had told her that it was illegal for them to send them to her or something. ie, we can;t be bothered helping this old lady, so we'll fob her off with nonsense, and she won't know any better.

She left, and the colo guy turned up a few minutes later.

He told me he looked at putting the settings into his RAS the other night, so that my customers could dialin, but the commands he had to enter into the cisco (aaa dnis something) were non existant on the equipment.

I stood there for a bit, and he showed me, there didn't seem to be any such command.

We looked form some doco, and I could see that that was how you do it, but there was just nothing in there.

Some woman came in with a modem she'd borrowed, apparently she couldn't get it working at all, and was trying to use it to work out if the problems she was having were being caused by her (possibly crappy) internal modem, or the phone line.

The colo guy told her to bring her pc in at some point, and they would look at it.

We went back to looking at the cisco, it's just not going to be easy.

My phone rang again. It was someone else who works at the college, they are having issues with their pc, and want to know if I can fix it for them. I said the earliest time I have available is next Friday, but I will let them know if I find time any earlier.

The woman started giving me her mobile number, I assumed it was the same as the number she had called me on, that came up on my phone, so I didn't need to write it down or anything, so I just pretended I was "yeah, yeah, yeah, ok, got that" as she told me the number.

I got off the phone, and looked in my call register. Oops, a totally different number, oh well, I doubt I am going to have time any earlier to do it anyway, and if I do, then I'll just call the college and get her number, and call her, tell her I lost it or something.

The guy asked me if I had noticed that all the gear went down last night. Nope, but I said I had noticed my static routes to get to my gear were missing (I was loading them in manually).

Apparently there were power issues in the building last night, about 11pm, and the UPS ran out. He went in there this morning, and found the power was on in the building, but not our room. He found that the telco termination cabnet has it's own power, and it was on, so he plugged the ups in there, and everything came back up.

Apparently the circuit breaker for our room had blown, or been pulled out, and that was why the power didn't come back, and recharge the UPS.

The guy asked me what I was doing tomorrow.

I said I was going to see the accountant in the afternoon, nothing in the morning (I was planning to get the rj45 wall sockets I need to install at the college next week, I guess I can get them on Monday afternoon).

He said to come in in the morning, and we would look at configuring the cisco, to get dialin working.

He said he had to leave before 4pm to post some mail. It was 4.08pm.

I got back on my bike, and decided to head for home.

It took me 20 minutes to get through a set of traffic lights.

I realised I was hungry, so I decided to go and get some food. I went to KFC.

The woman in front of me took about 20 minutes to order $3 worth of food. She wanted some combo meal, but wanted to swap part of it for something else, and it wasn't until the chick behind the counter told her everything she could possibly swap it for (but omitted to mention she could swap it for me taking her head off with my bare hands), that she decided what she wanted.

Just when I thought I was about to get served, the woman decided she liked the look of something on the rack, and wanted that "extra piece of chicken" it turns out it was ribs, which she didn't want, and wanted some thigh, which the chick served her, charged her, and she finally got the hell out of the way.

I ordered my food. It was served, I sat and ate it, and left, all in less time it took that stupid woman to order her food.

I took off, and I decided to go to the supermarket to get some dinner.

On the way, an ambulance and a paddy wagon went flying past in the opposite direction, with their lights on, but no sirens. Must be a good prang somewhere.

I pulled into the supermarket, wandered in, picked out some frozen crap dinner, and went to the checkouts.

The express lane had about 50 people in it, bugger that. I lined up at a normal register, where a guy had just finished unloading his trolley, but hadn't started being served yet.

I had one item, the guy looked at me, I thought perhaps he would allow me to go in front, since I had one damn thing, and I had the cash to pay for it (not exact, but close enough to make the change quick and easy), which would have taken me about 20 seconds to be served, but no, of course not.

So I just waited, while his 6 million things were run up, including something that didn't scan properly, and I had to wait for a price check.

He then proceeded to pay with a credit card or something, taking even more time. He finally left.

I put my one item through, paid, and left, in about 20 seconds.

As I was walking back to my bike, I realised that I have come to a conclusion over the last few days.

I REALLY FUCKING HATE PEOPLE.

I get pushed so far, that it takes all my energy to refrain from attacking and killing some people.

Like that stupid woman in KFC. She was about 3 seconds away from me picking up the charity coin box, bashing her on the head with it, and strangling her with the chain that holds it to the counter.

Someone will push me too far. This is your warning people.

I put my food in my bike, and I took off. I headed towards home.

As I came near the turnoff the main road, a guy on a big BMW bike waved at me. I think that was the highlight of my day today.

I came home.

I came inside.

Mum came in a few minutes later.

Apparently my cousin is back in the country, and wants help getting some parts for his computer. Great. More computer work.

Mum asked me if I knew about the eBay auction for a wedding dress. Nope. I googled around. Apparently some guy wanted to sell his ex wife's wedding dress, he has no female friends, and his sister was too big to fit in it, so he modelled it.

Apparently it received bids of over $99 million dollars, he received 5 wedding proposals,and nearly 7 million people have looked at the auction.

The auction ended, and he received nearly $4000 USD for the dress in the end, not too bad.

Dad got home, and came in. I told him that nothing had happened with the dialin stuff, and I was going to sort it out in the morning.

I started going through my email.

My mate I play snooker with called me, he wanted to know when I was available to come and fix his dish, apparently when we were fiddling with it recently, I didn't put it back in just the right place, and while most channels work, some (assumedly on a different transponder) drop out.

I told him I had no idea when I would be able to come and look, maybe sometime on the weekend.

I just spent the last 5 hours catching up on about 3 weeks emails, and I just finished.

My plan for the next week:

Tomorrow:
see the colo guy and get the dialin working,
see the accountant
go to the electronics place and get parts for tivo serial cable
maybe go to the hardware and get aerial/network parts.

Saturday:
start fixing the pc belonging to the guy at the college
adjust the satellite dish

Sunday:
finish fixing the pc
make up 3 tivo serial cables
make up aerial cable and drop it to my mate.

Monday:
got to the senior's annual general meeting and explain how the internet works
maybe go to the hardware for parts for the network install (+aerial)
post 3 tivo serial cables

Tuesday:
go to the college and install ADSL and network

Wednesday:
finish network install if needed
maybe go to seniors club and install network

Thursday:
install network at seniors if not done Wednesday

Friday:
fix computer.

I'm sick of next week, and it hasn't even started yet. I also have to find time to start and run an ISP in the above days.

Here we go, midnight again. Here comes 1am.

I was woken up about 9.30am, by the phone ringing.

Apparently the college where I'm going to install the network and stuff has received their ADSL setup kit or whatever, so now I can go and do the work.

I said I would look at doing it on Monday.

I got out of bed a bit later, watched some tv.

My mate I play snooker with called me, he wanted to know if I'd called the guy that wanted his tv/vcrs connected up. I said I hadn't.

I got off the phone, and got back to watching the tv.

I had a shower, and started getting ready to go out.

About 12.45pm, I called the guy, he told me where he was, and that he was going out now, but that I could go around there after about 1.15pm.

I left, went to the tax place with the letter I got last week telling me that I had to put my tax in or I would get fined.

I went there to get an appointment to have my tax done, the woman asked if I had my stuff right then, because she didn't have an appointment.

I said I did not have it, so I made an appointment to go back at 2.30pm.

I went to McDonalds, got some lunch.

There were far too many people here, and all the newspapers were gone.

I left here, and I rode over to the guy's place.

I had forgotten what number his house was. I pulled over in the street, called his house. The guy wasn't back yet, so I spoke to his wife, and she told me the number. I rode down there.

I went in, had a look around.

The guy has a DVD player, sat decoder, vcr, and they need to be connected to the tv, with has 3 inputs. Easy.

I started working out the cables I would need.

I had to get an extra set of rca leads up to the tv, this was easier said than done, the stuff was in/on a corner cabinet, and it had a shelf on the top at the back, so it wasn't a matter of just reaching around to where the cables came out, that would have required being a contortionist.

I got the cable through, and the guy turned up.

Apparently he had just had his floor repolished, it had been booked to start today, but they had a spot earlier, so they rang him, and he had to rush to get everything out of the room, and that's why the equipment was all unplugged.

He'd dragged everything back in, but not known how to connect the stuff back up.

I connected it up, noticed that he had video and audio inputs from the sat decoder connected to the inputs on the tv, that won't work.

I fixed that.

I then went about trying to work out how he had the stuff setup before, so he could record, watch videos etc.

I realised I didn't need that cable I spent 15 minutes putting up the back before, so I pulled it out again. Then I thought I needed it, so I put it back again, then I realised again that I did not need it. Argh.

Anyway, the dvd went straight to the tv, that worked.

One output of the sat decoder (the scart ones) went to the tv. This didn't work. Turns out the connectors labelled inputs were the outputs, so I put them back in, that was working.

I put the a/v output from the vcr to the tv, that worked.

I put the rca a/v out from the sat decoder to the input on the vcr, that worked.

What had been causing issues, was that the guy was telling me he put his vcr on channel 13 when he wanted to watch the satellite, but that can't be right, because there was no rf lead between the sat decoder and the vcr. I even tried connecting one at one point, but it didn't work.

It was all connected now, but the free to air reception was terrible.

I looked at the cable, it looked all corroded.. no, it had paint on it, that's not going to work real well though anyway.

The guy went and got another aerial cable from somewhere else, when he got it, the plug on the end came off the cable.

It was now about 2.10pm, I said I had to go, because I had to go to the tax appointment, and that I would come back.

I said I would go and get the parts I needed to make a new cable after that.

I chatted for a couple of minutes in the doorway, trying to work out what I needed to get for him to make the cables.

I left there at 2.15pm, and came rushing home.

I came in, grabbed everything I could possibly need, and I took off to the tax place. I got there at 2.35pm, not too bad.

I apologised for being late, the woman didn't really care, she was doing something anyway.

We went through, I gave her all the details she needed, I signed a couple of things, paid, and then left. I think it took about 1/2 hour. She reckoned I'll get about 2/3 of the tax I paid back.

I went over to the hardware place.

I wandered in, and up to the cable section.

I grabbed the connectors I needed, 3 male, and 1 female, all they had on the shelf.

I was just working out the cable to get (they have 3 different types of aerial cable), when someone spoke to me.

I turned around, and it was my mate (who drove us down to the radiohead concert)'s Dad, who works at the hardware place.

I was just about to get him to cut the cable for me, when his radio went off. I said I would get him to cut some cable for me in a minute. He wandered away to speak to someone on the radio.

I stood around for a couple of minutes, contemplating going around to the next aisle to get the ruler and the cutters, and just cut the cable myself, but I just waited, and after about 5 minutes, my mate's dad came back.

He asked me what I was up to, and we had a brief chat.

I told him I wanted 4 metres of the quad shielded rg6 cable, over kill, but it was only $1/metre, and the next stuff, at 68c/metre, looked really cheesy.

He measured up the cable for me, and cut it. I thanked him, and said I'd see him later.

I wandered up to the front of the shop, got in the line.

The guy in front was buying a laundry tub/cupboard. It scanned as $238, and he claimed it had a sticker of $138 on it.

The checkout chick got on the radio, and a guy from that section came up to try to explain to the guy that he had the wrong one.

He then said it was easier to just show him, asked if he wanted the $238 one (well, duh, if he did, you wouldn't be here), so he picked it up, and they both wandered off back to that aisle.

I put the connectors and the cable up, the chick rang it up, and I paid for it, about $12 worth.

I came out, chucked the stuff in my bag, and took off. I rode back to the guys place.

I went back inside, got out the stuff I needed.

I wandered back into the room where the gear was. The guy pointed out the big C band dish in the back yard.

I sat and looked at the lengths, I think my mate's Dad gave me about 10 metres, there's certainly more than 4 here.

I cut it into 2 lengths, about 1/3 and 2/3rds each.

I terminated the 1/3 length, it was to go between the vcr and the tv. I made the cable up, and then realised I'd terminated it with a wrong end, I'd made it male to male, which I needed to go between the vcr and the wall, and longer.

I took the end off, put the right one on.

I then put the cable in, between the vcr and tv. It was at this point, I realised why the reception was so bad. When the guy had brought all his devices back into the room, he must have had a go at putting the stuff back together, but got a bit confused.

He had the lead that should have gone between the wall and the input on the tuner of the vcr, going between the tv and the input of the tuner on the vcr, and he had the cable from the output of the tuner of the vcr going to the wall, instead of the tv.

I made up the longer cable, ran it through, plugged it in, and the reception was back how it was before he moved the stuff.

It's still not great, but it should be enough signal for a digital stb to work, that he mentioned he was thinking about getting.

I went and had a look at the other equipment now. It was the same story. He'd had to rip all the gear from here out.

I had a look, it was close to being right, execpt that he had his wireless video transmitter plugged into the output of the tv, instead of the output of the sat decoder attached to the C band dish.

(The output from the sat decoder attached to the C band dish is transmitted to the tv in the garage, where his Chinese wife likes to watch tv while she works, there was a sewing machine and some other stuff setup in the garage).

I fiddled around, and connected the stuff up properly here, sat decoder to the vcr and the wireless transmitter, vcr to the tv, and the aerial to the vcr. Same issue with the aerial cable in here, this is where the cable with the end that came off came from.

We pushed the tv right back near the wall, so we could get the dodgy cable out, but he had a male/female extension cable in the wall, so it was no good.

I looked at the other cables, the one with paint on it, and the one with the end that comes off.

We put one of those back in, and I said I would make up another cable for him, and drop it in.

He paid me for the parts I bought at the hardware, he then asked me if I drink Scotch, or Whiskey. Do I ever? :-)

I said I drink anything. He went over to the bar I hadn't noticed before, and picked up a big bottle of Whiskey, and asked me if I would be happy with that.

I was very happy with that. It's worth more than the bit of work I did. I said I would make up another cable for this room, and drop it in to him at some stage.

We had another chat about digital set top boxes, and then I left.

I decided to stop in at the supermarket on the way home, and get something for dinner. That was fairly uneventful.

I came home after that.

I didn't really do anything useful, watched some tv, and finished off the last of the bottle of Scotch I was drinking this week.

Dad came in for a chat about 9.30pm. Wanted to know about details of customers, in order to work out what to tell the bank, to get credit card processing facilities.

We sat and chatted for about an hour, about customers, work, getting the gear sorted etc. I said I would chase up what was happening with the gear tomorrow.

I went through some email after that. I realised I had arranged to go and do the networking on Monday, when I'm supposed to be at the annual general meeting of one of the seniors clubs, giving a talk on how the internet works.

I'll have to ring them tomorrow and move it.

I sat and watched a bit more tv, and then I went to bed.

Last night had to be the worst night's sleep ever.

I went to bed just after 1am, I had just put my Radiohead playlist on again.

I looked at the clock at the following times:

1am
1.30am
2.10am
2.40am
3.20am

I think I fell asleep at this point, but sort of a "conscious sleep" where I thought I was still awake. I thought the clock would say about 4am when I looked, it said 5.15am.

I fell asleep at this point, and slept until 8.30am when the alarm went off.

I got up at that point, had a shower, got ready.

The dvd had finished rendering, so I started dvd shrink running against it, to get it down to a size that would fit on a dvdr.

I was leaving about 9.20am, to get to the car service place for 9.30am to pick up my mate.

When I went down, I noticed my blinker (that I keep taping on) looking really sad, so I retaped it.

Dad turned up from somewhere, I spoke to him for a couple of minutes, he mentioned something about getting bank accounts sorted out.

I took off, went around to the car place. My mate came out, apparently he'd only got there about 5 minutes before, good timing.

He jumped on, and we went to the club. On the way, I felt my phone ringing. When we got there, I checked it, it was the guy with the colo where my gear is.

I tried calling him back, no answer. It must not have been important, because he didn't leave me a message.

We went in, and I checked my card to see if it was activated to get free lunches. It wasn't, so they sorted that out. While doing it, a line formed at the machine to collect the tickets.

We wandered around to the other machine, someone was just in front of us, so while I waited for them, I played the poker machine nearby, won nothing.

My mate claimed by lunch ticket for me, and then we went up to the snooker room.

We played 3 games, my skill was appalling today, and I got beaten by at least 50 on all 3 games.

During the games, my mate got called up a couple of times, some guy he helps out with pc stuff, it seems like the guy's hard drive is stuffed. We worked out finding out about getting him a new one.

The phone reminded me, I tried calling the colo guy back, and I spoke to him for a few minutes. I todl him I was having issues, and that the call routing was being a pain in the ass.

He said he would investigate something from his side, so we could get something sorted out. I said I would call him a bit later.

We finished up playing, and headed downstairs.

We got in the line for lunch.

Took a few minutes, but we got through, and got our food.

We sat and ate lunch. The food wasn't great, but what do you expect for free.

We left the club, and I took my mate to pickup his car, from a different place, but near where I picked him up.

They were doing the transmission at the place I picked him up from, and then they took it to another place ( a service station), where a hose was getting replaced, and the coolant was getting changed.

I dropped him off there. (It was now about 12.30 I think).

I was just about to wander over to where he was speaking to the mechanic, when a car beeped it's horn. I looked around, and it was the guy who owns the aircon business I used to work for.

I wandered over, and had a chat with him, he wanted to know how the ISP was going, and I said I hoped to have something sorted today.

He introduced me to the guy he's got working for him now.

We would have kept chatting, but the van was blocking someone, so we said we would talk later.

I wandered back over, saw my mate, he was chatting with the mechanic, I said I would speak to him later.

The service station was right near the place where I helped my friend put up a 15m telescopic mast last year, for a wireless access point, I wanted to speak to the guy who owns the place.

He came into the Cafe a few weeks ago, and they told him that I didn't work there anymore, and I wanted to have a chat with him.

I called in there a few weeks ago, but he wasn't there at the time, and he didn't get back to me.

I thought I would have another go and having a chat with him, since I was nearby.

I went there, wandered in, asked if the guy was in, apparently he's overseas at the moment, coming back in a few days, so I said I would come back next week.

I decided to go and see the colo guy, and see if we could work something out.

I rode out to his place, got there right on 1pm. I went to do into his shop, found the door locked, and noticed that it said closed between 12.30pm and 1.30pm for lunch.

I'm not waiting around here for 1/2 hour, so I went back to the colo.

I fiddled around with the ras again, trying to see if I could get the radius stuff working, one way or the other.

after mucking around with some routing stuff, in desperation, i decided to see what would happen if I connected our networks together, taking the issue of subnetting and routing tables out of the picture.

I took the cat5 that went from the ras to the other guys network, and I plugged it into my switch. No link came up. Maybe I need to use the uplink port since I'm trying to connect 2 switches together.

I tried that, it still didn't work.

Uh oh, I hope I'm not trying to plug an E1 into the swtich.. I checked.. yep.. I had taken the length of cat5 I ran from the first WAN port on the ras around to the telco termination. Luckily, the other end (where it goes to the telco termination) was not plugged in.

I put that cable back, found the one coming from the second ethernet port on the ras, and put that in the switch, in the uplink, and the link came up.

I still could not get any radius stuff working though. It was weird, I ran tcpdump on my radius server, and on the other guys, and after resetting the ras a few times, I never saw any traffic from the ras to the radius servers, it just complained they were down, without ever trying to connect to them, dumb.

At about 1.40pm, I gave up, put it all back, locked up and left, I rode back out to the shop again.

The guy was there, I had a chat to him for a bit, we decided to stuff the setup we were trying to achive, with call routing etc, and just get something that works. That way I can get some customers, get my service running, and sort out these issues down the track a bit, perhaps getting my own E1 with a different hunt group etc.

He hadn't looked into setting anything up, I said I was having issues with getting the ras going, and I was sick of it, so it's probably easier to just configure his stuff, and get some ports off there (I would have had to do that anyway, without reconfiguring the hunt group).

He couldn't remember the password to his ras, he said he would look at it a bit later, and that he had to leave, because it was his day to play golf.

I left a bit after that, and I came home.

My mate I had played snooker with this morning had tried to call me while I was riding home, he had left a message, he wanted to know if I could help out a guy connect up his tv/vcrs because they had been moved or something.

I tried calling him back about 6 times, but it complained his phone was off or out of range.

I checked my sat box, and the new software, still running nicely, good.

I went in my parents' place to check their sat box, it was complaining "insert smartcard". I had a look at the new software, it should work.

I could see the powered interface I made flash when I put the dummy card in, like the software was trying to bootstrap the box, but it just wasn't working. I fiddled around with the settings a bit, in desperation I set it to "humax", even though it's a uec decoder, went back, and jiggled the card again, and it booted up first go. Weird.

I came back out to my place. There was a letter on the floor inside the door, uh oh, Amex bill.

I came inside, opened the bill, D'oh, it's got all The Who tickets I bought on in. Now I need to chase up payment for those tickets in the next 2 weeks, before the due date.

I did a bit more dvd archiving, burned a dvd from the result of dvdshrink I had run this morning.

I watched a bit of tv.

My mate called me back, he wanted to know about me plugging the tv/vcrs in again. I said I may be able to have a look at it tomorrow. he gave me the guy's number.

I didn't hear back from him, so I'll call the guy tomorrow.

I went back to watching tv.

I was too lazy to make any dinner, so I ate what was left of a box of corn flakes.

I played solitaire on the palm for about 4 hours. I think I need to find a new game.

I poured myself a drink, had a bit of it, and about halfway through got shocking indigestion.

I had an antacid, but it didn't really do anything, I thought maybe I was hungry, so I started making some food.

I had to do the washing up, no plates left.

I got my food a few minutes ago, and now I am really not hungry, and I feel all yucky again after eating most of it.

Maybe I needed that acid I just neutralised.

I called my mate, he did have a spare video card. I said I would be there shortly.

I rode up there, wandered in, they were watching another episode of The Sopranos.

I sat down, my mate grabbed the video card for me, and I started watching the Sopranos.

About 15 minutes later, the woman who lives downstairs knocked on the window.

My mate went over to speak to her. I couldn't hear the conversation.

My other mate, about a minute later, paused the DVD, and went to join in the conversation.

The woman that lives below them was complaining that the woman who lives next door couldn't sleep because of the noise they make, and something about her having to move into the back bedroom of her house to get away from the noise.

my mates' main argument was that if her house had no insulation, then that was her problem, and that on the weekend, and public holidays, they would make as much noise as they liked.

The woman from downstairs then complained about the noise in her area (I believe this was the ulterior motive for this conversation, and the stuff about the woman next door was just nonsense, because the woman downstairs didn't want to complain directly), my mates said that that was why they kept all the equipment in the front section of the house, and not in the loungeroom (since the loungeroom is directly above the downstairs area of the house, and the front section has nothing under it).

She went away after that, claiming that she didn't want to be nasty about it.

It was very surprising that is has been this long before the woman complained of the noise, I would have thought she would have been up there the first week, and they've been in there about 2 months now.

Oh well, my opinion on the matter: call the police, let them sort it out.

As I've said before, the police don't care. So many times they came out to shut down parties I went to, I just spoke to them, apologised for the noise, said I would take control, and sort it out, and immediately they were happy, and went away, because they didn't really care, and just wanted to get out of there.

The same thing will apply here. Call the police, by the time they turn up, everyone will have gone to bed, and there is no issue.

I watched until the end of the episode, and then I came home again.

I put the video card in the machine, booted it up. Seemed to work.

I installed windows again, to work on this machine, installed all the drivers.

It seems like a pretty quick machine.

I went through, setup the video software, and started DVD archiving again.

I started web browsing, looking for new stuff on the sat tv forums, since I haven't looked on there for a few weeks.

There was a new card sharing software, I grabbed it down, and started reading the docs, looks like a cool bit of software, it might even get that mongrel UEC700 working that I tried 6 different interfaces in.

I was going to put it in, but my parents are probably watching, and will complain, so I'll wait til a bit later.

My mate I got to dinner with called me. He's putting his car in for a service tomorrow, and wanted to know if I could pick him up, take him to the club, where we play a few games of snooker, and then take him back over to get his car, yeah, that should be fine.

A few hours later, after I got through doing a bunch of videos from the tivo, I decided to have a look at the new card software.

I put it on the card sharing machine, killed the other stuff, started this one up, jiggled the card in my decoder, and away it went, first go.

I put the software on my parents' machine, and configured it so it should work, all they need to do is jiggle the card, and it should kick in. I'll have a look at it in the morning.

When I vnced into my parents' machine to put the software on, it complained that drive c was full. It had 38mb free. There was 370mb in the \windows\temp directory. I cleaned all that out.

I left my new machine rerendering all the mpgs into dvd format when I went to bed.

I woke up at 1pm.

I started watching some tv.

The guide data for the tivo is all stuffed up this week, so tivo thought it recorded a bunch of Simpsons episodes, but they were actually, 7th Heaven (which has to be the worst show on tv), Jerry Springer, and Cheaters. So I just deleted them all.

That was the fastest I've ever watched 4 hours of tv in.

I had some breakfast, checked my email.

Now I need to find something useful to do today.

I thought about the issues with the ras.

I think the only way I can get around it, is to get another PRI activated, with my own telephone number attached, plug it into my ras, and have my customers dial that number, and keep it totally separate from the other guys ras.

That's going to cost money though, and take time, but I don't see any other way to do it.

Ugh, I think I'll try calling my mate who was in the city last night, find out if he has a spare AGP video card I can borrow, and go about doing some DVD archiving from the tivo on the new machine I bought, since tivo is so full.

I had some dinner about 9.30pm, and I had a scotch and coke with it. I immediately felt like I had been kicked in th head, I had the worst headache.

There were no panadol, I'd eaten them all a couple of days ago.

I had a shower, that helped a bit.

I got dressed.

I tried to call my mate (who drove down last night) there was no answer. I tried calling a few times.

I sat and played Solitaire on my palm for about 10 minutes, I tried calling again, no answer.

It was now about 10.50. The supermarket probably closes at 11pm.

I left, I rode down to the supermarket, to get some panadol. It was freezing cold. My head felt a bit better immediately, being in the cold.

As I got near the shopping centre, coming up the other way on the road, was a white vehicle, I'm not sure of the name of the body type, it's like a cross between a ute and a van, I think painter's van is the best sort of description I can come up with for it.

It had red and blue flashing lights on the dash, somehow I doubt it is an undercover police vehicle.

As it went past, I had a look at the back of it, and it had brighter red and blue lights flashing.

It didn't have a siren or anything, so I don't know what it was.

I parked right near the door of the centre, wandered over, there's a piece of paper with some writing scrawled on it.

Apparently the centre was closed for Anzac day, but the supermarket is open, go through the after hours door. D'oh, I could have parked near there.

I wandered over, and went in.

The security guard standing inside asked me how I was. Great, like he really cares.

I went in, grabbed some "Fast acting" Panadol. I was going to get Advil, but I tried it before, it's twice the price, and does nothing.

I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge near the checkout, and wandered to the only open checkout. The guy serving had wandered off somewhere.

I put the stuff down, got my change out, and started workig out how much it was.

The guy came back, rang up the stuff, I paid, and he told me to "have a good one". Mate, I've just bought a box of panadol, and water, do I look like I'm going to have a good one?

I left from here, and was going to ride to my mate's place (who I'd been trying to ring), but I wasn't paying attention, and I went the wrong way. Oh well, I can get there, it's justy a longer way.

I stopped in at another mates place that was on the way, on this long way.

His old car that he sold to someone a couple of years ago was parked out the front, weird. There were no lights on, and no noise coming out, so there mustn't have been anyone there.

The only light, was a flashing blue light in the kitchen window, assumedly from a clock on an appliance that hadn't been set.

I kept going. I went over the railway line, and back towards my mate's place.

I rode up near his house. There was an unfamiliar car in the driveway. There were no lights on here either. He must have gone out somewhere, maybe in a taxi, explaining why his and someone else's cars are here.

I kept going. I thought maybe they had got a taxi to the club we talked about going to when I got out of the car when they dropped me at home last night, and it was so noisy in there that he couldn't hear the phone ringing.

I rode down to the club, I wanted to park underneath where all the security vehicles park, it's safer down there, (one time I parked in the motorbike parking, someone put a cigarette on the pillion seat, and marked it), but all the spots were gone. I've never seen anything like it.

There's one spot between a wall and a pillar, where only bikes fit, I thought I would park in there, but someone beat me to it.

I turned around, went back out, and went and parked in the motorbike parking, where some idiot car driver had parked. I felt like slashing his tyres.

I went inside the club, they had extra security on the door, someone was getting thrown out as I went in.

There were far too many people in here. It was too loud, too bright, too hot, too crowded.

I took several minutes to wander around, looking to see if my mate was in here.

I tried calling my mate, he answered. We couldn't hear each other, and a few seconds later my phone dropped out.

At some point, some guy bumped into me, and then he turned around like it was my fault, and wanted to have a go.

I was a bit taller than him, and I had my bike jacket on, that makes me look a little bit bulkier than I am (but I'm not skinny, by any means), so he immediately just pulled his head in and turned around again.

I got out of there, I tried calling my mate again, he answered. I asked if he was down here, or what the story was.

He told me he had been sleeping. They hadn't gone out, because he'd rung one of the others from last night, and they didn't want to go out either.

Apparently the other people's place I went past, they were staying down in the city.

Ok fine, maybe next weekend, and I got off the phone.

Perfectly good waste of a long weekend, not that this club was any great use of it.

Now I'm stuffed. I don't want to stay here. I don't want to go home, and I don't want to ride around, because it's too cold.

I went home. It was still before midnight when I got back.

I started playing Solitaire on the palm again.

I put my Radiohead concert playlist on again, and played Solitaire for over an hour and a half, and then I went to bed about 2am.

What a complete waste of time today was. I might as well have not even got up.

Woohoo! I found it! here.

The set list: (ungraciously ripped off from the above page).

01 2+2=5
02 myxomatosis
03 where i end and you begin
04 lucky
05 sit down. stand up
06 just
07 sail to the moon
08 i might be wrong
09 go to sleep
10 like spinning plates
11 exit music
12 talk show host
13 national anthem
14 fake plastic trees
15 paranoid android
16 idioteque
17 there there

Encore #1:
18 we suck young blood
19 nice dream
20 my iron lung
21 no surprises

Encore #2:
22 you and whose army? (actual setlist had planet telex here)
23 everything in its right place

Now I can make up a playlist for xmms/winamp and relive the concert.

So far I've eaten some breakfast, and googled around for a playlist of the songs Radiohead did last night.

My mate I got to dinner with rang me, wanting to know if I had the dialin working yet, and I told him I only just got up.

I mentioned I should have got him to get me a video card, he said he has a Geforce2 MX440 card there, that he bought when we built a pc a while ago, and then found onboard video.

I think I can get another one of these ATI Radeon 9200s (with 128MB) for what he wants for the 64mb GeForce. I'll have a think about it. I can always pop down the freeway on Tuesday afternoon (seeing as tomorrow is a public holiday, I doubt they will be open) and get a video card.

I've not found a playlist of the songs from last night yet, but I did find an article about Radiohead saying they were glad they would not get locked out of the dressing room by Mariah Carey this time, like they did last time they toured here.

I've also found some photos from last night's concert, here.

Where's that list?

Ugh, I have a headache. Not really surprising considering I've just slept for 12 hours. I don't remember the last time I did that.

Oh well, that's what I get for getting up so early, I should have known no good would come up getting up before 8am. I was up for 18 hours yesterday, normally I'm only up for about 14 hours.

So much for going out and playing 2 up today (if that even is today), I'm stuffed. I think I'll just listen to some Radiohead, and go over this ras config file again.

I went back to looking at the config file. It seems you can't have different radius source address details depending on what telephone number the dialin comes from, you can only have 1. That's some of the issue.

I'm not sure what the rest of the issue is however. More investigation is needed.

About 5.15pm I put some pizza in the oven, and jumped in the shower.

I gelled my hair up, I think I need a haircut, this isn't really a mohawk anymore, it's just sort of mixed length mess.

I ate my pizza, just as I was eating the last slice my phone rang a couple of times, my mate letting me know he would be here to pick me up in a few minutes.

I sat and waited, he turned up, I went down and jumped in the car.

My other mate with him asked if I had the tickets. Duh. I came back inside and got them, and went back and got back in the car.

I had specifically thought earlier this afternoon that I had to make sure I took them with me. Oh well, doesn't matter, I have them, and we're going now.

My mate told me his rego sticker on the window was expired by 4 days, but that he had the new one. Well, there's nothing to worry about. I carried my rego sticker around in the saddle bag of my bike for months before I got around to getting a washer to attach the holder, like they are going to worry about the sticker on the window being out by 4 days, when he's got the paid sticker waiting to go on the window.

He wasn't convinced, so I got to sit there scratching the old sticker off the window so the new one could go on.

The other guy who was supposed to be going said he couldn't if we were going down at 6pm, so someone else could go.

We went and picked one of our other mates up. Just before we got on the freeway, we stopped at a service station and my mate ghot some petrol. One of the other guys in the car gave me half the price of The Who ticket I bought for him a few days ago. Apparently the others (who weren't going to this one) hadn't given him their money yet, so I'll have to chase that up.

Then we got on the freeway, and drove to the city.

As we got off the freeway, I had just finished removing the sticker from the window.

I didn't put the new one on, the window was far too grubby, and there was nothing to clean it with. I stuck the new sticker (still attached to the letter), in the gape between the glass and the seal, so it just held it there.

My mate can clean the window and put the sticker on later.

We were getting near going across the harbour bridge, at about 7.15pm, the traffic got really slow. We thought there must have been an accident it was backed up so far, but we didn't see anything as we got near the toll booths.

My mate missed the entry to the parking station, so we had to go around the block to go in. Halfway around the block, while waiting to turn the corner, some asian woman attempting to park her car just starts backing towards us without looking.

My mate reveresed, and whipped out of her way quick smart, apparently his horn is too hard to find.

We went into the parking station, it was fairly full. We found a parking spot, someone pulled up really close behind us, we waved for them to pass us, but there must not have been room. My mate moved forward a bit to pull in, so they could pass, and instead, the idiot behind just leans on his horn, and then drives into the spot we were trying to park in.

We kept looking, there were a few more spots close by, so it wasn't worth having an argument over nothing.

A couple of spots were far too tight, we found one that wasn't too bad, and my mate squeezed in.

We wandered out of the carpark, and towards the Entertainment Centre. It was now about 7.50pm, the show starts at 8pm, but that will be the accompanyment, for an hour or so.

We walked to the Entertainment Centre, and we decided we wanted a beer. It was now about 8pm. We wandered back away a bit, to an Irish pub. It took us 15 minutes to get served, appalling.

We drank our beer. The only place to stand was in near the pokies.

I put a dollar through one, got nothing. I played another one, won 2 dollars, so I took it out. Back where I started.

I'd finished my pint, so had one of the others. My mate who drove has a cold at the moment, and is on antibiotics, so he wasn't drinking, we were just waiting on the other guy, who ordered a pint and a half.

He dumped some of the half pint, my other mate dumped what was left of his Coke, and we went back to the Entertainment Centre.

Some guy outside near us said "$180 for a ticket", not sure if he was selling them (ie a scalper), or if he wanted to buy one, it wasn't clear.

We went in, we looked at the merchandise table. Not much there, a bunch of different shirts, all pretty ordinary, $40 each, for probably some $2 made in China shirt. They also had a "poster set" which was a few A4 sheets of different designs, album covers etc, $40 for that too.

We went in, found our seats. We were in about 9pm.

Row M in the nosebleed section. We were at about 60 degrees to the stage on the left side. It was an ok position.

The people in the row next to us, a guy and (presumably) his girlfriend commented, somewhat sarcastically, that we had missed the warmup band, "the bumblebees". Whatever.

We sat and waited for a few minutes, there was a guy selling drinks, ice creams, chips etc, but he didn't come up the stairs far enough, and I'll be buggered if I'm going all the way down those stairs and back up again. That would defeat the purpose of consuming the sugar.

Radiohead came out on stage about 9.10pm.

They went through, played all really good songs, it was brilliant. They played "Just" early in the piece, it was different from the album version, but still good, in its own live way, they played a few more new and old songs, all really good, before playing Paranoid Andriod, an unreal live version if ever there was.

It was pretty cool seeing them drag a piano out a few times for Thom to use.

They played a few more songs, and went off the stage the first time about 10.20pm.

My mate thought they would only do one or two more songs, so he snuck down into the floor area, where people could mosh (not that Radiohead is really moshing music).

They played about 4 more songs, went off the stage again, about 10.45pm.

They came back out, and my mate came back up, he'd been found in the floor area and sent back, they played another 4 or 5 songs, with a brilliant ending, a massively entended version of "Everything in its Right Place", and left the stage again about 11.10pm.

I was very impressed. I didn't expect to get 2 hours worth, I was thinking maybe an hour and a half.

They didn't do Creep (surprisingly), High & Dry, or Optimistic, which I would have liked to have heard (and maybe Blackstar), but I was still impressed. I heard Just, and Paranoid Android, so I was happy.

I can't really remember all the songs they did play, there were so many, here's some of the ones I remember hearing:

2+2=5
A Reminder
Airbag
Everything in its Right Place (finale)
Fake Plastic Trees (unreal, didn't expect to hear this one, it went off).
Go to Sleep
How Can You be Sure
I Might be Wrong
Idioteque
Like Spinning Plates
Nice Dream
No Surprises
Sit Down, Stand Up
We Suck Young Blood (in one of the encores, eventually people got the hang of the clapping)
You and Whose Army (with the "come on" used by Thom to encourage us to make noise)

Some they may have done, but I'm not sure:
Electioneering
I Will
In Limbo
Lucky
Morning Bell

There's probably a proper list of what they played somewhere, or some hardcore fan was there writing them down.

It doesn't help that I've only listened to Radiohead for the last 2 days. I now can't remember when I heard the songs.

We filtered out of the Entertainment Centre, had another look at the merchandise, it's still ordinary, and we kept going. If they had had a Paranoid Android shirt I would have bought it.

When we got outside, one of my mates mentioned the bogans behind us that were annoying. Throughout the whole show, at the end of each song, one of them would shout "Play it again", and I thought they were also shouting "Thong" for some reason, and it wasn't until then that I realised they must have been shouting "Thom", pronouncing the silent H, illiterate fscks.

If I had realised it earlier, I probably would have turned around and corrected them, or just told them to shutup.

Other than the bogans (because it's impossible to go to a concert without that sort of nonsense), this is easily the best concert I have ever been to. It's going to take a lot to top this one.

We walked back to the car park where the car was (along with a bunch of other people, popular car park). Got in the line, paid for the parking, got in the line for the life, got in the car, and left.

We decided to go for a cruise through Kings Cross (Red Light District) on the way out of the city, for a quick perve.

There were some really attractive girls in there, it's sad to think they do that sort of thing.

On the way out of the city, my mate missed a turn, and so we went around some empty streets to get back and get out of the city the quicker way to get home.

We stopped just before getting on the freeway to come home. It was now about 12.15am. We got some junk food, and drinks, stood around and ate, drank, chatted, before getting back in the car, about 12.35am.

We came back up the freeway, my mate dropped off the other guy at his place, on the way, a traffic light turned orange, and my mate just gunned it through, very clever considering there was a cop car sitting at the other corner of the intersection waiting to come through it. They didn't even look.

My mate dropped me at home after that, saying that he would call me tomorrow afternoon, to work out what we are going to do tomorrow night, because it's a long weekend.

Hmm, Anzac day, I think this is the day you can play 2 up.

2am. I'm going to bed.

I got up about 7.50am, had a shower, got dressed, had some breakfast, it was now about 8.15am.

I grabbed my bag I'd chucked a few things in last night, I loaded in my crappy 486 laptop, a couple of network cards for it, and some other bits and pieces, like the manuals for the equipment I don't need.

I rode in there, got in there about 8.35am.

I set the laptop up in the back of my rack, it was easier to access the stuff that way, and the extra screen was handy.

The only other place to put the monitor/keyboard to access the gear is on top of the rack next to mine, which is really uncomfortable to try typing on. I was standing on the chair yesterday so I could type at a reasonable rate. (you try putting your keyboard on top of the monitor and typing something for example).

The guy turned up about 8.50am.

We had a look at what was going on. There were a whole bunch of errors in the radius log file from yesterday while I was mucking around, so it looked like I was almost there.

I checked through the configuration again. We setup new configuration on the radius server so I could have my ras connected at the same time as his.

I plugged the E1 in, and I could see calls coming in, but it wasn't trying to authenticate them anywhere. Bugger.

I went through the config again, I looked in the manual, I couldn't work it out. It should work.

While I was fiddling around trying to get the stuff working, the other guy grabbed the vacuum and started cleaning up all the dead cockroaches around the place. He commented that the spray he uses must be good, it looks like the roaches explode.

About 11.30am, someone called the guy, and he said he had to go.

I decided that I would too. I'll go home, dump the config out, go through it line by line, and load it back in again.

I've had so many settings in this thing, there's probably something sitting in the background screwing it up, and a factory reset will fix it.

He left, I plugged everything back as it was before, locked up and left.

I left the laptop in there, I never use it at home, and it will be handy in there, at least while I try to get this debugged.

I came home.

I dumped the config out, and started going through it, reading through the manual for every command.

I discovered a whole bunch of radius settings I hadn't entered, because my config was based on the one that was in the unit when I got it, and they mustn't have used them.

I wrote a whole new config file, then I remotely factory reset the unit (glad I put that console cable in), changed the password, avoiding running the basic config, and then I loaded my config file in. I had to do it line by line which took a while, but I got there.

"This time for sure!"

I rang one of my mates I'm going to the Radiohead concert with tonight, to find out what the plan was, he said he would call me back in a bit.

I went back into Gosford, changed the E1 over into my ras again.

I couldn't see errors, but I couldn't see it working.

I called my mate, and got him to do a couple of test calls. One of them ended up on the other guys ras, so it tried to authenticate against his radius.. failed.

I assume he got on to my ras after that, because the radius request just failed, didn't go to the other one.

Hmm, this is really annoying now.

I called him back, said it wasn't working, and that I give up for the time being.

I plugged it all back, and I left.

I went over to McDonalds, got some lunch, and then I came home.

I blogged yesterday and today.

My mate called me before I started blogging today, worked out that to be down there for the start at 8pm (which is only the accompanyment, not even billed on the ticket), we'll need to leave about 6.30pm, so we'll leave about 6pm.

It's just now 4pm, so in the next couple of hours I'll have another shower, probably something to eat, might have another look at the config file.

I got up about 10am, I have to make up a tivo serial cable, get ready, and go and meet my mate in Gosford, that shouldn't be too hard.

I bummed around, I made up the serial cable, it took a lot longer than I had thought. I finished it, tested it etc, at about 12.15pm. There's no time for a shower now, and I'll be a couple of minutes late.

The guy who wants to start an ISP called me, apparently the linux box I built for him years ago isn't working again, and it's because the powersupply has blown in it again.

He wanted to know if there was a computer fair on tomorrow. I checked, no, it said cancelled. I said that my mate was going to the wholesaler today, and might be able to get one. I was on the phone for a few minutes, at which point I said i had to go.

I left about 12.25. Sure, I'll be there in 5 minutes.

On the way in, my phone started ringing. Not much I can do about it.

I rode to the seniors centre to meet my mate, he was waiting out the front.

I parked near his car, chucked my helmet and stuff in his car. Normally I would just lock it on to the bike, but the sun was blaring down, and I hate putting a red hot helmet on.

We wandered over to the building where the gear is, went in, and I showed him around.

I checked the server that seemed to have hung.. it was, but during the kernel booting, because they have issues with the IDE controllers on the motherboard, that for some stupid reason you can't disable (I don't need them, I'm using the SATA controller, and there is nothing attached to the IDE/floppy controller in any of the machines).

I reset it, and then it came up fine.

We where in there for a few minutes, I gave him the cash for my monitor, and asked him to see if he could get a power supply. I doubt they would have AT powersupplies, but it doesn't hurt to check.

We came out again, wandered back over. I said I was going to see the colo guy, to find out about a phone number.

My mate took off, I took off too.

I went to the post office, and I mailed the serial cable. The woman tried to put it through as a letter (which would have been nice) but it was just too fat.

I left there, and I went and had KFC for lunch.

I went out to Erina to see the guy.

He was in trying to setup a laptop for a customer.

I told him that I was getting there, had worked out the network issue (with the interface in the gateway machine being set to the broadcast address etc) but that I still needed a phone number (i thought you could just pick any, but I wanted to be sure), and that I would have issues with routing to his network.

I also mentioned that I had noticed my machines rebooting for no reason. He said he had noticed that years ago, and it's why he put the UPS in there. Apparently someone in one of the other offices in the building where the equipment is had complained to him that their computers always reboot during the night.

That must be what it is. He told me to put my stuff on the UPS instead of running it off the wall.

I hadn't done this, because I wasn't sure of the UPS status, how much load it had, and the batteries etc, because it was complaining and beeping saying "replace batteries" while I was in there on Tuesday racking the gear.

He told me he had replaced the batteries, but that the UPS hadn't worked it out, and that it only had 20% load on it.

He also told me about the E1 I could use, where it was etc.

He said he would be going over there later, because he had an issue with one of his machines.

I said I would go home, get my gear (crimping tool, cable etc) and head in there.

I went home, got the stuff, and went in there.

I took 15m of cable with me, it took about 10m of it to run from my rack, through the conduit on the floor, up the wall, across the conduit on the wall, down, and to the ISDN termination on the wall.

I crimped both ends.

I traced the E1 I could use, it was a single run to a second terminal server he runs.

I pulled the cable out, put mine, after a few seconds the WAN signal light came on, cool.

I wanted to use the rest of the cat5 I took with me to run the second network interface on the RAS into his LAN, but it wasn't long enough. I traced a spare cable running to the next rack, that's now empty, and went about pulling it out to use.

The way they had put the cables into the racks, up through a hole in the bottom where the adjustable height feet sit, meant that I couldn't get the terminated cable out, because the rj45 wouldn't fit.

I didn't realise this until I tried to get it out for a few minutes, pulling the piece of gear out of the rack so I could get in and see what was going on. In the end, I just cut the end off, pulled the cable out, put the gear back in the rack, and crimped a new end on.

I ran this bit of cable from my ras, through the conduit, and into the switch on his LAN.

I then went to configure the second interface on the ras, only to receive an error about trying to have 2 interfaces on the same subnet. D'oh.

I removed the IP address from the interface connected to my network, I was then able to set the IP on his network. Just before I did that however, I went around and turned off his ras, because I was configuring mine with the same IP address, so no changes would have to be made to his radius server.

It came up, I could ping his radius server, it should work.

On the console, I was able to see people dialling in.

I called my mate, and asked him to try dialling in, it didn't work.

I then realised I hadn't changed the radius server settings in the ras, to match the new ip address since I had to change the IP address on the interface to my network, to avoid the subnet error.

I fiddled around a bit, changed those settings, still no good, after I called my mate and got him to try again.

I thought about, chances are, he's hitting the other ras, with the 4 E1s attached, and trying to authenticate against the other guy's radius server.

I fiddle around a bit more, and then I got another phone call. It was the guy who was supposed to be coming over, apparently a few customers had complained about not being able to get on. Oops.

We arranged to muck around with the stuff tomorrow morning, about 8.30am.

I pulled the E1 out, put it back into his ras, I pulled the ethernet from my ras to his network out, and I booted his ras back up.

I didn't get any more calls, so I assumed any problems went away.

I collected all my stuff, turned off the monitors, and I left.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got some food, and I came home.

I called my mate, told him what had happened, and said I might get him to do some testing for me in the morning.

I tidied up in here a bit, well, I just sort of moved the junk around, to try to make it look a bit tidier, I didn't really succeed.

I pulled out my new monitor, and set it up.

I wanted to finally boot up my new mobo/cpu/ram job cobbled together with my old disks and the new power supply I bought recently.. Then I realised I had no video card for it. D'oh. I've only got a couple of PCI video cards here, and it refuses to boot off them, it either displays nothing, or just beeps at me.

I dragged out the woman's pc I'm supposed to fix, and I plugged it in. It booted up, and ran. I can't see anything wrong with it. What the hell do they want done to it? I'll just wait until she nags at me again about it, because I don't really have time to do anything with it, I need to get this ras configured.

How annoying. I should have asked my mate to get me some useful things at the wholesaler, like a cheap video card (I thought about buying one when I bought the rest of the parts, but thought I would make do with the old geforce2 from the mobo that died), or a cheap cash to put what's left of my other machine into.

I think he mentioned something about going down near there next week, I might see if I can get him to get the stuff for me then.

I watched a bit of tv, I looked at the ras configuration, and the manual. I watched a bit of tv.

I made a few changes to the config, I'm not really sure what it is that I need to do to make this thing work.

I did this for a few hours, and eventually went to bed about 12.30am.

I got up about 10am, I have to make up a tivo serial cable, get ready, and go and meet my mate in Gosford, that shouldn't be too hard.

I bummed around, I made up the serial cable, it took a lot longer than I had thought. I finished it, tested it etc, at about 12.15pm. There's no time for a shower now, and I'll be a couple of minutes late.

The guy who wants to start an ISP called me, apparently the linux box I built for him years ago isn't working again, and it's because the powersupply has blown in it again.

He wanted to know if there was a computer fair on tomorrow. I checked, no, it said cancelled. I said that my mate was going to the wholesaler today, and might be able to get one. I was on the phone for a few minutes, at which point I said i had to go.

I left about 12.25. Sure, I'll be there in 5 minutes.

On the way in, my phone started ringing. Not much I can do about it.

I rode to the seniors centre to meet my mate, he was waiting out the front.

I parked near his car, chucked my helmet and stuff in his car. Normally I would just lock it on to the bike, but the sun was blaring down, and I hate putting a red hot helmet on.

We wandered over to the building where the gear is, went in, and I showed him around.

I checked the server that seemed to have hung.. it was, but during the kernel booting, because they have issues with the IDE controllers on the motherboard, that for some stupid reason you can't disable (I don't need them, I'm using the SATA controller, and there is nothing attached to the IDE/floppy controller in any of the machines).

I reset it, and then it came up fine.

We were in there for a few minutes, I gave him the cash for my monitor, and asked him to see if he could get a power supply. I doubt they would have AT powersupplies, but it doesn't hurt to check.

We came out again, wandered back over. I said I was going to see the colo guy, to find out about a phone number.

My mate took off, I took off too.

I went out to Erina to see the guy.

He was in trying to setup a laptop for a customer.

I told him that I was getting there, had worked out the network issue (with the interface in the gateway machine being set to the broadcast address etc) but that I still needed a phone number (i thought you could just pick any, but I wanted to be sure), and that I would have issues with routing to his network.

I also mentioned that I had noticed my machines rebooting for no reason. He said he had noticed that years ago, and it's why he put the UPS in there. Apparently someone in one of the other offices in the building where the equipment is had complained to him that their computers always reboot during the night.

That must be what it is. He told me to put my stuff on the UPS instead of running it off the wall.

I hadn't done this, because I wasn't sure of the UPS status, how much load it had, and the batteries etc, because it was complaining and beeping saying "replace batteries" while I was in there on Tuesday racking the gear.

He told me he had replaced the batteries, but that the UPS hadn't worked it out, and that it only had 20% load on it.

He also told me about the E1 I could use, where it was etc, and said I should put the ras in his rack with his. We looked for some clips for his rack, so I could rack mount the ras, but we couldn't find any.

He said he would be going over there later, because he had an issue with one of his machines.

I said I would go home, get my gear (crimping tool, cable etc) and head in there.

I went home, got the stuff that I needed together, and realised that my mate would be back from the wholesaler in a few minutes.

I waited around, he turned up a short time later, I unloaded my monitor, and dumped it inside the door.

He had no luck getting the power supply, didn't think he would.

We chatted for a minute, I said I was going back into Gosford to setup the ras, and hopefully get dialin working.

We both left. As I was waiting to get on the main road, my mate pulled up along side me, said he might be going to do some shopping, and then would go home, so if I needed him to do any testing, I could call him on his mobile and he'd get home.

I knew I had enough work with running cables and stuff that it wouldn't be an issue.

I got in there, and looked at it.

I really don't want to pull the ras and it's power supply out, move them over to the other rack, and put them back in again.. Oh, and the console cable isn't long enough anyway, so forget that.

I took 15m of cable with me, it took about 10m of it to run from my rack, through the conduit on the floor, up the wall, across the conduit on the wall, down, and to the ISDN termination on the wall.

I crimped both ends.

I traced the E1 I could use, it was a single run to a second terminal server he runs.

I pulled the cable out, put mine, after a few seconds the WAN signal light came on, cool.

I wanted to use the rest of the cat5 I took with me to run the second network interface on the RAS into his LAN, but it wasn't long enough. I traced a spare cable running to the next rack, that's now empty, and went about pulling it out to use.

The way they had put the cables into the racks, up through a hole in the bottom where the adjustable height feet sit, meant that I couldn't get the terminated cable out, because the rj45 wouldn't fit.

I didn't realise this until I tried to get it out for a few minutes, pulling the piece of gear out of the rack so I could get in and see what was going on. In the end, I just cut the end off, pulled the cable out, put the gear back in the rack, and crimped a new end on.

I ran this bit of cable from my ras, through the conduit, and into the switch on his LAN.

I then went to configure the second interface on the ras, only to receive an error about trying to have 2 interfaces on the same subnet. D'oh.

I removed the IP address from the interface connected to my network, I was then able to set the IP on his network. Just before I did that however, I went around and turned off his ras, because I was configuring mine with the same IP address, so no changes would have to be made to his radius server.

It came up, I could ping his radius server, it should work.

On the console, I was able to see people dialling in.

I called my mate, and asked him to try dialling in, it didn't work.

I then realised I hadn't changed the radius server settings in the ras, to match the new ip address since I had to change the IP address on the interface to my network, to avoid the subnet error.

I fiddled around a bit, changed those settings, still no good, after I called my mate and got him to try again.

I thought about, chances are, he's hitting the other ras, with the 4 E1s attached, and trying to authenticate against the other guy's radius server.

I fiddle around a bit more, and then I got another phone call. It was the guy who was supposed to be coming over, apparently a few customers had complained about not being able to get on. Oops.

We arranged to muck around with the stuff tomorrow morning, about 8.30am.

I pulled the E1 out, put it back into his ras, I pulled the ethernet from my ras to his network out, and I booted his ras back up.

I didn't get any more calls, so I assumed any problems went away.

I collected all my stuff, turned off the monitors, and I left.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got some food, and I came home.

I called my mate, told him what had happened, and said I might get him to do some testing for me in the morning.

I watched a bit of tv, I looked at the ras configuration, and the manual. I watched a bit of tv.

I made a few changes to the config, I'm not really sure what it is that I need to do to make this thing work.

I did this for a few hours, and eventually went to bed about 12.30am.

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.

I didn't do much today.

I reconfigured the network interfaces in the servers remotely, since the ip address on the network card in the gateway machine was set to a broadcast address, that explained why I was getting "netowrk unreachable" errors when I tried to configure my interfaces with the correct subnet mask.

Once that was done, I found that dns was working between the machines again, I would have put it down to a broadcast address issue (the fact that some machines had a subnet of 255.255.255.224, and the broadcast being .31, and other machines had subnet 255.255.255.0, with broadcast of .255) but the problem was occuring before that situation occured.

I started looking into the commands I would need to put into the ras. I think I just need to try configuring it, in which case I need it switched on. I left it turned off after rack mounting all the gear.

My mate I got to dinner with called me, wanting to know if he could have an email address, and I said that the server wasn't configured yet, and that I would call him later.

I got the mail server working, sent some test mail, it seemed ok.

I watched some tv.

I called my mate, told him his new email address. While I was on the phone, it started mucking around, and dropping out. I had to hold the cable from the phone to the handset in just the right place for it to work. It's faulty where it goes into the handset.

I got off the phone, and tried to see if I could fix the handset. The stupid things are clipped together, and it got all burred while I tried to get it apart.

I couldn't see anything wrong, I would thing the cable has just got pulled around and damaged.

I put it back together, tested it, it was no better, and now the speaker was rattling.

I got fed up, and I snapped the handset in half, it felt good, nice bit of stress releif.

Now I need a new phone.

I remembered that I had an old cordless phone somewhere, that hasn't been used for years.

I pulled it out. The adapter wasn't with it. It wants 9v, I found an 8v 100mA adapter that fit, it seemed to work.

I plugged it into charge.

I went down to the shops, bought some Coke and a chocolate bar. I thought about taking my bag, and doing some proper shopping, but the bag is still full of stuff I bought at the fair last weekend CDs, cases etc) and I really couldn't be bothered. I'll go tomorrow.

I had a drink, and ate some chocolate while I watched Tron that I only bought like a month ago.

About halfway through, my mate called me on my mobile.

While trying to answer it, I had to find pause on the remote, then pickup the phone, in the process I almost knocked my glass off the table, and I sent screws flying everywhere.

My mate was having issues with the email address. I thought maybe it was a problem with DNS propogation. I told him to try connecting via the IP address when he got back on the net.

When I had a look, it seemed that the mail server was refusing connections on port 110. I restarted qmail, and it started working again. Hmm, I'll have to keep an eye on that.

After fiddling around for an hour with the configuration (because qmail refuses to deliver mail to root by default) I went back to watching the movie.

I put it on again with commentary, and went to bed. I fell asleep before the end, woke up at the end, and turned the dvd player and tv off.

I didn't do much today.

I reconfigured the network interfaces in the servers remotely, since the ip address on the network card in the gateway machine was set to a broadcast address, that explained why I was getting "netowrk unreachable" errors when I tried to configure my interfaces with the correct subnet mask.

Once that was done, I found that dns was working between the machines again, I would have put it down to a broadcast address issue (the fact that some machines had a subnet of 255.255.255.224, and the broadcast being .31, and other machines had subnet 255.255.255.0, with broadcast of .255) but the problem was occuring before that situation occured.

I started looking into the commands I would need to put into the ras. I think I just need to try configuring it, in which case I need it switched on. I left it turned off after rack mounting all the gear.

My mate I got to dinner with called me, wanting to know if he could have an email address, and I said that the server wasn't configured yet, and that I would call him later.

I got the mail server working, sent some test mail, it seemed ok.

I watched some tv.

I called my mate, told him his new email address.

I went down to the shops, bought some Coke and a chocolate bar. I thought about taking my bag, and doing some proper shopping, but the bag is still full of stuff I bought at the fair last weekend (CDs, cases etc) and I really couldn't be bothered. I'll go tomorrow.

I had a drink, and ate some chocolate while I watched Tron that I only bought like a month ago.

About halfway through, my mate called me, he was having issues with the email address. I thought maybe it was a problem with DNS propogation.

When I had a look, it seemed that the mail server was refusing connections on port 110. I restarted qmail, and it started working again. Hmm, I'll have to keep an eye on that.

After fiddling around for an hour with the configuration (because qmail refuses to deliver mail to root) I went back to watching the movie.

I put it on again with commentary, and went to bed. I fell asleep before the end, woke up at the end, and turned the dvd player and tv off.

i had set the alarm to get up about 9.30am this morning, to get the gear in and sorted fairly early.

I slept right through the alarm.

I woke up about 10.40am. I got up.

I started getting the gear organised to go.

Dad wasn't here, the car wasn't there. Great.

I continued sorting stuff, finding cables, tools I would need.

Dad came back, we loaded the gear in the car, servers, RAS, cables, tools, and the couple of rack shelves I pinched recently.

I took the door off the rack, and dragged it over near the door, I want to make it as easy as possible when my mate helps me move it later.

Ok, that should be everything. I jumped in the car, and we went in.

Found a park around the back, in 10 minute parking.

Moved all the gear upstairs, and dumped it in the room.

Dad went to find a different parking spot.

It was now about 11.50am.

I went to call the guy whose colo it is, I only had the shop number, he wasn't there, I spoke to his wife, and said I would call his mobile.

I got off the phone, realised that his mobile number was written on a card.. in the pocket of my jacket.. that's on the chair at home.

I called the office again, asked for his mobile number, and then I called him.

I said I was in here, and when he was available to give me a network link it would be cool. He said he could be in here about 1pm.

I asked him to bring the 3 wheeled trolley he's got, (that he offered yesterday) since it might make getting the rack up the stairs a bit easier.

I started plugging the gear in, I can get it setup on the floor here, the guy can come in and give me the network link, then I can get the rack in here, and move all the stuff into the rack.

I realised I had forgotten the swtich, D'oh. It was on the floor where I put it when I unplugged all the leads, and went about getting them untangled.

Dad said he would go and get it, since we now had an hour to kill anyway.

I said I would go down the road, and buy 2 plugs to go on the rack (since the powerstrips in them had no plugs on them. They are supposed to have big industrial plugs on them, but I'm not paying $50 or so for connectors that there's no power point for anyway).

I wandered across the road, to the cheapy shop, that collects cash for the business I got screwed over by. I asked if they had plugs (it was a long shot, but I thought they might have them, and cheap, and it saved me walking for ages to go to the hardware shop). They guy didn't have any, and he didn't seem very happy to see me, very cold. Someone might have got in his ear and told him nonsense, or maybe he was just in a bad mood.

He suggested I try the supermarket.

I went over there, went in, all they had were these ugly side mount plugs, that would have been a mingrel anyway.

I ended up walking all thew way down to the hardware shop.

I bought the plugs, and a can of drink, and I wandered back.

I decided to get something to eat (I'd only killed about 15 minutes). I went into the shopping centre where the supermarket is again.

I was going to go to McDonalds in there, but there were tons of people there (now 12.20pm, no real surprise) I thought stuff it.

As I was exiting, near where I can get back to the colo, I went past a doughnut place, so I decided to get some. Mmm, breakfast.

As I was wandering across the road, I thought I could hear someone calling my name, nah, can't be me, and I kept going. Then I saw someone waving. Ah, it's the wife of the guy I've done plastering for, who I saw recently, when I went to a woman's place to fix her computer that wouldn't let her login. The woman whose computer I fixed was there too.

I went over, and started chatting to them, I told them I was in there installing all the gear, and getting ready to start up.

The woman whose computer I fixed wandered off, she had an appointment to get her hair cut. She came back a short time later, saying they were running 20 minutes later.

We continued chatting for a while, about the startup, and other things, when at about 12.40pm. I noticed Dad, and my brother wandering around.

I said I had to get back to work.

I wandered over, and we went back into the building.

I put the switch in, plugged everything in.

I had to finish reconfiguring the network on some of the servers, to get rid of the stuff to make them work on my home network.

The other machines weren't up, weird.

I plugged the monitor in to each one, they were complaining of no keyboard errors. Oops. I haven't tried to boot them up without keyboards before.

I reconfigured the bios to ignore that issue (or any issue) and that fixed that.

I reconfigured the network settings, fiddled around with ssh keys so I can login to each server without passwords, (otherwise I'll spend all day typing bloody passwords, and it makes writing backup scripts difficult). One of the machines wouldn't do name resolution properly.

I mucked around, trying all different things. In the end, I gave up, and put entries in the hosts file. Very nasty, but I was sick of it. I'll google around later, and come back to this.

Local short name resolution wouldn't work properly either.

Very weird, this probably has something to do with me skipping networking steps when I did the debootstrap after building the kernel with SATA support. Maybe I should have bought some floppy disks that worked, made a rescue disk, and installed it properly, and allow the setup to configure the network, I've obviously missed something.

I also took the extra network card out of one of the machines, I have decided against doing that, it leaves my network susceptable to a single point of failure, and I don't want that, it sort of makes redundant disks and network scripts a waste of time, if the default route dies.

The guy turned up about 1.30pm, he was late, because when he went to get the trolley, he found it had been left outside, and was full of water (rain). It had leaked out everywhere when he moved it, filthy water getting all over him (his shirt and hands were a bit grubby), and spilling all in the boot of his car, over a switch, and a manual for some of the telco termination in the colo.

He left the trolley behind, it didn't even fit in the car after all that.

We went about putting in a network link.

We tried to startup the second network card in a machine, but it wouldn't recognise it.

We ended up pulling the card out, putting the spare I had just pulled out in, and then trying to configure it.

Very strangely, the output from the machine was still on the screen, after turning it off and back on again, maybe it just suspended or something.

I pulled the video cable out of the machine. The display was still there. Uh oh, I think we're on the wrong machine.

Yep. That's why the machine refused to recognise the second card, it only has one.

We went to the machine we had just changed the card in, and tried to configure it, it hadn't detected my card we put in there (well, it did, and ran some redhat hardware change thing, but we didn't see it because we were looking at the wrong machine).

We were about to force load the module for my card, when we decided to put the original card back. We did that.

We reconfigured the second card to give me a feed. Then the guy realised the second card we had just changed was his link to the internet, and that we needed to add another nic to connect to me anyway.

He didn't backup the config file for the card either, or comment the old lines and add new ones. He couldn't remember the original config either.

I didn't see the original config, I was around the other side of the rack fiddling with the machine.

He rang his wife to find out what the settings were, since they were written down somewhere, she couldn't find them.

We tried resetting the file to what we thought it was, but it didn't work, got no traffic.

He rang the upstream network provider (that the nic with the settings we had just trashed connected to), to find the settings/default route.

While he was on the phone, his wife tried to ring him back, he didn't get a chance to answer in time.

I gave him my phone, and he called back to the office, he was now on hold to the provider, and talking to his wife, she couldn't find the settings, and people were complaining, oh oops. it's the live internet feed.

The provider came back, and gave him the settings, he forgot he was on my phone to his wife in the office, until I thought I could hear something through it, as he held it behind his back. Oops.

I put the original settings back in, we were close, but not right with the settings, and it still didn't work.

When I looked closely, the second network card had no link lights on it.

We checked the other end, plugged into the fiber transceiver, it was fine. Hmm.

We decided the card must be dud. We took it out, and moved it to a different slot. I powered the machine up, the link came up.

I shut the machine down again, and put my nic in the machine. Powered it up, the dodgy card didn't come up.

Hmm, I think I know what's going on here. The guy suggested I take my nic out again, but I said "hangon, let me try something", I turned the machine off, and then I turned it on again. The dodgy card came up immediately.

As I suspected, sometimes the card doesn't start, it just requires a power cycle, and then it will come up. Once it is up, it will stay up.

The machine booted up, found my card in it. It asked to do the network setup, but we didn't trust redhat to do it.

We loaded the module, it went in fine.

We configured the interface, and brought it up.

I plugged in my network, but I couldn't get any traffic.

Oh yeah, I'll need to put in a route to use my nic to get to my network. I did that, added a static host route. I still couldn't ping my machines.

There's subnetting going on here, and I really don't understand how that works. (I do now however, somewhat).

It was a subnetted address, and the address we had given to the card in the gateway box was outside the subnet I had used on my equipment.

I had no idea what I was doing here, no understanding how subnetting works. The guy suggested we put the fiber transceiver straight into a switch, instead of the routing machine, which may bypass the subnetting issue.

He said he had tried it before, but couldn't get the connection to work, I suggested he might need to use a crossover cable, since the transceiver is probably designed to go into a pc.

I grabbed my switch, unplugged everything. Took my short crossover cable (that I use to connect the gigabit interfaces on 2 of the servers together), and went over to the fiber transceiver.

I put the crossover cable in the uplink port on my switch (since it has a button to change MDI/MDI-X), and then I pulled the live ethernet out of the transceiver, put it in the switch, put my cross over cable into the transceiver. The link didn't come up. I was about to change the mode of the uplink port on the switch, when I noticed an MDI/MDI-X switch on the transceiver. I changed it, and the link came up, and traffic flowed.

We then realised that wouldn't work anyway, because there are only 4 IPs in the subnet provided by the upstream provider. I assumed he meant 4 usable IPs.

It turns out there are 4 IPs.. the range, 2 usable (our end, and their end), and the broadcast address. So that achieved nothing. I put it all back together, as it was before.

I setup a virtual interface on one of my machines, in the correct subnet, and then I could ping.

The guy said to do it that way temporarily, and we would sort it out after that, he'll change his ips, and we'll get it all tidy.

That'll get done on a weekend when it doesn't really effect people.

It was now about 2.30pm, the guy said he had to get back to doing his tax, told me to the change the root password on his gateway box, so I could continue configuring it later/remotely whatever.

My phone rang, it was my mate, wanting to know if I wanted to move the rack, he said he would be there shortly.

I enabled IP forwarding on this machine, added static host routes for my other machines, and then everything was working.

It's not a pretty way to do it, routing out one subnet, and then routing it back to different addresses again. At least it avoids the issue of a single point of failure (somewhat, since I can bring up a virtual interface on a different machine and stuff will keep going), and it allows me to control the firewall pretty well.

It's only a temporary setup, we had decided to reorder the network range, and put a /16 subnet in for me, instead of trying to use part of the /32 that is there. Unfortunately it seems that the size of the subnets has to go in order, for me to have a /16, it has to be the first IP addresses in the network range.


I kept fiddling with the routing, this was when I got everything properly working.

My mate called again, he would be outside shortly.

I came out, Dad did too, he had to move the car again (he was in time limited parking, had already had to move once, an hour ago). He decided to take my brother home.

I locked the door, left everything as it was, I'll be back shortly.

I jumped in with my mate, went to his parents' place, and unloaded all the tools (for airconditioning stuff).

We went to my place, put the rack, front and back doors in the van, and came back to Gosford.

Dad came back too, along with my brother.

My mate and I dragged the rack in, up the stairs, and into the room.

We dumped it in there.

Dad brought the doors up.

My mate looked around a bit, suggested having lan games in the front room, that's not a bad idea, it's separate unit, and it can be locked off from the unit with all the gear in it.

I'd only have people I knew in there anyway.

It would be pretty cool actually, go in the pub across the road, then come in here and play lan games, even on the internet, I could patch it into my network, and use some of my bandwidth for the customers, if they don't need it.

I'll talk to the guy who's colo it is, see what he thinks.

I'm interested in making use of the office anyway, it could be handy for doing PC repairs, setups etc, I don't want to be doing it at home.

The office is a bit scundgey, but it could be made ok, tidy up, a few posters or something. "It's got potential".

I'd be willing to pay a bit more rent in order to be able to use that space. As I said, I'll talk to the other guy, see what he thinks, he may not want people in there.

My mate left, and I got back to work.

I fiddled with the routing a bit more, got everything setup properly, default routes and everything.

I noticed the network link to one machine/the switch going up and down, and then it stayed off. I thought it was software issues, investigated the cable, and found one end to be faultly, so I replaced it.

Dad was putting the door back on the rack.

I thought I had the routing working, but then it broke again. I fiddled around, and found issues with the network settings, it doesn't like the default route if I specify the network range properly (and subnet). I think I need to learn how subnetting works more.

I put settings in I thought were wrong, and it started working, so I left it. I'll work out what I'm doing and fix it later.

We put the shelf in the rack, I shut all the gear down and started moving it in.

Then I realised I had put the shelf about an inch too low, and I couldn't get the bottom server in.

Bugger, pulled them out again, moved the shelf, put the servers back in again.

The shelf is sagging slightly, with the weight of the 2 servers on it, so they lean together at the top.

I found some junk mail, folded it up tightly (and fatly) and put it between the tops of the servers, that held them apart, I wouldn't have worried, but they have fans in the sides, and it makes them sort of pointless if they are jammed together.

Dad rack mounted the switch, my brother and I ran all the cables, patched everything in.

Oops.. the network cable to go from the gateway machine to my switch isn't long enough.

I found a longer cable coiled up in the other unit, with the junk in it, and put that in, fine.

Uh oh, where's the dud cable I pulled out? I think we found it, but I'm not sure. If a machine disappears off the network, I'll know why.

We rack mounted the ras power supply, and then went to put the ras in, but there are no screws left.

I think I have some floating around on the desk here.

I did a network test, I could pull about 155k/sec out, that was ok, that's about a 1.2mbit connection, sweet.

I might have to put my spare CDR drive in one of the machines, and download stuff remotely, burn it remotely, then just pop in and pickup the cd (and put a new blank in the drive :-)

It was now about 6pm. Dad wanted to leave.

I realised I had recieved an SMS on my phone several hours earlier, it was from my mate, wanting to know if I was coming up for dinner, and at what time.

Dad and my brother had already packed everything up, so we left.

Dad went to the supermarket, instead of coming home, I asked how long he was going to be, since I was supposed to be going for dinner, he said about half and hour, and asked if I wanted to go home first, I said I would prefer it, since it was now about 6.15pm, and we usually go for dinner about 7pm, and the place is about 25 minutes away.

We came home, I called my mate, he hadn't gone to dinner yet, said he would be in about 25 minutes when his wife gets off the trains (about 6.50pm) I said I was leaving now, and would probably be there about the same time, so I would go straight to the club.

I got my stuff, and rode up there. I still haven't charged my mp3 player batteries.

I went near the station on the way, to see if my mate was waiting there, I didn't see him. Either he's not here yet, already been, or is on the other side of the station, I kept going, and went to the club.

The carpark was full, I eventually found a place to squeeze in.

I went in, I asked the receptionist if my mate was there yet, she said she thought he was, but wasn't sure.

I said I would look.

I went in, looked around, didn't see him.

I grabbed a drink, I wanted a Rum and Coke, they didn't have any in a can, they asked if I wanted mixed, I said whatever, they then asked if I wanted Bourbon and Coke in a can, yeah, whatever. They then asked something else, I couldn't make it out, "freeze" or something, and again, I said whatever. She got an ordinary looking can of Bourbon and Coke out, and said it was very popular.

Whatever she was on about.

I paid, and went and sat down, started drinking. I think I worked out the thrid thing she asked "frozen?". The can wasn't frozen, but it was very cold, and felt weird when I tipped it, like it had a big block of ice in it.

Just then I saw my mate's wife, they had just got there.

We went into dinner, they were with a young Chinese guy.

We sat and ate dinner, I went through some of the stuff that had gone on during the day.

During dinner, my mate who helped me move the rack called. He wanted to know why one of his machines had a much smaller ping time to game servers than his other machine, and something about network collisions. I chatted to him for a bit.

We finished dinner, I thought about coming home, to continue setting up the servers, domain names etc, but I decided to go back to my mate's place, have a chat, and a cup of tea or something.

We chatted for a while, my mate rang me again, asking more about network collisions, and I tried to work out what was going on. He's got 2 switches around there, maybe they've got connected together with 2 network cables, and the traffic is looping around or something.

I said I was leaving shortly, and would come and have a look on my way home.

My mate tried to get on the internet, to do some online banking, but he couldn't get on. The company that screwed us over made him pay for his internet access after we got screwed, he's now a few days late on paying for the next month, and they've cut him off.

I setup my internet connection (with the other isp I have an account with, that I've been using at home since I got screwed by them, and they locked out my account) on his computer, so he could do his banking, pay his bill or whatever.

He tried to check his email, that should work, since the email accounts are on a different machine (the mail server that came from the isp I worked for back in 98/99, that my friend bought about 6 months before he was killed), and were never put in as part of the automated system that may have cut my mate off for his payment being overdue.

He couldn't access either of his email accounts. They've gone through and manually locked out his email accounts, without warning, and he's only a few days overdue of paying too. That's the thanks you get for volunteering your time obviously.

Oh well, I've got my gear up now, at least the servers.

As soon as I park a domain on them, I can start setting up mail accounts, he can have a new email account, and email everyone to let them know he's changed addresses. I might do that tomorrow, oops, today, it's after 2am. (Blogging takes too much time, I spend hours doing it).

Anyway, I left, I headed back to my mates place (who helped me move the rack). I had a look at the network, he'd ripped the extra switch out, plugged everything in to one.

He was still complaining about the collisioning, coming from the ADSL router. I looked at the switch.. it's not collisioning, this cheap switch has shared Full Duplex and collision LEDs, and the ADSL router is running full duplex.

We fiddled around, and tried to get everything else set to full duplex, in case that fixed the ping time issue. Nope.

it was weird, one machine (laptop) would rip out the ADSL router onto the telco's backbone with 11/12msec delays, yet the other 2 machines (normal desktops) would get 22/23msec to his the same hosts, that's just weird.

I had suggested that my mate try using the gigabit interface on the mobo (he bought the same board as I used in the servers) but he couldn't find the drivers, and couldn't get it going.

They were cryptically placed on the motherboard driver cd.

I installed them, but didn't seem to do anything, no new lan device turned up.

I checked the mobo jumper settings, tried disabling the gigabit interface, booting, shutting down, reenabling the gigabit interface, booting up, but it made no difference.

I tried checking bios settings, resetting the bios, updating the bios, all no good.

I tried installing the drivers again, no change. I put the virtual cable tester application on, and it claimed it couldn't find the adapter.

Hmm, this is just weird. I'll just blame windows. I had no issue on my servers, build the yukon network driver module, load it. back, the interface came up, and worked.

My mate put on an episode of the Sopranos, he and his housemate have been buying/watching all the seasons of them recently.

I sat and watched it with them, giving up on the pc.

While I was there, I typed in the IP address of one of my servers, and the home page came flying up, that's groovy, excellent connection.

When it finished, they were going to bed, so I left, came home, and started blogging.

That was like 2 1/2 hours ago. Damn.

The place looks a bit emptier in here no, with no rack/3 servers/ras/ras power supply/switch.

It's still a total mess in here, at least I have room to move the stuff around in an attempt to organise it now.

Ok, later today I have to park some domains on my machines, get the routing sorted, and then plug in an E1 to the RAS, so I can get people dialling in.

I really hate the way blogger defines days, making me have to fiddle with the time this was posted.

For me, the end of a day is somewhere between 5 and 6 am, not midnight. If I go to bed at 1am, it's an early night.

I woke up early, what I thought was about 5am (that I later worked out to be 7am), hearing everything going off, oh great, a blackout. I wasn't really awake, just a bit conscious to notice that.

I went back to sleep.

I was woken again several hours later, by the phone ringing (the land line). I couldn't be bothered getting out of bed to answer it.

When it stopped ringing, my mobile started ringing.

It was the guy I go to dinner with, he wanted to know about how to remove NetSky.Q from a machine he was working on.

I have no idea, I run a firewall, and keep my virus scanner up to date, so virus removal is not something I need to worry about.

I suggested he look on Google for help.

I noticed the power was still off. I decided to sleep until it came back on, there's nothing else I can do.

I can't finish configuring the servers, I can't check my mail, I can't blog.

I woke up again several hours later, I didn't know what time it was, since all the clocks were off (and as a result my alarm had not gone off).

I checked my watch, it was about 11.40am.

Bugger.

I got up, and decided to check the fuse box.

I turned off all the power points that run almost everything in my place (since everything is on powerboards chained together).

I wandered around past my parents' house, I looked in the front window to see if they had power, my sister saw me, opened the door. I asked if they had power, she turned the light on, and it came on.

Great.

I wandered around to the fusebox, opened it, started checking the circuitbreakers.

I discovered that the circuitbreakers that provide power to my place were off.

I switched them back on, they stayed on.

I came back in, and started turning everything back on. Everything came up.

The servers rebuilt their RAID arrays again. I don't know why they do that all the time, I'm worried it will wear the disks out.

My dodgy flakey motherboard wouldn't boot. I fiddled around with it for a few minutes, no good. I unplugged the psu and left it, it sometimes comes good after that.

I had noticed the other night, that all the capacitors looked really dodgy, like they were popped/blown. There was some brown crud on the board around them.

I noticed one of them had done this like 18 months ago, but thought nothing of it.

I decided I would try replacing the capacitors on the board, they are all the same (that look weird) JPCON 2200uF 6.3V caps.

I counted that 7 were obviously stuffed (there are actually 8, an extra one I didn't see near the keyboard connector).

I have to get parts to make up a couple of serial cables people ordered recently too.

So much for moving the gear today, there's not time left now, it's like 12.30pm.

I went out to see the guy who I'm going into the colo with, to get the keys, and check some IP addresses.

He hadn't copied the keys yet, so he gave me the originals to go and get copied. I also got some details about IPs and radius details I needed. I'll have to change all the IPs on my gear now.

I went across the road to the electronics place.

I bought the parts for the serial cables, they didn't have the db9 backshells I need. Bugger, I'll have to get them in Gosford, I'm going there (or near there) to get the keys done anyway. I also bought the capacitors to fix my board. In 2200uF, 63v were the smallest I could get.

I looked at the keys, one is a registered security key, it had the contact details of the place that copied it. They should be able to help me.

I called them, to find out where they were. I told them I had a security key to get copied.

The woman started asking me who I was, and where the building/unit was that the key was for, and who the real estate agent that looks after the building was, and a whole bunch of other details I didn't know.

SHe put me on hold for ages while she made a couple of telephone calls to chase up the registry for the security keys.

All I wanted to know was where they were, I didn't care about getting the authorisation to copy the keys sorted out while I was on the phone.

When she came back from putting me on hold for the 3rd time, I said I would come in there and sort it out.

I rode into Gosford, and I went to the locksmiths.

I gave the guy the keys, said who I was and the story so far.

He went away, He came back a minute later, and wanted the contact details of the other guy, whose keys they are.

I gave him the phone number. He went out the back again, and I could hear him on the phone.

I waited, and waited, and waited.

Some other customer came in, with a broken padlock. Some other guy working there came out and helped him.

I wandered around looking at the gun lockers, and safes they have in there.

Some woman came in wanting some ancient looking key cut, someone else came and helped her.

I sat on the lounge and waited, and waited, and waited.

About 25 minutes later, they guy came out, with copies of the 4 keys.

I was thinking it would be nice to get change out of $10 for the lot, but it's not likely, especially since the security key that caused all the issues is a dopey double pin "alligator" or something key, which is sort of like 2 keys together.

It was over $20 for the 4 keys.

The guy told me there were now 10 sets of these keys floating around (at least of the registered security key), and they only knew were 4 of them were.

I took the keys. I thought about going and looking at the place, but I have to get the keys back.

I went and got some lunch, I went down the road to McDonalds.

I looked in the paper for anything about all the stuff that went on last night with the sirens etc, but found nothing.

I went back through Gosford again, I was thinking about looking in the place again, but I couldn't find a parking spot, so I just kept going.

I went back out to see the guy again, and I dropped his keys back to him.

I said I was going to be moving the gear in tomorrow, and that I would give him a call, so he could come in and give me a network link etc.

I came back to Gosford, I looped all around looking for a parking spot.

I eventually found on on the other side of the road, after going right around the block, wasting about 5 minutes.

I went into the building, up the stairs, found the units.

I went to the second unit, that's just used for storage, I opened the door (good, the key works), and went in.

It was pitch black, I couldn't see a thing.

I stood there for a minute waiting for my eyes to adjust. They slowly did.

I felt around for a light swtich, next to the door, behind the door, on the other wall, I didn't find one.

There was a door on the wall behind the door I came in. I pushed it, and it opened, ah, a bit of light came in.

The next room (also the other unit) has all the gear in it. A few racks in a row, cables and stuff running around the place, pretty empty though.

I could now see in this room a bit.

There's nothing much in here, a sink, and a few bits and pieces on the floor.

There's another door on the wall opposite the door into the other unit.

I walked over (carefully, not really able to see what's on the floor), and opened the door. There's a big empty office, it was bright in here, it has all windows facing the street where I was parked.

I went back in, I left the door open for light.

I went into the comms room, had a look around. Nothing terribly exciting, it's just like any other, some racks. pcs, networking gear.

There's a couple of monitors sitting on the floor, and keyboards and spare cables etc.

I noticed on the wall a light switch, conveniently, on the opposite wall to the entry door.

I wondered if there was one in the same place in the first unit, where I came in.

I could just make out something on the wall in a similar place.

I went back in where I came from, closed the door to the comms room.

I went over, and turned on the light. That's a bit better, I could see now. Nothing more than I thought, just a few bits and pieces on the floor.

I closed the door to the front office, turned off the light, went out, and closed and locked the door behind me.

I came home after that.

I googled around for details about leaking electrolytic capacitors, and found a great deal of stuff about it, especially in the case of failing motherboards. Ah! so that's what's going on.

Apparently it goes back to some corporate espionage a few years ago, when some workers in Taiwan stole a formula for a water based electrolyte, but they didn't steal the whole thing. They sold it to a bunch of Taiwanese capacitor manufacturers, who made millions of capacitors based on it, before they realised the stolen formula (that they didn't know was stolen, apparently), was incomplete, resulting in premature failure of almost all of them.

Apparently a lot of these capacitors found their way onto motherboards, video cards, power supplies, and other devices.

Several places on the internet have setup to replace the capacitors on the motherboards, restoring function/stability to the board.

I googled around more, and found that symptoms of failed caps include things like the machine BSODing for no reason, and looking like memory failures, or other unexplained errors. Operating systems failing to install, boot, issues with POSTing, everything.

These were all symptoms I had experienced, I remembered a few months ago (maybe 8 now) the machine became really unreliable, wouldn't run for more than a few minutes without locking up or BSODing.

I thought it was heat issues, and bought a massive fan and put it in the case, but it did nothing.

I tried reinstalling windows a bunch of times, it wouldn't finish installing, or then it wouldn't boot.

I tried a different hard disk, made no difference.

I tried a windows install from a different machine (on a different disk) that would boot, and run, but it wasn't very happy.

I fiddle around for days with it, even trying to run windows 2000 instead of 98, that worked slightly better, but only for a few days, then it kept corrupting it's own registry.

Linux was somewhat happy on the machine (more happy than windows at least), but even it was locking up hard every now and then, something I almost never see linux do.

I put it down to hardware issues, I pulled the whole machine apart in the end, swapped all the cards around, mucked around with the whole thing. It ran just sitting on the desk as a board with cards in it, and all drives hanging off it everywhere. It seemed somewhat reliable, and ran like that for a few weeks, (I put the original windows install back it had been running forever) before I put the machine back together, and it worked until around Christmas, when it failed again. (I think I blogged this).

I had just arranged to get the board fixed/replaced by Abit (the only company to have admitted using the faulty capacitors too), when after refusing to boot or do anything for a couple of weeks, the machine started working again.

It did this again. Died, for a couple of days, and then after I bought the new board, it started working again.

I fiddled around on the servers a bit more, I changed the IPs I used, reconfigured the RAS, put in the details of the other guys radius server, so that his customers can dial into it, and be authenticated against his server.

I called my mate (who got punched the other night) and asked if I could borrow the van in the next couple of days, or perhaps the trailer, just to get the rack into Gosford, as I now had the keys.

He said he would see, the trailer was loaned to someone in Sydney, and he only had a couple of short jobs tomorrow, so he would call me in the afternoon.

I watched a bit of tv after that.

I went in and saw my parents, had dinner with them, told them what was going on, since I wanted to find out what Dad was doing tomorrow, so I could arrange to get the gear moved into Gosford.

He was going to go back to work today, but he decided he would take an extra day off, so he could help, and be there while the gear moved in.

Cool. I could have got my mate (that I go to dinner with) to help me, but he likes to play snooker on Tuesdays, and I'd rather not interrupt that if I can help it.

I sat and watched tv for a while. They must have changed the timing on the key updates (or my machine was behaving) because it rarely had issues/mpeg breakup. (Except for one time, when the machine locked up and I had to come reboot it, just after I had told the story about the dodgy caps to my parents).

I came back in a bit after midnight, IRCed for a while, I talked about the caps in there, someone pointed me at a site about capacitors, it says that capacitors have much reduced capacitance when run well below their rating (I got 63v rated to replace 6.3v rated), and I'd also read things saying that motherboards need "low ESR" caps, which "normal" electorlytics are not.

I guess I will need to chase some more closer to spec caps, I found a site on the internet where some guy sells kits of caps you need to replace the caps on certain boards, maybe he has one for mine (Abit KT7 non RAID).

I went to bed about 3am, after watching more tv.

No, I hadn't configured freeside to create MySQL accounts, I thought I had, but I didn't, when I wasn't sure of the DBI settings.

I worked them out, and configured it. It wouldn't add accounts however.

Turned out to be a permissions issue with the radius user on the database, I'd created a MySQL user radius.. with no permissions, oops. Then, while trying to fix that, I thought I would be smart and try to add extra hosts into the access list, that doesn't work (at least not comma separating them).

I also noticed the user for doing replication between servers/databases had no permissions, that's probably why replication wasn't working. (Nagios was the same, it had silly permissions granted, so I changed them, in case it will get nagios working).

I worked it out, and I had it creating MySQL entries so that the main radius server will work, and also creating user accounts on the mail server.

When I did some radius tests, I found that it was accepting the users details, but not returning anything.

When I dug around, I found it was because freeside wasn't adding a radiusgroup, so radius didn't know if the user had a dynamic or a static IP, and it didn't return any TCPIP settings. I added the group in, and set it as default, I'm not sure if it's working properly however.

I installed qmail, it's a bit tricky, because it's a source distribution, that you have to build. I replaced exim with nullmailer, then I tried to install the qmail deb I had built, and it wouldn't go in because it conflicted with nullmailer (or exim), I then tried to uninstall nullmailer (it refuses, because you apparently can't have no mailer), and then, I tell it to install the qmail deb again, and it works out to remove nullmailer and install qmail.

Both servers did the same thing.

The install wasn't happy at the end, because I hadn't setup the DNS.

I did that, found that the reverse lookups weren't updating properly, and then basically ended up doing the whole thing again.

I setup slave DNS on the other machine after that.

I spent quite a while trying to fix some of the perl errors that freeside gives, I can't work out what this nonsense about "insecure dependencies" is, and why the self signup server refuses to start, and gives "access denied" errors in the console when you try and start it.

I went back to qmail configuration, couldn't get it started, nonsense about "error reading control files" I found eventually, that this was because there were no default config files, specifying what domains to accept mail for etc.

I configured one box as the proper mailer, with the mail going into the user's home directories, so quota will work, and the other server as backup.

My mate rang me, we had a chat for a bit, he wanted to know what the CDs and cases I bought cost etc. We didn't chat about much else. He said one of the customers of the business that screwed up over had called him, wanting some help, because he couldn't get his webmail to work, apparently it's all broken. That's no surprise, they probably tried to replace the webmail we had, because each server was different, because each server had different mailers, and different mail store formats.

I watched a bit of tv.

I got a couple of SMS on my phone, they were from a mate I haven't seen for a while.

He wanted to know if I wanted a ticket to The Who concert, and to know what was going on with the tickets, apparently they go on sale on the net tomorrow (Gold and Silver tickets) and the general admission tickets are sold through the agents from Thursday.

(He didn't tell me all that in the SMS, I called him to find out the story, left a message, and he called me back an hour or so later).

The Silver tickets (fairly close to the stage) are $99 each, not too bad, the General Admission/Binocular seating tickets are $90 anyway.

He definately wanted one, I think I'll go, and 2 others have already given him the cash for the tickets.

I said I would confirm with the others, and then I'll order them in the morning with my credit card (it seems no one else has one).

I got off the phone, and called one mate, he said it was fine, and would pay me in a week or so. Whatever, I've got a month on my card.

I tried calling the sixth person who'll be going, left a message, he didn't get back to me. I'll try calling him in the morning just before I try buying the tickets.

I went back to watching tv.

I heard all these loud bangs outside, a fair distance away, at first I thought it was fireworks, but I didn't see any flashes from it.

A few seconds later, a whole bunch of sirens could be heard, about 6 I think. Must have been gunshots or something, it sounded like it.

I went outside and looked in the general direction where it was coming from, a few kilometres away, I saw 3 or 4 emergency vehicles heading east (I could just see the flashing lights).

A few minutes later, I heard more. I wonder what it was.

The MotoGP came on, and I sat and watched Rossi win yet again.

I started putting a webmail interface on the server, I've not got very far with that. I think a lot of the fiddling stuff will get done once the equipment is in place, and the service is running.

I'm sure people will put up with "stand by while this is setup" in regards to webmail and a few other things, for a week or so while I get them done. After that, things like nagios and the backup scripts can all be done in their own time, they're only for my benefit anyway.

I was now a bit hungry (about 10pm) so I had some fish and chips for dinner. I need to go shopping again, I ate the last of the breakfast cereal when I got up this afternoon.

Oops, so much for putting the gear in today.

I first woke up at 9.20am, but I'd only slept for like 5 hours. I went back to slepp, woke up again 20 minutes later.

I just wanted another hour or so.

I ended up sleeping until after 1pm. It's now nearly 2pm.

I don't think I'll worry today, I don't have the keys to the colo facility yet, and there's some stuff I could still get working.

Now that I have radius configured against MySQL, I think I need to get freeside configured against MySQL too (I may have already done that though, I hope).

Anyway, I'll spend the next few hours sorting some small details out, and then I'll look at putting the stuff in tomorrow I think.

I just got back from the club.

About 10.20pm I called my mate to see if anything was going on tonight. He told me that they were going down to the leagues club, and going there now. I said I would see him down there.

I got my stuff together to leave. I was just about to shut the door when I realised I didn't have my keys. I came back, looked for them, and found them next to the keyboard where I had left them when I came back with my McDonalds.

I went to my bike, and for some reason, I had the TiVo remote control in my hand.

Unfortunately it doesn't work in real life, it would be nice to have rewind, fast forward, pause, instant replay, mute, and best of all, a delete function for real life. There are somethings I just don't want to remember.

Anyway, I came back inside, dumped the remote, when back down, and rode down to the club.

I was in 2 minds, I was thinking about going to a service station and buying a bottle of Coke, leaving it in my bike, and then I can come the back way home, and avoid the main roads, or alternatively, go straight to the club, and get the Coke on the way home.

I'm not worried about cops, because by the time I come home, I'm totally sober, it's just the hassle of being pulled over, and going through the whole thing, when I just want to get home, because I'm tired, and it's freezing out there.

I went straight to the club. I wandered in to where we normally sit, there was no one there.

I wandered around looking for them, I wasted $6 in the pokies.

I went back again, and my mates were near where we normally sit.

I got a drink. We chatted for a while.

They all wanted to go upstairs to the night club, I haven't been up there for ages, and now I'm faced with 2 things, hang around down here for an hour because I've just had a drink, or go upstairs.

I decided to go upstairs (the last time I had to make this choice, I hung around for a while, and then went home, that was when my mate and I got tickets for going through a red light).

I checked my jacket in, went upstairs, paid $11, and wandered in. The staff at the door were mucking around and not paying attention, they didn't give me a stamp. I assumed it was because there were no passouts yet, and they would give me a stamp if I wanted to go down, so I just wandered past.

One of the chicks grabbed my arm, and gave me the stamp.

I went in, grabbed a drink.

We chatted, and perved a bit. I got another drink, it wasn't even 11pm yet.

We went in and had a dance. I stayed in while my mates wandered off.

I was up dancing on one of the stage things, and some chick started dancing with me, that was pretty cool, until I realised she was a bit slutty, as I saw her floating around to quite a few guys in there.

Eventually, after they opened the "Rewind Room" (that plays all 70's 80's music) I wandered in there, they were all sitting in there.

I had a dance in here for a bit.

We stayed in here for quite a while. They played Nutbush City so we all danced to that, and then the Macarena, and then Timewarp or whatever it is from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

We went back out to the main area for a while, where they play all the crap music, crap 40, r&b, (c)rap, and all that nonsense.

We were out here for a while, it was all trancey stuff now, which I don't mind.

We went back into the rewind room, it was nearly finished in here (2.30am).

As we came back in, I saw a guy I did my motorbike Ps course with, I thought I had seen him earlier in the night, but I wasn't sure.

Some chick was giving me the eye as I wandered back in here, but when I got up to dance, she was nowhere to be seen, oh well.

The rewind room closed, and we were herded out back into the main area, I was sick of it by now, so we all decided to leave.

We came down, I got my jacket back, and we went outside, my mates were waiting for a taxi.

As we came out, there were a group arguing as to where the taxi line started, one guy claiming it was near a ramp, and the other guy near the taxi sign.

A taxi arrived, they continued arguing, and wouldn't let each other into it.

Finally a useless security guard came over, sorted it, and the people near the sign got in the taxi and left.

Other people, including my mates, had got in the line after the people who had just left, instead of them being next.

As a result, they were arguing with everyone who had got in front of them. Another taxi arrived, and some people left.

As they were waiting, some guy was brought out of the club on a stretcher, and loaded into an ambulance parked outside the door.

There were 2 groups or so in front of my mates, who were in front of the people arguing where the line started.

It then became physical, they moved onto the road, and one guy from the group of idiots took a swing at my mate, and it just tapped his face. I was about to get in there, and have a go at the guy swinging, because my mate was being held away, but I had my key in my hand.

I put my key in pocket, and as I did, the guy took another swing, some people moved in front of me (i was standing back) so I didn't see exactly what was going on, but then my mate ended up on his ass on the road.

The useless security guard is just watching what's going on, and doing nothing.

There's about 10 people in the middle of the road now, scuffling, no punches were being thrown, or I would have got in there.

I just stood at the side watching to see what was going on.

Eventually they managed to stop all the scuffling, and move off the road, because another taxi arrived.

Some people got in, and it left again.

My mate started shouting at the useless security guard, asking why he let that go on without doing anything, and he said it was because it was on the road, not on the footpath. What a crock.

He wanted to know what the point of his club membership was, told the useless guard he could shove it up his ass, and he threw his card at the useless security guard, it went on the ground.

He just kept telling my mate that now that he was not a member, that he could go to the train station, because he would not be getting a taxi there, and if that wasn't good enough, he could go around the corner to the police station.

There was a fair bit of shouting going on, and I think I heard my mate saying something about suing the useless security guard for assult, for watching it and doing nothing.

I just stood back watching, and the arguments continued. I'm not sure who was with who out of the idiots, because they then started fighting amongst themselves, and even when one guy had his hand on the throat of another guy, _while standing on the footpath_ the useless security guard did nothing.

The next taxi arrived, and my mates got in, and it left.

I went back to my bike, and came home.

I bummed around for a bit, I still didn't know what to do with the hardware.

I noticed it was getting a bit dark outside, black rain clouds blowing over.

I decided to go and get rid of the printer cartridge.

I went down, took my mp3 player.

I got all setup, with my earbuds in, I was just about to leave, when the mp3 player turned off with it's low battery beep. Great, that was a waste of time, and I took it off again.

As I rode down, I got a few drops of rain.

It was weird, it was only raining very lightly, but they were big hard drops, making "doink" noises when they hit the visor on my helmet.

As I got close, I had beaten the clouds, so it was fine.

I got to the lady's place, I put the cartridge in for her, did a test print, it was fine.

She paid me back for the cartridge.

She had bought a drier, hadn't had one before, and wanted to know some details about it (like why there were these little plastic things you had to screw onto the back).

I looked at the instructions and worked out they are to stop you from pushing the unit hard up against tge wall and blocking the air intake.

I told her she shouldn't run it with all the doors and windows closed, because of the humidity it creates (the computer is in the same room).

I was just about to leave, when she mentioned something about the medication she was on for her asthma, we chatted about that for a bit (as I am an asthmatic too).

I left her place, on the way home, I stopped in at McDonalds, got some cheeseburgers, I ate one, stuck 2 in the saddle bags, and headed for home.

I was annoyed I didn't put them more conveniently, I could have just about eaten them while I rode home.

I got home, came inside, ate the other 2.

I then tried to work out what to do with the hardware.

I decided to run the 800mhz bare (since I don't have a case for it (maybe I could put it in that busted case)) with just a disk on it, and use it to run the sat decoder, and then I can put all my big disks attached to the new cpu/mobo/mem in the old case.

I mucked around and rearranged the disks in the machine, since I don't have 2 *DR drives in there anymore, only the DVDR, there's no need to have the disks staggered and be streching the IDE cables around.

I took all the disks out, fitted the cooling fan to the first one. I then realised it wouldn't fit into the case.

I took the DVDR drive out, moved it to the bottom from the top, put the hard disk back in.

I went to put the fan on the next disk, and realised it still wasn't going to fit.

I had to remove and rotate the 3.5" - 5.25" adapters I have on the disks, that worked a bit better.

I did that to all the disks, and fitted all the fans.

I put them all back in the machine.

One thing I don't like, is that they are hard pressed together, while it's a piece of metal, with big holes in it, which should act like a heatsick where it's in contact, and the air movement should get the heat away, I'm worried that the fans won't work properly because the holes where the air is supposed to go/come through, are blocked by the top of the next disk.

We'll see what they do, worst thing is that the fans burn out I suppose.

I put the motherboard in. D'oh.. it won't fit, because now the fat ass of the DVDR protrudes into where the corner of the motherboard needs to go.

I don't want the DVDR drive hanging out of the machine by 3 inches.

I pulled all the disks out, and put them back in again, with the DVDR back at the top, where it doesn't get in the way of the mobo.

My brother came in, watched a bit of tv, and said we were having barbeque for tea. Dad came in a few minutes after he went out, said the same thing, but didn't say when it was being served. I wasn't really in the mood for it anyway.

I plugged all the cables in to the disks, and left it.

I went back to the other machine.

I found a disk for it, the 3gb disk I was supposed to put into the busted machine, that didn't sound healthy. I plugged it on, it still didn't sound healthy.

I tried installing windows on it, it failed. When the drive didn't sound like a ping pong ball bouncing on tiles, it sounded like a piezo speaker screeching. Every now and then it would throw this nasty grinding sound in for good measure.

The files were corrupt, and windows install didn't finish.

I noticed another disk hanging around on the desk, a 2gb disk. I think I tried to use this as a linux disk in my mac, but I couldn't work out how to make it boot properly.

I plugged it in, the BIOS took ages to detect, or do anything. I gave up on that after a short while.

I was also trying to get the machine to run off a PCI video card, because I've only got the one AGP card for these now 2 machines. It would not run a PCI card, I tried 2 different ones, in different slots.

At one point, when I put the AGP card back, it still wouldn't even work.

I pulled the board away, and looked at it closely.

All the capacitors are on an angle, it's weird, and they don't go straight. I looked even more closely.. the cases off the capacitors has popped off, and there is brown crud sticking out of the bottom of most of them, electrolyte I assume. Some of it had even run a short way on the board, looked like chocolate melted on the board.

It was hard, and I was able to use a screwdriver to carefully remove it.

It's no wonder this board is flakey, out of about 15 large capacitors, about 8 are all blown like this, pushed over, with the cases lifting (and bulging at the top).

Maybe I should replace the capacitors, it doesn't look that hard, they are all straight through mounted, and there's only 2 types of cap, and all the ones that are blown are the same.

I put the board back, fiddled around a bit more, and got it working again.

I pulled the 10gb disk with linux on it I found the other day out of the games machine, and connected it.

It booted, started X, but I couldn't login, the keyboard wouldn't work, just like on the other machine I tried to run it in.

I rebooted, booted it in single user mode.

I had a poke around on the disk, there's nothing on it. I must have been building it as a router to replace the 486 that runs LRP to connect my network to my parent's machines.

I don't even remember. It had debian 3.0 on it, so it's not too old, but that's still a couple of years. The fact the disks hadn't been scanned for 760 days or whatever it was the other day when I frst booted it is a bit of a hint.

I couldn't find anything on the disk, I must have installed it, and then done nothing with it.

I had it in a different machine, I remember I had to muck around with the disks in that machine a while back, I think it was when the 2 IBM deathstar disks in the 800 died, and I had to salvage what I could.

I must have taken this disk out, to put a bigger one in, to salvage the data on to, and then never changed it all back (there is still salvaged data on the disks in that machine, a couple of years later).

Anyway, I repartitioned, installed windows.

The network was really slow in it for some reason (to the point where it didn't actually work), same card, same slot, same port on the switch.

I tried different slots and stuff, made no difference. When I moved it to the 10mb hub, it was a lot better. Weird.

I put the card stuff on the machine, moved the phoenix interface and the card/box interface back on to the serial ports on this machine (and reconfigured my parent's client).

It was now about 10.15pm, and I called my mate to find out if anything is going on tonight.

That's in the next blog.

I woke up about 9.20am this morning, the phone was ringing, I answered it.

It was my mate who stacked his bike and broke his wrist's mum, she was trying to get in contact with him, and thought I might now where he was. Apparently his wife (who's over in the US, where they got married) is trying to phone him, but can't get a hold of him either.

I told her I hadn't seen him for a while, and the last thing I knew was when my mate was late to pick him up from the train the other week. I said I was looking to talk to him too, because he's still got a bag here from when he was here.

I gave her the phone numbers of my mate who picked him up from the station the other week.

He'll be around the place somewhere, he's just hard to get hold of, since he lost his phone in the US, and hasn't got a new one.

Anyway, I watched tv for a bit.

The alarm I'd set went off at 10am (I've been sleeping until 11am recently, and I needed to be up at a reasonable time to go to the computer fair today).

I had some breakfast, got in the shower about 10.20am, I took my time, slowly got ready.

I unloaded my bag (it still had all the tools in it from the other day, when I mas moving the sat dish around trying to get Chinese channels). It had the ink cartridge in it I had to get replaced/refilled. I didn't even think about it, and I just chucked it out of the bag.

I took off, rode around to the computer fair.

I went in, had a quick look around. I bumped into the people from the Kincumber senior's centre I saw a couple of days ago. One of them had wanted to speak to me (to ask me how I fixed the issue with the network card) but she'd already left. I said I would send an email.

We chatted for a while, and then they decided to leave, it was a bit before midday.

I wandered around, looking at prices. I realised I didn't have my phone, left it at home.

I decided I would get my new mobo/cpu/ram, and then go home, drop it all off, get the ink cartridge and my phone, and come back.

I wandered around, looking at the prices more.

The guy I wanted to buy the stuff off, (who I bought all the gear for the servers from) wasn't here this time. There was a few stands missing this time.

I found the cheapest place, that I've dealt with before, and I bought the bits I needed. An Asus A7N8X-X motherboard (not as good as the Deluxe board I used in the servers I'm sure, but it was about half the price, and the machine I got for my mate last time had one of these boards in it, and it was ok). I bought an AMD Athlon 2600, I was going to get a 2500 like I got for the servers, but it was only $15 more for the 2600. I also got a single stick of 512MB DDR 400 RAM, I could have gone dual channel with 2 x 256MB DIMMs, but I might want to add more memory to this machine, without have to replace stuff, and if I get another 512MB chip, then I can do dual channel 1GB anyway. All this stuff was just shy of $400 worth. ($393 to be exact, and the tight arse guy wouldn't even make it $390).

I chucked it in my bike, and came home. I dumped it all out, grabbed the empty ink cartridge and my phone, and I went back again. Luckily this is the fair that's just around the corner from my place.

There was an SMS on my phone, from my mate I go to dinner with, he had decided that he did want the CDRs he wasn't sure about, and some cases for them.

I went in, and started looking for the replacement ink cartridge. I bumped into a mate, one of my other mate's sister's boyfriend. Chatted to him for a bit, he heard about me starting up, so I just went on a little bit about that.

He left a few minutes later, and I got back to looking at the cartridges. I had found one I thought looked compatible, but most of them are labeled by the printer they are for, not the genuine part number they replace.

I tried to call the woman who owns the printer to find out the model, she wasn't at home. She gave me her home phone number, I called in home, where her daughter might have been, but she wasn't home, there was no answer.

I got back to looking at the cartridges, and I thought I found one that looked right. I asked the woman selling, she said they were compatible, so I bought it.

I then went looking for new fans for the machine, because I'm not putting up with these niosy ass rattling fans anymore. I couldn't find any that go into the front of the drive bay, so after going around the whole fair looking for them, I ended up buying ones that screw onto the controller side of the disk, and have 2 fans attached. Hopefully the air movement will be enough to cool the top of the drive below, but I don't know what I'm going to do about the top of the top drive.

While getting them, I wanted 3 blue ones, but the guy only had 2, so I got three yellow ones instead (like it makes any difference) and the guy gave me a dollar off. Huge.

Oh, I've just looked in the case. I'll have to swap it all around anyway, the drive cage is in the way of the bottom drive, so I'll have to swap the order of the 3 hard disks and the DVDR drive around, that will fix that problem anyway.

I looked for the CDRs for my mate, I found a stack of 50, bought them. I decided it would probably be a good idea to buy some floppy disks, I immediately forgot again, until now.

I loaded all the stuff into my bike, I think I am done now. I will get something to eat, and then go.

As I was putting the stuff in my bike (Fans, ink cartridges, CDRs), I realised I hadn't got the CD cases. D'oh. I grumbled for a bit, but then I decided to go back in again, and get them. It took me a minute, I found some cheap coloured cases, bought them. I dumped them in my bike, got some food and a drink, and then after seating and eating it, I took off.

I went to the bottle shop nearby, to get more Scotch. Just as I had finished paying, my phone started ringing. I grabbed the bottle, and wandered out, and answered the phone. It was the woman who wanted the ink cartridge, she'd managed to find out it was a 640C or something. I said I had already bought it, and would come down and drop it off later, since she was still not at home.

I told her to give me 2 rings when she got home, and I would go down there some time after that to drop it off.

I got off the phone, I checked the cartridge while I put the bottle in my bag, and it was right. Cool.

I came home.

As I pulled into my street (for once I went the right way, instead of the wrong way up the one way street), there was a cop paddy wagon just leaving the street. I wonder why they were in here (it's all dead ends and stuff here, no main roads).

I unloaded everything.

I grabbed the motherboard tray out of my case with the dead mobo, and I started undoing the first screw. Hangon, Deja Vu, last time I did this, I gave the board one more go, and it worked.

I did the screw up again, plugged the board in, set it all up, and powered it up.

The monitor light went green this time, instead of just staying orange. Hmm.

I pulled the monitor signal cable out, and it came up "Check Signal Cable", ok good, the monitor is working, perhaps the video card is not.

I plugged it back in, no signal still, I powered it up and down a few times, each time the monitor would respond properly, but not give a picture. I tried turning the monitor on and off a few times, no difference.

I pulled the signal cable out. It didn't say "Check Signal Cable", and I couldn't bring the menu for the monitor up.

Hmm, I think my monitor just died. Very conveniently, just when I could have got a new one today, but now I'll have to try to sort something out.

I plugged the monitor from this machine into the video card, and powered the board up. Bang, it powered up.

Crap, now I've bought a new mobo/cpu/ram, and I don't know what to do with them.

The woman who wants the ink cartdridge just rang, she's home now. I suppose I'll have to go down there in a bit.

I can put the 800 back together as it was, but then I have all this new gear, with no case to put it in, no PSU, no disks to run on it, no video card.

Or I can replace the mobo/cpu/ram with the new ones, put them in the old case, reinstall windows, and at a later time get a case/disk/video card etc to rebuild the 800 in something else.

I just don't know what to do, I thought maybe blogging here would help me think about it, but it's not. It's a lot easier to just put the 800 back together and leave it alone, If I use the new mobo, I'll have muck around with the disks, and reinstall windows.

I think I'll blog yesterday and think about it more.

I got out of bed about 11am I think.

My mate I got to dinner with rang me, he said he was going to the funeral this morning, and then he would come and see me after that.

I mucked around on the servers, I copied all the stuff across onto the webserver, reconfigured the stuff to make it boot off SATA/RAID, and then rebooted it, it came up fine.

I removed some of the stuff I won't need on it (squid etc), and made small changes to it. This box is different to the other 2, it doesn't need much done to it, it's already got Apache/PHP/MySQL on it, so there's not really much I have to do to it.

I was getting a bit hungry about 1pm, and I should probably go and pay the insurance/sort out the rego on my other bike.

I started wondering where my mate was. If I go out, he'll turn up, so I just kept mucking around on the servers.

I dragged the Tigris out, plugged it all in, and got ready to start configuring it.

It sounds like a bloody jet engine, I couldn't hear the tv over it.

I plugged the network into it, a crossover cable to one of the servers, running tcpdump on the interface hoping I would find what IP it was configured to, but it didn't broadcast anything.

I found my null modem adapters, plugged them into the rear console port, and into one of my pcs. I couldn't get anything out of it.

I read the book for the Tigris, it mentioned a front console port as well. Yeah, there it is, on the front of the control card, but it's an 8 pin DIN connectors, not a db9.

I looked through the cables I've got, and found the console cable.

I plugged it in to the front, and then I had to find something to use as a terminal.

I grabbed my old 486 laptop, booted it up, couldn't find hyperterminal I'd been using to test the tivo serial cables with it.. oh, I was running hyperterminal over the network, from a different machine.. the one that's down with the dead motherboard. D'oh!

At this point, about 3pm, my mate turned up. After the funeral, he'd gone to see someone, and then gone somewhere else on the way.

We sat and chatted for a while, about where I was up to with stuff.

He mentioned he'd recently seen an episode of Oprah, where she gave everyone in the audience a TiVo, heh, I've heard about that episode.

He was here for a while, and told me he wasn't sure if he wanted the blank CDRs I was supposed to get recently, because I can get them at the fair tomorrow. He said he would let me know tomorrow, depending on what happened, because his wife wanted to go to Manly.

He'd gone and investigated pamphlet printing prices, not too bad, I'll get a few thousand made up, once everything it up and running very smoothly.

I got back to work after he left (about 3.30pm).

I downloaded serial terminal linux, a bootable disk that just starts up minicom.

About 4pm. I remembered I still had some biscuits in the cupboard, so I ate them for lunch.

I then had to find a floppy disk, and floppy drive, that would work.

Eventually I managed to (I really need to buy some new floppy disks), and tried to boot it up, failed. The kernel on there is compiled requiring a Pentium CPU, and the laptop is only a 486, so the kernel panics.

Hangon.. My games machine is sitting right here, it's a Pentium 133 (or a 120 overclocked to 133 or something), and it's got a working floppy drive.

I plugged it all in, put the console cable into it, booted it up.

It worked. I had a prompt on the Tigris.

I went through, I was trying to work out who I could reconfigure the network interface. to give it an address on my network (or to at least find out what it was currently configured to, since I could just start up a virtual interface on one of the servers on the same range).

I found the IP, setup the server similarly, but I couldn't get anywhere. I could ping, but nothing else.

I couldn't make any changes either, you have to be logged in, even on the console, to do anything.

I wanted to back the configuration up before I factory reset it, it's probably a really good example of things I will need to put in to set the thing up, I don't want to lose it, and I don't want to spend ages writing it all down.

Hangon.. there must be a way to log the screen in the terminal emulator. I had a poke around, yep.

I installed minicom on one of the servers, and moved the console cable over there (I don't know why I didn't just do this in the first place, instead of wasting about 45 minutes with machines/cables/floppies).

I logged in, set it to log, dumped the configuration on screen, and then I went about factory resetting the device, since I didn't know and couldn't guess the password.

After the factory reset, you get a wizard to put the basic settings in. After that, you can configure it locally on the console if you want, or remotely, via a web interface, or some flashy java web interface.

I went through, and put the network settings in.

Whenever I tried to save the settings, it wouldn't let me, since I still hadn't logged in. I tried logging in with the default username/password, but they didn't work. WTF?

Dad came in, asked if I wanted any dinner. I went and had some chicken rice thing he'd made, it's supposed to have potatoes with it, instead of plain rice, so it wasn't great, but it was food, and I'm sick to death of frozen stuff.

While I was in there, I noticed their sat tv was really bad for blips and blops. The P200 I've got running the card stuff really struggles, and the fact they have a router and a 10mb network link in between probably doesn't help.

I came back to the Tigris again.

I factory reset about 10 times, it made no difference. I was getting really frustrated now.

There is no support on Ericsson's page, and the ACC pages seem to be gone. I couldn't even find the updated version of the firmware anywhere, thinking maybe serially loading the firmware again over the console connection might fix the password.

I had a CD, with the stuff, it was an older version, but I was getting desperate.. but it only had documentation on it, no actual software. Damn.

I pulled the control card out, looked for a jumper or something, maybe stopping the password from getting reset. Nothing. I even took the flash card out, and tried booting the Tigris without it to see what it would do. Not much.

In the end, I worked it out..

I have to factory reset it, then reboot. When the Express Setup Wizard thing runs, abort it. I'm then at a prompt, and the Tigris has no configuration.

I then set the password, it worked. I then ran the wizard, setup the basic settings, and was able to login remotely, and use the web interface to set some things up.

I spent the next few hours putting the configuration in, with both the console interface, and the web interface. I was trying to find documentation for the commands, but the doco on the CD is really bad, there are about 600 different pdf files, and they are named with single words, and those words aren't really descriptive of what the file documents.

I ended up just looking at the old config, guessing what the commands do, and then loading them back in, modified to suit my environment.

I really need to know what live IPs I can use, and what telephone numbers will be on the lines attached.

I pinged around a bit, and found some empty IPs on the live network (I hope they are empty) and I reconfigured my servers to use those IPs, and put virtual interfaces on for the development work, that I will remove when the gear goes in properly. (On Sunday hopefully, but we'll see).

The guy on IRC who helps me with stuff all the time had seen me whinging in IRC about not being able to reset the password, he'd sent me an email with details of how to reset the passwords on a lot of Ascend equipment, it was interesting, too bad this is a piece of Ericsson gear.

It looked like it was working, I eventually got the RADIUS settings in, there's no real way to test that that I can find unfortunately.

I gave up about 2am. I think I've done all I can without the stuff being installed, and with everything setup and plugged in properly, and trying to run live.

I was about to go to bed, when ICQ popped up, it was my mate who's overseas. He'd chatted to me earlier in the say, and told me that he was going to be putting some pictures up on the web. I'd just been looking, and had found that he'd put them up.

We chatted briefly, and I said I was going to bed because I had to buy a new mobo in the morning.

Oh while I'm thinking about it, a couple of things I wanted to mention in my blog.

I was looking through the access logs again last night, and came across the following brilliant search term:

"squashed things that can fit in pocket are not electrical and basically do bugger all"

Why would someone be searching for that, and why would my site come up in the results. Oh well.

Also, while I was trying to find the Oztivo twiki page with details of the serial cables I make up (since I've had a couple of orders in the last couple of days, and wanted to check something). I came across a "how to hate microsoft blog", and it says:

----

So, if you just plain old hate Microsoft, here's what to say:

“I hate Microsoft. Your monopoly is the only thing keeping you in business. You guys are unfair in business. You are weasels. Your software sucks. You smell. Anyone who works at Microsoft is a shill. Why do you keep bringing out software that infuriates me?”

----

So I thought I would put that in here somewhere, since I do just plane old hate Microsoft, and that pretty much sums up what I think about them. Good to see it in a blog of someone who actually works for Evil, I mean Microsoft.

I first woke up about 7am, the tv was still on. I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

I woke up again about 10.20am, the phone was ringing.

I got out of bed and answered it, it was my mate I go to dinner with. I noticed the tv had gone black, obviously the software running on the old pc has been lagging too long, and the box has given up, and is just sitting there dumb.

I spoke to my mate on the phone, he'd called me again last night, wanting to know what to do about a machine that was locking up for no apparent reason, I suggested that he use SpinRite to test the hard disk thouroughly, and Memtest86 to scan all the RAM, in case it's some obscure hardware problem.

Alternatively, he could try reinstalling Windows on the machine, perhaps on a different hard disk, as a test.

Anyway, he called me this morning, because he couldn't find any of the software I'd told him about last night, he'd emailed me the this morning, but I hadn't replied. (I'm not that much of an email addict).

He wanted to know if I was going to be in all day, I said probably (forgetting that I have to finish getting the rego sorted on my bike), and that he would pop in the get the software after he went to a funeral this morning. I'd never met the guy who passed on.

I got off the phone, ate some breakfast.

I looked at the machine running the sat software, it had stuffed up, windows had gone to a black screen with the mouse moving around as usual. I reset the machine, set it all up again, and it's back working. Working a bit better than last night too, I think the reboot has increased the performance of the software, it's not blipping and blopping as much (almost not at all) when the keys change.

Time to finish getting this webserver setup, and then I have to drag the Tigris out and work out who to configure it. It's probably got a password I'll have to break in and change on it, and I'll probably need some weird serial cable to get in on the console port.

Just as I was finishing writing the last blog, Dad came in and said that dinner was ready if I wanted any.

I went in, and ate, and had a chat. I wanted to know what business stuff had been setup, so I could invoice the people I did the work for yesterday. Apparently still waiting for the ABN.

I didn't get around to dragging the RAS out to configure it (it's got everything stacked up on it in the rack). I went about building the webserver machine instead.

I put the motherboard in, the video card, and the disks. These machines are really neat and tidy, when you only have a couple of SATA disks in the machine, and it's not full of IDE cables strangling everything.

I moved the email machine out of the way, and put the webserver there. I plugged it all in.

I shutdown the accounts box, and took the IDE disk out that was hanging around in it, that I need to bootstrap the machines, so I can build the RAID array on the SATA disks, then dump all the data on, and run lilo to put the bootable MBR on the SATA disks.

I wondered if it might have been faster to pull one of the working disks out of the RAID in the routing machine (with the machine off, they don't support hot swapping), boot it up, let it realise a disk is missing, shut down again, and put one of the blank disks I intend to use in the webserver in, and have it rebuild the mirrors on the new blank disk.

I tried this. I did it a bit wrong. I tried to raidhotadd a whole disk device (/dev/hdg) to a mirron (/dev/md0), which should have been made up of /dev/hde2 and /dev/hdg2, but it didn't work it out for itself, so that was a good lesson. If a disk does fail, when I replace it, I need to partition the replacement disk first (I'll have to properly record the partitioning scheme somewhere), and then add each replacement partition to each raid device.

I put the original disk back in, booted up, oops, it didn't start up properly, it thought the disk was still missing. I had to raidhotadd all the original partitions on the second disk back into each md device, and have it rebuild each mirror. That took about an hour.

It was now after midnight, I'd been drinking for the last couple of hours, I'd finished off the Coke, I had indigestion from all the Coke.

I booted the webserver, and worked out a partitioning scheme for the disks, created the raid array, and waited for it to build all the mirrors.

I'd had enough at this point. The tv was going to crap, I'm not sitting up and watching infomercials, so I moved the phoenix programmer on to the machine with the ISDN card in it (that's not used anymore), I don't have any other windows machines, besides this one, but with the amount that Opera crashes and I have to restart it, the CPU load gets too high, and then the tv drops out (it the dodgy vb app also makes the machine really slow).

I moved the programmer, started the software up. I booted the sat box, it found it. I went and got the proper card, and installed that, mucked around getting both boxes to run off the card.

The machine isn't great. it's only a P200, and it has real issues running the software, and keeping up.

The music channels are hard to watch, because the music blips and blops everytime the key changes, because the timing has been made so close. When I went inside to eat dinner, where the proper card was in the box, I noticed it was even breaking up with the card in the box, what a joke, people are putting up with that? it must be effecting all the customers.

If I was a full paying subscriber, I would be calling up and complaining about it every single day, it's completely unacceptable.

Anyway, I watched tv for a bit, didn't do much on the PCs, and then I went to bed.

I felt a bit crook, the indigestion was really bad. I ended up going and having a bit of a spew, it was just because I was so bloated, I let out a massive burp, that Barney Gumble would have been proud of.

I went to bed about 2am in the end.

I woke up at 8.30am, got up, had a shower.

While I was in the shower, someone tried to call. I waited around for my message service to call back, it finally called a few minutes after I should have left.

It was the guy from the seniors centre where I was going this morning, he wanted to speak to me, but said he wouldn't be home until after 3pm.

I left, went to the seniors centre. I went in and saw the lady who wanted me to fix their internet.

It's a stupid telstra setup, the adsl router doesn't actually do anything, or have any configuration. The connection is established by a dopey pppoe client running on one of the client PCs.

I thought this would be easy, just a problem like last time, where the network card was disabled. No such luck.

Whenever they tried to connect the PPPoE client, it would just complain that the username and password were invalid.

They had tried calling the telco, they had said there was no problem on their end, and refuse to help them when they tell them that the connection is networked, but for what it's worth, the connection is not networked, because only one pc has the PPPoE client on it.

I fiddled around for ages, and it just kept saying the password was wrong. It was coming back and saying that very quickly, which didn't seem right to me.

I tried resetting the router, that made no difference.

I tried to setup a connection on the router itself properly, instead of using this dopey PPPoE client, but I couldn't find how to configure a connection.

I telnetted into the router, but even then, there was no obvious way to configure a connection.

I tried downloading the settings from the router, to see if there was something in there I could change, and then load the settings back in, but I couldn't find anything.

In desperation, I tried factory resetting the router a couple of times, again, no difference.

My phone rang, it was one of the women from the college where I'll be setting up the network shortly. They wanted to know about adsl providers, and whether they should just migrate to adsl from dialup with the provider they were already with, to avoid paying for email redirections. I asked the details of the plan they wanted to go on, 256k, $50/month, shaped after they use a certain amount (she didn't tell me how much however). It's about the same as the other guy, and it makes no difference to me, since I wasn't going to be getting anything out of it anyway.

She told me about the router they wanted to provide, a Dlink piece of nastiness. I said they should get an NB1300 instead, we chatted for a bit, and in the end I said I would sort that out, hoping I can get it from the place down the freeway at wholesale price. We went on about filters a bit, and I said that if I was sorting the router out, they probably would not provide the filters anyway.

I got off the phone and got back to fixing the adsl.

I created a new PPPoE "dialup" connection on the client PC, put the settings in, bang, it connected first go. The DUN "connectoid" or whatever they are called must have become corrupt.

I was asked to look at another pc they had their, that they were having trouble with. I booted it up, it took forever to boot up, it was insane. I tried to log in, it wouldn't login, (or it was going to take a week). I also noticed the keyboard didn't work.

When I investigated, I found the keyboard in the mouse port. I moved it, it didn't start working.

I reset the machine, it was halfway through booting windows (2000), and it BSOD'd. Something about "inaccessable boot device" and "unable to run chkdsk /f". I tried to reset the machine again, even the reset wouldn't work. I turned the machine off. I took the case off, and listened to the hard disk while it booted, it was making a very repetitive sound as it booted, and again while windows was trying to log in. I would say the hard disk has damage/issues, and it's stopping the machine from working normally, because it's spending so much time retrying reading files.

I said I could replace the hard disk for them, and they said they would think about it.

The woman asked me to setup the internet on the other pcs. Hmm, it should just work, seeing as they are configured for dhcp, and are getting their network settings from the router, but no, they did not work.

It wasn't just dns issues either, the traffic wouldn't even go through from other pc (without the dopey PPPoE client), even by IP address.

I configured internet connection sharing on the pc with the PPPoE client on it. Someone had already tried to do it, but had shared the wrong connection, the network card, instead of the PPPoE client connection.

I went back to the other PC, still no traffic (by IP).

The phone rang again, it was the woman from the college again, she wanted to know which telephone line to have the service provisioned on. I told her that it doesn't matter, but it's probably better to have it connected to the line that goes to the phone in the office down there, then only one filter is needed, for the phone, and the router will be in where I am going to install the switch.

I went back to fiddling, still no good.

The woman rang me back again. I'm not sure what this call was for, I think it was to tell me that it was arranged, and would be done in about 10 days. I told her to tell the other woman that I had the SP3 CD she needed, and she could pick it up whenever (to allow Office to be installed on the PC I fixed recently).

I still could not get the connection working. This is dumb, it should jsut work. It's going to the PC with the PPPoE client on it, and being NATted across the connection. What's the problem?

I went back to the machine with the PPPoE client. I disconnected the PPPoE connection, I disable the network card, I reenabled the network card, and reconnected the PPPoE connection.

I went back to the other PC. Oh look, it works. What a surprise. Thanks Windows, never failing to be extra useful.

I got the DNS server settings off the PPPoE client machine, put them into the other pc, and it started working fully.

I then setup the other pc they move out to the front desk, it worked fine.

The woman asked me if the printer they have could be used on all PCs, so I went about setting that up. Should be easy..

Went to share it, it was already shared.

Went to the first client pc, it couldn't see the other machine on the network, it kept going on about "network is not present or not started". I looked in the properties of the network card. No "Client for Microsoft Networks" in here.

I installed it, it could then see the other pc, so I installed the shared printer.

Went to the machine outside, installed the shared printer, no pain.

I was all done.

It was now about 11.30am.

She asked me what I would be doing fopr payment, and if I was going to invoice them. I suppose I should, they're a council organisation or something, so they would probably want to do things properly. I'll have to work out if the "Trading as" or whatever has been setup, so I can invoice them.

I said I had been called up by someone from the computer club, and the woman told me they were in there now. Oh, I didn't think they were there. I went and stuck my head in there, they were near finishing up.

There was a guy in there I haven't seen there before, he's a guy from the computer club I used to go to years ago.

We chatted for a bit.

They were working on one last machine, the network would not work.

I removed all the adapters, rebooted. It didn't detect one (but the BIOS did).

I pulled the cover off the machine, pulled the card out, checked it. Should work.

Put it back in, booted up. Didn't detect it. I looked in Device Mangler, and there was an "Other Device" listed, the network card.

I did a "Reinstall driver" on it, and it loaded it. Rebooted, and it worked.

We put the machine back together.

They have a machine with a dodgy rj45 end. I didn't have my crimping tool, so I couldn't fix it. I said I might come and fix it next week. I'll have to go there and invoice the other people anyway, seeing as I don't know what they are called, or their contact details.

I told them about the email that had been sent out, they checked, but they hadn't received it.

We chatted a bit more, and then we all left.

I rode to see the guy who's colo I'm going into. Had a chat with him for a bit, got a list of the live IPs I can use.

I told him the software I'm using, and we had a chat about that, and also about the RAS, I'll put in the Tigris I've got here.

He said he was going over to the colo today, and would get the key cut for me.

I'll arrange to pick it up tomorrow or something, and maybe put the gear in on Saturday afternoon or Sunday.

I meant to ask his price on an NB1300 (he had the box on the shelf in the shop) but I forgot.

I took off, got some fuel.

I rode back towards my mate's place, where my bike is that I need to fix.

I stopped in at McDonalds on the way, and got some lunch, and read the paper.

I rode to my mate's place. I got the key and the rego paper out of the letterbox.

I pulled the bike out, and had a go of starting it. It just wouldn't fire, no matter how much it turned over.

After a few cranks, the battery wasn't really happy, and instead of trying to turn over, it just buzzed.

I started trying to clutch start it on the spot, after a bit, I got a single bit of a fire out of it, but because I wasn't working the clutch properly (not expecting it to work) it didn't have a chance of running.

I gave up, and decided to check a few things. I think the fuel has probably died, it's been in there for about 6 months.

I need something to drain the tank into. I checked the garage, my mate had left it unlocked for once.

I found a big jerry can, carried it out, pulled the hose off the fuel filter, and put it into the jerry can, and drained almost the whole tank. It was nearly a full tank.

I took the tank off the bike, swished it round a bit, there is a lot of sediment in the bottom.

I unscrewed the bit where the hoses come out of the tank to the tap. I poured what has left of the fuel out.

I put it back together. I thought maybe the spark plugs were stuffed, I have no idea when I last changed them, probably like 18 months ago. I found a spark plug tool that fit (they are a different size to the ones in the 650), took them out. They were all black and crappy looking.

I took the battery out of the bike, there was all water or something all over it, and in the compartment where it sits, it drained out the little hole in the bottom. It didn't have much smell, but my hands had petrol all over them from draining the tank, so I couldn't easily have smelled whatever the liquid in the battery compartment was anyway.

As I moved the battery around a bit, a little bit of liquid came out of it (battery acid I assume) and when it dripped on the driveway, it fizzed a bit.

I took the battery inside, and put it on charge.

I pushed the bike into the garage, and moved the seat/tank/other bits inside.

I shut the door, jumped on my bike, and went around to the nearby bike place.

I told them I was having trouble starting the bike, that I thought it was the fuel, but that the spark plugs didn't look great either. I showed them, they didn't say much about them, but said I should dump all the fuel, replace it with new stuff, (since apparently it goes off after a couple of weeks, this stuff has been in there like 6 months), put new spark plugs in, and it should just go.

I bought 2 new plugs. I went back to my mate's place.

I put the new plugs in. I took about 1.5L of fuel out of my 650, (in a 2.3L big container, the only thing I could find) and then had to find a way to pour it into the tank of the 250 without spilling it everywhere.

I put a funnel into the tank, but it's not going to help with pouring out of the container. There were some plastic cups hanging around. I used one, and it immediately started melting as I went to pour it's contents into the funnel. It went like superglue, and stuck to my fingers. Ah, this plastic must be like the plastic used for polystyrene, that petrol just eats, and becomes sticky. There must be something else. I can't find anything else, and then I still have the problem of trying to pour it out of the container.

I started pouring it into the funnel, spilled a bit. Had a think about it, tried again, and found a tricky way where I could slowly pour it, most of it would pour off the lip into the funnel, and the bit that wanted to run down and off the container, I managed to position so the funnel caught almost all of it.

I used a cloth and cleaned up the bit that spilled.

I put the battery back in the bike, it had had about 1/2 hour of charge, probably won't make much difference however.

I turned the key on, immediately I noticed the headlight was a ton brighter.

I gave the throttle a couple of cranks, hit the start button, and the thing fired up first go.

The idle screw was up way too far, and the choke was on way too far (I never needed to use the choke on this bike), so I fixed those, and had it purring away.

I put the stead back on, checked everything, and got ready to go.

I turned it off, left it.

I came home, found the paper work I needed, rego/insurance/last inspection etc.

I went back, jumped on the 250. I got it out of the garage, and shut the garage again.

I rode it down the driveway. D'oh, there were a couple of cute chicks there, typical, when I'm riding this piddly little bike, instead of my 650. Even worse, the controls are in a slightly different position, so as I took off, and went to turn the blinker off, I accidently pressed the horn instead.

Ugh, I didn't look back.

I rode down to the service station, the bike didn't run too bad at all.

Damn, there was far too many people at the servo. Every bowser was full, and had someone waiting.

I found a spot to wait, took off my helmet after a couple of minutes, and chucked it on the back rest. I turned the bike off after another couple of minutes.

I finally got to the bowser after waiting about 10 minutes.

The guy on the next bowser made some smartarse comment about needing to refuel before you'd even left, having to wait that long.

I put $5.50 worth of fuel in, was trying to put $5, but it went to $5.01, and I hate that stuff.

I went in, got in the line. I don't know what the hold up was, because everyone in here was just getting in, paying exact money (or easy change, ie $50 to pay for $30 of fuel) and leaving.

I got on, and rode around to the place where you get blue slips done, it was now just after 4pm.

A guy came wandering out, I told him I needed the slip done, he looked at the rego paper, checked the details on the bike, that they matched. Then he looked at the bike, got me to test all the lights, blinkers, brake lights, headlight, horn etc, and said it was fine. He wrote the blue slip out.

He sent me over to the office to pay, cause the guy in there wanted to go home, I paid, and wandered back. The guy gave me the papers, and I left.

I rode back to my mate's place, and dropped off the bike. Weird. The garage is open. My mate isn't here. Hmm. I just dropped off the bike, and closed the door again. I know I closed it when I left.

I looked at the paper work. I need to renew the insurance now, then I can restart the rego on the bike.

I rode my 650 into Gosford, to go to the bank where I can pay for the insurance. It was getting close to 5pm, and I didn't have much time. I thought I had probably missed the working hours.

I missed gettng a parking spot, so I went around the block, found one, raced up to the bank (now about 4.57pm) and found that they close at 4pm on Thursday. Doh. So I came home.

I had just got in the door, when my mate I go to dinner with called me. We chatted for a bit, and he told me that he's got lots of people that want to sign up, and I said I should be getting something done over the weekend. It just depends on how long it takes me to build the webserver, and configure the RAS now. Maybe I can even test the radius.. oh, no, I can't, the tigris only has digital incoming lines, no analog, so I can't play around trying to connect a modem back to back with it.

I woke up abouit 11.20am.

I got up, started watching tv. Tivo has about 2 hours of free space left, other than recordings set to not delete (that I intend to dvd archive).

I think it will run out of space in a couple of days.

I watched the couple of episodes of the Simpsons it had.

A delivery van turned up, and the guy put something in the letterbox. I'm not expecting and couriered packages.

When he left, I went to go down and see what was in the box, I assumed a card saying that delivery was not possible, because no one was at home (they never knock on my door, because of where it is).

I opened the door to go down to the letterbox, saw Dad in the room of their house near the door to outside to get to mine, so I thought buger it, he can go and get it, and I cam back inside. I left the door open a little bit.

A bit after midday I called the guy I'm going into the colo with, to find out about getting the keys, so I can put the gear in, since it's getting close to ready. He said he would get the key cut tomorrow, and I could get it sometime after that, so I said I might pick up tomorrow afternoon, or perhaps Friday, when I might be putting the gear in.

He told me the other guy in there was moving all his gear out (or so it seemed), so there might be a rack afterall, and I don't need to take mine in there. We'll see what happens.

I meant to ask him about the IP addresses, so I could start setting firewall rules etc up. Oh well, I might call him tomorrow, get the keys sorted out, and find out about the IPs then.

I watched a bit more tv, about 12.30pm the phone rang, it was a guy who had been given my details, and wanted to know if I could setup some wireless networking gear for him, ah, this will be the guy my mate asked me about yesterday, as we were on our way to dinner, if this guy had called me.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, and worked out that I would come and sort it out for him, and I would just charge him for an hour. I said I could be there about 2pm.

From what he told me, I thought it sounded like a limited range issue.

I looked up in the street directory where he was, and how to get there, not too hard, maybe half an hour away.

While I was sitting around, the huge cat my parents got recently came in, because I had left the door open. He wandered around, under the desk, past me. I patted him. He looked under the bed, behind the chair, and then wandered out again.

I didn't have any allergic reactions, even after putting my hand I had patted him with near my face (that decreases the amount of time it takes for me to feel awful when I am in my parent's house). Maybe it's just my parent's house in general, and not the animals that causes me to be allergic.

I thought about taking my access points with me, to see if they had stronger transmission signals, and if that was the point. The power supply for them was stuffed though, and the only one that runs them properly is the one I'm using on my phoenix programmer on the card server.

A bit after 1pm, I decided to get ready and leave, so I would be there for 2pm. I got in the shower, just after I had got out, and before I came out of the bathroom, Dad came in to my room, we had a quick conversation through the bathroom door. Dad had to turn some power off for some reason, and wanted to know if it would effect any of my gear. Probably.

I finished in the bathroom, got dressed. I had to leave basically now to get there on time. Instead, I went about shutting everything down.

Since everything was shutdown, I might as well take the power supply now (I was just going to take the access points, and hope that the power supply for guy's adsl router/wifi ap would be suitable). So I unplugged it, grabbed it, along with the access points, my mp3 player and bike gear I needed.

I started loading the stuff into the bike (it was about 1.45 now, I'll be a bit late, not too bad). Then I noticed the stupid little adapter that goes in the end of the cable from the power supply that adapts it to fit into the socket on different devices was missing. Damn. It's fallen out somewhere between the PC and my bike. I went back looking, all up and down the stairs, inside, across the floor, near the pc, nowhere.

I looked for about 20 minutes, and gave up. I knew I had a compatible plug on the adapter that died, it was only twisted on, so I just ripped it off, and took off. I can shove the wires into the end of the cable where the missing adapter is supposed to be.

I rode up to the guys place, I got there about 2.30pm.

He came out, said my bike was "a nice machine", and asked if I wanted to put it in the garage. Heh.

I went in, and started looking at the setup.

The guy had an alcatel adsl router, with wifi built in. It has no external aerial.

The guy had set it up successfully on his upstairs pc (right next to the router) but he couldn't get it working.

I removed and reinstalled the drivers for the wireless device on the pc. I installed the usb wireless dongle thing, it detected it.

When I did a site scan, it could see the AP upstairs, but I couldn't connect to it, it just kept scanning around and around. Strangely, the AP had a null SSID.

I wondered if perhaps the wireless dongle was not working correctly. I went and got the dongle from upstairs, where it was working, plugged it in downstairs, no good. Maybe it's the signal strength.

I moved the adsl router downstairs, and plugged it in outside the room where the PC was I was trying to connect. Still no good.

I went upstairs and looked at the working config (put the original dongle back). It worked fine from upstairs, with the router downstairs. I went into the web interface to the router, and saw that it had an Access List, with only one MAC address listed in it. It must have limited connectivity based on this, and the machine downstairs is not in the list.

I started the procedure to add another machine, the one downstairs was still scanning around, it should just add in here, no such luck.

I looked in the config, and saw it had the SSID specified, and it wasn't null. Maybe it has a stealth SSID that you need to type in.

When I set it to automatic, it wouldn't connect. When I typed it in, it connected straight on. Hmm, I think that proves that theory.

I went back downstairs, typed in the SSID, it connected straight on.

Still couldn't get and connectivity from the router. I got the install CD that came with the router, and went about installing it.

I had a wizard that came up, and asked for the SSID of the AP, ok, I think that's even more proof it requires the SSID to be specified. It also asked for the details of the internet account, that seems strange for the client setup, and the email address.

I got past that with the settings.

The next step specified to press the big red "register" button on the back of the router/AP. I thought it would require something like that. The install went on, activating 128 bit WEP, which seemed strange, seeing as the AP did not have WEP on, and then it complained that the install had failed.

I got out of it, disabled the WEP settings (to match the AP), and it was on, and working.

So there it was, I had to specify the SSID in order to be able to connect, and the MAC address of the device had to be registered in the AP before it would reply to any packets.

I went into the web interface, saw the new entry in the Access List. Ok, that's all fine, working everywhere.

I took the router/AP back upstairs and put it back where it came from.

I wanted to install AdAware from the machine downstairs where I had just downloaded it to, but I couldn't see the downstairs machine from the upstairs one.

Uh oh, this must be a limited range issue.

I tried the AP upstairs in a different room. Still no good.

Put it downstairs, in a different room, still no good.

As we were installing it in the 4th place we tried, the guy told me he didn't expect me to do all this for the amount of money I had said on the phone. I said it wouldn't be much more, because it wasn't like this was hard work, it was just fiddling around.

The upstairs machine was working regardless of where we put it. We tried moving the wireless dongle all around to get a better signal, no good.

Put it back upstairs again, back near the upstairs pc, but near the stairs, away from the computer directly. It still did not work downstairs. Maybe the machine has dropped out of the Access List again.. I looked in the web interface from the upstairs machine.

Bingo. Only 1 MAC address in the list. Clicked on "register" to add a new one. 2 seconds later, the machine downstairs was in the list, and had it's settings, and I was able to ping it. That was a lot of wasted time.

it was now about 4pm. My mate (where my other motorbike is parked, and he was going to reregister today) called me. He asked if I was at home, what I was doing etc. I said I would probably be home shortly, he said he would drop in at my place about 4.45pm.

I got back to work, it was now all working again.

I forced the AP to save all it's settings. Shouldn't have the issue of the machine dropping out of the Access List again now.

Went back upstairs to try installing AdAware, couldn't access the files from downstairs, the share I setup isn't working.

I had to run the "Home/Small Office Networking Wizard" or whatever it was, on both machines, and then the Shared Folders nonsense was working across the network. Why does M$ have to make everything so painful?

I finally managed to get the file sharing working and install AdAware upstairs at about 4.30pm. (BTW, it found about 100 items on the machine downstairs, it stopped all the popups and garbage). There were only 4 items on the upstairs machine after all that.

I realised I was not going to be home in 15 minutes, so I sent an SMS to my mate telling him I would be late, and would call him.

I had a look at the guys email for him, it kept prompting to dialup to the internet to check mail. That was just caused by having an "always connect to this account using" setting on the PC. So that was easily fixed. Nasty LookOut. No other email clients have stupid errors like that.

It was now just before 5pm, the guy paid me, he paid me double what I had asked for. I didn't want to take that much, but he said it was fine. I told him that if he had any problems he could call me, and I would help him, or come back and have a look, since he had paid the extra.

Just before I left, I had a look at the email problem on the machine downstairs, same problem as upstairs, with an "always connect to this account using" setting, so I told him how to fix it, and then I left.

I rode towards home, I stopped in at my mates place who wanted to see me, he wasn't there.

I called him, told him I was at his place, he told me to go home, and he would be there shortly.

I went home. I had just got inside, when he turned up.

We had a chat for a bit, he gave me the money he was going to use to get the blue slip/pink slip/rego/insurance sorted on my other bike.

He had tried to get it sorted out properly earlier in the day, but the bike won't start for some reason. Hmm. Maybe there's a dodgy connection with the fuse or something, I vaguely recall that.

He told me that the power was on, but it wouldn't kick over. The fuel has probably gone shit, it's been in the thing for ages and ages.

I said I would have a look tomorrow, since I wasn't planning to do much, and see if I could get it sorted.

I'll probably just drain all the shit out of the tank, siphon some good fuel out of my 650, and put it in the 250 to see if I can get it started.

He didn't have the key on him, so he said he would leave it in his letterbox in the morning, and I can get it when I get there.

he left.

I started booting everything back up.

My brother came in complaining could I fix the pay tv (I had removed the power supply from the phoenix programmer, and the machine that runs the card sharing software was off). I said I was fixing it.

I decided to put the new power supply in this machine, instead of having 2 running it.

I started putting the power supply in, I was nearly finished, when Dad came in.

I finished installing the power supply, tried to boot the machine, it wouldn't work. Great. Doesn't boot.

I tried a few times, put the old PSU in, still no good.

Dad asked if he could have the card, to stop Mum whinging. I ripped it out of the phoenix programmer, and gave it to him, and he left.

I went back to screwing around with the machine. Couldn't get it working.

I ended up pulling the motherboard out to see if I could work out what was going on.

I can't see what's wrong with this damn thing, it should just work. It's doing it's trick again, like around Christmas, when it refused to work, until I arranged to get the motherboard replaced, and then it started working again.

I gave up. I started watching an episode of the Simpsons on free to air, and eating the easter egg my grandma gave me.

My sister came in, with a pizza box, and asked if I wanted some pizza. Sure, put it there. She dumped the box and left.

I grabbed it, opened in, 3 bits in here. I started eating a slice, stone cold. Lovely.

I ate it anyway.

I mucked around with the machine a bit more. Still couldn't get it working.

The phone rang. I answered it, it was a long distance call (it bipped when I answered it). It was a woman, she claimed I had fixed their adsl connection recently, at the seniors centre. I thought about it for a second, then it clicked, ah, I remember. Apparently she is having problems with it again. It was 7.45pm, I assumed she was not at the centre now, and said that, no, she was at home, I thought maybe I could help her over the phone having seen the config.

She said she would be at the centre between 9am and about 4pm tomorrow, was I available.

I said I would come down there about 9.30am. She said she could go earlier if I wanted (heh, no, 9.30am is early enough :-), but I said 9.30 was fine. Cool, I'll probably get paid this time, but if it's something as simple and dumb as last time, a disabled interface, I won't charge.

I tried running the CPU with no heatsink, it didn't even get hot.

I cleaned all the heatsink paste off, using a ton of WD40 and some paper towel (as far as I know, this thing is stuffed, so what does it matter?), it looks like the die on the chip has the corner chipped off. The CPU is probably stuffed.

What will I do now? I want a drink, there's no Coke.

I rode down to the supermarket, bought some Coke, and came home again.

I had a drink, ahh.

I looked at the CPU. I thought about.

I remembered that my mate has an "old" Athlon PC in bits, maybe I can test my CPU on his mobo to see if it's the mobo or the CPU.

I called him, he's still got it, an athlon 1800. I said I might come around tomorrow, and test it.

I got off the phone, and then realised I've got a brand new mobo in the box here, from the webserver I haven't built yet. Duh.

I got it, put my cpu/heatsink on it. Put the ddr ram on it, plugged it all in (to the dodgy 400w psu) tried to boot it.. bang, it just booted straight up. There we go, it is a stuffed mobo then. Great.

I think I'll buy a new mobo/cpu/ram on the weekend anyway. As I was thinking about buying a new one, an ad came on the tv for the computer fair. Convenient.

I put the stuff all away again.

I put the phoenix programmer on a different machine, and ran up the software. it looks like it will work, I just hope the machine is fast enough, there are issues trying to run it on slow machines. I'll have to go and get the card back in a bit.

I ended up going to bed at 3am. I didn't get to sleep until after 4am.

I woke up at 6.30am. Ugh, have I reached the point where my body doesn't want more than 3 hours sleep or something.

I went back to sleep, and woke up again just after 9am.

I got out of bed about 9.40am. I had a shower, ate some breakfast, and left home just after 10am.

I took the street directory and my mp3 player with me, so I can go from the club down the freeway to get a new powersupply.

My bike was really mucking around when I started it, misfiring and wanting to stall. I decided maybe one of the spark plugs was failing, it's not felt right for a couple of weeks now.

I stopped in at the motorbike place on the way to the club, and I bought a pair of new sparkplugs.

I went to the club, wandered into the snooker room, got in there about 10.30am.

I watched my mate and one of his mates finish their game, then I played against my mate. I don't remember the finish, it was close, I either won or lost by only a couple of points.

I played another game, against the other guy, I got beaten by a fair bit, he's a really good player.

The other 2 played again, I went and got a drink. I was going to play the poker machine that I usually win a few dollars on, but it was gone. They've changed all the pokies. I played a different one, lost.

I went back up.

Watched the end of the game, there was about 50 points difference at the end.

I played another game, against the guy who's really good, I played appallingly, and ended up losing by about 75 points.

My mate reckons I need glasses. Maybe I just have a problem with depth perception.

It was now about 1pm. We decided to leave, to get some lunch. My mate had his car in getting serviced, so he was being picked up by his daughter, and taken to get his car.

I wandered around with him for a minute, to find them.

I came back to my bike, and put the sparkplugs in. It didn't make much difference, The old ones were all black and crappy looking though, I put them in before I went to Brisbane nearly a year ago. I adjusted the idle screw a bit, that made it a bit better, but it still wasn't right. This thing really needs a service.

I took off, went up the freeway to go to Burger King for lunch. On the way up the hill, my bike didn't sound very good. I think there might be a hole in the exhaust, or the seals have failed. I know when I got it serviced last year (10000kms ago), the guy told me that part of the exhaust was failing, and would need to be replaced on the next service. I don't think I've changed the oil recently either.

Anyway, I got there, when I put the stand down, the engine didn't cutout until the stand was right down, weird, normally it cuts out about halfway. I noticed the little bit of metal that presses the cutoff switch had rotated again, like happened when I had the crash before Christmas getting out of the way of the ambulance.

I loosened the bolt, forced the part back around where it is supposed to be, and tightened it back up, oops, a bit too much, now the stand is really stiff to put up/down. Oh well.

I called my mate, I'd been waiting a few minutes now. He answered the phone, told me where he was, and said he was on his way.

I had a good few minutes. I decided to go and get fuel instead, nearby. I went in, did that, then I had to get back to the burger place, because the road is so busy, I had to go left, find the next road, and then come back. That wasted a kilometre.

I pulled back into the car park,and hopped off. Just as I did, my mate came into the carpark and parked.

We went in, got our food, sat and chatted for a while. My mate had his grandkids with him.

We all left, I checked the map (wasn't sure where I could get off the freeway when going south), put my mp3 player on, and took off.

I went down the freeway, got off, rode to the place. It was 58km there (I was arguing with my mate how far it was, I said it was about 45km there, he said it was about 65).

I bought the powersupply, they only had a 400W, nothing bigger. Damn, we'll see how long it lasts. I also bought the CDRs I was supposed to buy the other day while I was here (I asked for them, but the guy didn't list them, so I didn't get them, but wasn't charged). The guy totalled it up, and I paid.

He sent the lackey off to make up the order, he came back a minute later, "we haven't got the CDRs". Hmm, so I got a refund.

I got my PSU, chucked it in my bike.

I was feeling really fatigued for some reason. I wandered over to the cafe near the parts place, to get something with some sugar in it. They had a single chocolcate bar left in the place, a cherry ripe. Yuck, but I need the sugar. I got it, and wandered back over to my bike.

There was some dopey fat dog wandering around, from one of the other units, it kept wandering over, it wandered over when I had my chocolate, and sat and watched me eat it. I gave him a bit, and then when it was finished, and I said "no more", he immediately wandered away. Typical.

I put my earbuds back in, helmet on, and took off. I got back on the freeway, and came home. When I got home, the trip counter was on 103km. So we were both right.. from my place to the parts place it's 45km, like I estimated, from my mate's place down there, it's about 56km.

I got home, there is some mail shoved under the door. A Dell brochure as usual. I'll look at it and then throw it away. There was also a letter, from ITP (place that does tax returns). Hmm. I opened it, it's claiming I haven't put in my 02/03 tax return yet, and if I don't arrange to do it in the next month, I'll get a fine.

I'll have to get that sorted. I checked my group certificate from the work I was doing for my mate's dad who own's the aircon business, I paid $1400 in tax, and I should get it all back, based on what I earned for the year.

I'll get it sorted, get my money back. I'll get my bike serviced (and a new tyre probably), and then with what's left I might see if I can buy a new PC. I've put up with an 800Mhz machine from over 3 years ago being my best machine for long enough now.

My brother came and gave me another easter egg, from my Grandma this time.

Oh well, I'm out of here in 20 minutes or so, going back up to have dinner with my mate at the club.

I'll take the svideo extension cable and a couple of blank cds with me, I'll stop in at my mate (who was in the US recently)'s place, give him the cable I made, and get him to burn win2k SP3 on a CD for me, to give to the woman at the college where I'll be networking.

I decided to spend a couple more minutes trying to get replication working. I didn't.

First I put "bind-address 10.0.0.1" in the my.cnf on the master server instead of "bind-address=10.0.0.1". That took me a minute to find.

When I tried to test using mysql interface on the slave server to connect to the master, it's putting @hostname as the userid, instead of @ipaddress. Maybe it will work anyway..

I changed some data on the master. The slave did not update. Nope, not working. I'll get there. I'll just have to force no name resolution, or change the replication account details to reflect the hostname of the other machine, instead of the IP.

I'm going to bed.

It's nearly 2am.

I've just spent the last 1/2 hour trying to fix my video editing machine.

I was typing away on this machine, configuring mysql, and the video editing machine's monitor went into power saving mode. I assumed the machine had just gone to sleep because I hadn't touched it for a while.

I moved the mouse. It didn't come back.

I looked at the machine. The power light was off. Uh oh.

I tried switching it back on. No go.

I pulled the power cord out, waited a few seconds, put it back in. Switched the machine back on. It came up.

Cool.

Then the machine went off again. Uhh.

I pulled all the disks off the machine, leaving just the mobo. It would run. I hope one of my disks has not died.

I got another PSU, a 300W that I don't really trust. I put it in, it ran for a few seconds, and went off. I tried running it with no disks, it worked.

I could get the machine to run with one 60gb disk attached, but that was all, neither of the 120gbs.

I decided to try running the disks off one psu, and the mobo off another.

I grabbed another psu, a 230W AT supply, I tested each disk one at a time, they ran fine. I put both on, it ran fine.

I put the one disk and the mobo back on the internal supply. It didn't work.

I moved back to the 300W ATX supply, it didn't work.

I moved the other disk, dvdr drive, and fans to the 230W AT supply, and put just the mobo on the 300W supply.

It worked. Somewhat. Windows booted.

I went over to fix the sat box (it runs off the machine with the issues) when I came back, it had locked up.

I forced the power off (4 sec power button) then I tried to boot it up again. No go. 300W wouldn't stay on for more than 1/2 second.

I chucked it. tried using the internal supply running just the mobo, nope.

I went to find another psu. Here's one.. uh oh, it's got crosses all over it. It's here because it's stuffed, and I plan to rat all the parts off it (connectors, fan etc).

Aha! the case from the busted machine (that got dropped) it's got an ATX supply in it.. 235W.

I plugged that in to run the mobo, it worked.

The machine booted. It locked up again. D'oh. I rebooted. It came up, locked up.

This isn't good. One more go. It came up, it stayed up. It's still up.

I wonder how long it will hold.

Next issue.. the monitor keeps doing it's clicky flashy thing.. every few seconds. I think it is going to die very shortly.

Why does everything happen at once?

I need to go and buy a new PSU tomorrow, I'll go to that place down the freeway, it's only an hour out of my day, and I'll get one for like $30 as opposed to $90 if I go to a shop locally.

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.

I finished sorting the RAID on the second machine last night.

I did a few minutes on the first machine, and decided to leave it.

I found junkyard wars was on, so I went to bed, and watched that. It finished, and I went to put an episode of The Simpsons on, but the tivo mucked up (must have been up for too long) and instead of bringing up the details of the recording, it just sat there with a blank overlay screen.

I turned the tv/amp off, but as happens sometimes, the tv came back on, on to one of the normal channels, and Rage was on.

I turned the amp back on, put the sleep timer on the tv, and lay down listening to music.

The one feature the tivo lacks is a sleep timer. More than once I've wanted to go to sleep with a music channel on or something, but there's no way that I can find to do it (unless I put the audio into the tv, and then into the amp, and I could use the tv's sleep timer).

I got up about 11am.

I went back to work on the machines.

I built a RAID on the second empty disk in the first machine, then I mounted all the partitions, copied all the data over.

I swapped the second disk with the first, so it would try to boot off the RAID. it failed. Weird problems with e2fsck failing.

I mucked around with lilo, and forced it to boot off the non raid disk, then I went about trying to fix the RAID, I had to resize the partitions so that e2fsck wouldn't fail. Weird, I didn't have to do that with the other raid I setup.

I managed to get it all working off the raid, booting without issue.

I then trashed the partitions on the other disk, and tried to add them to the raid.

It didn't work. It recognised the partitions as being part of the array, but the stats didn't update properly, and it thought each mirror still only had 1 disk in it.

I thought maybe I had to raidstop and raidstart to fix it. When I tried to raidstart the /usr mount, I discovered I hadn't edited the raidtab file. I'd added the partitions, but I hadn't changed it to say I had 2 disks instead of 1. I couldn't start /usr back up.

Vi (and every other editor) lives in /usr, so I couldn't edit the file to fix it.

I ended up moving the raidtab, and writing a new one manually using cat. Then I was able to restart /usr, use vi, and fix the original file.

Restarting the raid md devices didn't help.

Rebooting didn't help.

I bit the bullet, pulled the IDE disk out of the other machine again, and put it back in this one.

I repartitioned it, backed up all the data on to the ide disk, in preparation for rebuilding all the raid partitions.

I got all the data backed up. I rebooted off the raid, and redid all the mkraids.

It did what it should have done when I added the extra partitions.. it synced the new partitions with the old ones, and didn't kill anything. Hmm. I don't know why it didn't work like this when I added the partitions.

I mucked around, fixed all the booting again, rebooted off the raid. It came up without issue.

I took a break at this point (about 6pm) and watched a bit of tv.

At some point a little bit earlier while I was mucking around with raid, my brother came in, and gave me an easter egg. I've eaten the whole thing already :-)

After an hour or so, I went back, and got the machine to operate as a transparent proxy, this took a while, and a bit of fiddling around.

I had to rebuild the kernel, when I tried to put a NAT rule in (for redirection for the proxy), it wouldn't go in.

I found I'd left a lot of networking stuff out that I needed, like NAT support. I rebuilt the kernel, and the new modules, then I loaded the new modules in (without rebooting, I wonder what will happen), I was able to put the redirection rule in.

As soon as I tried to access the web, which would be redirected to squid, the kernel crashed.

I rebooted, the machine came up fine, but it rebuilt all the RAID devices, this seemed weird.

After getting the rule in place properly, with the correct interface set (and after getting the second server back on the LAN) I managed to get it all configured properly, and tested it working.

I'm not sure what there is left to do now.

I need to write/find/steal some backup scripts, to get the live customer database moved across to the backup server each night, and I need to get all the user's home directories moved to the other server daily.

I need to get quota in place to, and properly configure the mailserver, get some spam control in.

I really need to find out the live IPs I'll be using, so I can start configuring things properly, working out the firewall rules I need.

Oh yeah, my mate I go to dinner with called me earlier, he wanted to know if I was still going up for the barbeque tomorrow, that's probably a good idea. He was trying to fix the next door neighbour's computer, it had lots of ads and spayware on it. I think he must have fixed it up.

It's nearly 2am. I'm going to bed. I've drunk all the alcohol in the place, I'll have to get more while I'm out tomorrow.

I was wrong, it did try to copy the mount of the destination in there too, so I ended up with /mnt/raid/mnt/raid/ etc until it ran out of space.

Here we go again, doing it properly, instead of trying to tar /.

I woke up about 10.30am. lay in for a bit, put the telly on.

Got up a bit after 11am.

Tivo's getting very close to full. I haven't had time to archive any of the stuff it's getting filled with.

When I ran out of stuff to watch (other than the archiving stuff). I started going through it, because I have 2 copies of each episode (in case the sat stuffs up, more often than not).

I got through 2 episodes (4 recordings). I couldn't delete any/either of them, because each episode had a video blip or dropout in it, and the other one didn't, so eventually, I'll pull both copies across to the PC, and be able to get one good episode from 2 with errors, with a bit of copying/pasting.

Dad came in, to ask how the setup was going.

I said I was having issues with freeside.

(I'm mainly sick of the bloody thing just giving errors, or even worse, not giving errors, but not doing anything).

I showed him that it doesn't create accounts, there is no errors or anything.

After a few minutes, he went out again.

I really need to put a bit more effort into this stuff, I haven't touched it for a couple of days (although I have been busy doing other things, most of the time).

I fiddled around with it again.

Aha, it wasn't creating accounts because you had to manually set it to.

The documentation is very poor. Getting the thing working would be ok if it explained why you were doing something (and what to do), since it leaves big things out. I had to work out that you actually need to setup an "export", and then I found (eventually, after reading a bunch of support emails) that you then need to go and reedit your actual services, and tell them to use the export.

After some fiddling with name resolution, file permissions, directories existing etc, it eventually worked.

I decided to start getting the RAID working.

I finished building one of the other servers (hardware wise). It needed a video card, disks. I put them in.

I recompiled the kernel on the working box, for large memory support, so I could use all of the ~1.03GB of memory, instead of just the 960mb currently available. I rebooted, it failed to boot, with cryptic errors like "mounting an ext3 partition as ext2" uh oh, that's not good.

I then went back to my old known working kernel, to see if for some reason ext3 support had been left out of the one I just compiled, it didn't even boot properly back there, it claimed the lost+found directory didn't exist, created it, and then rebooted.

I wasn't feeling very good at this point, thinking it had just corrupted its filesystem, but it hadn't, and it booted up.

I checked the kernel, ext3 was a module for some reason. weird. I compiled it in, recompiled, rebooted, it came up ok. Good. I had a few issues with modules, but a make modules/make modules_install fixed that (issues with have modules available for things that were compiled into the kernel etc).

I copied my new working kernel, and the modules, over to the ide disk I used to run the machine before I got the SATA support working.

I shut the machine down, took the ide disk out, and rebooted, it came up fine.

I put the ide disk into the second server I had just finished building. Plugged it in, it wouldn't boot. I had to hold the power button to shut it off too. Hmm, something weird going on. I tried to boot it a few times, unplugged the disks in case they were stopping it (I've seen that before) but it made no difference.

I pulled the machine out, and started checking it. CPU is in, and in properly, then I checked the memory, hmm, seems a bit loose. I pushed the levers to pop the memory out, and the levers just moved, very easily, and the memory didn't.

Hmm, the memory was just sitting in the top of the slots, it wasn't even pushed in. Thanks Dad. I pushed the memory down, into the slot properly. Plugged the disks back in, plugged the machine back in, and it booted up.

Cool.

I tried to find my crossover cable, I could link the 2 machines together with their gigabit interfaces, which should make the file copy fast. I found the cable, eventually, it was stuffed. I doubt some unknown piece of flat ribbon cable that I changed into a crossover by cutting and resoldering wires is going to run at gigabit speeds anyway. I dug out some cat6, rj45s, crimped up a corssover cable.

When I eventually worked out which was the gigabit interface on the mobo, plugged them together, and brought the interfaces up, they automatically negotiated gigabit, and all the required settings, that was cool.

I grabbed the raid tools, read how to set up raid, and went about doing it. Oops, I did it wrong.. I put the disks into a raid, but you are supposed to do it with partitions. It wasn't too bad though, I found I could partition the raid, of the raw disks, and it passed the partitioning to each of the disks in the raid, so it saved me having to partition both of them manually.

I stopped the raid, edited the raid file, to add in the new raids, made them all up. That took a while, I started formatting them while I waited.

I started copying the files across with scp, but I forgot that it destroys symbolic links. Hmm, how to copy the files with trashing the links.. I put samba on both the machines, tried copying the files across, that didn't really work either. I think the symlinks were working, but there were some filenames (like with "*" in them) that samba chucked a wobbly about when I tried to copy them.

I found details of how to use tar across a network link. Good, I knew you could do this (I used to do it when I was looking after the servers when I worked for CSC), but I couldn't remember how. I chained tar through an ssh link, untarring it on the other side, but the issue here is that I couldn't specify the directory on the other end, so it was untarring in /root.

I changed the home directory in /etc/passwd, so root's home dir is /mnt/raid, so the files untar in the right place.

That works, but I though the symlinks were still failing.

I killed the copy, and when I looked, the links were there, and right. What's going on here?

I kicked the copy off again (this must be about the 6th time I've copied the whole thing across).

It's just finished, complaining of a couple of errors. D'oh. Oh well, at least it didn't try to copy the samba mounted directory back over into itself again, that would have been clever.

This stuff is taking far too long.

I started working on this about 1pm, so far all I've achieved is getting freeside to create accounts, and setting a soft raid, and copying the machine into it.

I haven't even configured it to boot off the raid yet, that's the next bit of fun.

Once I get that going, I have to put the ide disk back in the first machine, rebuild it as raid, and copy all the files back again. There must be a better way. Maybe I can partition the second unused disk the same as the one I'm using, and then build it as a raid, and have it copy the running disk over the blank one.

It was 7.30pm, I thought it was about midnight.

I don't want to sit around here doing nothing all night.

About 8.30pm, I called up my mate (who was in the US recently), he said that all the liquor licenses are only valid until 10pm tonight, he went into a pub earlier this afternoon, and they told him they were shutting then, and everyone else would be too.

Damn it. Maybe I should go out, get more grog, and come back home.

My mate said he would check with the local club, and get back to me. He rang me back a few minutes later, they were open until 2am. Good enough for me, he said he was going down there. I told him to SMS me when the taxi gets there.

A couple of hours later, I got an SMS to say they were going.

I got on the bike, rode down there.

I wandered around, found them. I grabbed a drink, we sat and chatted for a bit.

They closed the area we were sitting in, about 11pm. We moved into a different area, found seats.

They were playing some reasonable music, we just sat and drank and laughed for ages. I was having a good time, I can't remember the last time I was down there and enjoyed it.

I had quite a few drinks, it wasn't doing anything though, I was just feeling a bit crook from all the cheap cola they were serving, as the mixer.

My mate saw his ex girlfriend, she came over some time later. After some conversation I couldn't hear (it was very loud in there), everyone slowly disappeared.

I saw them all dancing, so I moved in, and had a bit of a dance.

Danced for a while, got a bit hot (was wearing my bike jacket) so I dumped that, kept dancing.

Ended up dancing pretty much until they shut it all down just before 2am. I hadn't had a drink since before midnight, and dancing for 2 hours straight pretty much was good exercise, so I was fine at the end of it.

I rode home. Just before getting home, as I was waiting to turn a corner, some guy started waving at me. What does he want, it's not like I can take him anywhere.

He wanted some directions, he was from Adelaide, was lost, and no one would help him. He was looking for the Gosford Motor Inn, I told him how to get there, he didn't seem to think I was telling him the right thing, so I had to tell him a couple of times.

Eventually, he thanked me for helping him, went on his way, towards the Inn, and I kept going, and came home.

I'm, not really tired now, surprisingly, after all that exercise, I just have gut ache from the cola. And my foot hurts, I'll probably get a blister, boots are not good for dancing.

I got up about 9.30am, had a shower, while I was in the shower someone tried to call.

I didn't hear the phone however, not until after I was dressed and eating breakfast, my phone rang again, my message service.

I answered it, it was a message from the daughter of the woman who's phone line I fixed a couple of days ago. Apparently she was having issues with her account/password.

I had noticed the same thing when I was there, and had used my internet account to test the phone, since I assumed their isp was having an issue.

I tried to call her back a couple of times, to let her know, but the phone was busy. I thought maybe she had worked it out.

I got my tools together, and most of the parts I bought yesterday, loaded them up, and took off.

I rode up to my mate's place.

I unloaded all the tools, and parts. Put the drill on charge (that I got for Christmas, and have never used).

I got up, started adjusting the dish again, I moved the arm on the stand, so that I could move the dish where it had to go.

It didn't really help, the arm was still in the way, and now the whole stand was a bit wobbly. (I wasn't waiting an hour for the drill to charge, so I ended up using my mate's drill anyway).

I tried to get a stream of PAS8, with free to air Chinese channels, but the signal just kept flashing up and going away, didn't make sense.

I fiddled around for ages, make slight adjustments, both azimuth and elevation. I could get the signal a bit better, but it was still flashing up and down, and couldn't lock on to anything.

My mate called another of the guys we go to dinner with, he usually has lots of bits of stuff hanging around, and might have a bit of pipe that would fit into the stand, and allow the dish to go up higher, so I could set the correct elevation, he said he would be around near 1pm.

I tried moving the dish back where it started from, but that wouldn't work either. Uh oh.

I left it at this point, and we had lunch. Tomato and cheese on toast. Some of the Chinese relatives didn't want it, so I ended up eating about 6 bits, not too bad :-)

I fiddled with the dish again, still not getting anywhere.

I got on the internet, and checked the page.. ah.. the signals I'm trying to get are not broadcast into Australia, I was trying to get streams for SE and NE Asia. That probably explains the weird signal strength, flashing up and down.

I put in an Australian stream of PAS8, moved the dish around to where I was sure it was, and it locked on, first go. Gee, it works when you put streams in that are broadcast where you are.

It was an encrypted stream however, so we couldn't get anything.

I went back and looked on the net again. All the Chinese channels are on C band, rather than Ku, which requires a bigger/different dish, and a different LNB. Couldn't really find anything free to air Ku band that was any good.

My mate's mate turned up, with a bunch of different bits of pipe, and hacksaw. I grabbed a short small bit,it fit straight in, and allowed the dish to go higher, but unfortunately I'd already found the issue (being outside the footprint of the streams I was trying to get) so it wasn't going to help.

I found C1 again, set the box back to Aurora, and left it.

It was getting close to 2pm, my mate and all the relatives were going out to see someone. Because the car is not big enough for all of them, one of them had to get the train, so my mate took his wife, dropped her at the station, came back, and all the relatives got in the car.

I got all my stuff together while he was at the station, and I left when he got back.

He told me the guy that gave me the sat decoders recently wanted me to contact him.

I rode up there, got lost, not remembering the directions properly, and found the place.

I went towards the house, when I got near the door, I noticed a bit of a smell.

The guy answered the door, I went in.

He apologised for the smell, apparently he didn't know where it was coming from, had got someone out to clean the drains, but the smell was still there.

I sat down, the guy was there with his wife. We chatted for a while, about the sat service, my isp, bikes, all sorts of things.

He asked me to have a look in the celing for him, to see if I could work out where the smell was coming from, (he's not fit enough to go climbing up ladders). As I wandered through the kitchen to the laundry where the manhole is, it was really strong, with a deep whiff, it was almost causing me to gag.

I got up the ladder, opened the man hole, expecting the smell to be unbearable, but it wasn't in the roof, there was no smell up there, even with my head right up there (it was actually better than inside the house).

The guy didn't know where it was coming from. I had a look around in the kitchen, under the sink etc, but couldn't find anything. I t was weird, it smelled the worse right in the middle of the kitchen, up near the ceiling. It didn't make sense.

Apparently the guy was getting his son to come up later to see if he could find it. They'd had the drains cleaned yesterday, but the smell was still there. It wasn't the drains, because there was no smell in the bathroom.

While looking around, I managed to bump my head on a plant pot hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen, a lot of water poured out of it on my head, and all down my back.

I managed to dry myself off, the guy gave me a towel (that's why I was in the bathroom), luckily the plant/water wasn't the source of the smell, or I probably would have been sick.

I left just after 3pm, and came home with the intention of trying to get freeside working (still need to get the account management module working).

I got home, and ended up wasting a lot of time with emails, trying to help people on the oztivo list with IR codes, and other stuff.

So much for an early night, I went to bed about 10.30pm, but just ended up tossing and turning until after 2am trying to get to sleep.

I got up at 8.40am, had a shower, ate what food there was left. I bummed around for a little while, and didn't end up leaving until about 9.20am, and I was supposed to be there about 10am, shouldn't be too late.

I got there about 10.15am.

I had a look around, shouldn't be too much work, run some network cables, put in a switch, sort out the tangle of phone cables running everywhere.

I made some measurements, worked out the parts I needed.

I suggested they get an ADSL connection, since they don't have enough telephone lines, and instead of paying installation/rental/calls on another line, they may as well get a cheap ADSL connection.

They seemed interested in that, so I gave them all the details.

The machine I fixed for them recently was there, it has files on it they need to access, but office doesn't work, because it hasn't been reinstalled after I reinstalled Windows. They had the CD, but Office 2003 was complaining that they need Service Pack 3 on the machine. Argh. I said I would download it at home, burn it on a CD, at they could sort it out themselves, I'm not sitting here all day waiting for sp3 to download over a modem connection.

Until they, I showed them how they could just copy the files on to floppy, move them to a different pc.

She then wanted to look at the files on the laptop, that doesn't have a floppy drive. Hmm, they had a USB memory key though, so that was no problem.

I had called my mate to get the phone number of the guy to get the ADSL through, he called me back with it, and then he called me back a few minutes later, and asked me to get some PC parts for him on the way home, that was fine, and he gave me the address. Good, I can get the parts I need for here while I am there.

I finished making up my documentation of things I'll need to do, gave them the phone number, and I left, it was just before midday I think.

I checked the street directory

I went to the service station, because of dumb road planning, instead of being able to ride the 5 metres or so from the car park into the service station, I had to go all the way down the road, round the corner, turn around at a roundabout, come all the way back, about 500m.

I got fuel, took off, got back on the freeway, got off at the exit to go to the computer place.

I headed in near where it was, unit 11 number 10 my mate told me. I found number 10, it was a hot air balloon place.

Hmm. I asked a guy making the side of a basket if he knew where the computer place was, he said he didn't but that the people in the office might.

I went in, asked if they knew where the place was. They didn't.

The nice woman looked in the phone book, couldn't find them. She called directory assistance, and they were able to find a listing, gave her the number, so she called them, found out the address, and told me. They were at unit 10 number 1 apparently.

I thanked them, and took off, went back down the road, found them.

I went in, ordered all the bits I needed, and paid. The guy asked if I was the guy who'd gone to the other place looking for them.

I went around the back to collect them, a few minutes later they came out with the box, I checked it, everything was there, signed off. I looked at the receipt, wow, everything is so cheap, and it's not all totally crap either.

I strapped the box onto my bike, headed back, got on the freeway, and came home.

I dumped all the stuff, and sat down for a minute.

My phone rang, it was the woman who's network I look after. Apparently the Sydney service of the isp I was helping with until I got screwed over, is down, and has been all day. Hah. She wanted to know about getting the dialin number changed, to the Gosford service. Because the number is set in the linux firewall I setup for her, she can't change it herself. I said I would have to come up to change it.

She told me not to worry about it, because she had been told the service would be fixed shortly. I told her to let me know if it wasn't in the next couple of hours, and I would come and change the number.

Maybe it's not so bad they cut off my account, and forced me to use my other isp, it seems like they are having no end of problems anyway. Oh well, what can you do, you just can't help some people.

I grabbed my bag, and went to the shops, I need to buy some food. It's about 2.15pm, I can beat the school getting out.

I got there, got everything I needed, queued up.

Someone came up behind me, the person I was waiting behind told them that the next register had just opened (before I got there) and they went over and started unloading. Far out. I'm just waiting here for fun you know. But I couldn't be bothered causing an argument in the middle of the supermarket, so I just waited, in the line I was already in, as the woman in front took forever to finish being served.

I finally got my stuff going through, why do the checkout operators talk to you? they don't care about me, or my day, just as I don't about them. "How are you?" what are you supposed to answer to that? The woman scanning my frozen food isn't going to care that I'm a bit upset, because after my friend dies, and I spend 9 weeks running his business, just to keep it going, the people that take over ownership treat me like crap, exploit me, and then spread false rumours to try to tarnish my reputation, for god only knows what reason.

Finally, the food is all scanned, it's a few dollars more than I have in cash, so I'll use my card. My new card, that I got a few days ago, and haven't got around to signing yet.

I scan it, and then decide that I will need to sign it. I sign it. The chekout woman sees that the card is not signed, and that I then sign it.

She passes me the slip to sign, I sign it. Then, something I cannot believe, she takes the slip, and my card, and compares the signatures very carefully. Gee, what a surprise, they are the same, I wonder why, since she just saw me sign the card, and then 2 seconds later sign the slip.

I collected all my food, headed back out to my bike. I loaded it all in, went back in, bought some bread rolls for lunch.

Uh oh, what time is it. I headed back towards home, because there is road works, the entrance to the area that would have been a lot easier to use, is closed. I head for the other one, where all the Mum's taxis and 400 busses are going to come out.

Wow, there's a guy there with a stop sign directing traffic, someone was smart enough to think of that.

I get there just as he takes it away, so all the main road traffic that has been banked up starts going. Great.

I sat and waited, and waited, and waited. Finally he stopped the traffic again, and I was able to get across, and come home.

I was just starting to write this blog, when my phone rang, "Private Number". I hate these calls, I like to know who's calling, and what to expect. I answered it, it was a guy, I didn't recognise the voice, he told me he'd got my name and number from the oztivo mailing list, ah, cool.

I chatted to the guy for a few minutes, he told me he had a very similar VCR to mine, and wanted a bit of help with the IR codes.

I gave him the URL of the howto I wrote on setting up IR, and said I would send him the tcl file with the codes. That was pretty cool.

I called the woman who I'm supposed to be working for tomorrow, doing the networking. No answer, left a message. She called me back a bit later.

I told her I didn't have any of the gear I needed (network cards/cable/switch etc), so I would come down tomorrow, and just work out what they have (if any PCs have NICs etc), how much cable I will need, all that sort of stuff, then I will sort it out next week, and come back and do all the work (since Friday is a holiday).

That was fine, and she gave me directions.

I got off the phone, and looked at the street directory.. I know where it is, it's right near the college I was at back in 2002, I know the area well, I've even ridden through there a couple of times. No worries.

I tried to call up the woman I have to go and see later, to install her replacement hard disk, to check it was still ok, no answer.

I bummed around for a while.

I tried calling her again, about 5.50pm, got through, confirmed it, said I would be there about 6.30pm.

Literally 3 seconds after hanging up the phone, it started teaming down with rain. Mongrel.

I had some dinner, noodles, there is no other food left in the house. Just as they were nearly ready, and I wanted to put the flavour in, I dropped the open sachet into the bin, and of course, according to murphy's law, the sachet turned upside down, and all the flavour powder or whatever it is poured into the bin.

I opened another packed of noodles, got the flavour out, and put it in with the cooked noodles. What to do with the open packet of raw noodles with no flavour sachet? I ate them. gross, couldn't waste them though. I ate almost all of them, chucked about a mouthful, served the cooked, flavoured noodles, and sat and ate them.

It was now about 6.25pm. The rain had let up a lot.

I was about to leave, and it got heavy, you bastard.

I pulled out my dry pants, pulled them on, and took off. It was a very slow and long trip. I think I need new tyres, or just to avoid riding in the wet.

It stopped raining shortly after I left. I got there, went straight in, got to work. I put the new disk in, used ghost to copy all the files. It was incredibly slow to pull all the data off the original disk, but just the second quarter of the data, the rest was fine.

I ran a quick test across the old disk, Norton Disk Doctor and SpinRite, no obvious problems (besides a single lost chain, but that's not going to do anything).

I put the new disk into the silly mounting bracket (I hate low profile desktop cases), backwards, d'oh, turned it around.

Put the machine all back together, checked it, no issues.

The woman paid me for the disk, I only charged her for 1/2 hour, even though from leaving home to getting home again, it was about 2 1/2 hours, most of the time was just chatting and drinking coffee, waiting for the computer to do things.

I left the old disk, there's probably nothing wrong with it, but if errors were coming up, and since it was very slow to extract the data, I don't think it's great. I've got no use for a possibly suspect 10G disk anyway.

I took her black ink cartridge, it was empty (totally, I've never seen one so empty), I'll look at getting it refilled, or a cheap replacement, instead of the $68 HP want for a new one.

I'll get that sorted, and take it back in the next couple of weeks.

I should go to bed soon, I'm tired, took hours to get to sleep last night. My sleep schedule is so screwed up now, because of a couple of days ago, when I didn't get up properly until after midday.

Have to be up early to go down the freeway to look at getting the details for the network setup. I'm not going if it's pissing down with rain though, not on these bald tyres, after my fun this morning.

My mate I go to dinner with just called me, he's at a guy's place, and when he right clicks on a folder, it doesn't do anything, and then explorer says "not responding" in the task list.

We went through all the startup items in msconfig. My god, the list must have had a scroll bar slider about 1 pixel wide, because there was about 400 things listed in as starting up.

Every piece of spyware, porn diallers, everything. We went through, and I told him all the things to get rid of, and he rebooted.

I got off the phone at that point, so I don't know if it fixed the problem, but my god, I'm surprised the machine worked at all, with that much crap running on it.

Half way through the day.

Woke up at 9am, it started teaming down with rain. Great.

I got up, had a shower, breakfast, and got ready to leave, the rain had stopped for the moment, so it was OK.

I took my tools to replace the phone connector. I was just about to leave, when I realised I needed a CD with AVG to install.

I burned one (took all of a minute with the DVDR drive).

I took off, rode down to the woman's place.

On the way, I pulled up to some lights, in a left turn lane, to go straight and overtake the traffic in the main lane. There was another bike out, he came up behind me. As the light went green, I went to take off, and my bike stalled. Stupid thing. Must have been from the cold or the rain or something, because it wouldn't idle properly when I first started this morning either.

The last 2 or 3 days of torrential rain has probably not done it any favours.

Anyway, I started it up again, pulled the throttle on a fair way, dropped the clutch, and did a massive wheel spin. Oops.

The bike did a huge fishtail back and forth, almost in front of the 4 wheel drive I was trying to overtake, someone beeped their horn, it sounded like the other bike.

I didn't pay attention, and just took off the down the hill, and kept going, left them behind.

Maybe I need new tyres, I think these are getting a bit bald, I've had them since last May, I had them put on a week or so before I went to Brisbane and changed my rego/license etc over.

I just checked the paper work, I can't find the invoice for the 2 new tyres (about $400 for 2 tyres, and fitting) I had them put on after the rego check failed (obviously) the odometer was on about 40700 at the check, and when I got my bike inspected in Queensland, the odo was on about 42700, so I probably had the tyres fitted about 41000km, since I had them for a bit before I went the ~1100km to Brisbane.

Anyway, after all that, my bike is now on around 58000km, so I got 17000km out of them, not too bad, and they are still fine in the dry :-)

I had just got there, when my mate who does the plastering (who I've worked for before)'s wife turned up.

We had a chat, while I looked at the computer.

Hmm, click on the user to login as, and it does nothing, just sits there, saying "Loading your Personal Settings", and won't do anything. It's not locked up, the mouse still moves, just won't do anything. Alt+Tab didn't help either, no hidden errors.

I thought maybe there was something in startup buggering it. I rebooted, eventually worked out F8 brings up the boot menu (nice of them to take away the last known good message and stuff). Booted in safe mode.

Logged in as admin, disabled all the startup items, tried again, no good. Went into safe mode again, as the user, there were more items, disabled them, still no good.

I tried running System File Checker (SFC) no good, won't run in safe mode, useful. There were no system restore points to use either.

The woman had mentioned that she had installed Norton AntiVirus, and then it didn't work properly. Maybe that's the problem.

I went to uninstall Norton.. no option in the add remove. Argh.

I went into the settings, of Norton, and disabled the automatic start. Woohoo! fixed.

I then went about ripping the rest of it out, since there was no uninstall. Could get everything but the shell extension dll. Ended up having to kill explorer, and delete it, then restart explorer. What a pile.

The woman and my mate's wife went out, to get the car inspected to renew the rego/insurance.

I grabbed the AVG disc out of my bike, that I needed for the next job. I installed it, did a "quick" update.

I downloaded Adaware, since I noticed the machine was full of junk.

By the time the files had finished, they were back.

Installed Adaware, ran it, cleaned out 200 something pieces of spyware. No virii found.

Did a full update of AVG, that was going to take like 40 minutes, we all sat outside, and chatted, mucked around with the dogs.

After about 45 minutes, my mate's wife went home, I checked, the download/update was finished, so I ran a full scan, 25 minutes later (and after deleting 400mb of Temporary Internet Files it was taking forever to scan), it was finished, clean. Cool.

I collected my money, and I left, heading for the next job. I was there for over 2 1/2 hours, but because it wasn't all that hard, mainly just time waiting for downloads, I just charged for an hour.

I stopped in at the electrical wholesaler on the way, to get a new phone end, they don't have ones the same as was on the cord, with a tension relief throat thing, so I went to the hardware nearby, they didn't have them either, so I just got a wall mount one.

I went to the woman's place, she was there this time. I put the new phone end on, tested it, it was all fine.

Collected my payment (charged an hour, for yesterday, today, and the new phone end inclusive). I installed the virus scanner, but I wasn't waiting around for another hour for the update to download again, once a day is painful enough.

I left, went to McDonalds, got some lunch (about 2pm) and read the paper for a while.

I came home, uh oh, it must be 2.30pm, and the school around the corner has just finished (I thought it was the school holidays). There were kids in the middle of the road up the back of the school, where I can avoid all the hell, but I have to go the wrong way up a one way street to get to the house, so I decided to avoid that, in case it was busy at this time of day.

I went around the front of the school, through hell. Kids, Mum's taxis, Busses everywhere, it was a nightmare.

I got through it all, and came home. I'm not going through that school zone again, damn busses nearly running me off the road.

OK, time to make some phone calls, get my stuff together to go back out and install that hard drive, later tonight.

Today is weird.

I woke up, I'm not sure what time, 10am something I think. I got up, but then I felt really tired, like I could barely stay awake.

All night, I had had stupid dreams, they weren't nightmares, but they were stressful, if that makes any sense.

I went back to bed, and I was watching tv, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness.

I had weird deja vu feelings, I get them everynow and then, but I've been getting them a lot lately.

I was watching a show, it was an episode of the simpsons, it had been on a few days ago, when it finished, an episode of Law & Order started, that same as had done when the episode was shown a few days ago, this time, there was more of the show on the end of the recording, than there was last time.. as the bit ran on the end of the recording, that I hadn't seen, I knew what the guy was going to say, it was just weird.

I went back into half sleep again.

I got up again about 12.30. I felt a bit sick, and I had a terrible headache. I had some breakfast (I think), and then I had a shower.

I tried to call my mate, to find out if the hard drive had been delivered yet, no answer on his home number, he must have left home. I called his mobile, he answered, he was just around the corner.

He turned up, gave me the hard drive, and invited me to go to the club with him, and some of his wife's relatives that are over on holidays with him. I said I would go.

He'd arranged with the woman that called me a couple of days ago to sort her computer out, he preferred that I do it, since he didn't know what time was involved, it was lined up someone could go around 4pm. I said I would go, and he gave me the details.

I got changed, got on my bike, and went to the club. Something felt wrong, I don't know what it was.

I got to the club just as my mate did, we went in. There was a bit of an issue getting the relatives in, because they didn't have any ID (like they are going to carry their passports around with them). The woman let them in anyway, eventually.

I went to the ATM, to withdraw some cash, to pay my mate for the disk, the others headed up to the snooker room.

I got the cash, headed up. I gave my mate the money, he owed me some money for fixing the busted computer (that got dropped) the other day, so I took that off.

I'm not sure what time it was, but while we were in their playing 3 games of snooker, both 2pm and 3pm passed.

I played with one of my mate's relatives against my mate. He won the first game, we won the second game, both were black ball games, that were pretty close, and in third game, we got thrashed.

My headache was really bad now, maybe I need to eat.

On the way out, I played the pokies, I put $1 in, one of my mate's relatives watched, I was playing 15c/spin all the way, until I had 9c left, then I bet 5c, and got 20 free spins. Argh. I spoke to the relative, but she told me she doesn't speak English (they are all Chinese, like my mate's wife).

A couple of spins into the free spins, I got another 20 free spins.

After the 40 free spins was over, I had won $5 something. I pulled out the $5, and played the rest away. A $4 profit, not too bad. As we went near the door, I had a single spin on a $1 machine, lost it, oh well, it could have been like the other night, when I won $23.

We all left the club, I headed to McDonalds, and got some lunch, I think it was about 3.40pm.

I was just sitting down to start eating, when my mobile rang. It was my mate, he had forgotten to pick up the busted computer I'd fixed, oh yeah.

I didn't want to rush home, so I called home, my parents were in, I told them what was going on, and to let my mate in to get the PC. I called my mate back, and told him that he could get the PC.

A couple of minutes later, my phone rang again. It was a woman who I fixed a pc for about a week ago (and still has a PC at my place that needs fixing). She wanted to know about an alternative to the Sat tv, now that the cards don't work anymore, heh, and also to know when I am available to do the networking down at the College that she asked about earlier, and I was putting off until I got all this gear configured.

I said I would come and do it on Thursday and Friday. They aren't going to wait forever, it's worth a bit of money, and I haven't had a paying job for ages, since the last work I did for her I think, over a week ago.

I still need to finished getting all this gear configured. There's not all that much to do, but my brain is just not letting me do it.

I finished my lunch, sat and read the paper for a few minutes. It was now after 4pm.

I headed to the woman's place to fix her internet connection (the one who called at 8am a couple of days ago, and said she thought the machine had a virus or needed reformatting).

The woman wasn't there, but her spunky daughter was. I went about checking the computer, nothing I could see wrong with the software configuration. Tried dialling, no good.

I setup a connection to a different phone number, still no good. Must be a problem with the line, or the modem.

I asked for a phone, and the chick went and got one, I plugged it in, instead of the modem, picked it up, crackle crackle crackle over the dialtone. No wonder it doesn't work.

Ok, so the line has issues. We tried tracing it (it's just an extension cable hanging out of the ceiling, I assume just plugged into a socket upstairs), but couldn't find where it came out upstairs. The chick called her dad, and he told her where it is.

I had a look, found it, just plugged into a double adapter, into a proper socket.

I tried it without the adapter, no good, still crackly. Must be one end or the other, or the cable. I undid the connector upstairs, looked fine.

When I checked downstairs.. aha.. all the screws were blue and green, all corroded.

I removed the live lines, they had little crimped on ends, which were all corroded. I tried cutting them off, stripping them, and screwing them back on, to temporarily test if that's all the problem was, or if the cable was stuffed and needed replacing.

When I eventually managed to strip the insulation off the wire, I found that one of them was all black, but the other was fine.

It must be something to do with the voltage, one is -48v or something (or is that the US?) and it's either attracting all the corrosion, or repelling it, which is why one side is stuffed, and the other fine.

I could hear talking going on upstairs, it was the chick, and someone else, I assumed her mother, who had arranged for me to fix the computer.

I swapped to using a different wire that was fine, screwed it in, then I went upstairs to swap it at the other end, and found that it was another daughter.

I pulled the connector apart, swapped the wire, put it back together, went back downstairs, tested it, clear as a bell.

I plugged the modem in, dialled up, on first go.

The chick came downstairs, I showed her, and told her I would have to come back to replace the phone socket, because it was all corroded, and that it would probably all come apart if they moved it.

I arranged to go back tomorrow.

I left there, around 5pm I think, I thought about going straight up to my mate's place, (while he was at my place dropping off the hard drive, one of his relatives asked me to dinner, for "Chinese pizza").

I had thought about trying to move his sat dish to point at pas8, and see if I could pickup some of the free to air Chinese channels, since the relatives are over for 3 months, and are getting bored, because they don't understand much English.

I came home, there were cars all over the place, some huge bus of a 4 wheel drive thing parked up across the driveway and the front lawn.

I came in, got my compass and protractor, mp3 player, quickly scribbled down the location of pas8, and took off again, it was about 5.35pm.

I got to my mate's place just after 6pm.

I went out, and started moving the dish, I had forgotten that the arm of the bracket was in an annoying place, that made it hard to make slight adjustments to the dish.

I marked where it was, and I moved it anyway.

I came inside, changed the sat channel frequency, and tried to get it to find the Chinese channels, it wouldn't lock on, the signal was jumping all over the place.

I went in and out moving the dish a tiny bit a truckload of times, tried different frequencies, even got on the internet and got more frequencies to try, but none worked.

The signal was still jumping up and down between 79% and 0%, weird. Even adjusting the rotation of the LNB made no difference.

I put all the settings back, and moved the dish back where it was, and the (Australian) free to air channels came back.

I think I will need to have another go, and move the arm of the bracket out of the way, so the dish can be moved more easily (and put on the bracket properly, perhaps the elevation is wrong).

We had dinner at this point, Chinese pizza. It's strange, it's like a pizza beurrito (sp?). You get a flat round bread, put on ham, egg, bean curd, lettuce, and other vegetables, and then you roll it up. It's mainly strange (to me anyway) because all the ingredients are on the table, and everyone uses chopsticks to get the ingredients, and then just eats the "pizza" with their hands.

I t was nice, I had 3 of them, and a glass of wine, and then I was full.

I sat and watched tv for a while, most of them went to bed about 10pm.

I sat up with my mate and watched some sat tv while we chatted, then a show "Bedtime" I've been meaning to watch came on, so we watched that, it was pretty funny. I must set tivo up to record it for me.

When it finished, about 10.40pm, I was feeling really tired, and my head is killing me. I said I would come back up on Friday or something, (Good Friday, so I don't think I'll be working/networking the college), and have a look at adjusting the sat dish.

I came home, it was a quiet boring ride home, my mind was wandering the whole time, probably not too good. It was cold, I think I'll avoid riding around on cold nights wearing silk boxer shorts in future.

I now have to go to bed, I've got about 6 things to do tomorrow.. Fix a PC, replace a phone socket, make some phone calls, then go and install the replacement hard drive, and some other things I'm forgetting.

I went back to freeside, I went back to the beginning, and I decided to try using Mason instead of Apache::ASP, hey, it can;t be any worse.

I went through, set it all up again, and what do you know! it appears to work! When I put configuration settings in, it stores them, they don't just disappear!

The phone rang, it's the woman who's network I support. Earlier I had received an email from her detailing how she still didn't have her domain name working, that I configured last week. I checked, and it appears that mail.herdomain is not defined, but www.herdomain is.

I had earlier vnced in, changed the settings, and it appeared to work, mail came in. I didn't test outgoing however.

I went through all the settings with here, and noticed something a bit strange, when we changed the outgoing mail server settings, it seemed to ignore them, even after restarting mozilla and rebooting the computer.

I then found something about an advanced button on the outgoing server settings tab, we went in there, and there was a whole bunch of junk in there, the same mail servers listed about 6 times each, after they were all removed, there were then blank lines in the box, so we removed those too.

I t was still trying to use the wrong outgoing server, one that wasn't even specified anymore. Hmm.

After half an hour of mucking around, I decided to install thunderbird instead, started downloading it, 11mb, this will take a while. While I waited, I started googling, a couple of minutes later I found a webpage detailing a known bug in this version of mozilla, it edits the wrong mail server entries.

I found the prefs.js file, opened it in a text editor.. what do you know, all the incoming mail server definitions had their outgoing to set to like smpt3/5 etc, when there was only a single smtp1 setting defined. That's where the "%S" is coming from I'll bet.

I changed all the dodgy references to smtp servers to 1, configured the single smtp definition properly, and restarted it all.

Oh look, it works. Groovy.

Now I can go back to freeside, I think I'm getting somewhere now.

I installed Duke Nukem Atomic last night, it kept complaining about it needed the CD, but it was in the drive.

I tried to find an old install of D3D, the version I bought, I don't have anymore. I thought I would have found one in like \oldstuff\crap\oldcomputer\games\something\Duke3d but I didn't. I've lost all my modifications somewhere along the way, my dodgy CON files. Oh well.

I dug out my CD, installed the original version, and played it.

It still had the stupid adult mode locked out (from when they tried to release it here in 1996 or whenever), but I couldn't be bothered finding the fixed exes.

I played it until about 12.30, then I watched some tv, went to bed watching junkyard wars, turned the tv off at 2am.

I got woken up at 8.10am this morning by the phone ringing, I didn't recognise the number. I ignored it. The phone rang again, it was my message service. The message was from the woman who rang last week, wanting to get her internet setup.

She wanted to know what I was doing today, if I could do it. She thinks her machine has a virus or needs reinstalling, gees, I'm not interested in that, just from the time factor. I have to get this billing software working.

I rolled over and went back to sleep. About 10.30am, the phone rang again, once.

It was my mate I go to dinner with, weird, normally he rings the landline. I got up, grabbed the phone, and went to call him back, engaged.. someone's on the phone. I sent him an sms to let him know that it was busy and I would call back asap.

I went through my email, checking the phone every couple of minutes.

I just started writing this blog, when the phone rang, it was my mate.

I chatted for a few minutes. He told me that he went to the Cafe to get a driver CD for the modems we used to use, and he was told that they are under instruction not to give or sell him anything. What a joke.

I told him that I need a hard disk, and arranged to get that, I also told him about the woman calling andf waking me up, it's a job he can have if he wants it.

I got off the phone.

He called me back again, he's ordered the disk, and it will get delivered tomorrow, and he'll pickup the computer I rebuilt that got dropped and busted.

OK, time for breakfast, and then to try to work out why the hell freeside will not save it's settings. (And why I can't drop the database).

I didn't get out there to get more Coke and junk food.

I wasted more time browsing.

I worked on trying to get freeside working again, still didn't get it working. I think I might have to find something else to use.

I fixed ICQ, it hasn't been working since I reinstalled windows, last year.

I had some dinner, I'll have to go out tomorrow and buy more food.

I cleaned up a bit, there are far too many pcs in here, but I managed to move them around a bit, and get it a bit tidier.

My phone rang, it was a woman I haven't spoken too for ages, A firend of the guy who owns the aircon business I used to work for, I look after her computer. She told me it had been running slow, and when she ran scandisk, it was telling her that the disk was failing. I said I would get a new disk, and come and install it this week.

All day, I've wanted to play a game, since I started looking at dreamcast stuff this morning. There is still dreamcast development going on, that's pretty cool. There's still no support for the crappy winmodem under dreamcast linux though.

I just dragged the games machine out, noticed the side was off, weird, this is the one machine that stays together.. then I realised, it's because I was mucking around with this machine before it was put away, I was trying to put a 3dfx card in it, which has tv out, but not by default, so it's no good, because I use this machine connected to the tv for big screen gaming.

I put the old 2d tv out video card I normally use back in the right slot, took out the sound blaster card with the dodgy line out connector, and put the cruddy old ess card back in (not great, but it works).

I noticed there were 2 disks in the machine, I vaguely recall one failing, and me adding another one in there. I took out the one that was just sitting there, a 10g Maxtor, hmm, I wouldn't have thought that would have failed.

I plugged it in, booted the machine up, the 10g disk works fine, it's got linux on it.

During booting, it complained the partitions haven't been checked for 739 days.

I don't know what machine this is out of, or when I installed it. It's got a stock kernel on it, so I can't have used it very much before pulling the disk out.

It booted up into xdm, but the keyboard wouldn't work for some reason (maybe it was plugged in the wrong hole on the motherboard, it's one of those dopey boards with the vertically mounted keyboard/mouse ps2 sockets, where they can be either way, and never labelled).

So I turned it off.

I think I'll put the games disk back on, and play a bit of Duke 3D.

I watched Blade Runner, had a few drinks, and went to bed about 2.30am

I woke at about 10.30am. It's pissing down with rain outside.

The phone rang a few minutes later.

It was the woman my mate mentioned on the phone yesterday afternoon. She wanted to know about getting her computer fixed.

I spoke to her for a few minutes, quoted her, and arranged to go there on Wednesday.

I've just sat on the computer for ages.

I had breakfast a little while ago, about 1.30pm.

I'll have to go out at some point, there's no Coke or junk food left.

Someone was trying to send me an sms all afternoon. I need to delete a message to fit it, but I don't want to. It's been ages since I cleaned the messages out of my phone.

My phone rang, it was the guy I've done plastering for before. Someone he knows buggered up their computer, and they want to know if I will fix it. I told him that I could, and my price. He said he would let them know.

I decided to find my phone adapter, and my old phone (since nokia data suite doesn't work with this one). I found the adapter, half the wires from the serial port connector had come off.

I dug out the circuit diagrams, worked out where they came from, resoldered it, I noticed the connector to the phone was coming undone too, so I was just fixing that when my phone rang.

It was my mate I go to dinner with called me, he wanted to know if the computer was fixed, yes, I sent you an SMS back about that. we chatted for a while.

I finished soldering the adapter, plugged it in, and the LED wouldn't go on.

I had another look, couldn't see anything wrong.

I ended up wasting about 2 hours on it.

I gave up in the end, it just would not work, I don't know what's wrong. The LED at least should go on.

I found the proper adapter for the phone I use all the time, plugged it in, and as expected it didn't work with nokia data suite (didn't think so).

I reinstalled logomanager, and tried to use that, but it doesn't do anything with messages. I backed up my phonebook.

I googled around, found some new phone software, that's supposed to support a bunch of phones, and have lots of functions.

I downloaded a trial, it should be enough to back up my phone, and my messages.

I pulled the messages out, cleaned it all up.

I couldn't find how to import my old messages from nokia data suite, there probably isn't a way. oh well.

All in all I wasted about 4 hours mucking around with my phone.

No one rang me to tell me if anything was going on tonight.

I watched a bit of tv.

I ended up having dinner about 10.30.

While I was waiting for it to cook, my mate I go to dinner with rang me again, he wanted to know if there was anyway to get the sat tv working, even temporarily. It's not likely, with the timing changes they've made, I don't think it would work across dialup.

I suppose I could waste some time trying though, I've got a decoder with one of my interfaces in it sitting here doing nothing.

I browsed the web a bit, ate dinner.

I'm just about to put Blade Runner on, and have a few drinks.

It's easy to keep a blog when you sleep until 1pm.

I went to bed about 4am, after watching a bunch of tivo's suggestions, and drinking quite a bit. I didn't get around to putting Tron on.

I went to bed after watching the movie last night.

I got up about 8.45am this morning, had a shower, got dressed, ate breakfast, and left.

I grabbed my crimping tool, some cable, rj45s, the switch, tivo serial cable.

I rode to the seniors centre, I left about 9.25am, the police didn't chase me there this week.

Just as I go there, about 10am, my mobile was ringing, it was my message service, I answered it, a message from the woman whose network I support.

Apparently the mail server had been changed, and they'd forgotten about the domain that her (and at least 50 others) use for their email, so her email address no longer worked, and did she want one under a different domain.

She wanted to know if I could get her a domain name, and sort it all out.

What a joke, they've changed the servers, and forgotten to move half the configuration, LOL, they have no idea, useless.

I went inside the club, said hello, and then I called the woman back. I sorted out getting a domain name for her, and setting up email. I would sort it when I finished at the club.

I got off the phone. I checked if the domain was available, it was, so I registered it.

My mate in the US who does my hosting (you know who you are :-) was a champion, and he set it all up for me immediately.

I got out of irc, and stopped mucking around, and got to work.

I plugged the switch in, crimped up a couple of cables, patched them in, and it was all done, I was finished about 11am.

I had lunch, and chatted for a while.

They paid me back for the switch I bought for them, and a few dollars for the rj45s.

One of the machines had problems running freecell, we mucked around for about an hour, and discovered that the nvidia utilities were causing it to go white, and then have an invalid page fault in cards.dll. I thought it was the virus scanner causing it, but it wasn't, just nview.

I ended up leaving the club just after 2pm.

I went back to the shopping centre (where I found the bag etc). I posted the tivo serial cable.

I decided to pop into the department store next to the post office, to see if I could find Tron on DVD.

While I was in there wandering around, some guy asked me if I was the "Sea FM Fugitive", no, I'm not, and I left.

I went into another department store, didn't find Tron, and as I left, the woman on the front door came straight over, here we go, no, I'm not trying to shoplift something, I don't have anything tucked into my jacket "Are you the Sea FM Fugitive?" she asks. Argh, "No, for the second time, I am not".

I went for a bit of a wander, went into Electronics Boutique, I'm looking at the DVDs, and some guy asks me if I'm the Fugitive. Oh, for God's sake. No.

I asked him why he picked me "oh, you look a bit strange, and you're keeping to yourself, just minding your own business".

Yeah, take a hint I thought, I'm minding my own business for a reason.

A couple of people talking behind me started talking about it, and I commented I had been asked 3 times so far.

I left there, and I looked in the next music shop, some chick came running up and asked me. I'm getting sick of this.

I then headed into another shop, some guy came racing up behind me and asked. No.

I went in, didn't find Tron, I left the shop. As I was walking back from the shop, some woman pushing a stroller with a bunch of snotty kids asked me. "No, I am not" "oh, is everyone asking?" "yes, they are" and I kept going.

That's 6 now.

I got a bit fed up at this point, and started heading to leave.

I stopped caring at this point, 2 more people asked, I can't remember their details.

I went into a music shop, found Tron, it was $19.99. Bought it.

I left, as I came back near the exit, some chick came wandering out of a shop and asked me. That's 9 times now.

I thought about hanging around to go 10 for 10, but I couldn't be bothered.

i went back to my bike, and left.

I went up to see the woman I registered the domain for, and set it up on her machine.

Apparently they'd fixed the mail server, but she still wanted to change over, because when I get my stuff up, she will move over to my service.

I set it up, had a chat for a while, and then I left.

I went to my mate's place (who went AWOL last night). He wasn't there, or my mate down from Newcastle, but his wife was.

I sat in for a while, she was watching Evolution, we finished watching that.

My mate's wife's phone rang, it was my mate, he was down in Sydney, with our mate who came down last night. I spoke to them after a few minutes, and they asked if I was interested in going down to the city tonight, since they mighe be staying down there. I said to call me when they knew what they were doing.

My mate's wife said she was going out tonight, but didn't have a way to get there, so I offered to take her. She had a shower and got ready. I sat and watched the tv for a while.

We took off, went to the supermarket, she bought lemonade and icecream to make snowballs, and I got some Coke to drink with my Scotch when I get home.

We went over to my mate's ex girlfriends place.

I went up, and setup kazaa on her machine, easier said than done, it's really hard to find kazaa lite now, it's just about been killed off the web.

I had a snowball while I mucked around.

I found it in the end, waited a while for it to download, and set it up.

I was wearing my "bridge climb" t shirt, and my mate's ex girlfriend asked if I had been, and if I got the photos. I found them on the web, and brought them up.

I've still got them up.. here.

We chatted for a while, and I left.

I came back near the supermarket, I got fuel.

I decided to pop in to my mate's place and find out if anything was going on.. noone and no cars there.

I went around to another mate's place, his car was there, but he was not. He didn't answer his phone either.

I gave up, and came home.

I'm about to put some fish and chips in the oven, and start getting pissed on Scotch. Then I'll watch Tron.

Yet another dissappointing Friday night.

This is all so crazy I just have to blog now while the events are still fresh.

I'm sitting watching Blues Brothers, and my phone rings. I pause, answer it. (9.45pm).

It's my mate that I go to dinner with, who's on holidays in Queensland at the moment, he tells me he doesn't know how to do that messaging thing, and here are the phone numbers I asked for. I think about it.. Oh yeah, I sent an sms asking for the phone numbers yesterday morning, hopefully so I could arrange to install the switch today.

I wrote the numbers down. He told me he's coming back tomorrow, and we got off the phone.

I called up the guy, (on the landline). Just as someone answered the phone, my mobile started ringing, it was the tone my message service rings, so it wasn't important, I chucked it on the floor and put my foot on it because it's so loud.

The phone had been answered by the wife of the guy I was calling to speak to, but that's ok, she knows what's going on, so I setup going to install the switch tomorrow, and getting lunch. I'll head up there about 9.30. Hopefully the police won't chase me half the way this time.

I got off the phone, and I was just checking my email, when the landlline rang once. Weird. Then my messaghe service rang again. It was my mate who broke his wrist a couple of weeks ago.

He'd come down local, on of our mates was supposed to be picking him up, but hadn't turned up, he'd waited 30 minutes, and was now in the pub waiting. He wanted to get the mate's phone number (he lost his phone when he was in the US a few months ago, so doesn't have anyone's phone number) from me.

I couldn't very well call him back, since he was at a payphone. I tried to call the mate who was supposed to be picking him up, his phone took a very long time without ringing before it went to his message service. Crap. I tried it again. No good.

I might have to go up and pick him up, and then work out what's going on, but I've had a few drinks.

I tried calling my mate (who was supposed to be picking him up)'s wife, she answered, didn't know where he was or what was going on, and wasn't at home, and was without a car. Apparently her husband was now an hour late to pick our mate up.

She would try to call her husband at home, or would go with my mate (who was in the US recently)'s ex girlfriend who was wherever they were, and had her car there.

My mate's ex girlfriend got on the phone after that, and asked what software she needed to download music, and could I help her sort it out in the next few days. Sure. I got off the phone.

I had just typed the first line of this blog, when my mobile rang again, it was my mate who had gone AWOL, apparently the train staff had told him the wrong things, it was a screwup, and he'd gone back and forth between 2 stations looking for my mate. I t was all sorted.

I'm going back to my drink, my chocolate, and my movie.

I was woken up about 10am, a woman calling who's network I support. She was having trouble getting her mail or something. I told her I didn't work there any more, there was nothing I could do about it. She told me she would call up and give them hell. Groovy.

I got up.

I was mucking around on the computer, mum came in shortly after, with the mail, my new credit card turned up, and the money for the tivo serial cable I was supposed to send out yesterday, but the post office was shut when I got there.

Didn't do anything useful all day. It was a nice day, I thought about going to the beach (just riding out there for a perve), but instead, I just sat at home and browsed the internet all day. I didn't even get to the post office to post the serial cable.