Biobug.org

Since I’m a networking professional, I thought I’d comment on the outage for one  reason: In the words of Cap’n Solo: It’s not my fault.

In real life, I’m a network analyst responsible for a large university wide network. Even when I was regularly writing the site, I had zero responsibility for the server or it’s network connection.

Hackaday.com suffered from some server transition issues the other day, so they set up a fail-whale contest. Now, it seems that they’re really down – and down hard. From my view of the internet, there are no DNS records.  I’m certain that they’re working hard to get things back up, but for now the site is down hard.

Good luck guys.

I’ve finally returned to the land of the rag top! I picked up this slightly unfornate looking 92 Miata last week. The factory top is decent, but not the window. Luckily, it included a hard top – in 92 they added a rear defroster and light to the hard top.

With a mere 132k on the odometer, decent tires and running condition, it was a fair deal. I’m going to get the small rust spots on the front of the rear wheel wells dealt with, then it’ll get some fresh paint. Some day it’ll get some forced air. For now, it’s getting a tune up and an oil change.

There was a bit of stutter near 3-4k rpm, so I swapped out the plugs and wires. This seems to have cured it, but the idle is down to about 500rpm – a tad low. Once I get that sorted, she’ll be purring.

While my wife was out of town for a week, I decided to finally install the new sink she’d bought (last year). I’d been putting it off for a while: I suspected that the project snowball – and I feared being without a bathtub with two kids. I was right….
Read more »

I’ve been making some major progress on my wireless gear lately. My house is now running enterprise class wireless gear – There’s a Nortel wireless security switch that can be had cheap, thanks to some corporate mergers EOLing the product line earlier than they planned.

Meet the Nortel 2270 wireless security switch:

This thing uses SX fiber to connect to my network and can manage something like 26ish access points. I’m running five or so around my house. I can create multiple SSIDs and assign them to seperate VLANs on my LAN. Thanks to that, I can leave an open wireless network for visitors and create a seperate, more secure but still restricted wireless network for my machines. My APs are Nortel 2230s – they do 802.11a/b/g.

On the client side, I finally remembered to purchase an ALFA network 500mw USB wireless card. That’s right – 500 milliwatts or 1/2 watt. To take advantage of this nifty card, I’m creating a virtuam machine on my macbook pro to run Backtrack 3 final. (There are other things, but this is a good excuse to set things up.)

 My first ever design turned product is available from sparkfun electronics. They are now carrying my keypad bezel. It’s the exact design I used in my how-to series.

I finally called the telco about my DSL issues. Monday morning I had a tech on my doorstep. (surprising!) He got rid of the ‘half ringer’ that was on the box outside my house and redid the jack inside just to be sure. Then he ended up replacing the modem as well. Once the new modem was on, I ended up with 12Mb down and 1.1Mb upstream. Since then, the thing has performed pretty well.

Just a quick note that it is possible to set up a basic westell dsl modem to take care of the PPPoE side of things and still act like a bridge. I use it like this to allow me to simply run DHCP on my firewall and get the outside IP address instead of the NAT’d private IP space address.

Update: It seems that the built in DHCP server on the westell is just crappy. The connection died several times in a row. Finally, I set my firewall ip to static and things seems much more stable. One more change: I also upped the number of acceptable LCP echo failures from 6 to 3o. Since the connection was dropping so often, it made sense to crank up the limit.

I can still access the modem admin stuff too. I also set the connection to be always on in the profile editor. For some reason they think that having your DSL modem connect on demand is a good idea by default. (This is a retarded idea. The on demand connection is so slow that it makes you think your high priced DSL service is junk.)

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. After writing daily for Hack-A-Day for well over a year, it’s time for me to step back. While I’ve got loads of projects that I want to work on, I just haven’t had the time. I will certainly continue to write a how-to now an then for the site, but it’s time for me to start moving on to new things.

Part 1 of my latest How-To is up on Hack-A-Day. Check out the How-To here or go grab code and schematics here.

Since I sold off my ike housing and coolpix 5000, I decided to add an inexpensive digital camera to my arsenal for scuba diving. The ideal cam probably would have been an olympus c5050, or a powershot s70. Since I’m on a tight budget, I couldn’t resist a brand new Canon WP-DC800 underwater housing for $30 on ebay. The housing fits the digital elph s400, s410 and s500. These are a few years old, and originally went for $600 or so. I scored a cheap s500 to fit the housing.