Archives, eh
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# Work, Relatives and Wi-Fi
On Tuesday I was feeling lost. On Wednesday I was thinking I had made a mistake. On Thursday I knew I had made a mistake. On Friday I was feeling better and had decided to just roll with it.
The real problem is that I no longer have control. At the last place I had complete autonomy over everything to do with my projects. I was a team of one and accountable only to the client.
Here I have no client. At this point I don’t really even have customers. The sitch, Kim, is that there are a half dozen sites running various vintages of the version 3 codebase. There is then the version 4 codebase which has been in development for something along the lines of a year – maybe eighteen months – but is being kind of forced upon the company by their sole developer. Owner of the company doesn’t see the need for it. I can credibly argue the point from both directions.
To mitigate the coffee situation, I may have Counterstrike installed, but it crashes my system after five minutes. I may have water views and all that, but Darling Harbour is essentially one huge multi-acre rippling mirror reflecting and focusing the light of the afternoon sun straight into my optical nerve. I may have administrator rights on this website but it is a triple-edged sword. Sure, if I like I can browse through people’s private galleries. However people whose private galleries you might want to browse through have no need for a site like adultmatchmaker.com.au. The googles, they do nothing!
My sister made it to the UK fine. She has had trouble settling down as well – she has better reason though, being thousands of kilometres away in the
armpit of the universeMother Country where she knows no-one. Global Roaming didn’t work as expected for her, so she was making stressed out reverse charge calls to Dad. Those crazy poms thought she was South African, although I suppose we can blame Hollywood for that since American actors can only do one accent, Incompetely Trained American Actor, and “Australians” always sound South African or Kiwi.On the other hand, I called her last night. My heart sank when I heard her voice turn all Essex-ey on a couple of words. She’s already turned to the Bland Side.
Meanwhile, the wireless network is networking. The two desktops connect fine, the internet connection is fine, bittorrent torrents, World of Warcraft connects – even if I am planning to close my account in the next couple of days – and so on and so forth. All is wirelessly good. Except for one small thing. The whole fucking point of getting the network was so I could connect to the network on my notebook without having to have cat 5 running across the room. The notebook – or rather Ubuntu – is not playing nice with the PCMCIA card, a D-Link DWL-G630. The windows drivers are installed using ndiswrapper and the ndiswrapper admin tool claims that the correct device for that driver is present. The only problem is that the system hangs up immediately after the login screen. It’s like it is 1998 again and linux’s relationship with hardware is shitting me to tears. Or perhaps it is just my relationship with hardware.
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# A solution to my DI-524 and DSL-302g issues
So that google might pick this up and offer aid to future generations: Optusnet, DI-524 wireless router, DSL-302g modem, internet access.
As I mentioned earlier, I had the wi-fi network working, but no net access. The router didn’t not appear to be talking to the modem correctly. I didn’t bother calling Optusnet tech support because they weren’t going to help anyway, seeing as how what I was doing was unsupported by them. I was routing around all their attempts to make me their bitch in perpetuity.
So I called D Link tech support and had a solution in a few minutes. My first mistake was trying to use PPPoE(Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) for the WAN connection. I should have been using Dynamic IP and allowing the modem to handle the PPPoE connection. I then had to change the MTU setting from 1500 to 1400, apply the settngs and reboot the router. Connection was then achieved and I proceeded to start opening ports for Bittorrent &c.
I wonder how the fuck it was that I could have worked out this voodoo without being told. The Dynamic IP thing I could have had working, since the router may actually have auto-detected it anyway; it didn’t give any indication it had auto-detected and I changed it to PPPoE because the description said that is what most DSL connections require. But the MTU bit…wah?
