Done in Seattle (20120610 Su - 14 Th) with bonus trip report

Sunday morning, just hours before my flight left for Seattle, our router finally became unusable. It had been deteriorating for quite a while; I have no idea what the problem was. It would be good for a while after a reboot, then the lags would get steadily worse. By Sunday the "while" was down to about five minutes. I spent the rest of the day struggling to recover.

By the time I had to leave I had gotten our Linux-based WAP more-or-less configured, but it turned out that I had neglected to test ssh-ing in from the WAN side. So I spent the entire week without access to the files on the inside of the firewall. Including my email archives and password database.

Fortunately, I was able to set up email forwarding from savitzky.net to my gmail account, so I didn't miss much. Next time, though, things will be different. I'll write about that at some length later, for the geeks in my audience.

The flight was paid for by one of the two companies I had interviews with, Zillow. They'd booked through the aptly-named cheapflights.com (and ended up paying more than they would have through Southwest); my flights out were on Delta, and back on Alaska. Bletch.

I arrived in Shoreline well after midnight, and flopped into bed.

Monday morning I went with Naomi to get my first look at the new apartment, and pick up keys. Spent the rest of the week slightly croggled by the idea; there's nothing that makes it quite as real as a set of keys and a tape measure (which I wielded on Wednesday).

Monday afternoon was my interview at Zillow -- several coding tests and a lot of data structure and algorithm questions. I think I did ok. Gorgeous view from the 31st floor, a block from the waterfront. Great atmosphere -- it would be a fun place to work.

Tuesday afternoon was Intentional Software. Tougher questions for the most part, no idea how I did on that one. Very opulent and quiet offices, which I guess is what you can expect with Microsoft billionaires bankrolling it. Brilliant people; on average an older crowd than Zillow.

We'll see.

Wednesday I ran errands with Naomi, and we had lunch in Columbia City at a diner called Geraldine's Corner. Yummy chili with a side of excellent hashbrowns. After that she showed me the huge Goodwill in that area. I'll be back.

Thursday morning I had brunch with Chaos at another diner -- Shari's in Lynnwood. Which left me with just exactly enough time to drive down to Seatac and return my rental car. The trip back was, mercifully, nonstop, so I was able to get home in time for dinner. And to finish fixing the network setup, which only took about an hour once I had access from the inside.

All in all, a good trip.

Quite a few links in the notes, such as one accumulates over the course of five days without an update. The New Map of the Solar System has all thirteen planets (counting the five dwarfs).

( raw notes )

Adventures in Family Computing: Replacing the Router

As I mentioned downwhen Stargate, our gateway/router, had become basically unusable by Sunday morning. It's rather mysterious -- the CPU seems to be working fine, and it passed rootkit, memory and filesystem checks just fine. But there you have it: it would slow down rapidly after each reboot.

The next problem was finding a replacement. I tried the machine that had been our router. It wouldn't boot. Even after I noticed that the power connector on the disk had been disconnected, and fixed that. I tried several different ways of replacing it with the fileserver, and succeeded only in disabling its networking altogether with an ill-advised firewall install.

At that point I had two choices: add an extra ethernet card to one of the laptops, or reconfigure our wireless access point as a router instead of a bridge. Fortunately I did the latter. Which was something I'd been toying with for quite a while anyway. Did I mention that I'm somewhat obsessed with saving power?

At this point I have to mention that it wasn't quite that simple. I had to do quite a lot of reconfiguring, and got some of it wrong. For example, forgetting to test incoming ssh. I never did get that to work; it's something of a security hole, so it's not surprising that the router's ssh daemon doesn't listen to the WAN port. When I got back I did what I should have done in the first place, and forwarded the fileserver's ssh port to an alternate on the router.

Also forwarded the fileserver's web server; I still need to set up the appropriate virtual hosting. The other thing that needed attention was that the router was hosting my external git repositories. I moved them to my external host, at savitzky.net. No problem.

DHCP and DNS were a bit of a problem -- the DD-WRT distribution on the router doesn't seem to support multi-homed interfaces or my usual config files. I'll deal. I'll probably have to abandon my hare-brained idea of keeping WiFi and wired interfaces on separate subnets, but that wasn't working too well anyway. And I lose an instance of apcupsd, unless I can get that going on the router.

But the net gain is huge -- I've eliminated a box and about 12W of power-sucking from my rack, improved my security, and gotten a major project out of my "to.do" file. I win.