Mostly not what I'd planned on doing

[mdlbear]

Got up ungodly early, for some reason -- 4:30 or so and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up around 5am. Grah. Figured I'd get some work done on the network setup while nobody but me was using it. Hah!

Went out for a walk (4 miles, same route by Los Gatos Creek as yesterday), came back a little after noon, had some leftover ribs, and got back to hacking the gateway. Almost made it. There are still some serious oddities on selkit's machine, but I think that any machine that gets its IP address from DHCP should get the fast connection now. Still need to finish making the switch for the static IPs. And at least the laptop isn't pretending to be a router anymore.

Geeky details:

The way this has been done is thuswise: First, install a laptop (argo) as an interim gateway to the new DSL line. That was, it turns out, exactly a month ago.

Then, start configuring a mini-ITX board (formerly a thin terminal called "terminus") as a replacement for the current gateway. This was a little more tricky and tedious, because it has to deal with routing four zones: the dmz/wireless zone, the net, and the trusted and semi-trusted local zones. The dmz is actually handled by a Linksys WRT54G (unmodified, so far) serving as a separate router -- that simplifies things a bit.

Unlike the laptop, I didn't have to change the configuration on terminus at all -- just slap in a new 2GB CF card and do a clean install of Debian Etch. The new gateway will have a disk, eventually, but it'll function just fine without it. The plan is to reboot it once a month to clear out /tmp and prevent the kind of uptime scorekeeping that has made me reluctant to reboot the old gateway, which is now just one week short of a year of continuous operation. Try that with Windows!

At the moment, the new gateway is operating on a temporary IP address, and the old one is still up (on the old DSL line, which I'm still using for email) with its old address. It has its new address too, as an alias. I still need to move the "official" gateway address from the old box to the new, at which point all the statically-configured machines except the mail server will switch over to the fast line.

The other bit of geekery I have to do tonight is take the old IDE disks out of the fileserver and configure another 400GB SATA drive as the daily backup. It ought to be done tonight, or there's a real risk of filling up the backup disk. But hardly anyone but me uses Linux except for reading mail, and I usually go to bed about an hour later than the kids.

About the time I was finished stabilizing the network, the chaoswolf was in serious need of some attention. Since her fiancé was busy, I went up and mounted the shelf standards and tabletop for her hobby center. There was a certain amount of stupidity involved -- it didn't look level, so I remounted one of the standards only to find the screws going in the same holes they'd been in before. But that's done.

So, at this point in the writing of this post, is the front yard rose-pruning I've been meaning to get to all week. Part of the problem is that I only think about it when I'm actually looking at them, which means going in or out of my car, and the pair of pruning shears that's normally on or near the front porch has disappeared. So has the pair that lives in the shed under the back stairs. Fortunately, I keep a pair hidden in my toolbox in the office. The good pair.

The net result is that I haven't gotten a darned thing done on the album, but what I have done definitely needed doing. I probably still have time to work on the bonus album, which is very close to done. But I need to get printed blanks ordered and figure out exactly what I'm going to burn on them, if I'm to have them in hand by Baycon.

Album contents/format geekery:

The bonus disk is supposed to be a combination audio CD/CD-ROM. This kind of thing is very poorly documented, and I haven't been able to make a dual-session disk that I'm satisfied with, or that's in a format that a duplicator would so much as look at. So my next step is to try making a mixed-mode disk with the CD-ROM data in the first track; most modern players should be able to handle it, though it might be necessary to skip the first track. That's what my car player makes me do, even with a dual-session disk.

If anyone out there has any experience making dual-session (CD-Extra) disks, and especially doing it in session-at-once mode on Linux, let me know. I'll be burning them at home: the short-run duplicators I've found will take uploaded audio files or ISO files, but won't let you mix 'em. Foo.