The Mandelbear's Musings

Worried about Colleen. She seems to be getting worse, not better. I'm don't know what I should do. No idea what I can do. She's declining, and I'm scared. No idea what the fuck is going to happen when I go off to my 50th reunion in June.

I had a great time Monday doing a back-yard archaeology dig with N and (her younger kid) j. We actually found a few things, which made it a lot more exciting.

I finally managed to get the little yellow GL-iNet router configured as a wifi-to-ethernet bridge for the printer. That turns out to be tricky if you want both ends to be part of the same network. It's even pretty tricky if you don't. I am, however, finding my way around OpenWrt, the more versatile (and more up-to-date) of the two aftermarket Linux distributions for routers. I'm now working on the somewhat more ambitious project of setting up a bridge to the Box Room, using the Linksys WNDR4300 I ordered from eBay on Monday. That seems to be going a little more smoothly.

I ran the numbers on next year's taxes. Turns out I can reduce my withholding by over $1K/month. That will help a lot.

Pretty much done incorporating the editor's suggestions into $GIG; now I have to get the rest of it -- about the last third -- finished.

I really just want to crawl into a hole and hide until things get better. But I know that if I do that, they never will.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Fairly productive this week. Still feels like I'm getting farther and farther behind.

Lots of network administration -- I now have all three of the household's routers upgraded to dd-wrt. By the way, the fact that now Microsoft pushes Windows 10 upgrade to PCs without user consent gives you yet another reason to upgrade your computer to Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Emmy had some lovely 4x6 prints made of "cat and mouse", and I finally got Curio's Rainbow Bridge page to a state where I don't mind posting the link. I cried while I was working on it. (This is not a bad thing, on the whole. Tears are better than being numb.)

More links in the notes.

So... as promised, here's the state of the Starport's silicon life-forms and their network ecosystem. In some ways it's not all that bad. In other ways it's awful.

It would be nice to get enough of this done by the time Colleen comes home for her to come home to working, largely spam-free email. It would also be nice not to be paying for over $100/month worth of services we don't need.

... so this morning I took advantage of the fact that installing the new UPS required me to power down the entire bloody rack to re-route a few cables and to reconfigure the "interim" gateway machine that had been my main DSL router since last April when I installed it, and make it the "interim" gateway for the old DSL line. Pretty simple; I took down the mail server because I wanted to be around when I turned it on in case it didn't work. Good thing -- there are still some pieces of configuration that have to be changed. Like the hostname? Little things like that.

I left the old gateway turned off; the final uptime was 603 days. It will eventually become the main gateway.

At that point, I headed out to Fry's to get a new DSL modem. They had a D-Link for $50. Stopped at Sears on the way home for vacuum cleaner bags; by the time I got home it was raining hard.

One of my Linux laptops, Argo, is currently the interim gateway for the DSL line. It's taken me about the last 3 hours and a support call to get the bloody D-Link configured: apparently it's not really smart enough to come up in bridge mode by itself. That's going to keep causing me trouble, I suspect. (Come to think of it, my old modem probably just needed a reset...) (Never hurts to have a spare, though.)

I also picked up a cheap ($15) 5-port ethernet switch for the Y.D.; she's been complaining about slow wireless connections on her laptop. Part of that, and I suspect a lot of other network flakiness, was almost certainly due to the fact that the boneheaded family sysadmin (yours truly, of course) had the same gateway IP addresses configured on both routers. Probably never would have discovered it if the Y.D. hadn't told me she had an internet connection at a time yesterday when I knew that the main DSL line was down.

My shiny UPS (APC BX1500LCD) is currently showing a 17% load, and an estimated run time of 34 minutes. This makes me happy. I'd be even happier, presumably, if I didn't have as many machines running in the rack. I'm getting there...

Next in line for configuration are mail on the old gateway, DNS and possibly web on the interim gateway, and a re-install from scratch on the new gateway. Which will have four ethernet ports -- Whee!

update: 17:34 ...and a couple of firewall fixes later, mail is back up. Some messages may have been lost between early this morning and now; I sometimes wonder about forwarding. I *really* need to fix email. But not today.

Yesterday was pretty busy, actually. Started the day by rebooting the fileserver without the old IDE drives, though I left them in the case just, um, in case. Took a little longer than expected to get all the glitches out of the grub and /etc/fstab setups, but I never needed a rescue disk. Got a start on updating the daily mirror script for the new partitioning.

Measured the distance to the Younger Daughter's school -- it's about 1.7 miles by car, so maybe 1.5 by the obvious walking route. An easy morning walk for me, thought I don't think the Y.D. is interested. Would do her a lot of good, though.

Spent most of the morning at work reboooting the computers in my office and making sure things were still ok after Monday's power outage. Everything was fine, except that I missed a meeting because my reminder software runs on my desktop. Oops. Had a good idea in the afternoon that elegantly solves a nasty cross-site-scripting vulnerability, at least in the most common case. No, I can't say anything else about it yet.

Three mile walk, with hills. I needed that.

Spent some time in the afternoon researching short-run CD-ROM prices. I think I can get the bonus disk, About Bleeding Time, to a duplicator sometime this week, which means it should be ready in time for Baycon, in (urk!) a little over 2 weeks. I was originally planning to just get them printed, and burn them myself, which would give me the freedom to burn plain CDs or CD-Extra's for those who need them, but it's possible that CDROMs with audio will work for almost everyone. Depends in part on whether I can fix the remaining level problems by Friday.

When I came home I bounced the fileserver again to install the second 400GB drive for the mirror, formatted it, and finished rewriting the mirror script -- with some sanity tests in case I didn't finish the initial copy by the time the script had to run. Which I haven't -- I just started transferring the big partition this morning, and it looks like another hour or so to go. (8:24am: it's done now.)

Then, in a fit of productivity seldom seen in this decrepit old fractal, I added the missing bit of goodness to my TrackInfo script to look in the current directory for a secondary metadata file. That means that in albums like About Bleeding Time that have multiple versions of the same song, I can actually give them different descriptions in the liner notes. Yay! So I did that, too, burned a test disk, and took the flower_cat out for a test drive. Reluctantly gave up on putting in the version of "Silk and Steel" from Consonance -- the 5KHz feedback was never entirely suppressed, and it made the guitar sound twangy, too. Too bad -- it was a much better performance.

At this point the home network is in pretty solid shape, and shouldn't need much more attention until the time comes to move hosting for theStarport.org and its email, at which point I'll be able to dump my old DSL line. Repackaging the gateway and upgrading my workstation hardware are also on the short list, but aren't particularly urgent and won't require much in the way of time or planning.

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.

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.

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.

The flower_cat and chaoswolf are off at a Baycon -- or is it Westercon? -- meeting; a newly-arrived selkit is in the living room hacking something in SL, and the super_star_girl's plans for the afternoon have fallen through. I'll have to see if there's something I can do to amuse her. Meanwhile, the taxes are done except for the printing; I want to walk the Wolfling through hers and make sure she doesn't need her tuition as a deduction. I can use it if she doesn't.

Meanwhile, I still need to work on bringing up the new gateway system, and make sure there's no more recording I need to do. Some of the parts I put down over the last week seemed a bit shaky. And there's still a bit of percussion work needed.

The new DSL line is working well; I did a little tweaking with the ruleset to cut down on log clutter. The most common attack turned out to be Windows messenger popups. Go figure.

And did I mention that I still have taxes to do? Did the last of the receipt data-entry today; next up is the year-end credit-card summaries from AMEX. They categorize charges so it's easy to spot the charity contributions.

...and his techs will appear. My shiny new DSL from sonic.net came on mere minutes after my previous post; the AT&T tech showed up about an hour later to test the line. There was a mysterious outage after I upgraded my service from one static IP address to eight -- apparently it took a while for something to propagate. But it's working fine now: speedtest.net says I'm getting 5175Mb/s downstream, and 656Kb/s upstream. That's a bit of a step up from 325Kb/s each way on the old link. So long, PacBell SBC AT&T!

Nobody showed up to install a "home run" or an outside splitter, but as it turned out I didn't need it. All my inside wiring goes through a single point,

Darned if I know what I'll do with 8 IPs -- one will be the main gateway and web server, some of them will get used to NAT some of my inside boxen, mainly so I can ssh to them directly, and some will get used for assorted web servers. Eventually I'll probably want some for ssl (https), since certificates are tied to IP addresses.

Next on today's schedule is organizing the credit-card receipts for tax data-entry. (The checkbook is easier, but I did that Tuesday.)( done)

After a couple of meetings, one of which started at noon and dovetailed neatly into a very productive two-hour conversation which will almost certainly end up with an invention disclosure, I came home to put the Y.D.'s desk together. First thing I noticed was a piece of crumpled-up paper on the floor by the diningroom table that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the missing Ikea receipt for the damaged desk. Yay! Fell out of somebody's pocket, from the look of it.

Put the desk together, which took about 2 hours. The super_star_girl said, "It's just as pretty as it was in the showroom!" So she's happy, which means I'm happy. I don't think I was in any shape to assemble the thing last night -- daylight and rest were essential. Just installed her computer. Her sister's old Canon printer is missing somewhere in the garage attic, but everything else is up and running.

The DSL install is scheduled for Friday, and the modem is on its way via UPS. Still need to run cat5 to the demarc.

Still need to do taxes. I'll start data-entry tonight. Still have three or four parts to record, and a half-dozen or so songs to mix. Probably Friday, since I have to be here for the DSL install.

With the Fiancé (selkit) coming down soon from the frozen North for an extended stay with the Wolfling, the question of upgrading our miserable 384Kb/s DSL line once again comes up, this time with some urgency.

OK, so I seem to have convinced myself that Sonic is the way to go. So the main choices are:

1. Switch to Sonic on my existing DSL line and take my chances with how long I'm without service during the transition.
2. Add Sonic on my primary line, then drop the secondary. Take my chances on how long it would take, including the possibility of AT&T putting roadblocks in the way like they did last time. Smoothest transition -- only one DNS change.

Any advice? There are additional questions, like how to bridge my email and locally-hosted websites if I go with option 1. But we'll go with this one basic choice for now.

I really don't have the time to be messing with this, but that's another matter.