Another saturday off with no building one. I should be building tomorrow though. Today I will be catching up on some work that I did not get done in the last couple of days… I have some emails to work though, and some other things to work on. I might need to buy a new pair of side cutters – I managed to loose a pair yesterday I think too.

I have worked out why my Internet connection was having issues last weekend. I discovered that somewhere in the connection between me and the outside world was a piece of hardware that did not like it when there were somewhat more than 250 outgoing connections open at any one time. Since I did not seem to have trouble with incoming email or Web traffic I am guessing that it was outgoing packets only having an issue.

And once a connection was working (such as remote desktop), the speed on the link was good. Therefore it was not a bandwidth problem. This leads me to think that either my firewall or my modem were having issues with the number of connections with ‘NAT’ or Network Address Translation. NAT is only really used for outgoing connections since incoming ones get forwarded to a specific machine. So my guess is that the NAT table was getting filled up meaning that more outgoing requests were failing – for things such as WWW or anything else. I suspect that this is actually my ADSL modem that has problems.

And a link… Qantas has decided to charge people using credit cards to book $12 for an international ticket, and $4.50 for a domestic one, but they will be offering BPay. Also, Telstra will be offering selected people a $90 / month all you can eat local and long distance phone plan. About time really.