29-April-2002 : Pacific Power

You never know who is reading these things. Probably best not to try to work it out either. The site is continuing to grow. Some of the areas are now hierarchcal. Others will be soon. I did not want to go down that path, but I now think it was the only way to present the qantity of information that I needed to.

I have now implemented a HIGH AVAILABILITY system thanks to LINUX-HA.ORG. The system switches over to a backup machine if the main machine goes down. The process to do this was painless. I am still waiting for the ability to do a similar on my firewall which is more proprietry in nature – but will have the capability in the next month or so. All I will need then will be another machine.

And another machine will be coming. I am about to leave Pacific Power since it is shutting down, and I will get the chance to buy my desktop machine. This machine will then become my backup firewall server. Did you know that an ATX desktop case will fit in a 19″ rack case on a 4U shelf if you remove the feet. I didnt think so.

23-February-2002 : AlwaysOnline

AlwaysONLINE is not online yet… The problem seems to be partly or mainly with telstra or something. That has yet to be resolved. AlwaysOnline are now onto it. Aparently there is a second call in on my line. I did not even know that there was a first.

Got the Alcatel SpeedTouch modem, and it is a much superior modem to the Netcomm one. It seems to be a bit simpler to configure too. Changing IP address of the ethernet is easy. [Australia Post has stuffed up the delivery of the Netcomm unit back to AlwaysOnline though – I am glad I sent it registered]. The unit also has a serial port WITH A STANDARD CONNECTOR. The manual is detailed and usable. The only stupid thing was no filter – seems that some parts of the world have the filter in a box outside the house. Makse sense.

I have placed the box onto the Internet so that AlwaysOnline can remote administer to get it working (it is firewalled though).

I have been updating more WWW pages today. I now have over 200 online with correct formatting… More without page hit counters. GOOGLE has a copy of the site now too… Although their copy was before I moved the NavBar on the left to TEXT.

17-February-2002 : WebDrive and AlwaysOnline

Got a copy of a program called WebDrive that turns your FTP or WWW site into a file server. Took a bit to get the right permissions on the files in the FTP site so that I could save, but once I got it working it was great… It is just like SAMBA without all the problems. Speed is good too. I think I will pay for a copy. It is worth it.

Storms last night. Blackout for about 0.5 seconds. UPS coped without any problems. Thank god for the UPS. Needed to resent the modem just before lunch – probably because of a spike after major blackouts in our area.

AlwaysOnline are exchanging the Netcomm ADSL Modem Router with an Alcatel Speedtouch Pro. What good service!.

Started using MultiEdit again. Fantastic product… A real programmers editor. Now if I could only add a command to do a WMK -af from the interface onto a Unix system…. I will have to think about that one.

Started on Powerpoint presentation for Wyong…

15-February-2002 : Dummies

Still no luck with the Netcomm ADSL router… Asked AlwaysOnline if I could bring it in for them to reset. I have spent too much time so far on it. The ISP documentation is still unavailable too… Still they are a cheap ISP…

Purchaed DSL for Dummies (And I will not provide a link to it) and found that it provides none of the details that I am interested in, like what VCI and other three letter codes mean.

14-February-2002 : ADSL Connected

ADSL has been connected. At the moment there are some configuration issues that I am attempting to iron out… when those are sorted there will be better performance here… Check out this page for more…

AlwaysOnline provided a NetComm NP1400 ADSL Router. This is a re-badged router. The internals are from Virata. The USB interface is described as a ‘Virata VVB PC-Attached gateway’. This unit has a TELNET interface, and a serial interface. No serial cable was provided. When I needed it later I stole it from my Netcomm SmartAccess device which provides dialup access to my network.[YUK]

The unit came with two RJ11 Cables, and a filter for an existing phone. In my case I needed a splitter as well. Most places only sell an RJ11 splitter with a plug and two sockets. Tandy has a splitter (F-0061 for $8.95) with three sockets, in black to coordinate with most 19″ racks. This worked well, once the extra cable I needed (and found in the garage) was thrown out.

Changing the IP address of the unit was not nice. Rule number one is to follow the instructions… Unfortunately they are only on CD-ROM. Kill Netcomm for that (at the same time as killing them over the lack of serial cable).

What I did find was that the serial connection helps show what is going on. Also if you stuff up your connections this will allow you to recover. After many hours I manually configured the unit. This would have been much easier with a few things

Printed instructions so that I could easily see the summary of PPPoA.
Instructions from AlwaysOnline stating what the settings are in case you need to update yours
A password that is correct – The letter that came with my password informed me that my password now had a 1 in it, instead of an l… This took 3 hours to find.
Documentation listing your permament IP address….

The best thing about Always online is that you always get a person answering the phone with them. Email tech support is great too… I thought that Telstra Direct support was good… AlwaysOnline is better