The drive over to Pymble is certainly not a bad one… Traffic never seems too bad, and the main problem is staying to something approximating the speed limit.

I had a strange networking problem earlier today – I was trying to get a GPS tracking system to report to a new server… I have been testing the software on my Laptop, and I wanted to have things run on my Windows server for when I do not have my laptop plugged into my home network. Fine. I have a NAT rule that allows for routing the packets as needed.

Changing the rule did not work. Nothing happened. After probably 15 minutes I tried running the software on my laptop. It still worked! Strange. Delete the rule and it still works (but incorrectly) even though the rule does not exist. Recreate it, and things still do not work as expected… VERY STRANGE.

In a last effort I decide to restart the tracker. Things suddenly come to life. What was happening is that the firewall remembered where the packets used to be going, and though that this was still an old connection that needed to still work. When I restarted the tracker it got a new IP address, and this caused a new ‘connection’ to be created… which worked as it should have!