Entries this day: work work_late

work

1:42pm Friday 17 December 1999

Today is our big DSL switchover day at work. Well, actually it will be tonight. Currently (until december 31st) we are paying for a full T1 line. But we are using an embarassingly small fraction of the line. Tiny small. Average of 2kps with bursts as high as 200kps. T1 is 1.5Mps, almost 1000 times more than our highest bursts.

Anyway, we are switching to DSL, with 416kps as our upper limit, for a fraction of the cost. 1/7th of the cost. wait 3/14ths of the cost. yeah.

ANYWAY, I'm getting to learn all kinds of new and cool stuff! How to set up a router; how to telnet to our routers to change their IP addresses. How to change all the IPs in our NT network. How to change the IP in our FreeBSD (unix) box. How zone files direct all Internet traffic. How to change domain information on interNIC with networksolutions.com. How to change the third level domain names of our machines. Mine will be called rabbit.

I love it!

Oh.. one weird thing: I was testing IP switching on a relatively unused machine, and noticed it had only 48 megs of memory. I ripped out some memory from a different entirely unused machine to see if that would help. (All the memory slots were full on the good machine, so I just replaced a couple of chips to see if the available memory would go up or down. It went down to 40 megs.)

During this process, I noticed the power supply fan wasn't spinning. I tried to bring it back to life with a screwdriver (give the blades a push), but it didn't work. So I couldn't boost the memory, but I did give it a new power supply! Yay!

With Love
- Rob permalink

work late

1:35am

I logged 11 hours today, 9 of which go to DSL switchover.

Was not able to get the mail server happy.  We can receive email, but
not send it; the mail server thinks our new IP addresses are hackers
trying to use our server as a mail relay.  (This is a technique used
to spam people; our server won't allow it.)  I don't know where to add
our IP addresses and say, "hey!  we have new IPs!"

I also couldn't get our printers' IPs changed.  After I changed all
the computer IPs, I realized I had forgotten the printers.  I couldn't
telnet to them because the IPs were different; so I called Brian who
suggested connecting it directly to my computer (I'd have to change my
IPs back to old IPs first) but I couldn't get that to work.  Pooh.

Sweet and Wonderful Wende brought dinner over at around 9pm; we ate
and talked for an hour then she slept on the couch until I could no
longer think coherently.  Bed bed bed.

With Love
- Rob