Week of 2nd October, 2006

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Monday, 2nd October

It has been announced (courtesy the London Times newspaper) that Derek "Blaster" Bates died on 1st September 2006, at the age of 83. I shall always remember his classic stories of demolition - "The Shower of Sh*t over Cheshire" and "Oulton Park: The Naming of Knicker Brook" to name but two. Thank you for some great entertainment, Blaster. Rest in Peace.

For a flavour of Blaster's humour, try the transcript here, or the .mp3 rips from "Laughter With A Bang" here (you'll need to scroll down to the relevant entry - AOLPress won't let me paste the link directly)

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Tuesday, 3rd October

E-mail from CafePress this morning - "Babylon 5" Scripts Vol. 9 is on it's way.

Jenny 'phoned up to request an attempt to order her Physics course textbook from Amazon - the University branch of Waterstones is out of stock until Friday. I found something that resembles what she described, but I'm not certain - the publisher is supposed to be Addison Wesley, but Amazon list the publisher as Benjamin Cummings. Eventually, I consulted Google - and Benjamin Cummings is an alias for Addison Wesley. So it looks like this is the correct book - but I don't want to commit UKP40 (plus postage) for something that I don't know is right, because Jenny doesn't have the ISBN. We eventually agreed that she would purchase it herself, locally, thus guaranteeing correctness.

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Wednesday, 4th October

Although the set of books I got for my birthday is useful (including, as it does, material on the Postfix MTA) Tux, being a Debian Sarge box, runs Exim 4. I'm MTA-agnostic, although MTA choice can be a cause of Holy War for some people. Exim has a reputation of being opaque, but it seems easier to at least try some more detailed configuration, over and above what Debian does on installation, rather than risking breakage by changing to Postfix. So I've ordered the canonical Exim books from Amazon - on Supersaver delivery. Why spring extra for next-day delivery when this is a long-term project?

Shelves cleared of short-form ingest material by day's end, which is good, despite some problems with the new kit. I even filled the missing music videos - 12 of them. We need to do these eventually, 10,000-odd of them though there be, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a WIBNI task for the moment.

Two hours of overtime were required to do this.

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Thursday, 5th October

A shambolic day - everything went pear-shaped in the afternoon and early evening - the new kit basically stopped for about 4 hours, after being slow all day. And a major ingest error blew the October service level - as one of the others said, "Where's the incentive, now?" Well, there is the future - something we're lax about now could come back to bite us in a month or so. But at least I've done the logging VHS labels for the rest of the month.

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Friday, 6th October

E-mail from Amazon - the Exim books have been dispatched.

We're still waiting for Jenny's DSA-grant-funded computer system. It was supposed to be delivered in time for her departure for Lancaster last weekend, but the supplier didn't have licences for one item of preloaded software, so it wasn't dispatched. Today, I chased up the machine, and after a bit of telephone tag, I'm told that the machine is now complete, and can be delivered on Tuesday next - this will, of course, be to Jenny's University address. All I need to do now is tell her, and sort out communications with the installation engineer. All included in the price - which, being a Disability Support grant (because of Jenny's dyslexia) is paid by our Local Authority.

<pause>

That's done - Jenny will call the supplier and the engineers on Monday. A morning delivery doesn't work for her - lectures.


I've commented before about download speeds here at Semi-Detached Bedlam, and the apparent lack of effect of the change from ADSL at 2272kbit to ADSL Max at 7616kbit - I still get no more than about 800kbit or so actual datarate down. I've wondered whether this is due to internal routing issues, or link contention. Today, I decided to try to find out.

But first, I'll describe how things have worked here. Due to my requirement for static IP addresses provided via DHCP, I need a reasonably powerful dhcpd. The canonical package is from the Internet Software Consortium. I could run this on King, but it would be the only thing he would be doing, and I don't want the 100 watts or so of power consumption just for DHCP. I thought to try it on Tux, the Debianised Linkstation, but Buffalo, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to compile in two kernel options that ISC dhcpd needs. So it dies immediately, with appropriate error message.

Another option is to run a dhcpd on one of the several other network black boxes here. And this would work, but you can't persuade any of them to allocate static IP addresses to particular MAC addresses - with one notable exception. The D-Link DP-802 that I used to use as my dial-up router in the days pre-broadband is capable of this feat. You can also configure it to dispense static IPs via DHCP in a non-dialup environment.

But it's fascist - it insists on being the default gateway for your network. In other words, whatever it's IP address is (and mine is set to 192.168.x.254) that is the gateway address it hands out.

To get around this, I set things up such that the Vigor 2800 router (on 192.168.x.1) is the DP-802's gateway. This works, but I suspect that the DP-802 can't handle traffic at better than 800kbit/sec. I told you the routing here is eccentric.

I have no other network appliance that can provide static IPs via DHCP. But I do have a Linksys WRT54GS V4.0 wireless router sitting in it's box, which is capable of being flashed with the OpenWRT software package, to provide a fully hackable platform. OpenWRT includes the dnsmasq package, which is a DNS forwarder and DHCP server. Debian has it as a package in Stable, for the powerpc architecture, so it'll run on Tux.

So I installed it, and experimented. After a couple of hours, I managed to get the DHCP side sorted, to the extent that it would issue DHCP leases the way I wanted them, and would forward DNS queries.

Trouble is, it wasn't stable. Tux's connectivity was up and down like the proverbial yo-yo. I could be editing a file via puTTY from the Acer, and suddenly the cursor would freeze. Worse, ntp lost connectivity, and Samba was wedged - running, but not serving files.

After about 4 hours fighting this, I said, "Enough..." and reverted everything. It took a further 2 hours or so to settle (it's 10 p.m. as I type this) but everything seems to be back to normal. ntp has synchronised, Samba is working, DNS is stable, so I hope all is now OK.

Memo to self: Don't experiment on a production box.

I now have 2 options - one is to try OpenWRT on the Linksys WRT54GS, instead of the D-Link DP-802, or I can spring more money and set up a box running Chris Boot's PicoDebian mini-distribution, probably running on a Soekris NET4801. That will give me ISC dhcpd and named, and since they will be running on a dedicated box there should be no untoward effects on production boxen. OpenWRT might well work also, if my problems today were caused by interaction with installed software on Tux. That's the cheapest option, given that I already have the WRT54GS.

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Saturday, 7th October

The Exim books arrived this morning, so now I can start the attempt to configure Tux to be my in-house mail server. He already works for mail local to himself - cron jobs routinely report themselves by e-mail to my account there - so now I need to get external mail routing working. Without losing any mail traffic. I also need to set up special handling for mailing list storage, and an ability to reply to aliased e-mail as the alias would be good. Oh yes, and I want to forward what little e-mail arrives for Katy and Jenny to their University accounts.

I'll probably use fetchmail to collect mail by POP3, leaving it on Demon's server during the transition, and then allow Turnpike to re-get the traffic and archive it. In production, when and if I get that far, fetchmail will get the mail via POP3, and delete from Demon - or I may just allow exim to do it's thing via SMTP (although Demon ostensibly don't allow that on ADSL accounts)

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Sunday, 8th October

Verry interesting... but stupid. Experimentation with exim and fetchmail today. I obviously need to read the Exim book more closely, because I now have local e-mail going via Demon's mailservers - which is silly. E-mail to local recipients should not leave my domain. But it turns out that I probably won't need fetchmail. SMTP mail transfers work, both ways. Well, I never doubted that I would be able to send to the world via SMTP, but I was expecting to be barred from Demon's mailservers other than by POP3 - not true. But I'm still worried about losing e-mail while I get all this working, and what e-mail has been incoming has gone somewhere - I know not where at this moment.

This is not helped by the fact that Debian, in their wisdom, use an autogenerated configuration file for exim, which lives in a very non-standard place. I'll give them this, though - if you put an appropriately named file in /etc, where configuration files are supposed to be, the Debian build of exim4 will use it, in preference to the autogenerated one.

So, because of that uncertainty, I've reverted to the original configuration for the time being. I've made progress, though - it is now obvious that I should be able to get this working, with some more hacking. Which is a start.


It's Jane's Mum's birthday today - she's 86, and still going strong. So we took her to the "London Apprentice", near Syon Park in Isleworth, for lunch. Excellent meal, arguably over-large portions, but very tasty.

We followed that with a visit to the garden centre at Syon, for a little shopping, and then home.

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