The Inner Circle

Well, as usual it’s been a while since I last wrote in my diary. I haven’t felt like writing in nearly two weeks. But, that’s mainly because of what’s happened to me, by people, work, etc.

I’m on my lunch break now, so I thought I’d sit down and write about how I really felt. Or, as much as I want to give out, I’ve become a lot more closed recently, which is a bad thing to all my normal friends. I just haven’t felt like talking about what I feel, which isn’t to good for me either.

So let’s see, what’s happened? Well, I’ve obtained my new server, xeon.* is a dual Athlon with 2Gb of ram and over 350Gb of HD space, dual network cards. It’s fun, I’m still deciding what role it’ll have as it’ll be taking over most of the work from rubidium.*.

I started using a netgraph module to bind both the network cards together called ng_fec. However this module only had two ways of balencing the load between the different cards.

It could do it by MAC address or by IP address, however because most of the house computers are so close together, it ended up that all the connections went out of one card. It also ment that it was only possible to send a maxiumu of 100mbs to any computer.

So I put on my programming hat, I ripped the module appart and understood a suprisingly large amount of it, I’ve always had issues working with unix kernels, I find them over complex. I started to think, why couldn’t I just alternate the packets between the cards, so I wrote the code to do so, and much to my suprise it works.

It’s now possible for that computer to send 200mbs to any destination, that’s a huge amount of bandwidth, unfortunatly I don’t have another computer (currently) that could recieve that amount of data, however I had two ftp transfers going on at the same time and they where both pulling 10.5Mb/s, much much data. This is of course helped by the speed of the raid array.

So that’s the server stuff over and done with, works been okey, my boss is off this week, and my boss’ boss is out today, so I’ve been left to my own devices. It’s fun and quiet, the way I like it, it gives me chance in the quiet periods to think about other things, such as…

The DALnet CMS, it’s starting to take shape again, I’m writing a load of classes to handler staff, servers, team, nodes, etc, this should make it much much easier to program about, it also makes it far more maintainable.

I’m looking forward to having this one complete, I feel loyalty to the main webteam to get it completed, we still have the deadline of late December, then we have to start inputting data, it’d be nice if we could launch it on the new year at 0:00 GMT. A new website for a new year. Once that’s done we can move onto my.dal.net (read new users.*).

I’ve done a little work on the new version of siren, it’s code name is myst, thanks to maloy. It’s certainly better then the alternatives that where brought up.

As for my love life, which I’m sure many of you will have thought I was avoiding mentioning by now. I’m not seeing Millie anymore, we had a talk before she went back to France last Saturday. She feels that she’s restricting me, because if I met someone I couldn’t go and see them. I tried to explain to her about the fact that I didn’t want to see anyone else, but she didn’t seem to get that concept.

She says it’s not due to anyone else in France, although I’m somewhat not convinced, although that’s just me being jealious. I’ve hurting inside about it, after all I still care for her so much. Although this small part is happy, at least I know where I stand, how she feels and I don’t have to worry. Well, heh that won’t stop for a while.

We talked and decided we’ll always be friends, which was somethign we agree’d a long time ago. She said, joking or not, I’m not sure “don’t worry, I’ll always have sex with you when I see you”. That confused/hurt me a bit, I haven’t talked to her since she left, I should really email her, infact I’ll do that tonight and see how she is. I’d load up MSN messenger, but I don’t have my iPAQ with me.

I also lost my email client in a file transfer accident. Heh, read, I cocked up. So if I had you email address, I don’t anymore :). Luckly, I was able to get a large amount of the DALnet email back from Wagahai.

I really should try to write in this more often, although I’m not sure what about, I don’t seem to have any huge problems anymore and my days are just boring. And people, well most, really don’t want to read about DALnet or my geek adventures. But maybe I’ll bore you anyway.

Oh well, that’ll do for now this is an overly large entry,

Later,

Pete.