The Inner Circle

Well, it’s been a tiring week and weekend, I’m really starting to feel the need to relax alot more then I do. The holiday from work doesn’t seem to have really helped as much as it should. Maybe I should really try chilling at the weekend and not doing anything.

Anyway, the new RAID array is now in and working. I really have to remember that manufacturer sizes are in billions of bytes, not gigabytes. The RAID array is 1.5Tb in size, with 1.4Tb usable (thanks for that FreeBSD ;)). I copied the old data onto it last night and it’s now at 1.1Tb capacity. Tonights task is to rebuild my PC into a slow POS. :/ Maybe I’ll get away with playing SWAT, I guess I really need a new PC, I did spec one up last weekend, it came to the best part of £800. Sigh.

I’ve ordered a new gigabit switch from Dell (strange I know), it appears to be web managed and supports vlans and port aggregation. I’m thinking it might do the job. My current gigabit switch doesn’t support vlans at all, and goes flunky when you try and use it for that. It was uber cheap from Dell.

If you arn’t already a fan, I’d like to recommend Questionable Content as a great web comic, it’s about the only webcomic I’ve got into, and I’m not sure why. ’tis pretty neat and worth a read. You might need to go back to the beginning though.

Anyway enough of that for now.

D.

Whooo, tomorrow I go to Scan and pick up the bits for my new RAID array, again it’s gonna be RAID 5 and running on an Adaptec card, but it’s all new. I’ve brought a Adaptec 2810SA 8 port SATA I raid controller and five Western Digital 400Gb WD4000YR’s. The drives themselves get excellent reviews and show to be the fastest on the market for that spec, they support TLER and NCQ which should help error recovery and speed (respectivly). I also decided to buy a 5 harddisk caddy system that fits into 3 x 5 1/2 disc bays, and they each have their own LED! mmmmh RAID lights flashing.

So what else is going on, well at work we’ve been routing ResNet, instead of it being a static class B routed together at a Cisco 7401, now we have five routers all over campus using OSPF. Oh that reminds me, TEH VPN!

Andy and I have been realising our dream of a proper VPN between us. By the power of greyskull…. not wait, gif interfaces and OSPF, we have a resilent and fully functioning VPN. Point to point links make life very easy. I’m also in the middle of moving my network to the 10.10.0.0/16 range so that I’m fully VPN compatable, it’ll be nice once it’s done and there will be scope for some funky ACL rules on various vlans, including /30 (point to point) links for server. mmmh nice. I’d quite like to borrow the work N2X’s in order to through put test the FreeBSD router and to see if polling makes any difference at all. I shall have to ask Len about this.

Tonight work are off out for a curry with everyone in networking and network systems, it’s looking a tad thin on the ground, but otherwise it should be a good evening, including the chance to win a Video iPod…. mmmmh sexy.

Apart from picking up my RAID array tomorrow I also plan to pick up a cross training exercise machine to help loose the flab I’ve managed to “obtain” over Christmas. :/ Ah well.

That’ll play for now.

D.

Well it’s a new year, it’s also been nearly three months since I last blogged. I guess I’ve been a lazy naughty boy, although the real reason is that I just haven’t had time or felt the need to, not that I feel the need to now, well not on an emotional level. To quote Andy, I’ve been a “non blogging tart”, an accurate description to be sure.

It’s the new year and as such time to make resolutions that the chance of keeping is slim, there are two this year, one serious and one fun. The serious one is to get fit, I’m about two stone heavier then I should be, so it’s time to eat more sensibly this year, and to buy some hidiously expensive exercise equipment. I’m tempted to get an eliptical cross trainer. After using my mothers step machine last year I was able to reach a decent weight, but I could never easilly loose it off of my chest, with a cross trainer I should be able to.

The non serious resolution is to blog a lot more. Even if no one reads it, I’ve found it nice to have a history that I can go back and read on. To that end (until hiddenblog is sorted) I’ve installed WordPress and removed the old narwar.net. Sara said she liked the old one, which I’ll agree it was nice, but the only used part of it was the blog.

So it’s time to catch up… whats happened in the past three months?

First thing is I’m still living with John and Ali, and really intend to for the next five or six months until Sara is in a position to move in with me over summer, we’ll have a look for a house two months or so beforehand. Work is still good and enjoying it every day, it’s always different.

I haven’t had a huge amount of time for personal projects, I’ve got myself a Soekris 4801 which I intend to make a missionable FreeBSD machine. So far I’ve got FreeBSD down to about 16Mb with plenty of usable utilities on it. I intend for it to do routing and nat when it needs to, as well as other things such as monitoring and logging.

I’m also in the process of setting up a proper routed VPN between several sites, on which I’m trying to run OSPF to distribute the routes automagically, however I’m having issues atm. I have two Quagga servers set up and they are (or were atm) swapping routes correctly. They arn’t however sending or recieving routing information from a Cisco 2620 I have also connected to the VPN. It’s causing some issues.

As for projects I’ve kinda accidentally involved myself with programming (or attemping to) the new version of LuBBs. Looking interesting so far, although it’s only in planning stages.

Ah well that’s about it for now, I’ll try and write more stuff soon!

D.