Present Perfect

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new IP address assigned every fifteen minutes. The net result is that both my IRC and IMAP connections are pretty much unusable.

Also, some machine somewhere was asking my DHCP server for an IP address every minute, always pretending to come in via a different nonexisting host.

Friday evening I wanted to try and fix this. I started by trying to find the rogue host. I couldn't find the MAC address in any ARP table, and I couldn't figure out if there was a decent way to ping MAC addresses.

In a short flash of lucidity I configured my DHCP server to give that MAC address an IP address, to see what happened. After some waiting, that worked, and it got an IP address for me. So the host was somewhere close !

After portscanning it and telnetting to it, I realized it was my old Compaq Router locked in the fake ceiling. Why it never showed up in ARP tables I have no idea, but there it was, the bastard.

Anyway, fixing that didn't really solve my ADSL problem. So back to that. Only then my main server started throwing errors, and then I couldn't log in anymore. Reboot the machine, hard disk problems. Lots of IDE timeouts, sectors unreadable, and so on...

Sigh. So I bit the bullet - I'll stop using the old machine - it had the irritating problem of not accepting hard disks bigger than 30 GB anyway, and the mirrors I try to keep locally for fedora.us and rpm.livna.org building have grown bigger than that. And to replace it, I used some other machine lying around that I know some people will hate me for.

Anyway, it took me until about five in the morning to save what was left saving, migrate configurations, test stuff, and so on.

Luckily, the day after we were expected at Julien's place :) I felt a bit tired the next morning, but Wim, Johan, Kristien and I left in my car around 1. I had chosen not to bring my laptop :)

The rest of the weekend was a mix of great barbecue, floating around in the pool, having fun, laughing, playing petanque, reading, talking, playing guitar, singing, and staying up late. I almost forgot about my server trouble. Almost.

Anyway, we had a great time, and finally headed back home Sunday afternoon. After which I went back to fixing up the server. And I'm still stuck with crappy ADSL, hurray.

The past weekend started badly. I had been having lots of internet issues at home lately; half of the day my ADSL connection times out and I get a new...