This morning Jane and I went to the dump and then picked up a bunch of old wood. Rail road ties actually. I've put them all around our front yard driveway. It makes it look much better out there. I need like 30 more though. Give it time and we will have all we need.

Anyway, I need a shower.

I had a great time skateboarding today. My back is still hurting, but I endured it. I'm thinking that I just need to keep doing it until my back gets stronger. Too much sitting around you know.

I didn't learn anything new today. I just stuck to what I knew. I did get better control over my ollies on the wedges today. I was really feeling the pop on them. It's been many months since I've had solid ollies. I've been gradually losing my abilities over the past few years. I need to get back into it.

I also bought a deep cycle battery today at Costco. I had this plan to hook it up to my APC to replace the small Gel-Cells that are worn out.

I found out that my APC is a 24VDC system. So I had to borrow another battery from Johnny to complete the setup. No problem there. I wired it all up and plugged it in. So far so good. Still I get the error light that the batteries are bad. I was hopping that it would fix that.

I'm going to test it tonight by unplugging everything. I sure hope everything stay's running. I hate it when all my servers get turned off without a shut down. Sometimes it really causes damage to the files. I'll sync everything then unplug it.

Anyway...here it goes...

Didn't work. The APC status went from full power to one bar in 20 seconds. I plugged the power back in before it got any further down. I was scared that the servers would get switched off. I guess I'll just have to buy a 2500W inverter and float charger.

What's the difference between a Mac and a WinTel PC? View the photo and you will see that a Mac has much more though into how it is designed. You don't see a bunch of nasty wires all over the place. You see a nice clean system.

Now if you want to see something really cool, check out this!

So there was a dual power outage yesterday. I found out that my backup generator just will not work on my APC. It's time to buy some Deep Cycle batteries to hook up to it. The Gel-Cells only last a year then become useless.

My plan is to get about four 12vDC deep cycle batteries. Hook them up to the APC via some really thick wire. Then see if they go. I'm hopping that they work with the APC. If not, then the next step is to get a Inverter and a float charger. I will run totally off battery backup, and charge as I go.

I have the plan, I just don't have the money.

First things first. New roof on house. Next, build garage. Then it's time for the goodies.

The three steps of a Silver Springs whirl wind. This is not a tornado. This is your run of the mill whirl wind. Still, it's very impressive out here in the desert.

1. They always start big. This could be a mile high if not higher.
2. They always get bigger. The house in front of it is really far away from it. You can barely see the house in it to the left.
3. Then all the dirt and sand just falls out of the sky like rain.

It's cool to watch, but bogus to be in it.

Seems as the network is finally stabilizing now. I think everyone is back online and things are working correctly. I've had a few questions about all the hackers trying to bust into people's systems, but that's why Window's users need firewalls.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get the other two relays on the same subnet. I hope to figure that out soon.

I also need to finish the NoCatAuth install. I really need to get user log in's working. I have noticed that there are several users that are not customers on my system. I need to block them in a big way. This weekend I should have that running.

Ahh... I got it fixed. I installed the latest version of the DHCP server and it works great now. I can't believe that they would have the old version of DHCPD running on the disto.

The good thing is that the OS is Debian Linux and I can use the APT system to install software. It makes it really easy. It only took 30 minutes to upgrade all three AP's.

So life is one step closer to perfection. Now I just need to run it for a few days to see if the dreaded Power Save Mode problem is fixed.

Well, I found out about another problem with my switch Sunday. When I set everything up, I accidently swapped the wireless cards. So the card that was the AP before is now the back haul. Problem with this is that a lot of my customers still on the 1.0 DLink firmware could not connect to the wireless until the reassigned the remote MAC. I need to get everyone upgraded to the new 2.0 firmware. Not only does it solve this problem, but it solves the DHCP problem that the DLinks have also.

Fun with computers...

Upgrade...well... almost complete. I spent the last 35 hours redoing my whole wireless network. I had to collect all the relays, bring them back to the office, pull the compact flash cards, replace them with new one, install Pebble linux on them, and return them all in working condition. You'd think it would be a 5 hour job. Nope...

For the life of me, I could not configure them the way I want them. I had to go back to another alternate way. If only I could get a grasp on routing. What I want to do is:

Internet --- VPN --- AP1 --- AP2 --- Client.

Where they are all on the same sub-net. I wanted to have all the client system on the public IP addresses so they could play their games and stuff easier. I'm going to stick NoCatAuth on it for the login stuff. Then do some IPsec stuff with that. I want to have many options.

But, alas, I could not get AP2 to relay through AP1. I could see AP2 from the net, and from the Client, but I could not get packets to move through. Sucks.

Well, the most important thing is that the new and improved HostAP drivers are installed. Hopefully this will solve the nightly lock up problems.

I think this is going to be the year. The APC is in good shape. The cleaning lady is not allowed in the server closet any more. The power company installed new equipment out on the street.

I should get one year uptime on my old Linux box this year.

As you may know from past posts that I've been trying to get a year uptime on a web server that I maintain for about five years now. Every year something happens that causes the power to be turned off to it. APC's blowing up, miss-haps in the closet, power company's hardware blowing up in the street, .... The list goes on.

Not this year. It's going to happen!

Here is the current stats: *
Booted On Thursday July 31st 2003
Current System Uptime: 316 days
CPU Info:
model name : Pentium II (Klamath)
cpu MHz : 233.870
Memory Info:
MemTotal: 128420 kB
MemFree: 20348 kB
SwapTotal: 130748 kB
SwapFree: 130748 kB
Now serving 145 web sites.

I can't wait... 54 more days and I'm there!