I tried to switch to Ad-Hoc mode, but that didn't work at all. I could not get any of the customers to link up to the AP. I'm not sure why. I switched back to AP for now.

If I don't figure this out soon, my head is going to explode.

Sunday I am going to switch everyone over to IBSS (Ad-Hoc) mode. This is a way to figure out if the problems with POP3 are in the HostAP drivers. If everything works right, then HostAP was wrong. If I still get the problems over at POP3 then it has got to be interference from something.

I just can't believe it. I'm still having wireless problems with POP3. I get "wi0: timeout in wi_seek to 14a/3c; last status 403c" over and over. Sometimes it effects the speed of the network, other times it does not. So three boxes and two operating systems later, I still don't have a solution.

I'm checking customer systems right now. I have one that uses a PCMCIA card that I don't normally use. I'm going to replace it with my Lucent card tomorrow and see what happens. All the other equipment is Linksys or D-Link... As far as I know...

I just might be someone hijacking a connection, or trying to jam it...

The new relay is in place finally. I got it installed yesterday. I worked until 9pm getting all the customers set back up. It seems to be running good right now. I have my eye on it though. So far the DHCP server is much better. It issues leases to most of the clients that the old system would not. I like it better. I can also have the log's directed to my server so I can see what's going on. I'm thinking that this new setup is going to be really good.

The next thing I need to do is build in a reset script. If it can't ping home then it will reset the interfaces. If it still can't, then it will reboot. The old system had this, but it did not work...at all.

Anyway... I have a lot more work to do.

I received my new Soekris setup today, but my power supply died. Arg. I'll have to buy a new one, then get this thing setup ASAP.

Still problems with my RackSpace server. It's a single processor 1.8GHz system that runs slower than my Dual Xeon 500MHz system. I just found out that 5 year old Xeon processors still kick ass. You can pick them up for about $35 each now days.

So, my web/database server at RackSpace is just slow as molasses. The load average is up to 9.00 now. Crazy. I'm running around trying to optimize everything that I can to make it run better. So far no luck.

Today I tried to install Linux 2.6 kernel on it. What a failure. I guess it didn't have the correct RAID setup to work with the server. RackSpace isn't going to tell me how to do it. They want $150 an hour to do it.

I should have just went with a unsupported FreeBSD box that actually works well. I should have ditched the tape backup option and did it all myself. Just have it run on their bandwidth. Probably would have been cheaper and less headaches.

If I could do it all again, I would run like hell from RackSpace.

Net Nimble offered to replace the WRIP's with the Soekris versions so I can run m0n0wall on them. I've just got to say that Kelly has really done everything possible to help me out with my issues. He is a good guy.

Arg! One of my repeaters is driving me crazy. It has been locking up almost every day now. Always at around 9pm. I just can't figure it out. I think it's the software on the box. It's using very old software. The host_ap drivers are from 2002. I'm trying to get NetNimble to upgrade them, but it's not going too well. If I could, I would just do it myself.

The new AP that I have is working great. It's a Soekris net4521. I have m0n0wall running on it. m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD. I wish I could install m0n0wall on the old boxes I have. I may be able to, I'll just have to figure it out.

So instead of doing my work today, I redesigned my BMG50 web site. I did a new thing with the menu bar buttons, where they jump out. It's using CSS to do it. The whole site validates as XHTML and looks the same on all the browsers that I've testing in. Even winblows.

Well, I guess I need to get back to work on work stuff.

I'm still working out all the bugs in my new network setup. Seems as though the Linksys routers and bridges block the DHCP offers to Win98 clients. I'm not sure why. XP systems seem to get their DHCP leases just fine. Also some customers' routers won't get the DHCP lease in the first place. That is another mystery.

Now that I have a lot of customers online, I am finding out that Windows is worse that I remember. I am turning into the local "Fix my MickySoft Winblows" guy. If it wasn't for Google, I would never know what to do.

Problems range from corrupted MS Outlook outboxes, causing the customer to not be able to send email. To corrupted TCP/IP stacks, causing customers not to be able to use the internet at all.

I'll tell you, if it were all Mac's and Linux systems out there, it would be a very easy job.