(no subject)

[stormdog]

With a little help from the internet, my Cisco router is now talking to my computer and, with a little help from Madam Rommon, I got past the password on it that the guy at work who lent it to me couldn't remember. Now I have to remember how to configure the thing.

The class I had on it was phenomenal. My teacher was the best one I've ever had and the class culminated in the whole class having ten minutes to take each of their respective routers from a blank configuration to a working RIP based network with dynamically configured routes gathered from everyone else's routers. Every time we hit the time limit, he'd have us all shut down, clear our router configurations, and start again from scratch... It was the most fun I have ever had in school. I completely loved it, I felt like I'd truly learned a lot (and I had), and I came away thinking that network design is what I want to make a living at.

That was quite a while ago. I'm trying very hard to remember all the great stuff I learned in that class as a telnet prompt into the Cisco box waits very patiently for me to tell it what to do. All of my text books and notebooks that I've found since the move are on my computer room bookshelf. That makes me so happy; I've always wanted a computer room with a bookshelf for all my docs and manuals and room to work with them. Unfortunately, my Cisco manual and notes are not yet among them. I remember how to change execution privilege levels, and managed to figure out how to view the status of the various interfaces (though the T1 interface didn't show up there), but that's about it. I used to have a good grasp on the theory and practicalities of creating routing tables, but it's pretty deeply buried in my brain. It will come to the surface once I start looking through my notes; I know that. I just have to find them. Time for more cleaning.

More on that in a few paragraphs; for now, I will change subjects to the saga of the video card I put in a request for at work. I told my manager that I'd like to have a multi-monitor system at work; it would make a lot of the administrative tasks I do a good deal easier an quicker. So she approved a Radeon 9550 for me with 256MB of DDR. This is a pretty slick card; four times the memory of the one I have at home and considerably faster.

It came in toward the end of last week. On Wednesday of this week, if I remember correctly, I finally had a light enough workload that I could shut down my primary computer, using my secondary to keep up with email, and try installing the card. No dice; my aging Dell GX110 did not have an AGP port.

So, I decided I'd take one of the two Dell Dimension PIIIs that found their way to my house after my department decided to scrap them out in to work with me. They have AGP ports, plus I'll get a processor upgrade out of it. No problem, right? Turns out, after again shutting down my computer and swapping hardware into the new box, that it was the wrong kind of AGP port. I knew that some new machines had an AGP Pro slot that was not compatible with AGP cards, but the card I ordered was AGP, not pro, and I had no idea that there were different kinds of slots. I certainly learned something.

I found a wonderful web site detailing the various form factors of AGP that exist out there, what the difference is, and which ones are compatible. That would have been nice to know before I ordered the thing, but c'est la vie. I again set up the old Dell GX110 box, the Radeon 9550 gleaming tauntingly at me from inside it's cozy little box.

In the interest of research I took it home to examine side by side with the video card I already have, a Radeon 7550. (Yes, I'm an ATI adherent. I'm not sure why, I've just always preferred them over nVidia for no good reason I can name.) What I found actually makes sense. The AGP slot on the Dell dimension is a 3.3v, as was the slot on the board that I originally bought the card for, a generic PII board. The 7550 transferred right over to my latest board, an Abit NF7-S, which is, while not bleeding edge even when I bought it, still pretty modern, so I had no reason to think anything changed.

Looking at the cards side by side though, I found that, while my older 7550 is a universal card which fits both a 3 volt and a 1.5 volt slot, the new card is a 1.5v model and only fits a 1.5v slot. The older motherboard in the Dell is a 3 volt, whereas the AGP slot on my nifty-keen NF7-S is a 1.5. My old card, being universal, fits them both. The new card, keyed for 1.5, does not.

This leaves me in an interesting position. The most apparently logical solution would be to swap cards; use the 9550 at home and bring the 7500 to work to use with multiple monitors. I don't really need the extra power of the 9550 and just bought it because I knew it would do what I wanted it to do and it was the current standard from ATI; the older cards are only available second-hand and, since it would be company property, I wanted to go with something directly from the company with warranty and support. However, that card swap might kind of make me look bad. I'll have to check with my manager tomorrow because, apart from that, I see two other options. One: don't utilize the card (either return it if possible or put it in department inventory). Two: purchase better hardware to accompany the card. I know number two isn't going to happen, so we'll see which of the other two does.

I spent a few hours last night working on my parent's network. The computers there are talking to the internet but are not talking to each other. That's not very friendly, so I thought I'd see if I could get them on speaking terms.

It was not to be though. I don't know why it's not working; I think the switch integrated with the router they have might be fubared. At first I thought it was something to do with the fact that their DSL modem was on a different subnet than their router and some kind of problem was filtering down from there, since an ipconfig showed "hostname.no_default.invalid". I spend an hour or so playing with the router's IP address, until I finally looked for information online and found that the modem itself was adding an extra level of address translation: it pulls a public address from the DSL provider, but presents a LAN address in the 192.168.0 network to the router, which then offers DHCP leases in the 192.168.1.0 network to internal computers, but the modem is still accessible via it's own address in the 192.168.0 network. Why? I don't know. There must be a good reason, I hope.

I tried putting the modem in bridged mode so that the router was initiating a PPPoE session instead of the modem and pulling a public IP for itself, and the internal computers still weren't talking, so I could at least rule out a problem with incorrect subnets. There was one public IP on the router's public facing interface and everything else was on 192.168.1.0 and they still weren't talking.

The last thing I tried out of desperation was setting static addresses on two machines, opening up the hosts file on them, and hard coding the IP addresses that I'd just set. On one computer it worked briefly and then stopped; on the other one it didn't work at all. I figured it must be a problem with the switch not holding the right MAC addresses in it's table or something like that, so earlier this evening I brought a little five port Linksys to swap in and it was still being weird. I don't know what the heck the problem is but it's aggravating me.


I feel good about all the stuff I've gotten done today. The bedroom is almost entirely clean (that was a good many hours of work) and I sorted through all the boxes and bags of cable in the computer room, so that's looking a little bit better. Part of me wishes I had gone with Moira to the faire today, but a slightly larger part is glad I stayed home and cleaned. Maybe in a few more weeks I'll have the whole house clean and I'll be able to go out and do things, or play games at home, or even study for my yet-outstanding certification exams, and not feel guilty about not cleaning up. At that point, you may see more of me online and out and about.

Until then, wish me luck cleaning and I'll wish you well in your pursuits my friends. 'Till next...