December 12, 2002

Where did the day go?

Spent a lot of it in traffic. Didn’t get to go out to a client’s site – a single client’s site, among seven in this area that need visiting – until 1500 or so. I got stuck in plenty of traffic, yes indeed.

I killed a Cisco Aironet 340 LMC PCMCIA 802.11b adapter (phew) today. Hint: I think trying to use the (apparently undocumented) airoflash utility from the airo-linux project is a bad idea. I don’t blame them, really. What the hell was I doing trying to flash my card with an undocumented program, anyway? Now I think I just get the triple amber LED blink. According to Cisco’s site that means something like “bad firmware checksum.” It tells me to re-flash the firmware. Problem: I can get neither Linux nor Windows 2000 to recognize the card, so I can’t flash it. (Linux wants a device name, which never gets assigned since the driver (presumably) can’t communicate with the card properly. Windows has a similar problem: the Cisco utilities won’t load because Windows never really thinks there is a network card in the system.) I was going to call TAC, but I have fears of my bullshitting ability. I don’t think I will be able to say to them, “yeah, I was flashing it using approved methods, of course *wink, wink*” without sounding like a total liar. “So, what exactly did you click in the Windows application?” “Uh, well, I, uh, clicked, um… I don’t… remember?” “*click*” So I ordered a LMC 350 from techonweb.com who were highly rated at Reseller Ratings and Price Grabber. Oh, they also had a good price on the card; within $15 of the lowest on a $100-ish card. Then, of course, I blew $35 on overnight shipping. I’m so impatient when it comes to gadgets. Oh well, it’ll come out of my record budget.

I made seared Tuna steak covered in mustard, some fried brown rice (I forgot fucking Soy sauce!), and my own concoction of Broccoli in wine with some spices thrown on. I now have a mid-grade headache, and immediately after eating I thought I was going to puke briefly. That’s not so abnormal, but it was stronger than with other meals, so it stood out to me. This stuff makes me sick. I don’t know if it’s the spiciness, the oil, the mustard, or what. Maybe it’s all the salt I put on the food. I’ll down some Mylanta before bed and hope for the best.

Oh, I almost forgot! We have CABLE! Yes! We have Road Runner and 500 channels of shit again. Joy! No more dial-up. My co-worker’s power just got turned on today too, which is good. I wonder if Duke Power met their goal of having 90% of power in CLT on by today (well, yesterday; Wednesday) at midnight?

I set up my slight voodoo Bind configuration tonight and Bind 9.2.1 ate it. I can’t test yet since I have no machines configured on the internal IP block that the internal view’s match-client statement looks for. I was going to switch a system over tonight… but I stopped, since I thought I had determined that I would need to switch all systems at once (or within a block of time that customers will not be likely to access our resources). I thought this because I thought the name servers would only be available on one IP or the other. However, I’ve now remembered that Linux can have *gasp* more than one IP per interface. So I’ll have to configure my name servers up like that tomorrow and try switching a machine, then. It should be fun.

I think I forgot something in the above paragraph, but I’m too tired so I’m just going to be off to bed now.