VLAN woes (by alaric)

At our house, we have three LANs; the external one, which is connected to the ADSL router and has a range of six public IPs; the internal one, which is joined to the external one via a NAT router (so using a single public IP) and contains my workstations and the fileserver; and the guest one, which is bridged to wireless Ethernet - and also joined to the external network via the NAT router.

Now, since I've not cabled the place yet, the physical layout of the network is dictated by the lengths of the cables I have. The ADSL router is at one end of the building, near the phone sockets, while the workstations are right at the very other end of the building. Therefore, the NAT router is in the airing cupboard, roughly in the middle of the building; my longest cables reach from the ADSL router to the NAT router, and from the NAT router to a switch in the office from with the workstations and server connect; and the wireless bridge sits in the airing cupboard along with the NAT router.

Even when I have structured cabling in place, I don't want to be having to cable three separate LANs around the house anyway; the natural solution is to use VLANs. That way, you can have switches joined by single-cable trunks, and those trunks carry all of the LANs in one; at each switch, you can either configure a port to connect to a specified VLAN, or configure the port to use IEEE 802.1Q tagging to connect a machine that understands it, in which case that machine can join whichever VLANs it is allowed using the single cable. This saves on the cabling a great deal.

Will the Curse Ever go Away? (by sarah)

Today we discovered the wooden cube cabinate had cat urine soaked into it - AGAIN!!!!

We only moved the thing back inot the house just before christmas from last time 🙁 On top of that I had said last time I didnt want it back in the house until it was sanded and varnished so that things couldnt soak into it - but alas this did not happen and we had to bring it back in 🙁

So I spent a huge chunk of today trying to find homes for the things that live on the cabinate and getting a very stressed Al to bring it upstairs for me - it is now in soak in freash water after its disinfectant soak etc... It is most definatly not coming back into the house this time until varnished and its obvious we cant stand it back where it was as this will just keep happening. Also it turns out that Minni has been a very naughty cat - she though female is 'spotting' to mark her teratorry - sigh.

I wasnt very happy with her today.

On top of that the ADSL was down which lead to a slightly annoyed Sarah (who had planned to get loads of stuff done online whilst bobble was in nursery) and a very stressed Al indeed 🙁

Still I did get a nice birthday suprise of a great book arrive today so its not that bad - even if I did find a kitten mess in the stable by slipping on it - whilst trying to see if we needed to clean the litter tray - sigh.

Oh and I am desperate for the Dishwasher repair person to be able to fix the dishwasher tomorrow - my hands are a mass of red sores and bumps cuased by washing up and wearing gloves makes it worse (grrr! silly x-mar) - this means that I havent been able to do the washing up for the last week as its too painful. We therefore have a kitchen full of stuff waiting to be washed up 🙁

Xen (by alaric)

I'm seriously considering becoming a big user of Xen. As in, making all of my servers run Xen (with NetBSD as the host OS), with everything of import then running in Xen "domains" (virtual servers) beneath.

There's a number of advantages to this. Read more »

Eyes (by alaric)

When I was quite young (5 or so?) I remember having conjunctivitis - rather vividly, since it involved my eyes being stuck shut in the mornings and having to be cleaned out by my mother before I could open them. And, alas, I have it again; this morning, my wife had to clean my eyes up before I could see...

So when I could see well enough, we went and got this 'eye ointment' stuff that she had to put in my eyes (holding me down as she did it!), and afterwards, my eyes felt very sensitive so I sat there for some time with them closed.

This brought to mind a long-running area of interest of mine, which is the design of computer interfaces that are usable to the blind. I only see usefully with one eye anyway, so if anything should happen to the other eye, my career in software development will rather depend on such software...

My Story Line for Tron 2 (by sarah)

First of all for those who don't know about Tron! This is a story about how a little bit of each programmer ends up in the program - towit - little versions of the programmer are running around in an electric world - which is very pretty and very styalised and very cool. This was one of my favourite films as a kid - me and my brother begged for fresbys so we could throw them at each other! Of course David always cheated 🙂

I would keep the Tron world pretty similar to the origional to be honest. The parts of the film in the electronic world have not dated unlike the 'real world' scense. I would not however have the main interface as vedeo games as they are too realistic these days - ie no more space invaders and more actually people running around which just wont work! Back then most people didnt really have a concept of computers but they did (if young enough) know about vedeo games and arcades - this is not the case today. My Beavers know more about how to us a computer than many of our helpers and they are only six!

Having said this I think that having the tanks and thing from the first film would still be plusable as it is part of the Tron world - especially as you could show 'retro gaming' (ok I made that phrase up) as fore shadowing - I know lots of people who hunt down the old style games - its sort of afashion thing so no problem there!

As it would probably be a PG made by Disney or Pixa I would have the main protagonist as a young teenager - simpky becuase many people are programmers as adults but a kid who mucks about in their spare time and is intelligent can still be as good as someone coming out of uni with a computing degree!

Throw in some family issue - say perant divorce or some such and have the perant/s work for some big science industry thingy. Have someone have to work late or take the kid in during the holidays and sit them at a terminal etc... etc... Now how to get them into the computer and why that needs a bit more work. But instead of lasers like the first film you coould have nano tech but this I feel would be parralleling too much with the origonal so why not have it as a new uploading your concousness technology. Put helmet on and wam - your in the system in a little glowing cuicritry outfit.

Now what the intrege would be I havent thought up yet but the world itself would be like Tron only bigger with more and different things like the solar sailor - there is the internat and intranets all of which are considerably bigger than when Tron was made. I feel that fire walls would be a fun thing to represent as would the nasty things like worms, viruses etc... I realise that this is where the artists and the computing people would probably start arguing 🙂

Ok so this isnt really a story line I realise that but its an idea, a concept but I bet it'll be made with too flashy graphics and be too paralelled with the first one - sigh.

Oh of course the kid would meet versions of the adults in the system and so learn lots about them in real life - blah blah blah!

Feel free to post your suggestions for a Tron 2 as a comment 🙂