- Took the router back to the shop. Shop called Netgear. Netgear said take it to the distributor. We took it to the distributor who wasn't happy because "you're a customer". After I jumped up and down, they said they'd have a new one for us by the end of the day. Bizarre love triangle!
- Greg bought a whiteboard.
- We did some planning, writing down the things we need to do. We want to run XFree86 4.0.1 using a framebuffer and replicate the embedded device work done by Century Software. We can do that on PCs before we get hardware.
- This requires upgrading a PC to Linux 2.4. But we don't want to risk our development machine (which is also our gateway). So I will set up another small machine (AMD K5/160) to act as the gateway. Got the pieces together from my junk bin pretty quick.
- Went to the shop and picked up the new router. Also, asked the shop for quotes on PCs and other equipment.
- Greg played with the router - this one works! :-)
- I put the hardware of the new gateway together, and got it to boot the RedHat installation CD.
- Greg continued work on strace.
Thu Aug 17 10:24:44 EST 2000 1030-1200 1415-1900 0050-0530:
- Greg kept hacking strace. He finally got it to link, and he tried it out. It didn't work first time which is hardly surprising. It's horrid code doing bad bad things.
- Started installing RedHat packages on the gateway. Without X, it's possible to make the whole thing take less than 150mb of disk (glibc is about 30Mb of that).
- Customised the gateway - removed unneeded software, configured other software.
- Spent far too long futzing about with the network card and the PnP modem - they worked just fine in the other machine.
- Went to lunch with our friends from our old work.
- Greg bought a nice sturdy chair. He's come far too close to breaking all of mine...
- Started configuring the gateway machine to be the dialout server/ICQ proxy. We will still use it for this even after we have the cable modem, in case of downtime on the cable network.
- One of our other machines suddenly died. Much futzing later, I found the cache SIMM had come loose.
- Moved our work disk from the gateway machine to another machine.
- Installed a different (external) graphics card to replace the internal crappy 2mb one. Finally, a useable resolution and color depth.
- After setting up the DNS proxy and dialing server on the gateway, I finally got my first dialout at 5am. Ouch.
Fri Aug 18 13:19:44 EST 2000 1300-1420 1510-1730 2100-2310:
- On the home straight with the dialout machine. Final tweaks.
- Greg found vfprintf bug which was killing strace.
- gnb found bug in entry.S which prevented strace from working.
Sun Aug 20 13:19:44 EST 2000 1130-1200 2045-0115:
- Went to swap meet. Bought Red Hat source CD, and 2 power cables.
- Moved all the equipment to another room, so that the only thing in our office was one PC, for the cable modem installation.
Mon Aug 21 13:19:44 EST 2000 0900-1800 2130-0100:
- Installed Windows 98 on the PC, so as not to freak out the cable company.
- The cable installation was supposed to take 2-3 hours, but took nearly 6. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Part of that time was blocking up a hole that turned out to be useless, and reconstructing a brick that the drill shattered. Also, it took a long long time to configure the PC to work with the cable modem.
Tue Aug 22 13:19:44 EST 2000 0930-1320 1340-1840 2200-0130:
- Carried all our stuff back into the office and set it up.
- Worked on getting the networking going. Tried for a long time to get the router to work with a Linux box.
- Found out from our friend what we needed to do to get
it to work
with Linux (the DHCP request needs to know the official
name
of the machine).
- Futzed and tinkered with the router trying to get things to work. Found some bugs in it, plus manual mismatches, and upgraded to the latest firmware. Seems a little better, but not much.
- Late at night, outgoing connection failed. The router couldn't be pinged. After much head-scratching, I found that the DHCP client on the WAN side was giving itself a private (192.168.100.*) address - impossible! Also, it seemed to give this IP address up after a couple of seconds. Left it unconnected, as I didn't want it flooding the net with DHCP requests and getting us into trouble. Rebooting the router did not help.
- Installed ssh on felix.
Wed Aug 23 13:19:44 EST 2000 1100-1420 1540-1900 2110-0230:
- Retried the router. The DHCP address now looks normal, but the lease counters are far higher than I would think normal. I think the router software has DHCP bugs.
- gnb wrote fork() test for strace.
- gnb sent strace patch to SuperH mailing list, and to the strace maintainer.
- gnb and I set up cvs log to linuxsh-cvs mailing list script.
- gnb figured out glibc problems - MUST compile with threads.
- Downloaded PeeWeeLinux, a Linux dist targetted at embedded needs.
- Since we're now outside Alphalink, we can no longer send or get mail through there. Reconfigured our mail programs to get the mail from our cableco.
- Set up a .forward file on Alphalink to redirect my mail here.
- Downloaded and installed StarOffice 5.2.
- Tried to read Greg's timesheet spreadsheets with StarOffice. No joy.
Thu Aug 24 13:19:44 EST 2000 1120-1300 1400-1830 :
- Set up some NFS shares of our MP3 collection, our SuperH work area, and our home directories, so they can be accessed on all our machines. This should really be done with the help of NIS and autofs. Greg will do that.
- Reinstalled sshd on catflap.
- Worked out why ssh was not authenticating me on other machines.
- Explored why only some of my mail is being forwarded to me.
- Untarred PeeWeeLinux and started having a look at it.
- Worked on spreadsheet for timesheets.
Fri Aug 25 13:19:44 EST 2000 1245-1515 1645-1730:
- Timesheet stuff.
- Looked at PeeWeeLinux. A twisted maze of shell scripts. The website is so promising, but it feels quite clunky to use.
- Went to OfficeWorks and bought stuff.