Wed Mar 20 07:13:16 PST 2002

Bible study went pretty well last night. I got a call from Pastor James late yesterday saying that he wasn’t going to make it because he had too much other stuff going on (he’s leading a mission trip to Mexico later this week) so I would have to lead the music without him for the next two weeks. Not a big deal, just not entirely expected. So last night we ditched the list of songs that I had prepared and just did requests, mostly ones that we hadn’t done before there, so I was a little rough, but not too bad.

Also yesterday we got a postcard in the mail from AT&T Broadband claiming that they were actually now ready to sell us "lightning fast" internet service after a year and a half of snubbing us. On one hand I’m tempted to just ignore it because they weren’t willing to work with us before, and their acceptable use policy had some issues with both hosting servers and VPN, both of which we do on a regular basis. But on the other hand the increased bandwidth for what is probably a substantially reduced price would be pretty nice. I’m considering if we could actually get both and effectively use two at once.

In theory it’s possible to use a pair of WAN lines, and just route traffic based on where it’s going. We could route incoming web and mail traffic to the IDSL, and run the VPN connections (.intel.com) over that and then let general surfing/game traffic run over the cablemodem. On the downside, it wouldn’t significantly improve our 2-person VPN solution any, which is one of our weak points, but it would improve performance when we had more than 2 people online or doing non-VPN activities.

Of course doing a dual-link network would involve somehow cramming yet another ethernet card in pooh, or putting both the outbound links on the same server port, but in theory that could work as long as both of them don’t confuse pooh too much about his own identity in terms of DNS and those other issues. Maybe I should look into those 4-port network cards again.

There’s one available from D-Link, a DFE-570TX, but there’s not a lot of information about using it with linux. One user claims that he can only get it to run in 100MBit mode if he uses the de4x5 driver explicitly. which might be an option, but some of my network devices that I’d want to hang off of it are 10MBit interfaces, like the printer and I think the 802.11b WAP is a well.

And I also found this rather disturbing conversation between Matthew Callaway and Jeremy Jackson on the linux-kernel list:

<> This is a reproducible oops, and my guess is that it’s related to <> the tulip driver included in the 2.2.18 source tree. We’re using <> a D-Link 4 port NIC, and it appears that it doesn’t work well with <> IPV6 interfaces. < <I have had problems with this NIC as well… Redhat’s installer/kudzu <tries to use de4x5 (sp?) module … bad news. But it works fine using <old_tulip module with only IPv4. Same with 2.2 series and 2.4 series <kernels. FYI

But maybe this message in early 2001 from Avi Green is cause for hope:

<I’m using 2.4 with DFE-570TX cards in a bunch of routers and other <machines and I’ve never had any problems with the cards. I use the tulip <driver in 2.4 in some machines (not routers) and in the routers I use an <optimized version <(ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/tulip-ss010111.tar.gz is the <latest stable version)

It might just work, although I’d like to try it out in a spare machine for a while before risking pooh’s stability.

Wed Mar 20 23:20:01 PST 2002

Fun stuff, the fans from www.pcmods.com showed up. 4 low-volume (and very low noise) panaflow 80mm fans. I put 2 in my P4P system which should help out the overall thermal performance without increasing the noise. Another went into the backside of Pooh to try and increase his airflow some since it had just the power supply fan and felt a little warm. I do have the case basically maxed out, so increasing the airflow seemed like a pretty good idea. The last one I used to replace the front fan in Ryan’s machine which made a huge difference in how loud that machine is. It was annoyingly loud, and now it’s acceptable.

Cat’s bugging me for dinner. Constantly trying to get my attention in the hopes that I’ll feed him. I don’t want to feed him until I actually go to bed or he’ll try and get me to feed him again when I do head for the sack.