Category Archives: Diary

pfSense – round 67 (Or that’s what it feels like)

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So the day started well, I took the woof for a two hour walk. Weather started out miserable but I started sweating buckets as the sun finally decided to show it’s face. It defo wasn’t woolly hat weather.

Got back and did the garden poo run, emptied the kitchen compost and refilled the bird table. I then preceded to have the standard Sunday lunch of two boiled eggs, while I read the paper.

Then it was time to venture out to the front garden again. I’m slowly trying to clear a hedge. Slowly being the operative word. I had a tree stump in my path and three hours later it was finally out.

Then on to the next job….pfSense firewall. Well this one’s been on going for a while. So after the strange firewall error from last time I decided to reinstall from scratch. First thing I did was set up one of the spare NIC’s as a backup emergency access for when I inevitably locked my self out of the web config. This time I set up all the bridged lans as ‘none’ and then created the bridge and assigned that to LAN. After some playing with the server firewall it all actually started working. So I’ll leave it there for this evening. Next job is to create a proper set of firewall rules.

And now bath time (I’m already on the wine, but digging was hard work), then I’m going to watch the Olympics closing ceremony.

You need to go at my ass like your mining gold

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Now I receive some odd text messages, but that one is quite strange. I suppose it’s also technically wrong as you pan for gold and mining is more for coal. Although ‘you need to go at my ass like your mining for coal’ probably doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Work wise, spent the morning on m4a (mp4) codec again, this time added the missing alac support (Apple Lossless), so now go to the stage where it can be passed to the decoder. Then got dragged off to look at some PS3 stuff. Ended up looking at an odd font problem, which turns out that scaling whole pixels by odd numbers is never really a good idea.

Car still holding together which is good. And what the fuck is the weather doing? I’m stuck in a room surrounded by computers and a PS3 that keeps over heating. Never mind I’m sure it will be back to rain soon enough.

Welcome back VXR

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So first thing this morning the nice man from Vauxhall turns up for the 2nd time with my car. This time it has all the correct fixings and the wheel no longer hits the wheel arch. They even cleaned it. So top points for a Vauxhall main dealer.

Work wise, still on Apple lossless codec. Did a load of stuff to decode caf files, then found I was actually using m4a. So now trying to make that build.

And on the server front, back to pfSense, still trying to get my transparent bridge to work. It still doesn’t.

Anyway, torture porn night. Time for wine and a film.

The Agila 1.2, why?

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Today the nice man from Vauxhall turned up with my car. It now has a nose. I looked up underneath and there’s a bolt missing, a fixing missing in the middle and various plates hanging off. Also with the wheel on full lock, it banged into the wheel arch. So back to Vauxhall it went. To be fair to them it came back straight form a 3rd party body shop. The actual bumper repair has been done very well.

Apparently it’s all been fixed now so will be back tomorrow.

They left me this white Agila. It’s very ugly. Like a small high box on wheels. The boot is the size of a glove box. It does have four doors. The gear lever feels like a clunky piece of plastic connected by a broken Biro to a hair-dryer of an engine. It’s reverse gear is where my 6th gear is, which could lead to some interesting high speed gears flying up from the engine. Power wise it isn’t going to scare a speed camera in a 20mph zone. The brakes feel more like the pads are being grasped gently by a couple of dusters, so not to frighten the car into stopping.

It has no extras, no air-con and no redeeming features. If you want to carry four people in discomfort then it’s probably the car for you. The Vauxhall Agila….why?

In server news I’ve made a bit of progress by setting up two lan cards to bridge and then set that to filter through the firewall. I was able to access all windows and samba shares, so making progress at last.

Work wise, finished off iOS audio session handling and started off doing a windows version of the Apple Lossless codec.

pfSense, you are going to be an arse

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After spending the day swearing once again about anti aliasing and iOS codecs (oh why don’t you call my callbacks…). I spent the evening trying to convince pfSense to route windows shares between lan’s. It wasn’t going to happen. After several hours of googling I’m still none the wiser. Another battle to behold.

Oh, and no sign of my car yet. Seems to have buggered off into oblivion.

No matter how much you swear at the ticket barrier, it’s never going to open with a Toy’s R’us loyalty card

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So today I was rudely awaken by Tesco home insurance, they did the usual thing of send me a renewal which was over a hundred quid higher than the exact same insurance online. Why they do this every year is always a bit of a puzzle.

Then the man from Vauxhall turned up. Said, ‘Your car’s in for some minor body work’, then looked at the front of my car and said nothing further…My car has now been replace by some ugly white Agila on the driveway.

Took the dog out for an early walk, this confused her somewhat, but confused me more. Far too early for that sort of thing.

I then caught a bus (with common people) and went to the station, where I waited an hour and a half for a broken down train in the Severn Tunnel. Journey to London was fairly painless, caught up on a couple of episodes of Dexter. I then did battle with the underground barrier…the Oyster card and the Toys R’Us card are the same colour. And bloody tourists, I know the Olympics are on, but please don’t just stop dead in the middle of the pavement.

I then spent the day in the office, trying to discuss aliasing, but no one was really interested. It’s a subject that I now 100% refuse to talk about ever again. Our musician man was there though, so we discussed wine and some audio stuff. I did hunt around for a Vigor 120 ADSL modem, didn’t find one there, but after some useful negotiation one is on it’s way.

And then it was back home again. Had to wait an hour for a packed train, but did managed to get a seat. Got a taxi home and drank wine. To be honest a fairly pointless day and I’m knackered.

So, no pony sex then

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After last nights Chinese and large amount of beer / wine combo all I was greeted by this morning was a large dog poo and pool of piss. Can’t blame the dog at all, I know she would have tried to wake me and failed. She did look rather guilty though, and gave me that ‘I jumped on your head at 4AM and you failed to respond’ look. It rained constantly all morning so put off the normal dog walking session and moved back on to doing server experiments. Basically you can fill a machine with network cards and providing they are on the PCIe bus (including the built in NIC), they will always transfer at a pretty constant 942Mbps. If you use the PCI bus however then you get 778Mbps (Even with Intel cards), also I’m sure if I managed to get it going that transferring from two PCI cards would have been even slower. So anyway, now built the pfSense machine up, removed the hard disk and replaced with a flash memory card, installed 4 additional NIC’s, 2 PCIe and 2 PCI. So that gives me 3 high speed connections and two slower ones to choose from. I only need 4 network ports really, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for them all.

The amusing thing is I’be had to configure one of my Ubuntu PC’s to run minicom, as when you install the embedded kernel on pfSense you get no VGA driver. The last time I used a null modem cable I think was in the 80’s. Anyway, it’s installed and it boots fine from the flash card and all the tty appears on minicom. Just set up the firmware load for the wireless (otherwise you have to unplug it each time as the driver isn’t built into the kernel). Next step is to do some proper pfSense configuration, but that’s enough on it for today, but great progress.

Oh yes, for some reason I asked Jamie if he would dress up as Rainbow Dash and I could dress up as Derpy….he turned me down, but did enquire into how I suddenly knew so much about ‘My little pony’.

And then we had Chinese

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Well, the day started off well, I slept quite a lot. Dog went out for a crap then politely went back to sleep. Had breakfast and a coffee to kickstart the system. After multiple showers we headed out (me and the dog that is). Thankfully we choose the only hour where it didn’t piss down continuously. Lisa came round and did the cleaning, I reminder her that we were coming round in the evening, thanks to everyones great lack of communication skills nobody actually remembered. So after I finished my mother (well finally setting up her laptop for her email) we ended up going to Lisa’s and having a chinese. Jamie spent most of the evening asleep. So I’m now updating this blog here on Lisa’s laptop while for some reason watching fucking Elton John and Keekie Dee on the TV. There is a good reason why Lisa never broke into the charts. They are going camping next week for a holiday. Sorry, any type of holiday where you carry around your own washing up is not a holiday. Quote of the evening from Lisa, ‘I want a pair of dungerees’.

Bye bye proxy

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My trusty (and almost reliable) mail / web / print / ftp server has been decommissioned. After probably about ten years of pretty good service. It’s got through three fans, two hard disks and completely knackered the on/off and reset switches. It was built into a small Mini-ITX box running a VIA EPIA processor. Had the power of a digital watch and ran Windows 2000. Also installed were Argo Soft Mail server pro, Ability FTP server, Zone Alarm (remember that?) and various other bilge. Alas it was time to say good bye. It’s now been replaced by my shiny old Pentium 4 small form factor PC, running Ubuntu with all secure email using SSL & TLS. The internet and mail security has moved on in ten years, that server hadn’t had an update in about the last five. Microsoft stopped doing security updates years ago, only AVG ever got updated. Now it’s gone I may get round to repairing the switches on it and try and find it a new lease of life somewhere.

I spent the day on PS3 playing around with Anti Aliasing, I think I’ve finally convinced myself that true msaa x4 is far better than mlaa, but may be smaa is the future…

I went to the gym, did BodyPump and then managed 25 minutes of running afterwards. So I think that deserves at least half a bottle of wine. The car is allegedly being repaired next week. Although I’m not entirely convinced that the body shop has a bloody clue what they are doing.

I’m already on the wine, so must be bath time.

Please, stop asking me about render….

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I don’t know the difference between Blinn and a bin liner. Spent the day looking at a Crytek paper and demo on SMAA. As usual all these things look really pretty until you move, then it all turns into a shimmery mess. It’s good to see the demo produces the same shimmery mess. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at MSAA again just to prove that isn’t any better and it’s still a shimmery mess.

Went to gym, only did a 20 minute run as I wasn’t really in the mood and my legs are killing from the last two nights jaunts. Car is in garage on Monday, will be fixed by Tuesday and I’ll be about four grand down.

In server news I connected two of my Ubuntu boxes to each other and ran iPerf again, still the same 943MBps, so the switch wasn’t adding any overhead. I’ve ordered two PCI nic’s and a PCIe one, all Intel, so I will perform further tests in various combinations. Still 943 is pretty good, if I can keep that up across all interfaces then I’ll be impressed. Also ordered a compact flash drive sata thing, to install pfSense on, just to make things interesting.

Now it’s time for wine and torture porn, until the next person asked me about render…