Luke Sheldrick's Blog

One of my house mates, has been constantly uploading torrent type stuff for the last couple of days, and it’s getting to be a bit of a bore, as it is killing the network.

Mainly because the incoming tcp packets, require an ACK, which Unfortunately are getting muchous delayed due to the upload stream being saturated. Unfortunately both my cable modem, and hardware firewall are pretty crap at handling this.

Also my hardware firewall, has a 12meg throughput, which is rubbish when I am on a 20meg line.

Anyways someone on uknot suggested m0n0wall, a software / os firewall. Tried setting it up on a VM machine, and it didn’t really play nice there, so set it up on an old box (which happens to be party the said housemates, I just had to replace most of it), and after fiddling with my switch to get it to delete its vlan and arp settings, all started to play nicely.

I must say I am very impressed so far, it can cap the max uploads, set to about 85/90% to allow for ack’ing, so downloads dont grind to a holt. The interface is pretty sweet too. Would definitely recommend it, well saying that not sure how stable it is just yet.

Also throughput, much better, now easily max’s the line out (well almost)

Just got to wait for all the DNS records to update over ze internet, and then mail and web pages should be back up. Well if you’re reading this, then yours already have

Well what a week, glad it’s over

Has been quite eventful, but over all quite boring.

I broke my Dell Laptop screen a couple of weeks ago, and hadn’t got around to fixing it as yet. In a meeting earlier in the week, a project that had been put on hold came up, which i had been working on, but had been put on hold. As I am leacing the company pretty soonish, they wanted it completed. Hmm. The source code is on the laptop, the laptop screen is broken. Tried plugging in a VGA monitor, but seems as default is not enabled in the BIOS. No amount of screen pressing got it to work either. The HD is encrypted, using details from the mobo, so wont boot in another machine. Excellent the only thing really is to either pull two laptops apart and bodge it (which none of us wanted to do) or get it fixed.

As its my own kit (used as I have licensed versions of the dev tools) they wont repair it… great. Anyways come to some compromise, and they said I could go and get it fixed Thursday. The place is near Heathrow, and for times sake, I drove it there.

Thats where the fun starts, Thursday is really pants weather, so much so that visibility is really crap on the M25. Anyways doing about 50ish in the outside lane, then without knowing about it, I am spinning over ever carriage. I had hit the brakes, as there were three cars pilled up in the outside lane, but as its so wet, my car span. I ended up stopping a cm away from the crash and the central reservation. Then I see a TT doing the same, stopping a CM from me.

I looked at the chap, and laughed. Then thought shit better get out of here before someone crashes into me. with that went to Heathrow, got my lappy repaired, and back home (well the office anyways). Thought as it was mid-day I’d pay the CC charge and go through central London. Seems the CC change hasn’t actually cut traffic, but you just have to pay for the privilage.

Later on in the week, I was getting a server ready for sticking in a colo, as when I leave my current job, I loose the nice perk of having a server in the DC. I had some LP2000r’s lying around that I use for testing and running a couple of VM’s. One had a few warnings, i.e. the fan had died…etc, so thought I would strip that one down, and make 2 more powerful beasts, with some spares for the future.

In doing so managed to reset the raid on one of them. Needed to rebuild the OS anyways. My primary exim box, which is a virtual died a couple of weeks, ago, so was running off a backed up version, which also has now died. So had to rebuild that, and made a couple of spares too.

Friday saw KCOM being particularly up to spec (that’s sarcasm there, if you didn’t guess), so this is definitely coming up to my last week.