Lord Andrei's Blog

So, here we are in LAX. Now, you may be wondering.. Is he really gonna to do a full entry on the little sidekick. Well, actually, I’m doing this on the laptop.

Yes kids, it would seem that LAX is fully Boingo WiFi’d now. I had a small panic because it had me pay for the day’s service (fairly inexpensively) and then it told me I needed to download Boingo software. (For Windows and Pocket PC only)

I was quite annoyed. But, I paid the price, logged in. And Panther. (Yes I admit to running it) self configured itself with absolutely no problem.

We leave in about an hour. This means boarding will be in about 30 minutes. Heather is on my right playing CivIII on the iBook. I’m doing my usual job of answer people’s questions about the 17″ behemoth.

I love Macs. Especially from profitable companies 🙂

So, I am off to meet the future in-laws (and apparently spend much time in their hot tub) We will hopefully be performing a Gnostic Mass on Saturday for people in Maine. Hopefully, because we are pretty much doing this on the fly. It’s a little scary.

It’s currently 5:30am (Pacific). I didn’t sleep last night. This means the world has that fuzzy, unreal quality to it. The gate counter is now open to process people. We are all taken care of. 6 months with my check card getting me frequent flier milage has finally paid off. We are flying first class 😀

I am showing off the new on the fly html rendering of my client to shimmeringjemmy who has of course seen it before and returns to her world conquest.

I’m off to take a look at who’s updated their LJ’s. (I am such an addict)

More later.

*waves* from LAX

P.S. Never been to Maine before. Kinda nervous. I hear they have Killer Cars and Rabid Dogs and Insane Clowns. And a really scary looking author named King, too.

This is all tech foo. Feel free to ignore this one…

So, software guy gets to play networking geek this evening. (Ignoring entirely the need to be up at 4am tomorrow)

So, I decided to move my tenuous DSL connection from the test laptop to the Airport Extreme base station. This seemed to work at first until I discovered that only one machine at a time was ‘allowed’ the connection. Each machine had to auth with a web page and then take control and release control of the “ethernet.”

Sigh, time to call tech support.

Tech support had me turn my modem into a Bridge modem. In other words, it no longer authenticated. The authentication in this modem is very interesting it does PPPoE. Then it looks at the MAC address of anything asking for net services and assigns one MAC the right to be called active. Active must give up the scepter before any other MAC can be active and thus have ethernet.

So, with the adsl modem now an ADSL bridge, I configured the Airport base station to do the PPPoE and then NAT/DHCP out internal fake addresses. Now multiple machines inside my LAN can see the net. Yay me.

Okay… All well and good. But…. I have a static IP address on the far end of the Modem. How do I get from the Static IP thru the modem to the machine that has a NAT address. Hmmn. Well, it would seem that from there we use Port Mapping. Basically I tell my Airport which ports to expect contact on. I then forward them to a machine inside the LAN. I could theoretically run two different web servers. Go to (My unreleased IP):80 to get to one machines server, go to :9080 to go to the other machine.

This worked. Now all I have to do is reroute my domains to point to the new static address.

And of course.. wake up in 3 1/2 hrs.

So, at 8:30 this morning the ISP calls and wants to follow-up on Covad coming to the house. I plug in the modem (*note forthcoming) and we’re getting what are called training starts. This means that the line knows there is a modem hooked up to it but the modem and the line aren’t seeing eye to eye.

I take the modem to the office to do some experiments. At about 10am the ISP calls me at the office. We think the line is okay but we’re not seeing a modem anymore. I explain that this makes sense becuase it’s here on my desk. They ask if I can get it on on the line for some tests.

My very cool coworker KK. (Yes, kids… his middle initial really is K as well) gives me a lift back to place. I hook up the modem again. And I’m ashamed to say that I had it hooked up wrong this morning. The lights come on. And as Heather has pointed out already the DSL line is now live.

As for the hooking of the modem, I have to explain. There were 2 jacks on the back, ‘Ethernet’ and ‘DSL’ both of which were those amazingly annoying jacks that look like they take ethernet plugs but in fact could seat a telephone plug comfortably.

So, I had the phone plugged into ethernet (thinking this was the wire to the ethernet) and had the computer plugged into DSL. This is what happens when you get all egotistical about working in the field and you really have no clue what you’re doing.

Now, that aside, it’s unlikely that the covad guy that came out monday made the same mistake as me. Also, I did originally test with two modems, so.. the problem wasn’t merely my morning mistake 😉

So, the signal is at least up and running. We have DSL to the house. Now I get to take the next step and try to actually rig up the network again. Tech foo comes next…

The planned design layout.

So, on an egoistical trip thru Google to see if there was anything new on my last name I made a discovery. To be honest… I actually check my last name on google out of curiosity to see if there is anything on anyone else in my family. Tapolow is a very rare name limited only to about 20 relatives of mine. Most of my family is not on the net.

That noted…

There is a new mini-cocoa-app on the net.
httpquery is described as: a simple utility for querying the version string of an HTTP server. You can use it to find out which software (e.g. Apache, Microsoft IIS, etc.) a web server is running.

The thing that blew my mind was:
Credits go to G. Andrei Tapolow of Apolo Productions for writing the base network code (“IJSimpleSocket”), which I used with some modifications.

IJSimpleSocket was actually a mini project that I was doing to see if I could make my build process automatically send emails to me if there were build problems. It didn’t conflict with work interests so I was given permission to submit the class to the open-source IJournal project I was working on. I eventually bailed from iJournal to offer support to another iJournal developers spin off project XJournal.

So, it’s kind of nice to see your work being adapted by someone else. It’s a sense of professional validation.