Gareth Halfacree

I came home tonight to find that my Internet connection had crapped out, but that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about how Billion – that is, the company rather than the oft-misused numerical value – software engineers are perhaps not the sharpest tools in the box.

After restarting my router, the syslog spat out the following:

Jan  1 00:01:33 DDNS: DynDNS can not be reliable if SNTP -time server do not
reply to modem correctly, Please fix SNTP -server address.
Oct 21 19:13:50 syslog: NTP current time is Wed Oct 21 19:13:50 2009

That’s the DDNS service complaining that things might go wrong if it doesn’t know the current time – followed by the NTP service updating to the current time.  Apparently making those two things run the other way around is too logical.

Eugh. If anyone ever tells you that Cat 6 UTP cabling is just as easy to work with as Cat 5e, tell them to bite your shiny metal ass.

Guess what //I’ve// been doing today. That’s right – crawling around a filthy loft space running cabling with a mind of its own. The rigid plastic guide inside the sheath might help keep the cable unkinked and ready for 10-Gig-E, but it certainly makes it a bugger to work with.

Still, it’ll all be worth it – 44 brand-spanking new Cat 6 network terminations going to a lovely dark blue wallmount rack with a couple of switches linked to a Gigabit fibre backbone back up to the main rack. Shame I’m not staying to enjoy the fruits of my labour, really.