Router fun and games

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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.

Cat 6 joy

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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.