Firewall fixed - it was an error on my part - a single line in pf hadn't been correctly modified from the Sparcstation. However, there was also the issue with either the switch on the router not clearing its arp cache, or believing it was a different address than it should have been, as I started receiving lots of duplicate IP messages. Fixed by not using the switch in the router.. (I can't reboot it at the moment - it's going through the initial training period and you're not supposed to mess with it).

It is now rather quiet, even allowing for the three fans in my main system. A Sparcstation 10 with an ancient narrow SCSI disk and loud onboard fans really is very loud in comparison.

A few speed tests show that currently I'm getting close to 8Mb download and about 1Mb upload, which is a bit better than ADSL MAX. It's probably possible to get better speeds if I fiddle about with things, but frankly I'm not that fussed at the moment. Downloading ubuntu for the hell of it is maintaining sustained 860KB/s+ (7Mb).

OpenBSD 4.4 is out. At some point in the near future I'll upgrade the firewall to that and add in an IPV6 tunnel.. Now that I've sorted the configuration files for flashdist, rebuilding it should be trivial.

Shortly off to the pub.. I have chainsaw, I have fake blood, I have t shirts than can be artisticly ripped..

I did consider using my Bicon costume again but thought a) this might be a bit much for Horwich and b) it's far too cold to be wearing that!

Nipped to the health food store attached to Tesco and checked out their food; in general whilst they have a larger range it's rather expensive unless on offer. There's a lot more tofu, but only of the chilled type. Did pick up some 'no egg' though, and may try baking a cake to see how appalling (or not) it is.

A fair bit of the remainder of the evening consisted of reconfiguring the firewall to use NAT and the new Be Internet connection, a task made longer than it should have been by utorrent being annoying and claiming it wasn't working when it actually was..

This also necessitated scrapping all my externally exposed hostnames (like gladstone) because I've moved from 8 IPs to one (I could have 8 again for a tenner a month, but decided I could do everything I wanted by NAT mapping). So now there is only Blears known to the outside world, which as I hope to offer things like an IRC server (a 'community service') it should be best to name it after the secretary of state for communities and local government(*)

I'm not actually certain how fast my connection is.. Whilst the router seemed to be synching at about 12Mb I'm limited by my firewall which only has 10Mb network cards and a 40MHz sparc processor! I didn't think my ADSL connection would be fast enough to overwhelm a sparcstation 10 for some time, but it seems so. Good job I have these new fanless boxes lined up.

In any case I'm getting well over 100KB upload speeds, have had at least 200KB+ download speeds and various speedtests have shown anything between 6 and 7.5Mb. We shall see if this improves when I put an AMD Geode based system with 100Mb network cards in. Regardless, it's still fast and I can watch Youtube videos without them stuttering! A fair bit of laughing at Armstrong and Miller ('text message swearing') was had and I must buy their DVDs.

(*) For all who aren't aware, my computers are named after members of parliament. My main workstation is usually Gladstone, and there are others including Mellor (media PC), Cook (bittorrent), Portillo (firewall), Heath (OS/2/DOS box), Cameron (SGI box - because it's all pretty on the outside, but still the Same Old Shit inside) etc

After several swapouts between the old long-ish flat RJ11 cable and the Belkin 2.1M shielded RJ11 cable with gold plated connectors I can confirm the gains are real (if not huge). There's approximately a 1dB gain, equating to an extra 600kbps (ish) in ideal ADSL2 situations. w00t.

Attenuation consistently down from 33.4->33.8dB to 32.4dB.

According to the the line capability estimator here this makes no difference at all in an ADSL MAX situation, but approx 600Kbps in an ADSL 2 scenario as mentioned above. Reality, rather than theory, now that's a different thing..

Weekend didn't start amazingly well - pub at night feeling what seemed to be an impending back ache on my lower back. This got worse during the night waking up early finding it very painful to turn over, and an emergency 6am yoga session was necessary.

Rose somewhat later and dived into a Radox bath before going to Manchester for chinese buffet and drinkies. This was rather pleasant and much silly conversation was had. Decided not to head to the local pub for last orders and instead be sensible and nip home to chill. My back was much better, and it seemed more likely that I'd actually pulled a muscle at the top of my arse (sleeping in an odd position, most likely).

Sunday was devoted to chilling out and signing up to Be (think you paulgregory for referring me). The sign up website is frankly a bit crap (Direct debit setup doesn't work, modem delivery address not recognised even though it was looked up using postcode lookup on the site itself..). However, support is quite good - e-mail responses were sent within a few hours, and I've already had the first informative SMS.

Must keep doing more consistent yoga.

Received my super filtering faceplate to improve my ADSL connection. Stuck it in and the attenuation went down by a whole decibel! Wiggled the RJ11 wires around. Rebooted router. It went back up. Oh well.

Have ordered a shielded RJ11 cable, but very much doubt it'll make any difference. Still, for the sake of a fiver I might as well try.

Highly likely to move to Be*. Anyone else fancy moving too, as then I can get free connection.. :) (well, it's worth asking!).

Watched a few episodes of Crusade whilst fiddling with techie stuff and ordering *toys*. In particular I wanted Police Squad. The shielded RJ11 cable and a few SACDs (Debussy/Respighi, Bartok, Handel).

I must look at getting a surround sound amplifier and at the very least a centre channel and a sub so I can hear the music properly.

Up late on the Sunday, lounging around before checking out various ADSL upgrade options. After starting a bittorrent my router appears to be extremely unhappy, so I'll need to change it to something somewhat better soon.

Ordered an XTE-2005 filtered faceplate to see if I can get my downstream ADSL line attenuation to lower than 34dB. I'm looking at Be* as a provider. Probably the Unlimited product - I'd like to use the Pro product but at 34dB it evaluates to about 12Mb and I'm unlikely to benefit from the Annex M fast upload (up to 2.5Mb) service.

I'm hoping the faceplate will also be better at isolating the ADSL squeal/hiss on my phone line. I currently use a microfilter, but it's really not effective. I can't detect the hiss on the DECT phones I currently use, but with the big white BT phone I have the audio quality is a lot better and the hiss readily evident. At the very least the faceplate will be much neater.

Nipped on the bike and got muddy. Up near Lead Mines Clough, round up Sheep House Lane, up Winter Hill then down the other side. This was Rather Exciting and especially when going down the rocky bit from the tower I could probably be heard to be using some slightly colourful language whilst simultaneously making liberal use of my disc brakes..

I still wasn't too tired after going over the hill, so I reversed my usual upwards path through the forest and found that it is substantially more fun in the opposite direction :).

Crumble in the evening, followed by a couple of pints to finish.

This weekend was one of concentrated biactivism (obviously with a little chilling out and gossiping inbetween). Hopefully useful things will get done, and I have a few actions to do.

There was the enjoyable Saturday night meal and drinkies, and a slightly ill advised getting home and then playing Jets n Guns Gold until 2am (Zap! Boom! Schuhwep!). A small snooze was had when I got home after Sunday activism, and then I decided to have a quick go over of my budget to verify exactly where all my cash goes.

The result was fairly predictable. My basic cost of living is a bit lower than I actually thought, whilst a substantial part of any spare cash goes on drinks and meals out at the weekend. The boiler (see below) and cats are the biggest new cost in the last year.

British Gas tried to sneakily upsell me on Friday, as the £30 boiler maintenance per month is coming to an end, and I'll be reverted back to the £15 or so maintenance that can be signed up for when your boiler works.. Their gambit was to offer to cover all the pipework and suchlike for 'only £26 a month, isn't that a bargain sir?'.

nPower have finally got round to considering sending a bill, and it is likely to be Large and Painful (a year and a half of electricity, I'm guessing.)

Have also looked a little at ADSL packages, and the choice is narrower than I first thought. Whilst normally I don't tend to overuse ADSL much (last month : 3.5GB), occasionally I do a lot of downloading (May : 40GB, June : 26GB). This is made worse by the fact that most cheaper providers count upload and download together, and premium services such as Zen, IDNet and A&A don't count uploads. So, 40GB for May is actually 82GB (up and down).

It also looks like some of the providers are suffering from lack of capacity. There are a few whinges about Entanet's network latency, and both Zen and IDNet suffered a little during the Olympics. I'm a bit fed up of having a 512Kbps connection, with Youtube videos that won't stream, but it is unlimited, which is an advantage.. decisions, decisions.

The weekend consisted of drinkies, rain, ADSL and OpenBSD

First I offended a couple of people with some (not that strong) garlic bread prior to the pub Friday.
There was some drinkies and chat at pincussionqueen's birthday celebrations
Sunday there was Chinese lunch and drinkies with T, lownote and S.

There was also Rain, and the discovery that my comfy new shoes are not waterproof. bah.. My umbrella is also extremely sick.

ADSL and OpenBSD was another chapter in the ongoing new firewall implementation, viz : I want the WAN address on my ADSL router on my firewall instead.

The short version of what happened is that it is indeed possible to get the address, but now I can't bridge it to another NIC.

Or, in more technical terms : many UK ADSL exchanges now support PPPoE (PPPoE LLC in the case of Horwich - LCHOR). PPPoE can be easily bridged across a router so another device (the firewall) can establish the ppp connection. By default most ADSL exchanges use PPPoA which can't be easily bridged unless you have a box like the Vigor 100/110.

Unfortunately once the ppp interface has been established in OpenBSD it appears to be impossible to bridge it. The NICs have an MTU of 1500, and the PPPoE an MTU of 1492. The MTUs must match in order to create a bridge. PPPoE has an overhead of 8 bytes. The MTU on the NICs I'm using can't be changed. As soon as OpenBSD's majordomo decides that the mail server I'm using isn't sending spam, I should be able to ask if this is actually possible..