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

Monday night is Shopping Night, and thus it was time for Adventures in the Freezer Cabinet. yoyoangel had said in my post about soya adventures that one of the supermarkets did own brand 'chicken' soya pieces in the frozen section. I couldn't seem to see any at Tesco, but they do sell their own brand veggie mince.

Verdict : slightly nutty tasting soya mince that can be used direct from the freezer. It looks reasonably similar to browned mince, the texture isn't bad but as per usual it lacks the creaminess of real meat. This might be fixed by adding creamed coconut (my usual method of creating vegan chilli with dried soya flakes).

Overall, probably not worth buying again, as dried soya flakes aren't that much different and cost a lot less. There is, however, another variety of third party veggie mince that might be better - will try next time and see if I can pop into a health food shop to buy some better tofu and locate the wheat protein based substitute skibbley mentioned.

Normally I don't look in the freezer cabinets for anything other than Swedish Glace, onion rings and sweetcorn. Everything else is either filled with dairy or better fresh AFAICS. This time I had a more leisurely look and found some vegetable samosas at a price ridiculously cheaper than buying them off the Indian section, although unsurprisingly they need frying in oil.

There probably should be a word for realising the shopping bill is substantially higher than you expect. The food bill was quite low, especially due to batch cooking. However, 8 weeks worth of razor blades, a bottle of wine and two big bags of cat litter (they didn't have any wood litter last week - why does a store as big as this run out?) cost just about as much as the food again.

Of course, I'm not exactly economising here, especially after spending more than my entire grocery bill for last week on a meal out at the Greenhouse (then again it did include expensive beer and starter, main course and dessert).

In other news, I should be activated for Be Internet today. Have fettled the OpenBSD firewall to work as NAT, started to do some imbound NAT mapping (for bittorrent etc) and will migrate the configuration to my fanless low power box at some point. I can then move the firewall and the bittorrent box into the lounge and upstairs will be utterly silent when nothing is on.

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.

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.