Tag Archives: PfSense

Going from A to B

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So started fairly early, well normal time, I just didn’t read BBC news for an hour first. So back on to routing, Al was moaning about a couple other frame rate cases. So did more research on HPA (a variation on A-star) but all involved building graphs and lots or preprocessing which I didn’t really have time to do. So came up with a simple solution which would involve a bit of manual work but would give me good results and importantly not use much memory. What I did was dump out the maps to a text file. Mark walk-able squares with a 0 and non walk-able with an X. Simples. Then manually went through the text files and grouped all the closed off areas, so for instance a closed off bit at the top of the map would be allocated section 1, then the next 2 etc. I had up to 16 areas that could be grouped. All I did then was add additional routing hints. So to go from one area to another you would just do 0:3:2; meaning to go from area 0 to area 3 you needed to go via area 2. All other areas could be disregarded in the A-star search. This reduced my maximum search nodes down to about a sixth of what it was. Total memory requirements…512 bytes. Ok, so manual editing, but it’s only a couple of maps, gives great results and only took about one mug of coffee per map.

Walked the dog. Finished work vaguely on time. Did a home check and went to the gym. Ran, only thirty eight minutes, on a short week this week. Did a home check for a kitten. Sat down and ate salad. Actually watched quite a bit of TV without any distractions.

Sasha is off to doggy day care far too early tomorrow morning. New cleaners starting. Need to order stuff for new pfSense box. New server seems to be running fine. Think I’ll have some fruit cake, may be a glass of wine and an early night.

More routing – It’s over there not there

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Got up. That was an event in itself. Spent most of the morning, well the bulk of the day actually doing research into routing and trying to optimise the search of the mobile game. I looked at quite a few different ways of improving it, but most require additional trees and memory. That’s one thing I’m very short on, so ended up just tweaking heuristics. Still got a bit more to tweak and tidy up. Get a good run on it tomorrow I think.

Walked the dog, I think I’ve decided on our new winter route. This is mainly tarmac based due to bad flooding down the nature reserve.

Went to the gym, did Body Combat. Couldn’t really be arsed to do any further running.

Came back, did some more work. Also moved the server to it’s new case that arrived today. It looks very smart and eats about a third the power of the small form factor HP. All working okay. Next is to do something similar to the pfSense box.

Tried to get dog sick out of a carpet, that didn’t work.

Feeling very tired. Thing I’ll try and have an early night.

Boiler man No.4 & No.5

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So two more boiler men today. First one was nice enough but did want to remove half the pipes in the airing cupboard, including the main heating feed and expansion pipe, to me that seems somewhat pointless when you could just connect a hose to it and blast it.

Next one was this evening and arrived an hour late. He was a little bit ‘in your face’ and you felt like he was invading your personal space but I grew to like him. He knew what he was on about and did mention that the gas pipe was probably 22mm up to the cooker, that opens some interesting possibilities. I’ll need to yank the cooker out and take a gander or try and look through one of the air bricks under the house.

Had a quote back from No.3 and just now No.4. No.4 as I guessed would be a bit pricey if he wants to change half the pipework and do the dreaded power flush. No.3 however (which is Rob Sarah’s friend) came in with two very competitive quotes, which may be cheaper if the gas pipe checks out. I need to do the wiring for this one, but it saves a few hundred quid and I can get Paul to check it.

Anyway, enough about boilers….Spent the working day doing a few things on the mobile game and then trying to get GDB to work. After lots of buggering about I finally got it to do source debugging. I certainly need to do a lot more work on it though before it becomes useful.

Talking of bugger about, very good sex first thing this morning, even if it was with Jamie. It woke him up anyway, he even participated at times.

Walked the dog, another unexciting road tour today, it was very cold. She is going for her doggy day care induction tomorrow, so will see how many dogs and people she can attack.

Moved the server into the cabinet, connected up the printers two it and it’s all still currently working. Ordered a new case for it with integrated PSU, that should sort out the power up problem. Haven’t ordered the replacement pfSense stuff yet, will see how the week goes.

Went to gym. Ran for seventy six minutes. Now watching the Abu Dhabi GP, I may get through all of it by the end of the week.

Mr British Gas tomorrow, I’ll be very disappointed if he’s not a tosser.

Today I moved my life

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So started off with a call from plumber…lets call him No.3. He came round pretty much instantly, seems like a nice chap, friend of Sarah’s. Did mention that the boiler would need a permanent live as it will be switched from the time at the moment. It’s a very good point and it’s the first one to mention it. He also didn’t mind who I got to do it, hmm wonder who that will be.

Spent the day sorting out routing issues on the mobile game. Mainly an analysis and optimisation task. Appeared to be quite successful. I’ll see what Al says the performance is like on his iPhone4.

Took dog out for a walk, today we choose a new rather dull route around the industrial estate. Can’t see us doing it again. Pawstretchers called and Sasha is going to visit on Wednesday.

So tomorrow I have two plumbers, one in the morning, one early evening. So far none of them have been even vaguely attractive, let alone cute. How come in porn films the plumber is hot and has a tool like a tree trunk?

Went to gym. Did Body Combat, followed by half hour of running.

I do like my new coffee machine, almost got through a bag of beans in two days. But now does mean I won’t be able to sleep for a week.

Spent the evening moving my life, well moving MannMansion.com anyway, which contains this blog. It hasn’t moved far, about two and a half feet for the moment, but it’s now on the mini-itx box.

So the joys of moving a Ubuntu server from one machine to another. First install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server on to new machine. Had to do this via a USB stick as I forgot it only has a CD drive not a DVD drive. Once that’s installed, best to backup fstab as restoring a backup with a different UID isn’t pretty. It’s all going to go to cock anyway as grub will have bad entries but that can be fixed later. The other thing to do is backup the udev persistent files. This was the cause of my missing network connection, it was there but moved from eth0 to eth1. Then stop postfix and apache2 on old server. Back it up as normal and then copy the backup file to the USB external drive. Then plug that drive into the new server, mount it and restore the backup. Now copy the backup persistent files over the new versions and restore the old fstab. Then reboot and watch it all horribly go wrong. You’ll get no end of mount errors, but if you ignore them all it will actually boot correctly. So reboot and run Ubuntu recovery, when that’s loaded run the ‘repair packages’ option. This will update everything and most importantly rewrite the grub boot loader. When this is done reboot again and you’ll get an error about the file system not being properly unmounted, ignore this and let it do the file system check. It will then boot as normal. Next reboot will be error free.

So I connected up to the pfSense box DMZ and made it live. I’m surprised that my SSL certificates are still valid, but that all seems fine. Apache is working okay, imap appears to be okay. Weather it’s receiving mail or not I’m not sure of yet. I’ll give it a couple of minutes….Sending mail appears to be working….dum de dum….Oh I haven’t got the printers plugged back in yet or the UPS, but I’m not really expecting any issues with those. And receiving mail is working. So final job then is to move old server out of cabinet and install new server, which is actually the old proxy box, which needs to be changed as the PSU isn’t really up to the job. So I’ll sort out a new case and then look into the second project, changing the pfSense box to a machine that uses less power than the sun….

And todays post is being typed using Ubuntu Desktop edition

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It’s on here as it’s switched on and I can’t be arsed to fire up the main machine again.

Ok, so cleaning man came round this morning to give me a cleaning quote, walked round with a clipboard, that’s one step away from wearing a hi-viz. Ooo, firefox doesn’t seem to have a spell checker built in…ah it does, it just wasn’t set to the right language. Anyway, he came up with 2.3 hours and two cleaners (they always work in pairs, a bit like breasts). With the price they can do it once a fortnight and it better be bloody good.

Work wise, playing around with more Android stuff. Getting it set up on the Ubuntu box, there’s also a solution I’m looking into for dev studio as well.

Managed to find a reasonable Mini-ITX board that was display stock, so got it for £50. It’s dual core and apparently only needs about 20 watts. Hopefully it will fit and work in the old proxy case. I think I may have found another board also that would be good for pfSense, but one thing at a time.

Went to gym, did combat, ran for twenty seven minutes afterwards. Now I’m going to eat salad and watch the Indian Grand Prix. Man coming tomorrow to give me a quote for new boiler and doing the bathroom.

“When shall I come round?”, “Sorry are you expecting me to administer an anaesthetic?”

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So started late as I didn’t sleep very well last night, hell of a stiff neck. That seems to be the only stiff thing at the moment. It’s either age or Jamie’s gone to an ugly phase.

Carried on with the documentation, which oddly I seemed to be in the mood for. So throughout the day I’ve managed to get through the bulk of it. If I have a clear day tomorrow I hope to finish it all off plus the example code and a couple of problems Al found.

Finally got the online person working with pfSense, although I think it would have been easier to get my sister to become a nun.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym, ran for sixty sixty minutes. I finally gave in and bought some cheese. I will weigh it though. But I’ve ran 36 miles this week, so a bit of cheese and crackers isn’t going to suddenly make me put on three stone. Eating it with a bottle of wine however may do.

Bowel update, nothing much to report, still pressurised at about three atmospheres. Don’t poke me or the outcome may not be pleasant.

Kyros Christian is coming to London at the end of October, I said to Jamie that I should go there for the week, he said no. May be I should just invite him here for a couple of days and show him the sights.

Oh new cleaner hopefully sorted out.

Cheese.

If there’s one thing I hate (which there isn’t, there are lots and lots) it’s documentation

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So still get this network thing to sort out. Couldn’t do much more on it until I got the destination IP addresses. So started on the audio lib documentation. I really do hate writing docs, it’s very dull and very repetitive and most of the time no one reads them anyway. Still made a decent start on it today.

Walked the dog. Had lunch. Came back to one of the online guys asking how to work out what IP addresses the 360 was trying to access. I’m surprised by this as online know all about routing, firewalls and what the hell what is trying to connect to what. Anyway, got him to get a copy of pfSense installed, then look at the firewall logs. It then took him all day to burn a copy of the pfSense CD. Sometimes I despair.

Arranged to do a re-check on a lovely dog called ‘Ben’, whose now called ‘Hooch’. Very nice lady and dog. Went to gym. Ran for sixty five minutes. Came home. Ate salad. No cheese.

Bowel update. Today it’s less like Mount Vesuvius and more like a chocolate fountain, although I wouldn’t want to dip a marshmallow in the stream.

No cheese.

Oh, reviews of a couple of films I’ve watched in the last few days. “388 Arletta Avenue” “Devil”

Cushions on wooden seats, no

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Watched this last night, very good “The Cabin In The Woods”

I’ve been offered some orange cushions for my wooden chairs from the mother in law, it’s a nice gesture. Now, there are two things that irritate me in life (actually there are about 470), one is people who wear socks with sandals, the other is cushions tied on to wooden chairs. I blame my Aunty, she used to made gravy with OXO cubes. She had wooden chairs with cushions tied to them, for some reason always hated the bloody things, that hasn’t changed now. I want to encourage piles.

So spent the morning battling with iOS to save out ID3 tags to IMA/M4A files. After some irritating fun with mutable dictionaries I got it going. Added a couple of other iOS specific things for speaker routing. Ordered Jamie’s birthday presents, joys of internet. Put an add for a cleaner on myhammer. Walked the dog. Went to the gym and ran for an hour.

pfSense needed rebooting, first time in thirty days. The web interface ground to a halt after WAN 1 went down. That’s thirty days without me moaning about it. Now it seems to be working fine but accessing the hard drive a bit excessively. Need to keep an eye on it.

Now watching bollocks television. May go for a film, I fancy some cake.

99 tracks and the bitch is one

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Spent today back on the mobile game. Tweaking AI, audio and some other bits. Then various people decided to annoy me with questions on PS3 setup and linker settings. I felt like that guy in the Simpson’s on customer services – “I know nothing about Turkey, either the bird or the country”, now fuck off. Even setting my MSN status to “I’m busy, go away”, had little effect. May be I just stress too much.

Anyway, got it all done. Took the award winning dog for a walk (she really must drop that title) then went to the gym. Did a home check on the way back, they already have a very cute dog, so that’s a straightforward one.

Updated the thetorturepornmovieblog with my Saw 2 review. I don’t really do full synopsis, I’d rather people just read my rough outline and then go watch it. If I did the entire plot then whats the bloody point in watching the film.

Got to the root of the DVD ripping problem. If you open the DVD in media player and start the episode, look at the exact time of it. It will only match one track on the entire DVD, so that will be the one for the episode. Also found that I had to trim the last 5 seconds off each episode or the encoder would lock up. But after all that everything seems to work.

Got the office to order me a new SSD as this one is so chockka and I need to install VC2010 and that’s another vast amount of crap. The old one has a huge amount of bad blocks on it now anyway, so I may retire it over to this server as it’s backed up every night anyway and will save me a bit of power. I also plan on going back to the compact flash for the pfSense box, but will probably do that after they have launched the next stable update.

Now I’m not really in the mood for the Belgian GP, I fancy a film. So may settle down to something, I’m supposed to be in London Thursday anyway, so that will bugger up torture porn night.

And then we went to the mother-in-law’s

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Started off on the ima4 codec again. Managed to convince the iMac to convert a wav file to an aifc. That was still getting distortion, traced that to it using the step/sample hint on each block each time, when normally it doesn’t really need to. In the end I only used that for seeking. Worked fine in the end, decodes lovely. Now doing the encoder, which is straightforward except for the file format which contains a 10 byte encoded float just to complicate things. Will get that finished pretty quickly. Then I want to add an MP3 encoder and that’s about all codec work finished then except may be for Android.

Jamie actually walked the dog with me today, so same distance, but my arm didn’t feel like it was put through a mangle.

Went to BodyPump, no running afterwards as we then headed out to Alison’s as it was her birthday the other day.

Now back, about to hang up the washing and eat pizza. Fun days.

pfSense news, had a bounced mail today as it appears that it’s not sending out on the correct ip addresses, will need to investigate further. But defo next job is to pile it all into the cabinet.