Broke again, now back again#

Wed, 05 May 2010 10:32:37 +0000

Extended outage, yes. I moved house. That wasn't itself the problem: the problem was that the machine which runs this blog decided after the move that it didn't want to run for more than a few hours at a time without panicing randomly.

After replacing the mouse (no, really, the USB-serial interface it was plugged into seemed to be sporadically disappearing from view), hoovering out the inside of the case, reseating all the cards, and various other forms of voodoo, it seems to have been made stable by a couple of BIOS tweaks I found on overclocking forums: upping the northbridge voltage and dram voltage by 0.1V. Apparently this is a common problem on the Asus P5Q-EM when it has all four ram slots full. And no, I'm not overclocking it.

Anyway, I have a stable (so far) system again and blogging service will resume soon. First up: it must be late last year that I started playing with Ruby, so it must be about time for the 6-month review.

Using a public routed network on a Vigor 2700#

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:57:31 +0000

If you have a tech-friendly ISP (like mine ) your DSL service might not only have a static IP address (one that doesn't change each time you reconnect) but several of them. In my case, 8 (five usable).

If you have a Draytek Vigor router, you can configure it to know about these using the 2nd subnet support - this is what I did before I moved, with the 2600 I had at the time

If you have the specific Draytek Vigor 2700 model that I have (and I don't know how wide a problem this is) you may attempt to follow these instructions but find that the configuration options for second subnet are missing. The option for DHCP relay agent is missing too. I tried a bunch of stuff including factory reset, firmware upgrade, and "phone a friend" to resolve this before eventually grasping the nettle and fiddling with firebug and HTML "view source"

The situation seems to be that the router is entirely capable of doing both these two things (if you're reading this, it must be) but javascript variables govern whether the HTML configuration interface actually lets you, and for no reason I can think of these variables (called HIDE_LAN_GEN_2NDSUBNET and HIDE_LAN_GEN_DHCPRELAY) are, on my router, set to true. So, login to the router, pull up the firebug console, enter

parent.HIDE_LAN_GEN_2NDSUBNET=false
parent.HIDE_LAN_GEN_DHCPRELAY=false