h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good idea that, Phil. Too many people make the mistake of not testing upgrades on a non-production box prior to their scheduled outages.

I've been caught out like that before

Thing is the real swerver is 2x2.8GHz Xeon with lots of memory (running freebsd4.10) and the test is just a single 450MHz P3 with 256M memory (FreeBSD 5.3) so it's taking it's time compiling stuff.
I hope that whatever the stable release version of FreeBSD is when it comes to the upgrade will boot on the real thing as the last time I tried a 5.X series on it it didn't boot.

Hows the job going now you're getting into it and no longer spending all your time doing training?

Still training... I've been to more training than I ever wanted. I am taking some cases, but still undergoing a ton of training at every step. Next week i will be training for half of the week. The morning half.

Sheesh. I rather want the training to be over.

So it finished compiling at sometime around 10 to 6 last night, somewhere between 7.5 and 8 hours!

I exchanged my router at home yesterday, adding wireless to the wired ports. No problems, actually - I was up and running the existing wired network and, in addition, my work laptop wirelessy inside 45 mins.

And I had closed off the wireless net (changed SSID, limited to the laptop's MAC address, even activated WEP which is all that my laptop can in terms of encryption).

11 mps downstairs, even good signal strengths at the terrace in the front garden

Then I hibernated the laptop. Haven't been able to get a signal through to it since

The router's up, according to wired PCs. The settings for the wireless net are all in the laptop. I'll go see around lunchtime whether I can get a signal from the company's wireless setup (in another building) to verify if the laptop can receive.

Any other ideas?

Is the wireless stuff built into the laptop or an additional card? If it's a card try taking it out and putting it back to reset it.
Do you normally leave the laptop hibernating? Have you tried a full power down and power up sequence again?

Wot Phil said. I've had similar problems with the airport card built in to my apple. I sometimes have to reboot to get it back.

Sorry, forgot to mention that power down and back up didn't help... (built-in by the way)

Thx anyway

What version of Windows? I've seen that happen on Windows XP, it seems to affect the "Home" edition more than the "Professional". I never did figure out how to fix it, but if you keep twiddling with the settings on the laptop it will eventually come back. Actually with my niece's laptop I gave up entirely and didn't do anything for months, then one day it worked. A software update must have fixed something, you should definitely check for update wireless drivers.

Marv, that's atypical for a powerbook. Did you store your access keys in the keychain? Turn on the menubar indicator too - then you can turn the card on and off again from the menu without rebooting, if it really is necessary (I only do to conserve battery power). The only time I've ever had real trouble reconnecting is when using bluesocket for encryption, but that's the bluesocket that goes wonky after sleeping, not the wireless card.

It's Win2K Prof. I talked to the IT guys - it's rather as the PC reports 0% signal - but yet, in the wireless-enabled building we have, responds with a list of SSIDs/MAC adresses when you scan for networks

Anyway, there's something in the PC (deep settings and/or hardware) that's screwed - disabling the internal card and putting in a PCMCIA card known to work still gave the same results...

*sighs*

So it'll have to go in...

I had to change the DNS properties on 2 of my systems here as I was not able to access any webpages though I could ping their IPs. A trace route to yahoo.com had a timeout on the 2nd hop.

One system is connected directly to the router (DLink DI-524 rev A) and the other is connected to a hub that is connected to said router.

The curious thing is another system (our dial in server) is connected to the directly to the router and has no DNS issues without having to change the DNS properties.

The only other difference is, the two systems I had to make changes on are XP Pro, the other one is 2k Server.

Ideas anyone?

Be a little more specific than you just changed the properties. What changes did you make?

I changed the DNS from auto obtain to a static DNS with another ISP (Xmission).

There has been a spate of DNS attacks going on lately effecting MS DNS servers. It is quite possible that your DNS servers being assigned were under attack. Perhaps the other machine was assigned a different DNS server. Setting static entries is all well and good till something happens to your route to Xmission.

That said, I still use those servers as a test to make sure that I can actually reach the internet when other problems are occuring.

Is that why Comcast had an internet outage throughout NJ yesterday afternoon and evening?

That is possible Witty. I don't know the details but I do know that there has been a lot of DNS cache poisoning going on.

Would anyone happen to know of any device that would make it possible to play music backwards?

I'd like to check out something someone said about Ravel's Bolero see...

What format is the recording you have T? Is on cd, tape (compact cassette or reel to reel), mp3, wav etc?

Well, I have it on CD, tape (cc) and vinyl (although my recordplayer is broken, so I can't play it) and I imagine there are various other formats available for download on the net...

The easiest way of doing it (other than just flipping the reels over in a reel to reel tape machine ) would be with a computer. If you have a copy on CD, convert it to either wav or mp3 format using your prefered tools of choice. Then using something like audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net ), reverse the track or part of the track you want.