Flahed out

My epic journey towards having a decent internet access scenario at home has taken another step forward. I’ll be getting a nice new D-Link DL-615+ Wireless Access Point on Saturday for the bargain price of 125 euro. That’s all I needed to complete my setup at home. Now, I’ve just got to wait for eircom to get their head out of whatever dark place they have it shoved, and get my DSL set up in the exchange.

In other news, I’ll be in Dublin over the weekend, if anybody wants to buy me meet me for a pint

Been looking at Wireless (802.11b) Access Points recently, with a view to getting a reasonably cheap one over the next couple of weeks. There are a lot of good ones out there, but the really nice ones seem to be available in Ireland for about three times what they are available for in the US. And as for Germany… well their prices are unbelievably low, but I can’t read German, and their sites are (generally) not in English.

Any suggestions for AP/Routers from Irish vendors greatly appreciated.

Looks like we’ll be getting into offering official Red Hat training here (Eirteic Consulting) in the next couple of months if people are interested enough. This is good, because if we do start to make a few bob out of it, I’ll probably get to go on a course myself, and sit the trainer’s exam.

Also ordered my two Buffalo wireless PCMCIA cards and a PCI adapter from PC Pro on the company account earlier today and they’ll be delivered tomorrow! Things are looking up. Now just waiting on my DSL line, but hopefully that won’t be long. Maybe another week, or two at the outside.

As I may have mentioned (or not) I’m looking for wireless kit. Linux-supported wireless kit, to be more specific. So after much hunting I decided yesterday upon two Linksys cards, a WMP11 and a WPC11 from Amazon in the UK, as it seems to be common knowledge that these cards use a Prism 2/2.5 chipset (which is well supported under Linux).

Then, this morning, while doing a bit of searching for various bits of wireless info, I discovered a few sites which claim that the current rev of the Linksys kit uses a totally unsupported (in Linux) el cheapo Broadcom chipset. Needless to say, I hit the roof.

However, it looks like my employer is coming to the rescue, as we have an account with PC Pro, who I have been informed stock Buffalo 802.11b cards, which use the aforementioned Prism 2 chipset.

Nice one. I may yet get this wireless network off the ground. And when my DSL arrives… well let’s just say I wouldn’t be averse to working from home occassionally not often, maybe 4 days a week?

Hooray for me, I beat the system

If you’ve been reading my ‘blog, you’ll know from yesterday about the stumbling block with regard to getting DSL. I needed account details from eircom, to forward to Esat BT, to confirm our ownership of the line, so that they’d put in the DSL. If you can’t follow that, don’t worry… I can barely understand it, and it’s happening to me.

Anyway, I discovered that the contract form that eircom had sent us to sign has the relevant details on it, so I faxed a copy of it to the sales person in Esat BT. When I spoke to him this afternoon he confimed that he now has everything he needs to go ahead.

Now, the long wait – Esat BT’s agreement with eircom provides for up to a four week lead time on these jobs. However, I’m optimistic. After all, I was quoted 4 weeks for telephone line installation and they did it in two days!

Ah, at last… the big stumbling block I was waiting for has arrived. Esat want a copy of either a phone bill or a letter from eircom including the phone account number, line number, name and address. As the line went in less than two weeks ago, I have neither of those and eircom refuse to supply me with a letter. When I queried this, I was then forwarded to their “Credit” department for some reason. This led to me being put on hold for nearly 15 minutes and then hung up on. Not that I expected any better from eircom, but this is infuriating. No wonder so few people have availed of DSL in this country, if this is the kind of crap they have to put up with.

My next call is going to be to the data protection commissioner, as I believe I am entitled to have eircom send me the details I have requested.

The memory profiling app I’ve mentioned on the ILUG mailing list and the IRC channel (#linux) is taking shape.

I’m absolutely dreadful at C string manipulation – which is something I will have to look into – and was having trouble getting VmSize in a usable form from /proc/pid/status. Last night, I got fed up and decided to just rip off some of the source from “top”, and in doing so, discovered that top and the other packages in the procps package get their data from the libproc library! Alleluia!

However, it’s pointed out to me that I really am going to have to get to grips with the string stuff in C. Any pointers to related resources would be gratefully received.

After much F-ing and blinding, I got the DSL application forms faxed out to me this morning Now all I have to do is get Louise’s signature on them (the phone line is in her name) and hopefully I’ll be all set.

Though they did say that they have to ask a few basic credit-related questions of me too, so you’d never know. I can’t imagine that my credit is all that good right now. That said, I have been with my bank for 16 years, and will be paying by direct debit… hopefully points in my favour.

Incidentally, thanks to longword on #linux I now understand the essential difference between PPPoA which Esat are using for their residential customers apparently and PPPoE which they’re using for their business customers (i.e. me). The upshot of it is that MAC address info is not visible to Esat over PPPoA, so it doesn’t matter how many PCs you put on the end of your residential line, though the contract does limit you to one.