Kitten Presant (by sarah)

I was outside yesturday evening when the kittens came trotting over and placed this at my feet.

I am both happy that they consider me worthy of their presants but at the same time feel sad for the poor little rodent. Still it means they are definatly good mousers now - even though that isnt a mouse!

Opps! (by sarah)

I think I have lost or gained a week or something and mixed up the back dating of some posts - so I would ignore the chronoligy of the blog for a while if I were you!

Plus I want to post more stuff that I've written ages ago but havent got round to posting!

Another Hectic Week (by sarah)

Yep another one!

This week Jean had a bit of a stomache bug resulting in me getting covered in puke at three in the morning. Lack of sleep then led me to get us to an appointment that happens to be in Febuary!

Then Wednesday was the Beavers, and a training course we managed to be over an hour late for :(. Thursday saw the Cubs and Scouts doing archery and Friday a client turned up unexpectadly. Saturday ended up being a business day what with said client being about but we also had to go the tip to drop of the dishwasher as we didnt want to drive all the way to Petersfield with it in the back the next day!

It was supposed to be the Swimming stage one badge for all three sections but some one was ill in the pool so it was canceled and we had to phone everyone! We also had to do a panicked arranging of the football team for the Sunday as we werent going to be there - though we still do not know how that went!

Sunday saw us visiting family 3 hrs away in Petersfield which was great fun 🙂 Baby Jean was much appricieated by Harry and Annabelle - I have a few pics but am currently too tired to upload them so you'll have to wait for the cuteness I'm afraid!

Cat bouyancy (by alaric)

Cats naturally tend towards the highest point they can get to. I presume this is to do with the ease of defending a high point and the ability to easily survey the most terrain, but either way, they seem to enjoy lounging in places they have to climb up to...

For ours, when they're indoors, the highest point they can reach is the top of a box, which is on top of a bookcase about two metres tall, in my office (which is upstairs to begin with). It's also a rather awkward place to extract them from when we put them out for the night, which I think they've realised too. But by climbing up on my desk, I can get them down anyway.

Anyway, as I came back to my desk after lunch, I realised that both of the black and white cats were curled up together up there, and made a cute picture (although I only had my mobile phone to hand, so sorry about the quality):

VLAN update (by alaric)

Ok, suspecting that the MTUs might be a problem, I put an fxp ethernet card into the single PCI slot in my home server (ousting the SCSI card), since that card can support the large Ethernet frames required to have a standard 1500 MTU plus 802.1Q VLAN tags.

But, alas, things were little better. From a desktop machine wired into the same switch as the server I still can't do DAAP without iTunes randomly closing the connection in mid-stream, and from Sarah's laptop on the wireless LAN, she still can't do DAAP or reliable SMB file sharing (the connection keeps getting dropped). SMB seems OK from the desktop machine, however.

So I wondered if NetBSD's 802.1Q implementation might be the problem; since the old vr interface is built into the server's motherboard, I now have two NICs, so just put the server on both internal VLANs independently (with no 802.1Q). And it's no better.

I can imagine that iTunes might just be fussy about its DAAP implementation and not like something daapd (an open-source implementation of the DAAP music sharing in iTunes) is doing; but why should SMB also be unreliable? I tried SMB from my own laptop over the wifi link, and found it workable but oddly slow. I'm going to experiment further with connecting my laptop directly to the switch (on either wifi or internal VLAN) and seeing how it responds, I think... something's fishy!