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September 30, 2003

Updates and ISPs

Well updates have been a bit sporadic and the more astute readers may have noticed that Sunday's post appeared after Monday! This is part and parcel of the pain that comes when you charge ISP. As of yesterday afternoon (local time), I no longer have a cable connection. this has one immediate benefit - SPAM reduction. My ISP assigned email address (which I never use for anything) is a major span source thanks to the incompetence of my ISP (Telstra). this morning I had only two SPAM emails instead of the usual 50+.
On the downside there are the usual reconfiguration issues to sort out like network settings which moved from 10.0.1.* to 192.168.0.* and associated DNS changes. I had to change the airport from being a router to a bridge and reconfigure mail. Most of the computers were easy to sort out but for some reason the nBlog software refused to work even after a complete remove and reinstall. After spending well over an hour on it, I gave up and emailed the article to myself and posted it manually.
Naturally email didn't work either! I had changed the mail server address but a quick check in the mail log indicated that the mail was being rejected because the incoming IP did not resolve in DNS. Well of course it doesn't - it was an address allocated by the DHCP server instead of the old static address that was used previously. There is probably an easy solution but I hate digging through sendmail so I hacked the DNS instead with dummy entries for DHCP addresses. A quick restart and everything was working OK - article posted - after all, late is better than never!
I should have quit while I was ahead (which Diskworld character said that and in which book was it?). But no, I just had to keep fiddling. I tried the latest version of NewtSync to try and get my address book updated on the Newton. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. The MacOS X replacement for NCU is called Escale but it is not 100% kosher yet - in particular it is very fiddly to install packages (best bet is to do the install from the Newton end and restart Escale between packages - slow but functional). Got both bits of NewtSync working (sort of) so pushed the Sync button. Bang, crash. Apparently, my version of iCal (1.5.1) is too old and I should upgrade to 1.02 or later. Ummm. I am using the "later" option here....
Do you think I have learned my lesson yet?

Posted by Ozguru at September 30, 2003 09:09 PM

Comments

Nope, I doubt if you have.

Posted by: Kingsley at September 30, 2003 09:09 PM

Just noticed that nobody got the 'quit while I was ahead' question. The character was the skull that the raven sits on in Soul Music. The skull and the raven converse .... The raven of course is the translator for the 'Death of Rats' who needs to get Susan (Death's granddaughter) involved in something.

Posted by: Ozguru at September 30, 2003 09:09 PM