Unpacking is fun!  Well, maybe not, considering I'm a neat freak, and there's tons of boxes lying around here, begging to be unpacked.  Unfortunately, I can't really completely setup stuff until 1) My desk arrives and 2) The CAT5 wiring in this place gets fixed.  At least the four deliveries went well.  No scratches or problems at all.

Of course, can't let the day end without running into another routing problem on my network!  So, I finished building my new nat/vpn Linux box here, and connected to Road Runner's network.  Works well.  I build a couple OpenVPN tunnels to my other sites, and enable OSPF via Quagga.  I start running into some weird asymmetric routes, after realizing that my DNS server's inability to do a zone transfer for once isn't a BIND-related configuration issue.  Anyway, I narrow down the problem to some stupidity between OpenVPN and Quagga.  All of the tunnels I create are numbered, using a 32-bit netmask for each address.  Quagga somehow sees the remote address as a connected route, and the local address as an OSPF-imported route.  And, to further complicate things, most of my routers are also running IPtables, and seem to have trouble with asymmetric routes and keeping packet state, etc.  Initially, I thought this was a FreeBSD-related issue, but routes to some local tunnel IPs on my Linux boxes were showing up as OSPF-imported, too.  So, I tried adding a static route to the local IP, and redistributing static; no dice.  Actually, I ended up ripping out most of the router ospf section, all the route maps, and started from scratch.  Same thing.  Soo ... anyone encounter this before?

Alright, I'd better hit the sack.  Eyelids are shutting ...

Last few days have been hectic, to say the least.

I've been making multiple trips between NC and NJ via car, moving all of my belongings down south (ok, mostly computers).  The first trip kinda sucked, since my poor planning left me with only one audio CD to listen to.  I won't make the same mistake again.  I'm still bummed out that even though I'm getting a ton of stuff delivered this weekend, I still won't have my desk, dining room set, or sofa for a week or two.  I love how these furniture stores advertise great sales, then fail to tell you that it'll take about a month to ship.  Oh well, at least I'll have the other stuff (and internet access!).

Oh, yeah, I took some time earlier this week to upgrade starfire (this web server) to FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE.  Running mergemaster took less than five minutes.  Not too many changes, compared to the hours I spent with mergemaster on the 5.2.1 -> 5.3 upgrade.

Speaking of upgrades, I really should upgrade some of my other boxen.  Too bad nat's 371 days of uptime is too much to lose, I think I'll wait!

Well, I survived spring up until now, it seems.  I got hit by a blast of allergies on Thursday, resulting in all sorts of sinus fun.  Drinking large amounts of citrius drinks seems to have calmed it down a little, for now.  Maybe I can make it go away before Monday.

In other news, I'm finally going to be moving all my stuff from New Jersey in a couple of days.  Fun!

Quite an impressive electrical storm we had this evening.  From the 4th floor here I get a nice view of the bolts of lightning forking as they hit the ground, somewhere.  I tried using my digital camera to record a couple minutes of footage, but since the framerate was only 15fps, nothing really came out.

I get to walk through my condo, and point out things that need fixing tomorrow.  It's supposed to be for scratches and the like.  I guess being slightly obsessive-compulsive doesn't help.  I printed out the list, and it's three pages long.

[ares:22:55]% host www.google.com
Host www.google.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Time to go outside and ride a bike, or something.

nonce:~# umount /mnt/plv
umount: /mnt/plv: device is busy

That just burns me up.  fuser and lsof say nothing is using that mountpoint.

Even more GPS maps.  Yay!

Shopping for furniture and appliances is more painful than it looks.  I spent most of today running around between different stores, comparing prices, dimensions, and probability of stuff matching correctly.  It became easier after I borrowed a sample of my wood floor from the sales office.  Why didn't I think of that sooner?

Anyway, it was a pretty productive day.  I now (well, will) have a nice dining set, sofa, and beds.  Tomorrow I look for kitchen appliances and other stuff for the bedrooms.

After that, I need to start looking for entertainment center components.  I'm thinking of attaching my Mac Mini to whatever kind of HDTV I get and surround sound system.  I took a trip through Best Buy and Sears, but nobody seems to carry HDTVs capable of 1080p, the best I could find were ones that support 720p.  I guess that's fine, for now.  I doubt the Radeon 9600 in the Mac would perform well at 1920x1080, anyway.  So much for high-res Quake III ...