SWG Fun

I picked up Advertising III in SWG the other day, figuring that having my shop on the map might help a little bit. Little did I expect to make 6 sales (mostly cheap furniture) in 2 days, let alone get myself mail from happy customers! I logged in this afternoon, to find two people in my shop buying furniture. I filled a special order, and they are advertising me to their guild because they liked my store/stuff. Woot.

I spent an hour or two stocking up (using my newfound profits), and now have a variety of houses, generators, furniture and lighting. Very nifty. Hopefully, it'll sell as quickly as my first batch!

Afterwards, I got the crazy idea to go Overt and attack (NPC) rebels around Anchorhead, Tatooine. My assult went really well for a while, taking down lots of rebels, a couple of camps, some crazed hermits, and even a rebel Leiutenant General. Then I ventured too close to town by accident, and a red dot started to head at me, at great speed. Faster than my burst run (he was burst running, too!). A (player) master combat medic was inbound! Getting away wasn't working too well, so I kneecap-shotted him a couple of times. That bought be a little time, and I pulled out my speederbike - just as his mind poison hit me. Zoop - from full mind to none, but not incapacitated (you can't get incapped from poison, just drained). I got on my bike and jetted out - amazingly enough, still alive. Re-reading my combat logs, I hit him for maybe 300 points total - and he did over 1,000 to me. Owie.

I headed back to Mos Eisley, and went started the timer back to Covert. I then caught a shuttle to Theed, normally very safe for Imperials - only to walk into the middle of a raid! A crazed wookie squad leader named Longhorn and three rebels were gunning down Imperials left, right and center. I ran for it - they headshotted me, I died. Oops.

Despite this, I did manage to make a good 4,000 off of my raid. Even with the cloning costs, and my 400 credit tip to the medic who healed me up afterwards, that's a profitable run!
Mood: relaxed
Music: None

Armadillos's

I was just reading Armadillo Aereospace's regular updates. It's good to see that Carmack isn't impeded by his rocket crash - but seems to be coming back stronger as a result. As he pointed out, he could crash one of his rockets a week for 10 years and still spend less than SpaceShip One!

Also, congratulations are due for the baby Carmack.
Mood: happy
Music: Iron Maiden - Wasted Years

PIX's SUCK

So the PIX saga continues. On TSG's LAN, it runs at 9.8mbit/s - not too shoddy. On the client's connection, it tops out at 57kbit/s! Teh suxxor!

The FreeBSD box in the exact same place tops out at around 95mbit/s - more than enough to fill their 6mbit/s connection. It has more features, is a LOT more secure than the PIX, and cost... nothing. So of course, the client is pissed off and won't believe that anything free/cheap could possibly be as good as a $2,500 piece of shit firewall.

I should have told them that it cost $10,000 and can make toast.
Mood: thirsty
Music: None

Blogging again

So life is almost back to normal. I worked another twelve hour day yesterday, hopefully the last in this particular work spree... although I'm set for a long stint today (more on that later) Why have I been working so much? TSG no longer exists! For IRS reasons, we are now Zero1Tek (domain name coming soon). I'm going to break the update down into sections.

The TSG/Zero1Tek Saga
Years ago, TSG got behind on it's taxes. Not very far behind (for a $250,000 turnover company), a few thousand dollars. We agreed a payment plan with the IRS; paying it was tricky sometimes, but we were gradually clawing our way out. Then, we were pursuaded to sign up with a company called Omni Financial who specialize in reducing tax debts - and had impeccable (fraudulent, in my opinion now - Omni, if you read this, sue me! I dare you!) references. They ate about $5k of our money, and kept asking for more money and more paperwork. They also gave us some really bad advice. According to them, the only way for them to renegotiate with the IRS was for us to default on our existing payment plan. Our former accountant didn't disagree, so we did it... landing ourselves $20k in tax debt, and $35k in penalty fees. Omni stopped talking to us, so we ditched them - but by this point, the IRS were adamant that it was pay all $55k or die. We don't have $55k in liquid assets, that's a lot of cash to just have lying around. We do have $20k available. The IRS offered to write off all of the penalty fees if we pay the $20k and close TSG. We checked around, and there's nothing illegal about closing a failing business and opening a new one. So, TSG is no more. I was laid off on Friday. Steve's new company, Zero1Tek, has since hired me. We bought the assets from TSG's liquidation sale, conveniently including all our clients, contracts, and none of our debts. So from the ashes has arisen a phoenix, resplete with several thousand a month in profits, no debt, and a perfect tax record. Not too shabby!

Anyway, a downside of liquidating is that you have to have a completely clean slate, accounting-wise. That meant that we couldn't just keep using our existing office administration system, save in a really stripped down version. I worked day and night for two weeks to create a new one, in C#. It's a full-blown Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), it isn't quite finished but it does enough to be useful (and as much as the old system!). It's a 3-tier architecture in .NET, and when finished it will truly rock our world. For now, it works moderately well - and that's enough for me to be able to go back to a semi-sensible schedule.

So why am I working late tonight... PIX firewalls and incompetent competition

We picked up a client who have a Cisco 1605 router and a PIX 506. They used to have this kit hooked up to a DSL line, and they wanted it switched to a new Mediacom line with 3mbit/s download and 512kbit/s upload. Sounds like nothing a PIX shouldn't be able to handle, right? Well, their former consultants hadn't told them how their setup was configured, given them passwords, or given them installation media. We had to practically beat the passwords out of the former consultant, and they were no help at all on the existing configuration. It turns out that this is probably because they were embarrassed by it: the 1605 router was doing nothing at all! It didn't have to do any routing - the DSL company did that. It didn't have to do NAT - the PIX did that. It didn't have to filter the connection, the PIX did that. It didn't need OSPF, RIP or BGP - none were supported by the upstream provider, and they really aren't necessary for a tiny work LAN of 10 clients. Oh, and it was set to bridge with no IP address visible, and we couldn't get into it to configure it without resetting to factory defaults. So... we took it out of the loop completely. The PIX worked - but at 30kbit/s max. That's really crappy. The former consultant sent us a cryptic messge telling us that this was because we took the router out, and since "PIXs can't do routing, this is a critical part of the setup". Erm, PIXes speak OSPF, RIP, can NAT connections, and understand the static routes needed for a simple cable-modem just fine. After a day of wrestling with a perfectly functional PIX, I found out what the router was actually providing: a full duplex NIC, something the cablemodem (and the DSL modem before it) lacked. That's it. 100% of the functionality of a $2,000 switch was providing a 10baseT NIC at full duplex. Why did that matter? It turns out that the PIX goes REALLy slowly when connected at half duplex. Taking it to the office, putting it inline between my workstation and our LAN, and I have it performing its duties at 99.9% of it's 10baseT wirespeed. At least I solved it, but that was ridiculous!

On an amusing note, since we couldn't fix the PIX without downing their LAN, I stuck a FreeBSD firewall in place as a stopgap. Without blinking, it handled 3mbp/s firewalling without issue. It would have gone faster if the upstream had let it. 3mbp/s really isn't much to an OS that can route gigabit ethernet at wirespeed. :-)

So... since I've figured it out, why am I still here? The client wants a lasting backup FreeBSD box available for tomorrow if the obvious fix of a full-duplex switch ($30!) between the cablemodem and the PIX doesn't work. So I'm building one. I love FreeBSD, but I wish their FTP servers would go faster!
MythTV

I picked up a WinTV PVR-250 the other day. It streams TV directly into MPG2 files, rather than relying on the host to do the gruntwork. MythTV now provides crystal clear recordings! I finally finished getting the remote that ships with the PVR-250 working last night. There is something wonderful about sitting on the couch, controlling a PC-that-thinks-it-is-Tivo across the room. :-)
Mood: happy
Music: The really loud fan in the PIX on my workstation!