2013 — 22 February: Friday
This is just a place-holder.1 Last night's film "The perks of being a wallflower" turned out to be very enjoyable, though I have to say I'm very glad not to have had to navigate the American High School system. Grammar school was bad enough. And once is more than enough. Mind you, Christa attended a year of High School in Nebraska in 1963 and made some long-lasting friendships. But my son and I both agree that our school days were far from the happiest of our lives.
G'night.
I'd suspected...
... the loss of my external connectivity might be due to early preparations for today's line upgrade but it turned out to be much more mundane. I'd briefly plugged in a spare phone upstairs on the landing, checked it had a dial tone, unplugged it again, and there — as usual — went my router to that twilight zone where it goes until brought back to the land of reality by a swift reboot. This is, it occurs to me, the first time I've actually performed this particular trick since changing routers. I shall quiz Mr BT on the topic, as it would be quite convenient to have two landline phones in the house.
It's a dull, grey morning, just below freezing. [Pause] I really don't like being forced to hang around for a gentleman caller without a clearly-agreed appointment time.
The phone call I've just had from BT suggests I got up about three hours earlier than necessary. The switchover should start at about 10:45 and he'll be here within the hour.
The good news is...
I have a new, faster, connection to the outside world:
The bad news is...
I haven't currently got a clue where my Raspberry Pi has decided to run away and hide itself. This runs my internal website, of course. Irritating.
The in-between news is...
The Android Tablet PC downstairs now knows its way around my wireless network. I shall turn my attention to the Win8 laptop. How hard can that be? Or, I could grab a bite to eat. It's already 12:35 and I could use the calories.
I also found out where "my" BT cabinet is. That's where the optical fibre terminates and the bits have to make it the rest of the way here on twisted copper wires. My box of tricks is on the corner of Chalvington road and Bournemouth road, so it's about 300 yards away, I guess.
Having refreshed myself...
... with tea and a biccie over with Roger and Eileen, I've also refreshed / reset my shiny new router modem, but with no recognition of the existence of my Raspberry Pi. So I've hooked up a screen and keyboard to it, watched it boot, start the webserver, and proudly announce its TCP/IP address with the value I expect it to have. But my Win8 PC remains completely blind to it. Most odd, and rather annoying. Still, I have email, external web access, read/write access to my external webserver, and rather faster podcast download speeds, so I suppose that will have to do for the time being... — the time being 18:50 it's actually about time I did something about placating the ever-hungry inner man.
It feels horribly cold out there, by the way, and was just below freezing when I got home.
All is now...
... network sweetness and light, following a very productive visit from Len. The trick to recovering the Raspberry Pi was to work out exactly where Brian had hard-wired its network address and reset it to the 'new' IP range. Also needed to set the default gateway address to ensure it could still go off and find updates when asked. The Buffalo NAS got its new address set statically to the value that had been assigned dynamically. (Servers and network lumps of storage are best kept at fixed addresses, one way or another.) And the little WD HD TV box came back online after being rebooted on the new network, as did the Win8 laptop.
Quite why the Cisco Network Manager software chooses to identify the new router as a shared network printer (which, in my case, I 'ave not got) is a Mystery that Life is Too Short to Explore.
This is the new toy.