It's that time of year again, too much time over the Christmas holidays, overeaten, got on every ones nerves. What better excuse to update the Website?
The trouble with teetering on the brink of being middle aged, is that unless you're free of children, chances are that you've not done anything exciting that is really worth sharing with the world. This is especially true in our case, with no less than 5 children to avoid. Life is kind of on hold whilst the kids get out of nappies/into school/out to work (there's a bit of an age range) so regrettably there's not much to shout about. It's either that or we're all completely boring and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......
On the technical front, things have changed since last year. Our site is now hosted by.... Us!. Last year saw us getting ADSL from Pipex together with a fixed IP address. Configuring Red Hat 7.3 and Apache to host our pages was therefore trivial. Configuring our Smoothwall firewall was similarly lacking in challenge. We now enjoy the benefits of instant mail delivery courtesy of Qmail although it takes Diane three days to find the time to log on and read it.
Although Smoothwall is allegedly (I've not tried it) capable of supporting USB ADSL modems, we'd already dodged the whole issue by buying an ADSL router. BT's attitude towards non-Windoze operating systems (scream loudly that it does not work) was kind of off putting, so a hardware self install option seemed the best way to go. It was all just dandy with Pipex despite what you may have read elsewhere.
Our first router was an AR601 ADSL Router from SEG Communications. It's very reasonably priced at £139 + VAT. One point to note, however: the 10base port on the router requires a cross over cable to connect to a hub i.e. it is designed to plug straight into a NIC without a hub, or into a hub with the "uplink" button pressed in. They don't tell you that on the instructions, but the absence of illumination on the hub is a dead giveaway. If you're using a non-NAT configuration, you may also benefit from setting the ip relay all parameter, otherwise none of the interfaces talk to each other, which is rather sub-optimal. I wouldn't recommend this router for 24/7 operation because it seems to loose the plot after several hours and requires a restart to restore the "lights on but no one home" state it gets into.
We're still using GANDI as our domain registrar. They're still very cheap, and they appear to be efficient and I've not had one single spam from them. Why bother with a domain name? It looks more professional, costs less than a tenner and allows us to be independent of any provider we might happen to be using at the time.
What's the purpose of this site? None at all really, just as a method to flaunt ourselves to the world, and to allow us to inflict our dodgy perl/cgi scripts on an unsuspecting cyber public. To see how bad these scripts really are, try my STD code finder.Hey, it beats cutting COBOL programs for a living! Other vaguely useful stuff includes my perl mail processor, and some notes on installing Red Hat Linux on a Compaq ProSignia 300. My, what fun that was. You may also be interested in some notes on the subject of Linux recovery from tape, or Linux Wireless Fun.
Who are we? Well as you've probably worked out my name's Jez , and Di's isn't. We're a Wife and Husband double act living in Bognor Regis, UK, with our five children: Sammy, Craig, Rhiannon, Imogen and Freya, who is our latest offspring - 5 hours from birth to WWW fame. We also have an assortment of animals, the latest arrivals being the Chickens.
The hot off the presses, latest news (such as it is) will usually be found below. Alternatively you might want to read about some of our previous adventures.Then again, maybe not!
3rd January 2002
The long awaited birth of Rogers No. 5 finally happened today!. Freya
was born at 15:26 weighing a respectable 9lb 7 1/2oz. Both mum and baby
doing fine. Click here for the pictures
11th February 2002
A pal of mine has entered the London Marathon. Dan was
sufficiently impressed with the on line sponsor CGI thing
I did for last year's Bognor 10K, that he asked me to do
the same for him.
Naturally I was happy to oblige. Sponsor Dan at
www.slake.info
27th March 2002
We're moving our website to our home server, running on the end of our
recently installed ADSL line. Please bear with us whilst the 'net plays
DNS catch up, and let us know if any of the pages do strange things once
they're back up and running.
Bognor Prom 10K Road Race 2002
Following my successful participation in last year's Bognor
10K, I've entered again this year. Not suprisingly, I'm after your money again, this time in aid of Michael Ayres Junior School. Check out the roadrace page for more info.
28/6/02 - Oops We're Off The Air
Oh Dear, it appears out website was down all of today. This was due solely to my inability to set up my new Zyxel Prestige 643 ADSL router. Apologies to regular readers.
For the technically minded amongst you, the problem was that the router appears to have some preconfigured IP filters that block common ports such as web, telnet, ftp etc from coming in from the big bad Internet, but they don't stop you getting out so unless you try and connect to yourself, you don't notice.
I'm just trying the Zyxel router out for a coleague who's going for ADSL some time soon, and SEG were all out of AR601 routers.
Freya's Walking
25th October
Freya has been taking the odd step or two for some time now, but she surpassed herself this evening. She stood up, took three confident steps towards the cat, stopped turned and took two more before sitting down and crawling after poor old arthur puss. It's time for the stair gates methinks.
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