We managed to get the trench dug out, I thought it’d take most of the weekend to get it right, but after smashing out the concrete with a sledge hammer and breaking out the pavers, the ground breaking ceremony began.

The trench has to be a minimum of 200mm deep, so we’ve aimed for that for the full length, and I’ve aimed to keep it as straight as possible, because if the plumber wants to use copper pipe (or anything that won’t bend easy), it’ll be difficult to get the right angle. What we’ve done is come off the house straight for about 1m, and then diagonally across the yard for about 7m.

After we started the angle, we found a bit of material that looked like brick, some careful prodding revealed the sewer line, and it sits at a wonderful 150mm – right in the way of the trench. So, we’ve allowed 300mm – one of the pipes is going to have to move, and I’ll assume it won’t be the sewer.

We continued digging out further, and come across another pipe – thin, doesn’t really make sense as to were it goes, as it’s many meters away from the cabin, and seems to come off from the house. Perhaps it’s the drain from the Kitchen or something.. Anyway, it’s higher than the sewer, so we can work around that.

Next, continue digging and find a tree root as thick as conduit. We let it live, it’s not in the way.

We approach closer to the granny flat, and run into cold water pipes, at about 150mm, and about 50mm below them is a 100mm thick storm water drain. It’s at this point that we attempt to consider how on earth the plumber is going to reach the hot water pipe anyway. The walls on the cabin are fibro, behind the ‘landing’ area for the new pipe is the bathroom basin, so that’s the closest point to get the hot water into the cabin – the problem is, how is the pipe going to get past the mess that sits in the way of it’s finishing spot, and how is it going to get into the granny flat.

One scenario – pull out the basin, to find the pipe for hot water, punch out from there, add a T-join to the pipe, and then feed that through under the storm water drain (meaning we now have to go 500mm or so deeper I think).

The other, use poly pipe which can bend and flex around the spaghetti mess in the way, and feed that into the granny flat, through the wall into the hot water pipe. Remove the hot water system and cap off the plumbing.

Still, that means punching one hole through as there is no external pipe for them to get to.

Tuesday will be interesting, as the cabin will either have hot water, or we’ll need to sort out something else to get it hot water from the new system, and also of interest is how hot the water will actually be, that will give us an idea of how effective it is.

One of the issues lately has been the rain, it’s been overcast and rainy a lot lately…

The price jumped from our expectations by another 7500 for the Invisigard security screens we decided we’d stick on.

They seem to be worth the money, rivalling Crimsafe products at a cheaper price, yet using a stronger marine grade stainless steel mesh.
Invisigard seem to have figured out how to keep criminals out, yet, let you out with their Invisiscape product. We tested the escape feature, and the older kid can open it,  without much hassle, so it seems ideal.

Unfortunately, the sample wasn’t suitable for testing the mesh as it was too small to jump on, or throw a brick at, or try and damage, but the test details speaks volumes about the product, here.

Crimsafe have a video of the testing they do, with Marine grade 304 stainless steel, and it seems to hold up to their brutal attempts here – Invisigard is Marine grade 316, apparently, it’s better than 304 if you take Invisigard’s word for it.

Of note in the Crimsafe video, in the first attempt, beside the screen door is a window with no screening. Smash it, and your in. Some criminals are stupid. Which reminds me of another point – the builder didn’t initially agree as to the requirement to cover the fixed panel of glass. It just didn’t make sense to me to protect the opening, yet leave a fixed panel of glass ready for the breaking – it’s a clear weak point, unless as Crimsafe’s video suggests, all criminals are stupid (I’ve not ignored that possibility, but I’m also betting on their intelligence increasing).

That leaves only a few ways in, bring a ladder, rip off a colourbond roof panel, crawl along the roofing beams, find the manhole, and jump down.
Get under the house, start smashing up floor boards, then rip up the carpet.
Smash through the new weathertex, rip through the sisalation, cut through the fibreglass insulation, and smash through the Gyprock.

To me, all that seems a bit too much work (and fibreglass insulation makes you itchy, so they’d want to bring a long sleeved shirt, and dust mask to prevent lung irratation). On the other hand, leave the fibro on the walls, and they might end up with mesothelioma in around 30 years.

Invisigard comes with a 10 year guarantee, and if the tests Crimsafe are comparable (similar tests), then the glass shouldn’t get hit by a rock or the like when lawnmowing, etc.. making the glass last longer. Not that a guarantee means much if the company goes broke though…

Add to this, we’ll have to add in Insulation (I’m contemplating R2 or R2.5 for it’s thermal efficiency, else R1.5 for it’s dollar value), and Sisalation, and talk to our own arranged asbestos removal contractors to ensure they are up to speed on installing insulation (so they don’t go packing it over a power point), and it makes for extreme expenses.

And we are yet to decide on what type of exterior paint, what colour exactly, and who will be applying this paint, and we are over budget by $5000 at the moment. I look through it, and there’s nothing I can change easily, without a significant setback. Change the screens to fly screens, and there goes the ideal security for the place. Change the weathertex to Hardiplank and it won’t look as nice. Everything in the contract seems required, with very minimal in excess spending.

Our internal work is going to be off by years due to the simple fact money is actually an object, and when you are spending thousands on a house, choosing quality should be a key decision as opposed to price – my impression is if we did it in Hardiplank we’d be ripping it off down the track and getting Weathertex as it’s a better profile. If only money was no object.

We’ve got indications of around $25k to $40k for the internal work (this might be on the high side of the scale, but then I can see blow outs adding to that anyway). The bathroom is about $1k in demoltion, and a further $5k plus in replacing. Then we’ve got the Kitchen, and we know that’s going to be more than the Bathroom.

Much of what we want to complete will be years off (and this will be with conceding to a 30 year mortgage instead of the previous self imposed 8 years – not gonna happen).

I was thinking of snapping up some pics and posting them, but I’m not sure I’ll go that far. I’ll get the photos, probably won’t post them though.

The problem was cookies. In order to recognise the person posting, the site requires cookies, and that’s just something XHR can’t manage outright by itself. So, I devised a better strategy.

Using GM_setValue, I checked the location in the script to ensure it matches where I want the Cookies to be stored from, and set the value of MyCookie to document.cookie.

Then, when it comes time for a request to be sent, in the XHR, I add a header: Cookie: GM_getValue(“MyCookie”). This fetches the cookie from the script settings, and sets it as the cookie for the request.

Then, it was just a simple task of encoding my data, and sending the request.

This is of course a friendly reminder to ensure you only install scripts you trust, else you might find someone catching your cookie data and using it for undesired purposes.

And, after previously deciding to tell CBA to shove it, I’ve since changed my mind and took up a Personal Loan with them for the renovation work. When you consider the discounts we get for bundling all the products, the interest rate at 15% over 7 years is pretty high.

But, being a variable loan we can pay it down, play with redraw a bit so that we take full advantage of the redraw on the personal loan, and avoid paying the loan off in 2 years, and we could theoretically come out near interest free (well, nearly.)

This works out massively cheaper than the refinancing costs, even after reducing the amount of the increase to $15000 because of the refinancing costs alone.

The downside is we don’t get near as much done. I’m still waiting on updated quotes from our builder (I hate waiting), on the exterior being done in “Classic Ruff Sawn” Weathertex. This will allow for paint to be changed in the future, which PVC would not allow for.

New Windows, and we’ll add Crimsafe’s Safe S Cape after as suitable replacements for the jailhouse bars currently on the windows.

As part of the Green Loan, I plan on insulating the ceiling and walls – this will improve temperature and reduce heating / cooling requirements. One of the quotes for exterior removal was a third of the builders price, and offers sarking and insulation as well. We are going to toss up on their skills, insurance and licensing, to ensure nothing nasty comes of it.

We also have the solar power going in, a quote outstanding for another meter from Energy Australia for the workshop, which will allow for better expansion of the solar system there too, and hot water.

That will leave Air Conditioning as the one remaining item, which will need to wait til we can get the interior quoted and done, which, depending on circumstances will be around 18 months or so away (depends on how aggressively the loan is paid off).

Hopefully, there’ll be a gap in the middle, where the bathroom finds itself.

I contacted our Loans rep from RAMS tonight with some questions, particularly around the refinancing figures, and suggesting a Personal Loan would probably see us better off. He has a commission to make according to the documents, so I’m keen to see what he’ll do to make the logic work, but have also thought that he might not be able to do much – he did a fair bit to try and make the figures work, and we are ‘approved’ for this, but a Personal Loan, we’d pay more interest, but save thousands in refinancing fees.

Alone, we’d lose the LVR fee we paid to CBA – $2500. Then we’d pay another to RAMS – $3500, valuation fees, lose the flexibility that we do have with CBA at the moment, and end up paying more interest over the life of the loan due to the amount and duration.

I realised I wasn’t comparing like for like, we got him to assess $40 000, but since this will put us at a significant disadvantaged position, and the granny flat was later revealed to not be council approved, we’ll do those later / ourselves. The house is what matters, so we’ve asked the builder to change from PVC to Weathertex, submit a house only quote, and we’ll go with this.

I’m hopeful of a quote less than $25000, as we are aware we can get a James Hardie product on the outside, unpainted, the bathroom stripped and lined, the laundry redone in new, new ceilings in both, for just over $20000. Considering he suggested Weathertex would be cheaper than PVC cladding, and the extent of his would be less, I’m hopeful of a smaller quote.

Assuming the financing falls into place, however we go, probably Personal Loan now (yes, I’m indecisive, it’s a failure of the research), the work is still 6 weeks off starting, and the builder advised his busy. The solar panel group are due to contact in 2 weeks.. I’d say that’s getting rescheduled for sure.

A Home Loan would be $25000 in interest over the life of the loan, a Personal Loan would amount to $7000 in interest – it seems sensible in that respect, despite the higher interest rate. We’d do as we did with the mortgage, aggressively attack it until it’s gone, Relax a little on the mortgage, then revert to attacking it.

The interior will be on hold indefinitely unfortunately. It’d be a better world if money was no object.

I’ve had a look at the Environment Minister’s website tonight after hearing a news article about the Insulation / Hot Water rebate being scrapped.

Immediate disappointment struck as our subsidised, yet, still to be installed system would face a $1600 increase.

My thoughts earlier today were that we’d then need to find another $1600, it turns out that it’s now $1000, so the result is $600. Not too bad, but different.

The issue was flawed though, they shouldn’t be bundling hot water and insulation in the one program, they should be two seperate programs, and if they want to determine eligibility, then ‘you must not have Hot Water rebate’ – etc.

The other screw up is the Green Loans program, we narrowly made it with being through the door on the 17th, but as you’ll see from this Whirlpool thread, many, many, many, many, many others have been met with an engaged tone after several telemarketing bodies have taken up ‘free assessment’ telemarketing calls. This means the hotline customers AND assessors call are bogged down from the moment they open, to the moment they close.

My partner has been trying to follow up on the promised but not delivered $50 green card – for spending on ‘green’ products. The elected officials must be held to their promises, else they’ll go on breaking them.

We had a somewhat difficult experience with the green loans office, week after week of follow ups, no report, it took them several weeks to actually get the report emailed, months after the assessment was done.

I thought to myself this has to be the easiest report ever to produce – get the assessor in, get the readings, he supplies the data on the website, they script the retrieval of the power / water / GHG data from the appropriate supplier, and print and email the report.

No, not the case – they fart and fuck around for weeks on end, claiming they will call or email you back, with no result. “Oh, it will be done by next week” the polite, but foreign female lady would say. Next week would come – we’ll email it to you. Next week, no email.

So, Peter Garrett goes and touts to the media:

• the discontinuation of the less popular loans component next month to provide for the significant boost to assessment availability;

I read that line and immediately thought of the numerous people on Whirlpool alone, having numerous difficulties getting through, and then I recall the rejections from Community First Credit Union. Look at the name and description of the program, “Green Loan”, “$10000 for Green Improvements”, etc. These are what people are getting them done for (at least, prior to the telemarketers artificially inflating the statistics).  The reason they are ‘less popular’, is because the call centre is difficult to get a hold of, reports aren’t getting delivered to the users, the banks have credit policies that vary and range from very relaxed, to very restrictive (requiring the invoices to pay the supplier directly..)

The proper process is easy, takes little thought, and could possibly be done whilst high – yes Peter, whilst high as a kite:
- The government makes the decision on who the money is lent to, they do this by guaranteeing the funds to the bank.
- The government changes from whatever poorly thought out and ill conceived ‘green’ assessment system they have, to one of numbers and email / print and mail outs.
- They abolish the telemarketing crap, and allow people who WANT it to seek it out (as we did, and many others).

Sounds simple, ensures that only those who seek it, get it, removes the delays in production of the report, and ensures more people have access to the green loan.

Then, there is the Insulation cockup. As with the First Home Owner Grant, prices will rise to meet whatever perception the installer has of available funding (which reminds me to scrutinize the builders quote when he finally gets it here). If he knows $1200 is available in grants, then damned it, he’s going to ensure he gets it – so he’ll charge that. $600 insulation in the roof, 2 hours of his time. $1200 in his account.

That’s flawed, but I’m sure it wasn’t a fore thought. The claims process is better, and should allow for the insulation prices to drop back to reality. We aren’t getting insulation done by an ‘insulation professional’ (professional, as if). We’ll get the people who are doing the exterior wall removal to insulate before they put the sarking on. They’ve offered to do it for free, we supply insulation and sarking. Bargain (and they are friends, so we know they aren’t ‘cowboys’).

It’s still a bit of a road before we see the power meter spinning backward, and the hot water flowing freely. I’ll do that in a separate post in a moment.

Who the hell elects morons to run the nation? Less popular green loan, my arse. More like poorly managed department. Typical.

In the sense of a VoIP call,  you typically will terminate a call to the PSTN, so you send an invite to your VoIP service provider. The VoIP service provider verifies you have the right money, the right allowance to make such a call. The provider then picks up one of it’s many PRI channels, dials the requested number, and then the call is answered.

The audio in that scenario is proxied via a media proxy, the PRI channel is connected to software, such as asterisk, which then sends the audio to / from you and the PSTN gateway.

The SIP server, and media proxy can be on two different servers, in two completely different locations – the SIP server is there to initiate the session, the media proxy is there to handle the RTP audio data.

The SIP server still can disconnect the session as well – by sending a BYE packet to the calling device which gets the device to terminate the call, and cuts off the media stream.

When one places a call on hold, the device typically sends back RTP data with an ‘a=inactive’ state request, this causes the session to be placed on hold – in the case of asterisk, plays hold music to the channel placed on hold. Picking the channel back up will then route the audio back through.

When you transfer a call, however, you don’t simply change the RTP stream, the change involves sending another SIP invite to the affected peer, and depending on whether it’s attended or unattended, the other user will end up with you first, before yet another invite is sent to transfer the call “attended” mode, or unattended, they are simply sent an invite to the SIP stream, with the person transferring the call removed.

To avoid issues with NAT firewalls, you should port forward the applicable RTP ports to the device, and specify the public IP the device will communicate on, this allows for the RTP packet to be routed directly, and can avoid ‘no audio’ or ‘call drop out’ issues experienced.

The builder operates rather differently to how I’d do it. I like a rough indication, I don’t want him to go away, research every minute detail of the pricing, and give us a full detailed tender, especially so if it’s only going to make a minimal difference in price, like I suspect it would. I do like a fixed price, but if the difference is miniscule, that’s all we really need to know at this stage so we can get back to determining what painting it would cost.

The PVC cladding wouldn’t require painting, but the valuers believe it cheapens the look of the house. We’ve seen a few of them around here, and I’m not seeing how it cheapens it – the ones I’ve seen are in the same street as ours, and they aren’t looking cheap, but you can see it for the PVC or plastic material when the sun shines on it.

It’s maintenance free though, and a 50 year guarantee too – not that it means anything, because it’ll probably be forgotten in 10 years – which is another argument, why offer exceedingly large guarantees.

Weathertex has an OK website but I’m unable to locate any per square meter pricing of it, except from this store here, which I can’t say for sure represents the true cost of the material the builders will pay.

We’ve also concluded there is no sense putting anything other than new fibro on the granny flat and garage – the granny flat is only approved as a workshop, so doing anything other than the basic to that would be wasteful in my opinion. The new fibro doesn’t have the bulky join strips that the older material has, so you can apply a texture paint to it, to give it a cheap render effect, or you can apply a standard paint, and end up with a near smooth wall effect.  Either way, it should represent good value for money.

The house, I’m not sure. I do know we need the windows sorted, they have the security bars on them preventing any entrance, but also, any exit, thus a fire risk. Either PVC or Weathertex would suffice, it’s really down to the specific advantages of each product.

Weathertex:
- Can be painted.
- Real timber, not PVC.
- Different styles/ timber textures.

PVC:
- Lasts up to 50 years.
- Maintenance free, won’t rot.
- 8m lengths, so minimal joins.

I don’t care for maintenance, I’d like to not have to maintain it- but that’s me, a future buyer might not like the coastal colour scheme we plan on doing (At the moment, it’s Deep Ocean Colorbond on the roof, and will be Sandy Beach PVC cladding).

I’m no sucker for exceedingly long guarantees, that could well surpass the manufacturer’s existence.

Joins that are very visible can make the job poor, but then, a professional builder should be able to do the job correctly and smooth those out.

Those would make weathertex the clear leader, except for the maintenance, but I wonder if we put a real good quality paint (not just the advertising selection, but a properly researched and evaluated exterior quality paint), if that would mitigate the maintenance?

Then, we’ll need to consider price too – if it’s going to come out – with painting, at higher costs than PVC for installation, then it might not be worth it.

We have about 2 weeks left to get it done before the solar power system is due to be installed! We aren’t going to make that time frame, so solar power is going to be rescheduled I think.

Another decision will be, what colour of the chosen paint do we paint it – since the PVC cladding is not available in any of the leading paint manufacturers colour catalogs – I checked at Bunnings some time ago.

And finally, we still have the interior work – which as I was suggesting above, the builder won’t give us a “err.. somewhere in the 20k area” figure, he’ll want to come out, measure it up, get up in the roof space, figure out what he needs to do, price the moving of walls, etc., go away, quote it, come back in a week with a tender, which will either surprise or scare us.

Which, should then lead us to decide on the interior, wall colours, lighting, tapware, kitchen, bathroom accessories, tile styles. Right now, it seems like hard work, a lot of money, but a great wow effect at the end.

I do know we need a price.

The valuers claim that for the money we’d outlay, only a 50% increase in value would occur (meaning, we’d be sinking half our money). That makes sense though, my calculations would suggest about half the quote to be labour – and it’s not exactly a walk in the park to do the extensive work.

So, now we must determine if we proceed, full well knowing the additional investment is unlikely at producing productive returns, or if we sit tight, or instead, renovate the internal instead.

Our focus for the exterior was so that when the solar system was installed, we’d not need to remove the inverter later if we decided to remove the exterior. I know it’s not critical, and we could always take the cop-out, and just replace that affected panel.

I can see from my partner’s comments about the phone call with the valuer that he dislikes the ‘plastic’ effect of the PVC cladding, which is OK, it’s his opinion. He recommended Weathertex, which was something we considered, however it was always the view from the start to go with maintenance free PVC. We did ask the builder if he’d be able to quote Weathertex, and it’s claimed to be cheaper.

But, then when you factor in the paint, it’ll probably come out to the same, espiecially if we pay a professional, for that professional finish I invariably fail to achieve in any of my efforts (at anything).

The internal work is good, but I am curious if it will exceed a fair amount – i.e. I know I can put plasterboard up, but I probably couldn’t do it neat. I can probably lay tiles in the bathroom, but then we can get that done relatively cheaply.

The other consideration is if we are going to do the internal work, are our internal plans exactly what we want.. I was considering it today, and to me it’s the only way to get a third bedroom.

A new Kitchen would bring the house into the future, and the bathroom could be better, the valuers thoughts are it’s functional. But functional isn’t the point. We know they had a hard time selling, we don’t plan on selling, but having it in a better state would be nice.

Oh well, back to the builder and see what we end up deciding.. (and we just want solar power).

So, there will be an appeal, what the grounds for that appeal have some options.

AFACTs counsel made a major screwup in the presentation of a case, I’m a big believer in the ability of a strong case to stand on it’s own merits, reading just the first 200 paragraphs of the verdict, the impression surrounding it was the case was never actually a strong case. This is determined by the below:
- Their needless credibility attacks on Mr Malone and Mr Dalby. Both of them presented what appeared to any objective viewer to be reasonably presented evidence.

- The letter they sent to iiNet tried to make inferences that AFACT were some kind of authority (they are not).

- The intent of trying to dismiss Dalby’s affidavit caused Justice Cowdroy to assess it closer than it would otherwise have been, in doing this, the discovery was made that he was actually the opposite to their claim, and in many of the credibility attacks, Justice Cowdroy’s assessment was no such dishonest or misleading items were present.

These credibility attacks did two things, it first suggests their case was too weak to present itself for what it is.

The issue was AFACTs counsel (well, their case) claimed copyright infringement, yet throughout the trial, they failed to in anyway demonstrate iiNet authorised their users to commit copyright infringement – they claimed iiNet were advised, and even knew it was occurring, however, iiNet’s ultimate defense is – it wasn’t their job to investigate AFACTs claims, AFACT remained to be Jo Blow making a report of copyright infringement, but the evidence was gathered using unknown means, and the courts were the best place for AFACT to assess that information.

And the process remains, for the actual copyright infringement to take place, and for it to be prosecuted, one must not need to prove full distribution, they need only prove such packets were made available for distribution.

So, they have the tools to gather evidence, DtecNet’s evidence appeared satisfactory to the expert witnesses called, and therefore satisfactory for the purposes of proving infringement.

The steps that they should have followed were – obtain a subpoena for the names, and addresses of account holders that they had conclusive evidence of infringement.

With these account holder details, they must determine if the copyright infringement activities are civil in nature, or criminal, or both. The criminal offence is the path they should take.

With the correct evidence, they should indeed file criminal proceedings against the account holder, which should cause an evidence gathering process to occur, a raid of the account holders premises should suffice.

With this evidence, they then need to gather the information relevant, and prosecute, and if successful, rinse and repeat.

There’s two immediately obvious reasons why they targetted iiNet and none of the 3 other ISPs:
- iiNet’s email trails, and specific written statement that they would not be taking any action regardless of evidence presented. AFACT saw this as an oppourtunity, they saw more value in it then was present.
- iiNet’s a big enough ISP to scare the others into submission, once a precedent is set, John Linton, Simon Hackett, would immediately cower to AFACTs demands.

In their pursuit of domination, they became blinded to reality. They still needed a strong case that would stand on it’s own merits, they did not have it.

To launch an appeal though, Justice Cowdroy’s dismissal of the calling of other technical staff would be one rightly considered, an argument used was the sending of the notices would be ‘too difficult’, this falls flat as they are in no way required by law to forward them on (AFACT have this strange perception that iiNet must) – but they could launch an appeal based on that – in the hope the lower staff of iiNet, would in some way make errors that could positively impact the judgement.

It’s one of a few avenues, I’ve only reached line 220, and there’s 400 odd to go. There’ll be other avenues in there of appeal.

It’s great that Justice Cowdroy had no issues in his findings, the technical details (protocols, BitTorrent, IP, etc) are where I initially thought this case could fall over (what Judge is distinctively competent in IT?). The explanations in his findings (the explanations) are very much satisfactory, but they do have some flaws (i.e. the verdict states iiNet DSLAM, but not mentioned is iiNet’s resale of Telstra, or iiNet’s backhaul agreements with PIPE). These are immaterial, but still – there were errors.

Our key obstacle will be getting the hot water to the granny flat. New piping will be needed, and I’m sure it’ll have to be insulated in some way, so that we can remove the one that is out there.

Once we’ve got:
- Recladding
- Windows replaced
- Solar Hot water
- Solar Power
- Rain water tank
- Bathroom and Laundry renovated
- Back decking

.. then I think the house will have had enough of a punishment until we eventually paint it.

How wrong is that!

We got thinking all the way over that time, and now the internals will be redone, I’m just not sure when.

Recladding is key, we need that done for the solar power and solar hot water.
Windows replaced is to insulate the house more – too much air escapes through these older windows, and that’ll be a problem when we later add a reverse cycle air con.
The back deck will be useful, the new internal layout (an after thought), will work well with the back area – it could double as a second living area.

The new floor plan, which went through so many edits, and a contact of mine go over it and make many changes, and we eventually emerged with a plan we thought suitable.

I’ll go through the different revisions, the first of which is below:

This layout was wrong, it had a hallway added past the new 3rd bedroom, and the kitchen was squashed into the corner room, it was OK, but not the best – it took time to determine it just wasn’t the best layout.

So, onward the changes went, chopping and changing, as if walls were able to be erased with a click of a mouse, and kitchens could be pulled from the very floor boards (thank you Google SketchUp!).. we revised, to this layout:

It likewise, sucked – the TV was just in a crazy position, the open space seemed too open to be workable.

This new one eventually emerged after many days, and was the beginning of what will become the ‘current’ final edit:

The open area was suitable, the layout matched roughly the idea that was being targetted, but it wasn’t quiet there..

From that, the advice received from my architect contact was immediately edited in, and we conclude with:

This new idea finds the best of each, and seems to be the best we can probably pull off. In it’s current ‘theoretical’ state, it’s hard to tell if we’ll run into issues, the builder who quoted the exterior indicated anything is possible, and I used to live by that very logic, until I came across some impossible end users (the technicalities might be possible) – so now, I’ll remain a little cautious and wait for the ‘oh, you can’t do that, else building code X, Y and Z will be invalidated’ or ‘the structure simply cannot do that’ and so forth.

I get the sense it can be done, but also consider that the plan could be open to changes.

One idea that remains in the back of mind is to add a garage with internal access, and launch highset from there, but I think the intricate detail required to make such a change work will outweigh all possible benefits.

It was my partners plan to extend, rather than modify, I’m glad we eventually considered modifying, because the new plan, should it work out, will provide the best possible use of the space available to this 1960’s building.

We’ll run the current and planned layouts past the valuer, along with the exterior changes, and if we get a positive result, the situation then becomes a little more of a no-brainer.

I still have the desire to eventually build from scratch, I’d love to have a high set house – I’m always surprised by the different ways to use that under house space in those older two-story houses. I’ve seen garages (the most common), extra bedrooms, and offices, and in one case, a BBQ area and a bar.

We had waited weeks for the quotes from the builders to come in, of 4, 2 have so far quoted, and the trend is looking higher than we anticipated. Looking back, my estimates only included rough figures for removal, and raw material costs, so no labour, no other extras that invariably are required to do the job and do it right.

Once we got the two quotes, it became evident we need more funding, so we sought out our bank for an increase, to which they responded (no kidding, 100% serious), due to CPI increases, they can’t grant us any further credit as we don’t fit the banks lending criteria (in response to borrowing power).

So I ask, what is our borrowing power, and he replies – $149000. This, despite the fact he moments earlier stated we had a mortgage balance owing of $252000. The CBA is suggesting CPI has created this $100000 gap? Idiots. The house itself was recently appraised at $325000, so there’s plenty of room in the ‘resale value’ for any default to be recovered by the bank, and then some.

We had been waiting since Friday for the response ‘within 24 hours’ the online system said, so at this point, I wasn’t in the state of mind to sit and argue with him how absurd his suggestion that CPI is responsible for the $100000 gap in their lending criteria.

I did take a moment to remind him of our redraw balance, and indicated to him that the factual evidence shows the amount required to fulfill the renovations would easily be returned to the bank inside of 18 months to 2 and a half years.

He then proceeded to dribble some scripted garbage that the bank always use in CPI declined applications, and I responded is it your suggestion I take the mortgage, 2 credit cards, and 2 bank accounts to another bank? He told me not to.

Anyway, in the time since the call ended, my partner has been looking into it, and can see a big gap in the borrowing power suggested by CBA, and the borrowing power offered by BankWest, ING, NAB, Westpac and ANZ – all of which gave figures near our current mortgage rate.

The next step is to go in to the bank and see if we can’t talk some sense into them – they’ve got a good set of history data to go off, and crap, the money is going into the house they have mortgaged, it’s pretty secured.

If not, I think I’ll give up waiting, and go have a talk to another bank, I know we can tell CBA to jam it up their arse for $700, the downsides (or possibly upside) is we’d lose the wealth package we have with them, which offers a Credit Card for 55 days interest free, essentially shifting expenses by 55 days, giving us a better mortgage result (in theory, in practice that is probably different – the very card can actually increase your expenses).

This move by CBA is going to delay a lot. We need to get the exterior walls recladded for the solar power and solar hot water setup, we’ve already got both of those ready to go, with Solar Power due to arrange installation in around 4 weeks. The builder has given us a suggestive 6 week lead time, and 1 – 2 weeks to complete the work.

It’s now a matter of getting the dollars there to ensure we can pay the builder, else the whole concept is going to sit on the backburner, with the affected fibro sheets being replaced with new fibro instead (a stop gap measure until the funds fall in for cladding, a waste of money IMO).

I get the required daily tasks done, then I’m seeking out other things to do – this bit annoys me as I find the lower level stuff really boring, I don’t mind spending a bit of time on a case, and investigating the full details – I do mind if the answer to a simple question is mentioned 400 times on 35 pages of a website, and the user was too lazy to read. That bores me.

The complex cases are challenging, I like challenges. I enjoy them.

Another ‘downside’ of work that seems to be ‘everywhere’, no matter where you go, is incompetence. It’s just about everywhere in this world, and after being exposed to it from the various companies and organisations that dish it out in the plentiful, I have a very low tolerance for it. I don’t show up to work with my head in the sand, my brain turned off. One would hope others don’t either.

There’s a singular area I can think that most of the ‘poor’ actions come from, and the fact that it’s relied on for so much, yet makes so many errors in just a few short weeks of a year fails words. I really shouldn’t care, if they didn’t screw up so badly, so regularly, I’d probably miss that and be looking after even more elementary enquiries.

I’ve been pondering longer term career development. I like to create, that is, I like to put systems in place that work, I’ll happily build a DNS server, a radius server, a web server, a web site, mail server, make them all redundant. Configure a new router, setup a VoIP box / VoIP appliance. The angle there would likely be Systems Administration, Systems Development or Network Administration – each of those come by locally very rarely. The only way I’m likely to get such a position is push closer to Sydney, but that’s not going to happen. I refuse to live in Sydney, I refuse to commute daily to Sydney.

This causes me to reject possible avenues of study, i.e I would like to go get a CCNA, heavens knows I’m good for it, or go through Uni and graduate, but the direction largely depends on career moves. CCNA is valid for 3 years, before you have to renew it – if for the next 3 years, I’m still replying – “reboot”, then that would be 3 years and considerable $$ wasted.

I’m not exactly against a construction position either, it’s pretty similar to the above, I like to see things take shape, and building houses, renovations is something I would say appeals to me. Amazingly, one of my first positions at 14 years old was working in a sawmill, and then later moving onto a window factory, delivering windows to new constructions. And then, I went onto making frames for carparks.

I got away from that, the desire to gain a career in IT was too strong, and I wasn’t getting anywhere in construction (I had a really unstable life back then..)

Back to the only reason for work, the house – we are still waiting for quotes from builders for some of the work we want done, it’s been 3 weeks and we have just 1 quote. I consider myself patient, at times, but I think that largely has to do with ‘knowing what’s to come’. I am tired of waiting on dollar figures, so we know where we stand, and we can decide if we need to rob the bank, or ask them kindly instead.

Once you start looking at the most simplest of tasks, recladding the outside asbestos fibro, to allow for solar power, many other decisions come into play (and yet, there’s more to come):
- Any changes to the windows or doors (these need to be known before hand, so the necessary work is completed, instead of cladding being cut later).
- New windows can require resizing the window frames.
- Relocating walls / doors requires new frames, filling in the old.
- An outside deck requires removing the outdoor half wall.
etc.

So, we went further, the inside layout isn’t open plan, and we’ve spent countless hours, countless edits on getting the interior layout ‘done’. We want to do as little as possible, whilst maximising the overall impact, and today, that layout has found it’s way ‘mostly there’.

We’ll have to sit there and poke holes into it as we’ve done many times already, and once you can poke no more holes, the design is complete.

I’ve got a new Netbook coming from Hong Kong soon, the idea being that we could plug a HSPA modem into it when waiting in the car or whatever, on the train, etc. Plug a GPS receiver into it, and run any combination of navigator software, and plug a memory stick into it, etc.

My first plan is to strip it back and see if we can chuck a larger card into it, and put Ubuntu on instead of the Windows CE stuff it comes with – that’ll be the most interesting. I’d also want to find a way of mounting it into the car, which again should be fun.

And, I’m still currently trying to fit doors to two rooms, this was started approximately 1 month ago, just after Christmas, and is still going. The issue is the door frames are differing sizes, so you have to go over them again and again and again with the wood plane. Still, it beats work – which is just plain boring.

Approaching the simple and obvious issues is easy, the solutions to them generally present themselves, or take very little consideration. Complex and complicated matters will always deserve careful thought and checking around every corner for what might be the ‘real’ solution, as opposed to a 30 second patch.

However, not everything simple and obvious is easily resolved, if you have your head closed to alternative solutions, and that appears to be the case in many situations all too often. It’s not always easy to hold an open mind to the issues faced, and some reactions to events can be ’snap’ reactions – little thought goes to them, and the reaction can indeed be completely incorrect and wrong.

There are a few reasons I identify the above, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that the approach taken to resolve some of the issues faced, that an alternative approach could get very different results to the previous consistent approach that was taken in the 12 months prior.

Maybe it’s because when something works for a short time, it wears off and the approach then needs replacing, or maybe the original approach was wrong to begin with.

Either way, a change in approach has bought about positive results, and it’s opening the mind to the different method that’s bought about those positive (so far) results.

I’ll have to try and clear my head more often – I can see a correlation between the time spent on work, the time spent doing other activities. Time remains the resource of most desire.

Unfortunately, we can’t slow the planets rotation, so the only other way to gain time, would be to be more efficient… if that’s even possible.

As expected, Solar Hot Water was a key recommendation. It was something we were considering eventually anyway, but the shock news came as he found the hot water system on the granny flat leaking water out and therefore wasting power (as it’s letting out hot water onto the ground and heating up the new cold water)..

We noticed our power consumption was increased, I drummed that down to the granny flat and the person we have there using about 5kW more than we do, but it was just the hot water system – they now turn that off when it’s not in use.

The plan for now will be – recladding – as the walls are fibro, we can’t do anything that needs wall cavity access, such as running Solar Power – so we’ll need to strip the exterior walls and eaves and get those replaced. Solar Power would require cabling and the inverter needs to go on the wall.

The plan for that will be to put some sort of vinyl or timber cladding up. I prefer maintenance free, I sometimes get bored and have little to do with my time, but the majority of the time things can be pretty busy – no time to paint cladding every so often. This would be why I would lean towards the maintenance free vinyl cladding, but we could also take the cheap exit and fibro the place with new fibro.

The problem with doing that is, when you try and sell the house, espiecially with the dangers of asbestos becoming more and more prevalent as time goes forward and more mesothelioma victims make the news, no one will want to associate with what was actually a very good construction product. So, from a resale perspective, it’d be better to avoid the fibro for that reason.

I’ve been trying to find prices for vinyl cladding online per meter, and I’m coming up empty, ‘free quotes’ isn’t necessarily what I am looking for, I don’t want to waste someone’s time to come out here, if we can’t trump up the dollars for it, I can get a rough calculation in my head and allow for cost overrun if the company’s actually put some $ figures out there.

Then, we’ll get the windows done as part of that process, and from my initial research online, 6mm laminated grey glass really sounds like the way to go – the office is affected by sun glare in the morning, really annoying, and so something that blocks that out is more than welcome. Add to that laminated glass is harder to break, and insulates more effectively, and it does seem to be the ideal product.

We’ll go with sliding windows as opposed to the current double hung type that is in place, I think.

Then, we’ll go with Solar Power, as once the emissions trading scheme is in place, we’ll want to be sourcing as little electricity from Energy Australia as is feasible, and Solar is the perfect way of doing that.

Cutting out the hot water will drastically drop our power bills, simply because the system we have is 250L and it’s overkill, we don’t use a lot of hot water, so it’s wasteful to heat so much.

After checking out the power consumption of air conditioning, I’m relatively sold on it. We have a little heater that’s 1400W, and I look at reverse cycle, 4 star air cons, and they use 200W, and yet I know they are really good at changing the temperature of a room – they are also fan forced, so generally push more air through, and with the windows being replaced, less air is lost, and so the costs are reduced.

A rainwater tank plumbed to the  laundry, and the many toilets (we have 4 here.. ), and to the garden will do some good. I’ll be able to wash the car – and there’s little spend for rainwater.

Then, we’ll be doing the bathroom – it’s got asbestos sheeting on the walls, and the same for the laundry, so whilst they are removing the exterior walls, it’d also be a good time to get them to take away all that crap too, then we’ll put tiles in the bathroom, and either plasterboard or fibro in the laundry area. We’ll need to plan how the new bathroom turns out. Ideally, when it’s stripped clean, deciding what to replace will already be determined.

The Solar Hot Water will be the evacuated tube system, with the tank split off, so that way it can be put on the side of the roof, allowing for the solar power to take the front position (best position), and the hot water tube type system can capture more sun then the panels, and so won’t be too adversely impacted.

Our key obstacle will be getting the hot water to the granny flat. New piping will be needed, and I’m sure it’ll have to be insulated in some way, so that we can remove the one that is out there.

Once we’ve got:
- Recladding
- Windows replaced
- Solar Hot water
- Solar Power
- Rain water tank
- Bathroom and Laundry renovated
- Back decking

.. then I think the house will have had enough of a punishment until we eventually paint it.

The kitchen will be done eventually also, the benches and cupboards are too thin and small for our requirements, plus, a marble benchtop will help make the place appear that more modern.

Oh, and the granny flat still needs a master bedroom added, once we get rid of the tree in the backyard – and we want to sooner or later, add some fencing down the sides, replacing the rotted timber, with Colorbond fencing.

One of the issues that wasn’t mentioned anywhere noticable, but was found (in french.. ) was the extconfig.conf change.

The log was flooding with error messages:

[Dec  7 00:57:27] WARNING[1759] res_config_mysql.c: MySQL RealTime: Invalid database specified: asteriskrealtime (check res_mysql.conf)

Of course, the database DID exist, and the database connection was fine. I tested and couldn’t find any obvious cause.

So, I googled and found a french forum, and found the problem, in extconfig.conf, the sip peers and sip users entries (and any other relevant entries), need to have the database name changed to ‘general’ instead of ‘asteriskrealtime’ (or whatever you use).

The problem was due to ‘upgrading’ – a new install of addons, and make samples shows the config file has help text!

My colocation box is a HP DL360, G3, so it’s not exactly bleeding edge, but it’s a fantastic server, does it’s job and does it reliably.

Last night, we had a planned outage for just a short time to move the box to a different power situation, this was done and the box came back online.

It dropped off 6.30pm, came back 6.45pm. Then, 7.15pm there was notices coming through – I’ve began to ignore the warnings for a while now, so I failed there but it wasn’t too bad, because..

.. My colo provider, Inticon detected the port was flapping 20 minutes later, and went back to have a look, at 8pm he had advised that the issue was with the processor fan assembly, only one fan was spinning – strange, it was OK for a while before hand.

He went out and about to find a replacement part, and tried to find alternative measures, but came up empty. Considering the nature of the part – it’s pretty server specific, so it was understandable that we had no alternatives.

I then began hunting around for the part – found one, $185 online. I thought, wow, this must be a pretty premium part..

The contact at the colo provider went even further, and actually advised me there was a box on eBay for $250 – no kidding.

I looked at it, considered it’s marginally more expensive, but gives us a lot more hardware to play with as well. I contacted the eBay seller, asked if he could accommodate pickup for tomorrow – he was OK with it, fantastic I thought..

So, I head to bed – we can’t pick it up at night, it’s just not THAT important (and I had started work 8am, so by that point I was very tired). I think about this for a while in bed, then somehow drift off to sleep.

One of the kids is sick, so they crawl into bed beside me and annoy me, so I get up at 6am, head to sleep on the lounge, peaceful.

The next morning, I get up, sort out a pending PC related issue for somebody (it was arranged already), then the seller was interstate for the morning, not back to 1pm, so that was as good as we could get.

He then contacted us, advising he wouldn’t be back til 3.30pm – considering we were getting ready to leave around then, that’d work out perfectly. We got near the address in the southern Sydney area, but he calls and advises 4.30 – he was delayed. No problem, can’t do much if he isn’t there..

So, 4.30pm, he arrives, we have a look at the box, it works, he upgrades the CPU and RAM and throws in a 15K 36GB SCSI drive – fantastic I thought, more spare parts. The box worked, so in the boot with it, time to hit the highway for Newcastle.

We hit Newcastle at 7pm (after litterally, racing down the freeway to Newcastle), and the colo provider contact was already there – fantastic.

I take the server into the colo room, upgrade the box with what good parts I could – extra 1GB of RAM, 3.06 to 3.2Ghz Xeon, swapped over the fan assembly.. Power it on, it takes some time to boot, unusual, it eventually does boot.

Then, I enter into windows, get a ping going, get task manager up – make sure the virtual machine kicks over, it does. Box stays up stable.

Pack up the changed parts into the ‘new’ box, and get the colo provider to hold those incase something else fails down the track – pretty much a fully working machine with exception the front panel – which shouldn’t fail again.

Then, head back home approximately 30 minutes later, by this time the kid who is sick complains about pain, ends up needing a toilet break, all sorted.

Hit the highway to go back home, arrive at 9.30pm.

Wait for the colo provider contact to remove some trickery done to assist with the downtime, and I modify the SMTP route I put in place to redirect the affected domains to my router.

The outcome – all mail leaves, some spam shows, delete this, and I update the database, all in sync.. fantastic..

All up, nearly a full day, 460KM’s travelled, $14 spent on food at Aldi in Sydney, $22 spent at Maccas in Newcastle, $250 spent on a pretty darn good deal (compared to $185 for the processor fan assembly) – and we are all back and operational.

Hardware failures are REALLY annoying – especially when you can’t just call HP and say fix it in 4 hours.. – but we did pretty good for a 23 hour restore time (and still managed to keep some essential services up anyway).

And the dedication of Inticon is outstanding.

Had this been Servers Australia, I have no idea where we’d be. Part of me says ‘online sooner, cause they have HP DL360’s (or had them)’, the other says ‘getting Jared to get off his arse and take some damned action’. I’m leaning towards the latter, it’s just typical of previous experiences.

Note to self: work harder on high availability.

From his description, sounds like it was a bad username or the modem was faulty, however, he clearly didn’t know exactly what was wrong, and claims to have waited 20 minutes on hold for Telstra, and then again another 20 minutes.

This was OK, I thought, because I’ve seen 30, 40 minutes, and when I was a customer of Netspace, I was on hold for 45 minutes each time (they really were just that annoying). But the radio presenter went on to say, he’ll call them live and if Telstra didn’t answer in 5 minutes, he’d end his contract with them.

Sure enough, many songs later, 15 minutes, the Rep answered, and he advised he would be cancelling the account. The rep, probably in Telstra’s new Malaysia centre, clearly didn’t care  about the loss of a customer, he was more likely happy he didn’t have another idiot on the line to assist.

That lead me thinking, what exactly makes for good customer service? Then I began to think about a previous job, where I thought we provided excellent customer service, and the feedback from customers seemed to back this up. What is different?
- Getting through to a person, not a machine – people hate that, of course, in larger business it’s understood it’s there to route calls, so people might tolerate it.
- Hold times, when they call, they don’t want to be kept waiting, they want their enquiry sorted, so they can get back to whatever it is they do best.
- First point resolution. Not everything can be resolved ‘on the spot’, some things are complex, but for the predominant amount of enquiries, a resolution should be put forward, and acted upon.
- Escalation. Where something can’t be fixed on the spot, adequate escalation processes need to exist, so those who can fix it, will.

And, then I thought about how the company I work for currently does things, they’ve improved drastically over the last year, yet each time we get more staff in, old and new staff seem to lose all concept of how to solve an issue.

The process could be totally torn down, and revamped with the emphasis on first point resolution, issues are taken care of as soon as possible, where something is better dealt with via email, it is, and where something is simple for a phone call, or an issue where phone is the only option, it is.

Complaints are averted, you get the customer at the lower part of their anger, and so they are relaxed, ready to accept any resolution put forward that is reasonable, and where you avert the costly complaints, you generally have a better experience to offer the customer.

This week, I’ve been really successful at resolving some issues that seemed like they were going to result in the worst case scenarios. The suppliers are very helpful (except one), and the customers are ending up happy with the outcomes.

The problem remains though, how do we get the issue from the first point of contact (i.e. a phone call), escalated correctly to the right people, and resolved? The process just doesn’t seem quiet there..

It has many different methods of operation, and can be used in different ways, such as a simple proxy, where you set it up, only allow your traffic, and set your browser to use it.

A reverse proxy, so that it caches traffic for busy websites and therefore removes load.

A transparent proxy, so that users don’t have a definite idea they are being proxied, and this is the method I used – purely so we didn’t have to set it up on the client machine, and that’d just be boring anyway.

So, I setup the access list in my wonderful Cisco 871. The access list is set such that any traffic that is not web traffic, goes out directly, the PCs that matter are also not routed to the access list, and every other machine is.

Then, I setup squid, I configured it as a transparent proxy, and then enabled the rewrite_program option, then I setup the rewrite script to rewrite the urls for youtube.com to xtube.com – so, any request for youtube, results in xtube – a more explicit knock off of youtube.

Unfortunately, the desired effect of having the traffic decrease was not the case, they indeed viewed the xtube traffic instead.

So, the next step (a later on thing), will be to setup a virtual host in apache on that server, mirror the youtube website content, and then replace the area where a video would normally appear with a singular cached video. I’ll have to find one worthy of such a task.

Then, any requests for youtube videos shall be met with a repeat video. Or, we could confuse things, and swap the code in the youtube video page, with one from another site, so when they next seek out the latest Black Eyed Pea (s)hit video on YouTube, they are met with a very, very different black, eyed, pea.

So, How does VoIP work?

Setting up an outbound call

Your ATA is registered to the VoIP provider, you have the right settings in the ATA, you’ve got a dial plan entered that is Australian compatible, and so, you pick up the handset.

As you’ve adjusted the regional settings to match that of Australia, you hear your usual Aussie dial tone, and begin to push the numbers of the destination you want to reach.

The ATA has timers setup in it, such that it will wait for a certain time, such as 5 seconds, before generating the call.

Once the timer has been reached, the digits that have been dialled, and the information it already has (such as user name, password, and outbound proxy), are formed into an INVITE packet, this INVITE packet is sent to the VoIP provider, inviting it to setup a call to the destination.

The VoIP server, reads this packet, and if you’ve given it the right details, should respond with a “TRYING” packet, advising your ATA that yep, I got your request, I’m trying to see if I can do it.

Then, the VoIP server upon successfully parsing the packet, and proceeding through to either an upstream carrier, or terminating on it’s own equipment, will respond with either an “OK”, “BUSY”, or “SESSION PROGRESS”, advising the ATA that either – the call is answered and ongoing, failed, or progress (as in ringing, or in cases such as Mobile, message service to send your number).

This packet can also contain data on “RTP”, which is the audio stream used, and the ATA will connect to that RTP audio stream, and send / receive audio via that stream.

Upon successfully setting up the call, the reply should be “OK”, meaning the Invite sent was accepted, the remote party answered, and the call is ongoing. Assuming your ATA is reachable, and the packets contain correct RTP information, and everything else is in order, the call is setup and works.

So, SIP is used for ’signalling’, and RTP is used for audio.

Setting up an inbound call

Incoming calls are not unlike the above outbound calls.

The server receives (either via an upstream provider, or it’s own termination equipment), a invite request, inviting it to setup a call with a user it should be responsible for.

The server checks it’s lists, much like Santa, and if it finds you on that list, it will then find out if you are registered, and the ‘contact’ line from the last register packet your ATA sent to the server.

Depending on it’s configuration, it could send the call to your ATA, route it elsewhere (such as call forwarding), IVRs, Voicemail, reject and call back.. the list is endless. In typical consumer cases, the call is first sent to the Contact line in the Register packet.

The VoIP server should then send an Invite packet to the VoIP ATA, using the last Contact line as the point to send the call.

The ATA when not in use should respond with RINGING, meaning that it’s trying to alert the user to the presence of the call. This follows it’s path back to the VoIP provider, and there is then a ringing signal sent to the caller’s provider – so they know the call is trying to work.

When you answer, the INVITE the VoIP server sent to you is then replied with an “OK” packet, and the VoIP server specifies the RTP stream, and the call is setup.

But, what if I am already on a call? Well, that depends on the configuration. If your ATA has Call Waiting enabled, the call is attempted, you hear the call waiting tones, and the same process for ‘ringing’ is followed.

The process for call waiting with SIP involves putting one audio stream into ‘hold’, and the other into ‘active’, they do this by using SIP packets to the VoIP server specifying an RTP option of ‘active’ or ‘inactive’. When a call is RTP  set to ‘inactive’, the call should be put on hold, where hold music is typically played (from the VoIP server).

If you don’t have call waiting enabled, there is a reply back to the VoIP server “BUSY HERE”, meaning the call can’t be accepted. It might also be a “DECLINE” packet – it should have the same effect.

The VoIP server then decides the next step based on configuration. If you have Voicemail enabled, the call should be sent to Voicemail. If you don’t, then the next natural step is for the provider to echo your busy reply, with a busy tone back to the server.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26097791-5007133,00.html

The article earnt Kevin 1/10th of a vote from me. If he keeps this up, then he very well could have better than no chance of a vote from me at the next election. All this just days after he ’swears’ to never ignore violence against women – I guess verbal abuse isn’t included in that.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/11/2682608.htm?section=justin

I like his appearance here, telling fellow MP’s to go ‘fuck themselves’ is exactly the kind of government we need.

It’d make Question Time more interesting to watch, because not only will “Mr Speaker” be replaced by “Get Fucked” as the most repeated words, but this government might actually get fucking somewhere.

I can see clearly where Kevin was coming from – print material is a waste of money and a severe impact on the environment, because they don’t print on tissue paper, meaning you can’t wipe your arse with their political bullshit, and therefore must place it in the recycle bin.

By reducing the budget for each by $25,000 this could cause an increase in the use of cheaper print papers, such as toilet paper, or the reduction in election and political garbage, a win either way.

So, Mr Prime Minister, keep up telling your fellow ministers to go fuck themselves, and asking if they fucking understand – clearly they don’t, otherwise the sentence enhancers wouldn’t need to be bought out.

And if they don’t fucking understand, fucking sack their fucking sorry arses.

I’m curious if the recent spike in sentence enhancement is costing Rudd some votes, the old farts probably won’t like it, but perhaps anyone under 40 won’t care?

So, I reset them all – everybody is back to 100%. Latency is reset, the highest is 68ms, to a provider in Perth, the lowest 6.4ms to a provider in Sydney.

I’ve reworked some of the outage back end, after an iiNet representative raised issues with the outage logging.

There was an alternative -remove all the outages in question, recalculate the uptime, but I want the latency to reflect what is current, and this is the best way to do that.

So, for now, I’ll monitor it and see which providers lose the 100% lead, and have a look at what happens there.

I predict Netspace will be the first, as they for some reason have no replies at 4am every morning.

I had a new website layout in preparation some time ago – it’s still back there in the ‘preparation’ stage as my job keeps me busy, and it takes a fair amount of effort and time to pick up from where I left off.

I’ll do it someday..

Since the change from Windows to Ubuntu, my email backup has been pretty lax – as in, it’s not a job for cron. I’ll have to work on this soon.

I find the subject to be somewhat true. I’ll say something, but I may not necessarily do that. Maybe it’s because that sense that “I can probably fix whatever it is” that promotes it..

I was having problems, randomly, my system would choose to have a ‘read only filesystem’ error appear, and all the labels on the windows would lockup, and the graphics would randomly offset somewhere in the order of + / – 150px, making using them difficult.

I tried to troubleshoot this, and despite the very obvious error message, I ignored that and went off suspecting gdm was the cause.

At some point between there and last week, I found the issue may have been in my face all along – I was forced a fsck by Ubuntu’s startup and this revealed many errors in the file system. So, I piped the output to ‘yes’, and let it do its thing.

After doing this, and switching to GNOME via KDM, I haven’t had the issue. I do suspect the issue as being the file system errors, as the system boots with ‘remount-ro’ – which explains would explain the problem.

Back to the spam problem, I got blocked once, dang virus. Anyway, unblocked, I thought nothing of it until recently, where I came across some more reports – I looked at the date / time, and sure enough, they were recent. I then looked at the router to see where port 25 clients came from and found the server IP there – that was OK, it runs an SMTP server I thought, then I considered they were client connections.

Remote desktopped, and I found IE opened with spam pages – the calling card of a virus. Checked task manager, ended an imposter process, and now running an online virus scan.

There’s a few things to consider here, in order of importance:
1. This would never happen if it was a linux system.
2. The system running a mail server goes a long way to promoting the ignorance of port 25 sessions.

However, being a ’server’ there shouldn’t be many client connections, so now, I’ve changed the monitoring slightly – I now get alerts when a SMTP threshold is exceeded. One might consider installing an AV, but that just adds to load, the likelihood of a virus is actually, zero in normal conditions. Having users susceptible to viruses (gullible is the word), is not a normal situation here.

So, back on goes the firewall, a bash script is in place to grep the output of expect’s telnet checks, and email the domain about any large numbers of SMTP client sessions. I had checked ntop for the availability of this – it doesn’t have it. Cisco’s ‘kron’ doesn’t seem capable of sending the output out to a URL (I was initially going to write a PHP script to count the sessions and create an email).

Netflow is feeding ntop, but I couldn’t identify any quick way to get those sessions, so the ‘least’ intense method of checking is in fact, telnet, expect, and grep.

I thought nothing of it, until I began to ponder the possibility of a heap of port 25 outgoing sessions, and thought I’d check. At the time I checked, the machine must have been turned off for at least 5  minutes – they didn’t appear in my samba check, and pinging them resulted in no replies.

I checked ip nat translations, and sure enough the SMTP connection attempts were there.

Earlier on my partner removed the MSN virus from that machine, and it appeared again just 2 hours later.. Wonderful.

I’ve now reconfigured the wonderful Cisco router. No more port 25 connections from any machine, except mine and the server IPs, whilst I was at it, no more P2P can occur.

Cisco’s 871W does this by using class-maps to scan protocols (to identify bittorrent, limewire, kazaa), and set a DSCP on that particular class map.

Then, my access list allows my machine, the servers, and then drops all P2P, then drops all outgoing port 25, and then allows traffic – this disables P2P and drops all port 25 traffic that doesn’t go through the server – i.e. all spam traffic.

A slight adjustment of the machines to make sure they send mail via the server, and that should stop any further activity in its tracks – testing shows it is not possible to open port 25 to a server, but that server happily chats to my mail server – solved.

The configuration?

access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.4 any <– Allow me, I don’t want to get denied access to anything, including the router.
access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.3 any <– Allow my server.
access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.2 any <– Allow the linux box.
access-list 100 deny   ip any any dscp 1 <– Drop all P2P
access-list 100 deny   tcp any any eq smtp <– Drop all SMTP
access-list 100 permit ip any any <– allow

Then in my LAN interface:

ip access-group 100 in

That makes it check access list 100 prior to routing any traffic ‘in’ (i.e. In from the LAN connection).

The class map for P2P:

class-map match-any P2P
match protocol bittorrent
match protocol directconnect
match protocol edonkey
match protocol gnutella
match protocol napster
match protocol kazaa2

Those are all the obvious protocols I found, I could add NNTP or FTP or HTTP if I wanted to..

The next step is the policy:

policy-map P2P
class P2P
set ip dscp 1

That tells the P2P traffic to have DSCP 1 set, so the access list picks it up and drops the packets.

There’s also some QoS config I have there too, to give full priority to VoIP, RTP, SMTP and SSH traffic – above all other traffic, works great.

I find myself very happy with the Cisco router – they aren’t the cheapest, but they sure can accomplish much the same, if not more than a Linux box setup (I was previously happy with my Tomato and DD-WRT setups, but the Cisco is just a tad more beefed up).

the government is said to be watching the case closely and along with attempts to introduce a three-strikes law in Australia, it appears the law will be changed if the government dislikes the outcome of the case.

This point from the slashdot story shows that if they need to wait the outcome of a court case to determine laws, they clearly are incapable of ‘governing for the people’.

No ISP in the world is capable of determining if a P2P transfer is copyrighted or not – names aren’t enough, because I can have Horton.Hears.A.Who.avi – and size of 90kB – that’s either some uber compression, or I like using bad filenames.

Why don’t they simply look at the circumstances and decide for themselves, is the current process in place suitable? If not – what needs to be changed? Why is the current process in place ‘not used’? Once they find answers to that, they can find suitable measures to resolve the issues surrounding this.

It is far from the job of the ISP to police the users, we pay law enforcement for that – should we pay ISPs to enforce law? Does the Management of such an ISP become the ‘judge’, the user is then the ‘defendant’ and the copyright holder is the claimant? What if Management of the ISP make a screwup or they simply don’t like the user?

It’s not the end of the world if they do start cutting connections on the say so of some third party copyright holder – but they can’t be trusted to be accurate all the time, too many screwups occur for a ‘disconnection’ decision to be made there.

iiNet in a way are correct with their argument – they can’t break Privacy laws to intercept traffic, and I sure as hell am not going to trust some third party claiming to represent MGM or Universal, yet cannot supply any clear evidence in writing of such.

If iiNet really wanted to be smart, they’d reply to each and every notice requesting written and signed statutory declarations of such copyright activity, because an email can easily be ‘faked’ – and being a judge in a court of law, I’d take their side in a heart beat.

To get that many statutory declarations sworn would be enough to make damned sure they had the right facts for each case (as the significant delays such a process would impose is enough of a disposition to ensure accuracy/ worthiness of claims).

Then, they could forward such a request to the user, who could in turn request documented technical evidence, such that it can be disputed, and this in turn creates a larger turnaround for the copyright allegations to be validated enough.

Then, the user can assess it, and if they are happy, reply stating the activity was discontinued 12 months ago, or if they disagree, they can dispute it – and see what happens then.

The point? The studios aren’t really that big on copyright infringement, fact is – they don’t give a rats arse. They just forward automated output from their detection systems to the ISP, who can action as they see fit.

They went after iiNet when they realised they weren’t forwarding them on – of course, the intent of the notice is to inject fear into the user, so iiNet’s reasoning for not sending the reports on is probably to ensure customers didn’t call up asking about a notice – or flooding them with crap about them.

The other point is, iiNet have no legal responsibility to send an email onto a user about a abuse report – copyright issues are for the copyright holder to persue through channels already present.

I imagine a copyright investigation requires first – a civil claim lodged, but to get the user details, they need to subpoena the ISP for those details, which could then be given out – and in turn, they can lodge a statement of claim against the user (after validating the details), and this results in a hearing setup for the allegation, and a court can decide the merits of the claim and amount claimed.

As you can see, the automated systems processing these copyright claims aren’t going to like such a system, it costs the copyright holder a LOT of money for what amounts to one user viewing some file from the internet, and uploading anywhere from 20 – 80% of the copy – something they couldn’t really prove anyway, unless the full file was uploaded to them (I doubt they’d download the same copy of the same file however many times to prove copyright infringement).

And so – they just want to intimidate users, by sending emails saying “we are on to you”.

And because it’s a lot of work going after the users, correctly, in the above scenario, they just go for iiNet, who are simply a carriage provider. Much like if I used Australia Post to ship 2KG of Mary Jane three suburbs over.

Or if I burnt a DVD of Horton Hears A Who and send it three suburbs over by Australia Post, and quoted a PO Box as a return address. This isn’t worth trying though, as they wouldn’t get detected, and Australia Post isn’t a key target for these copyright ‘emails’.

The process in place can work well, if the copyright holders are indeed serious, they aren’t. Just like the current government, completely full of shit.

I moved recently, after they absolutely demonstrated their ignorance and incompetence of a routing issue within their network to the good people at MaxoTel, who also colocate with these idiots in Sydney.

Before the move, I would see intermittent increases in latency, random packet loss, and 8 hour outages with no satisfactory explanation.

Add to that the 2006 and 2007 breaches of their own systems where attackers managed to exploit their own crap, to send emails to all users. And the continual DDoS attacks.

They advanced later in 2007, where they had the network running stable, in a near excellent state. Then, recently, they screwed it over again, and they still screw people over.

I think to myself now, why did I put up with them for so long? The answer is easy, because like all incompetent idiots, they couldn’t ever get the billing right, so that was to their disadvanatage, and gave me only a little to complain about.

Flash forward to last week, I’m emailing them about a routing error to MaxoTel, they don’t have the Sydney and Newcastle networks routed correctly. It was like that for a good month, before the good people at Maxotel noticed it.

I create a ticket stating I can’t reach other IPs in the same IP block, and I can’t reach the other IP block (their Sydney IP block).

Anyway, the reply I get back from their incompetent Network Operations Centre 24 hours after reporting the issue, too bad if it was actually a network outage, because they’d be too busy watching YouTube (I have an email from them stating exactly that) – “The default gateway is set incorrectly”..

What? How is that possible. The sites and server are online, I can reach everything else (heck, I did the ping and traceroutes from the actual server), it’s been set to the right default gateway for a year or more.

So, I replied showing my clear frustration and disappointment that someone employed in Australia can be so incompetent, and yet be in a position responsible for the Network Administration. The idiot didn’t test, disregarded the testing I had provided, and replied on some useless assumption, ignoring the fact the second IP block was also unreachable. All because the IP I tested was 119.63.204.1 (and others, I just used that as an example.. )

Then, I get a reply from the ‘director’ (who is just an immature turd that started Servers Australia) who also doesn’t bother to read the previous content and tells me he’ll unplug it in 7 days.

I figure that’s fine, and reply advising him as such,  to which he replied with 24 hours. A little sudden, but the good folk at Inticon, who I am now hosting with aranged the smooth transition and it was error free.

I’m happy to be away from the rubbish that is Servers Australia. I have mountains of content in emails demonstrating the pure incompetence that is Servers Australia, but I’ve got more time on my hands available now, as I don’t have to monitor the server and make sure it’s up – I can actually trust Inticon to be ‘up’. I can’t say that about Servers Australia’s useless attempt at IP connectivity.

The downside? Inticon is competent, so they’ll probably be billing correctly, so now I’ll have to figure out methods of making the traffic from OzVoIPStatus cover the bills – I don’t have anything in the pipeline yet, I’ve still got an aging web layout sitting on the dev server waiting for tidying up – backend pages to create, edit, adjust.

The thought did cross my mind to stop OzVoIPStatus, and decommission, but I think it’s a useful tool, users like it to find out how reliable a voip provider is – they have opinions they can add.  The maintenance schedule is shot tho, I simply haven’t maintained it at levels I wanted to, and I can’t foresee time in the very near future to finish what I was doing -I’ve got other things still happening.

So, for now, the situation remains – it’s still working, it’s still somewhat useful, I want to put more of the useful features I do have live, but I need time or money for that (time would help to get my stuff live, money would help pay someone else to do exactly what I have in mind)..

OzVoIPStatus seems to be holding steady, the outage logs seem to be a little more accurate since the move. I also did some ICMP tests from Sydney, and I was reaching the old network in an average of 17ms (peaks of 56ms), the new network at Inticon was a constant 5ms. I should have taken screenshots at the time, too busy making sure the transition was smooth to think this far ahead.

My advice to anyone considering Servers Australia: Get a second ADSL2+ line, you could do better on your own connection, for much less!

They haven’t supplied any ‘reasonable’ explanation for it, so I’ll assume incompetence is the cause and they’ll insert whatever excuse for that will seem plausible.

Anyway, throughout the downtime, I was considering – how could I ensure high availability, the colo provider I am with is generally about 97% available. My home internet connection – no kidding, serves better speeds, and is 100% available.

So, at this time I started to think I can do a better job hosting the thing myself, the colo provider, whilst the prices are short of justified, they are cheap enough that what little value comes from the sites hosted, covers there cost. I can still do a better job hosting it over a connection that costs less.

I don’t plan to pull the server out, as I still have the invisible, and perhaps invalid perception that the colocation is going to be better. So, High Availability hosting crossed my mind. I can do that.

I now mirror the database from the live server to my connection, and due to the nature of the updates, the usage should not be significant. I also have MySQL replication back to that database, so that in the event the dedicated server is down, the database locally can be changed, and those changes will replicate back to the live server when it comes back.. In the event a future 8 hour or more ‘incompetence’ outage occurs.

The stumbling blocks that I have to jump over are:
- File management. How do I mirror those on both servers.. It’s likely only the server ones will change, but I still need to mirror those to the home server.

- DNS. I can manage this easily – by having multiple A records. Though, I would prefer to have something like the MX method, where you specify priorities, and the host is contacted in each order.

My thoughts on file management, at least for now, will involve some sort of check, to see when files are changed, and then mirror all changed files again. This way, we maintain sync of the files.

The DNS issue, it’s not a large issue, as I think I will just have two A records, and this will point at both IPs, then its just random as to which location is reached. Of course, during an outage, the down A records are removed, which would make only the ‘up’ site respond – high availability.

Mail is already OK for the sites concerned.

I’m not doing all the sites at the moment, I still have some PHP items to sort on the home server. Version checking could be a problem, if I wasn’t administering both servers – but I am, so that won’t be a problem.

Maybe I should setup the home server, see if its a success, and if it remains better than the newcastle box, the move to shut it down and remove it, and it’s associated expense could be natural. I can see latency might be an issue, but perhaps it won’t be.

I’ve got little to do lately, I work, I sit with the kids, I try and force the dollars owing on the house down further.

I try and make work a challenge by finding problems and looking for solutions to those problems, I try and find the more challenging work so that I can have something to think about and resolve. For me there is a ‘no dial tone’ issue, and a ‘intermittent speeds issue’ – I’m going for the speeds issue, I don’t care for the simple dial tone problem.

And I look at our banking, and try and find areas to reduce spending to force our home to be paid within the self imposed 8 year time frame – it’s looking good, but it’s needing some more force, which at the moment is going to need more input.

But, that’s all nothing – I have my own time, and it’s somewhat spare, I have little to do.

And networking, I’ve pretty well dried up what I want to know there for now. I can use Cisco routers for QoS, routing, Netflow via ntop, ACLs. And the other aspects of networking – DNS servers, web servers, VoIP.

And web development – I can’t say I’ve reached anywhere near a good level here, but I’ve made a lot of roads into it, I’m just lost for a new challenge. I could finish the OzVoIPStatus website design and features I have started, but .. interest in that site isn’t running high, both from me and users viewing the site – lack of updates, and the content there isn’t dynamic enough.

On one hand, I wanna tidy this place up a bit more – expand the granny flat, add another storey, landscape the gardens, paint the walls, make an underground car park.. But that’s conflicting with our 8 year pay off target, which will save us more long term..

On the other hand, I could lose a few kilos from the ’stress’ of working at home, so that’s a ‘challenge’ that seems to require more pressure than I have clear motivation to throw at.

Maybe that’s where my efforts could be focused.. But then – I’m not willing to throw a lot of money into that either.

I’m bored.

It’s performed great, and aside from the few minor issues, such as crashing in suspend (caused by the cx8800 TV tuner driver), and minor software configuration, has been troublefree.

Over the last few weeks however, the graphics card has developped an issue – most times, it’ll work OK for days on end, and others – I’ll go out for lunch, come back to bring it out of suspend.. And it won’t resume. OK. Hit Reset to reboot.

But, that’s where the problem starts – the Gigabyte BIOS boot screen is pixelated badly (as if 16 color mode was enabled), and the display won’t show the desktop after the text part of booting starts. The system boots still, I just can’t SEE anything.

After some testing this afternoon, I swapped the card with another card (VGA / DVI), and this didn’t have an issue. Put my card in the system I took the other card from, and the issue was there.

It works when I leave it off for around 10 – 15 minutes sometimes (it didn’t this afternoon, when I needed it most), and then continues to behave normally – until reboot.

After letting it cool this afternoon, I put it back in to try and get my dual screens working again, and Ubuntu didn’t like me for it – the Panel’s I had on the second screen were on the first, and the CPU on the panel application was at 100% – so I kill it, and the system freezes. Great.

I didn’t keep any logs of it to lodge a bug report unfortunately, because the circumstances won’t arise in normal use – only after the system has 2 monitors, and it reboots with only one video card.

Luckily, I had icewm handy, and logged into it and all was well, enough to get work done.

I tried different variations of X configuration (/etc/X11/xorg.conf), to get the display as expected – as one continuous long display, this way the mouse doesn’t break into two between each monitor – how I like it. I haven’t had any success getting that BACK, despite restoring configuration files, and rechecking each setting, and going through manual config.

It’s a waste of time now anyway, the graphics card clearly needs to be replaced soon, but I’ve always been amazed the rest of the system can run at around 40oC with minimal cooling, and the graphics card, which has it’s own fan (and is dust free), can’t stay below 57oC, it seems to run at high temps all the time.

Time to go have a look at what to replace it with.

The entire process seemed smooth now I look back over it. We selected the place we liked, we went to the bank, had a chat about what’s possible, and then put a deposit on. Building reports came back as expected, no problems there.
Closer to settlement, everything was on track all set to go ahead.

On settlement, they failed to provide the title.. Idiots. How do you lose the title to the house. A bit of background information revealed the owners actually paid for the house in full, and just never collected the title.

Another settlement attempt later, it failed.

Finally, 3rd time lucky, it settled!

Excitement continued in and out of suspended mode, whilst the keys were in our hands and the previous asbestos based roof was replaced with a new Deep Ocean Colorbond roof, at under $20k, it appears to have really bought out a better looking house than before we purchased.

Asbestos roofing tends to look ‘crap’ after aging, kinda like parking your car under a tree with birds shitting on it for a month without being washed. That’s the effect of aged asbestos roofing.

Colorbond is so much better.

We are still continuing through a rather small list of changes we want to make, the granny flat will eventually have an additional bedroom added, the external walls will either be replaced and repainted or just repainted to suit the new roof. Some internal walls will get repaired and repainted. Some electrical work is planned, and if there’s a spare $30 we might get the carpets cleaned.

We remain on target for our aggressive repayment target of 8 years, whilst this is likely to be 10, it’s going to be a far lot less than the 30 years allowed. I just never did get my head around paying $500,000 for a $250,000 loan. Insane, but of course – there must be some that do take such lengthy times to pay it off! I just never can get my head around paying more..

I’m becoming increasing bored and annoyed at the lack of challenge my job currently involves. The biggest challenge I get is telling a user that there connection is slow because they are using wireless, or the link they are on is choked because of supplier planned upgrades, or replying to people who just can’t write a sentence without the word ‘fuck’ in it (those are the most fun, sorry, I won’t help you whilst you swear at me!) – they then reply crying ’sorry’, and the next reply is simply “You need to listen to us, and actually run those tests”. Total tards of users, still, it beats what you can expect at many others!

I need more of a challenge though, I typically like to keep busy, and I can barely fill half my day with my own tasks, which is disappointing.

I’m still aiming to advance to a position which has an ongoing challenge, as I just don’t sit back, it’s not in my nature to take it easy, even if there is always an easy way out.

I’m currently disappointed at Telstra (I know, nothing new there), $299 to reactivate a second copper pair is ridiculous. A rip off! Of course, they dictate the prices due to their network, so we have little option but to either work around it, or pay up.

Overall, I’m happy with the house, it’s really a great house, on a great block of land, in a great location (the roads here are just that little more smoother than 2k’s up the road).