I’ve been talking to my boy about starting a new website, one that he can create content for. Since he was little ( I guess he still is, since he’s only 7) he’s been either watching me use a computer or using one on his own. He’s got an amazing array of knowledge about things like dinosaurs, planets, robots, whatever. We’re never too sure where some of his information comes from. One day I asked him if I should grow a beard – I was being lazy and didn’t want to shave. He informed me that beards are for hobos. He couldn’t tell me where he heard that, and I can’t say that ‘hobo’ is really a very common word anymore. Usually people say ‘homeless person’.
So, I might be giving him a guest-writer position on this blog or another to see if he gets into it before I create a whole new site for him. He’ll probably talk about Star Wars, or Lego, or Club Penguin – who knows? Yesterday he asked me some wierd questions about how Japan selects their Emperors.
Simple fix from CIsco TAC – turn on route-cache cef on the tunnel interface, set the MTU to 1400, and set the MSS to 1300. Other than the route-cache cef, I coulda sworn I’d done those things several different times and in different combinations. Hopefully the TAC rep can explain further.
I’m up against another issue now. Tried to turn up my second hub/spoke tunnel through the second ISP, but it’s stuck in phase 1. Haven’t had much time to research this one yet. It worked in the lab setup, but real life is always a struggle compared to the lab.
Here’s my latest struggle. Why can I ping and traceroute through a ipsec-encrypted GRE tunnel, but not browse? Every article I read that offers to fix this for me points to MTU and MSS settings, due to fragmentation of packets caused by the additional overhead of GRE and ipsec encapsulation, but I’ve beaten my head against the wall today trying every combination of settings that I can think of and every resolution I can find to fix this problem, but no luck yet. I’ve got a support case open but I’m not sure how far I’ll get with tomorrow being Thanksgiving. I know I’ll probably be working on it, as I have a spare router handy. Even if I’m not actively testing it, I’ll be thinking about it – I’m kinda obsessive that way.
It’s always said that kids try to emulate their parents, and my son is no exception. All his life I’ve had jobs that require me to spend a lot of time in front of computer screens, and he definitely noticed. I’d say his favorite thing, by far, is to spend Saturday morning at the computer, playing games and finding new “club” sites (like Club Penguin). He doesn’t care much for cartoons if the computer is available.
He’s only 7, but he’s been sitting next to me for all 7 years. In fact, he’s reading this out loud as I write it this morning. I think I may need to create a website just for him so he can learn to write HTML and PHP and Perl. 
Well, I think I figured this out before TAC contacted me back. I had been running a continuous ping from the inside of the LAN to an outside public IP so that I could watch the failover when I cut the primary ISP dead. The only problem is, the continous ping was keeping the NAT translations fresh, and they wouldn’t time out and clear. Once I dropped the ping and just waited a few seconds, thy cleared on their own and re-built with the outside IP of the secondary ISP connection.
So, back on track with this project, should be all wrapped up today.
My latest frustration – getting a Cisco router to swing from one Internet connection to another one, and to get it to drop the nat translations at the same time. Starting to get in my nerves that this won’t work, so time to get Cisco TAC involved. They’ll probably tell me in about 60 seconds [...]
I had to find a new theme for the site – I’m never quite happy with that I’ve got. The closest I found was this one, but it had a mouse at the top. Kind of a generic symbol for computer consulting. I’ve always thought networking was the core to our current technical world, and [...]
Man, all this talk about Usenet, trolls, Geek Code…. it just keeps the memories rushing back! I remember so clearly having to compile every stupid application that people wanted to run. Not Windows stuff, mind you – real apps run on Unix servers via telnet clients, character/curses-based. Gopher, Archie, Wais, IRC. There weren’t any handy [...]
I actually started creating my own Geek Code, as I never had one back “in the day”. Quickly gave up, however, as several sections seemed completely irrelevant in today’s Geek world. Usenet is all but gone, and today’s modern Geek probably never saw OS/2 or VMS. Maybe someone should rewrite the Code and replace those [...]
I had almost forgotten about the Geek Code…. Bookmark to:
