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*phew* - Today was a bit of a marathon geek out. In the early afternoon I took Jennie's laptop completely apart, cleaned it out and re-assembled it (it had gone out of warranty and the power supply had stopped working). It appears to be functioning now although I'm still not sure what was wrong.
In the later afternoon I got around to installing the new ADSL modem in our router machine here. Previously we had been using a squashed-frog style USB Speedtouch 330 modem which, quite frankly, sucked. Around every 5 or 6 days it would just drop connection and, being a cheap PoS, needed to be physically unplugged and re-plugged before the connection could be re-established. The new card seems a lot better at getting a connection and maintaining it so here is hoping we don't get any more semi-regular outages. While I was playing with the router, I took the opportunity to upgrade some of the more critical bits of software (e.g. pppd) and move to kernel 2.6 along with a little rationalisation of the software installed. All in all Charon is looking a little leaner and far more stable now. |