Oliver Hansen

A techie's not-so-technical weblog

Mother’s Day Gift — Building a Fence

For Mother’s Day I was thinking of a couple things but they didn’t work out. I was talking to my mother the weekend before and she mentioned she wanted to build a stronger fence to keep the deer out of her garden. It would be quite a project because it had to be done in one day or the deer would have free reign overnight.

So I came up in the morning, we put everything up somehow and then went out to dinner at night. The next day we went out for breakfast and enjoyed the new fence before I headed to my grandma’s house for the rest of the day. Not a bad weekend, I’d say!

Barenaked Ladies — Sound of Your Voice

I think I’d heard it before but this time it caught my attention. This video is a live performance from where I’m not sure.

Continue reading “Barenaked Ladies — Sound of Your Voice” »

Where Is The Love — Black Eyed Peas

I’ve just always liked this song and wanted to share it. The video has the lyrics which are really what make this song. It’s always nice when a song that has a good beat and is a bit catchy also has great lyrics.

From Tropical Humidity to Dry Desert Air

After being in Singapore for two weeks and getting used to the moist and humid air the desert air of Las Vegas is quite a change. I felt a cold coming on while still in Seattle for a week in between but now that I’m in Vegas it’s really not helping. I’m even inside the hotel all day and my throat is constantly sore and my nose is always full. Hmmm, I wonder what the difference would be if I was sick in a humid place like Singapore. I only was sick once or twice in Jamaica and I don’t really recall what it was like other than vomiting.

I know I haven’t written about Singapore yet. It’s always so hard for me to summarize an entire vacation without going into the minute details that most people probably don’t care about. I do have pics I should put up ’cause I think some of them are pretty nice. Since I’m away from home though I don’t have the photos readily available to put up.

Well, until then I’ll stay sickly and dry in Vegas.

Host Unreachable When Pinged

I just modded my second xbox which I got from my cousin. I gave it a static IP, put it on the network and everything looked good from the xbox side. Then I tried to FTP to it to load on some programs. Could not connect. I tried to ping and this is what I got:
icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

Hmmm, I’d seen this before but couldn’t remember why. I searched online and found references to the routing table being configured incorrectly. I played around with mine but just ended up messing things up because it was already looking good. So then I took the same network cable and plugged it back into my first xbox which I have been using for months now. I could ping it. Plug it back into the second and it can get to the internet to download new skins for the dashboard. Hmmm what is the problem? I SSHed into one of my servers and pinged it from there successfully. Something between my laptop and the xbox.

I finally started looking at some of the settings on my wireless access point to see if something in there could possibly be messing me up. After trying some settings that I really didn’t expect to work I blindly clicked my way into the page that restricts computers on the network. I’d completely forgotten about it. See — I used to have this access point acting as my router so I had it restrict people from being on my network by MAC address. This meant that if a friend came over I would have to enter their MAC address before they could gain access. The thinking is even if they got past my wireless security code, the access point would not let them access the network because their MAC address did not match one on the list. Just one more step to throw off casual wireless snoopers.

When I moved to using IPCop for my router I just turned off the routing features of the access point and used it for a simple access point to the rest of my network from my laptop. The only thing is any computer that I want to connect to via wireless now has to be added to the MAC address filter. Since the access point is not between any of the computers on the network but mine it won’t affect any non-wireless computers (i.e. my servers) but will still affect me. Sometimes it’s the little things you forget.

I do end up learning something from these things. This time I decided to fire up tcpdump to see what was happening when my computer asked the network for the address I knew existed. It still took me a while but now I am not afraid to use tcpdump again for any future problems.