After entering last night's Anti-Movielog entry, I remembered and realized that my first Anti-Movielog entry was for the direct sequel of my first Movielog entry. Strange how these coincidences happen. I didn't plan it that way, really!

Alright. As stated previously, I took home a TEAM Internet box from eSoft on Wednesday after hammering out a deal. (Well, there really wasn't that much hammering. "This is what we'll pay you. Here's a contract. Welcome aboard!" I was satisfied with what I saw, so I signed and accepted.)

I took a bit of time to calm down from both the sheer excitement of having reached a deal, and the relief that my bumblings on Monday hadn't caused anything severely detrimental to happen. (As it well could have. When I told my dad about it, he said that at one point in his career, he had been asked to name his salary as well. When his potential employer didn't like the number he proposed (which surely wasn't as out of line as my figure was), they immediately withdrew the job offer. End of discussion. Ouch.)

So on Wednesday night, I managed to borrow a spare hub from bouncing, and proceeded to take the new box for a spin. After a little messing with Dagobah's routing tables so I could access it (which would later come back to haunt me) on its default 192.168.1.1 address, I was in. ping? Check. telnet? Check. http? check. Everything looked good.

Pretending I was an idiot user, I accessed the web interface, and grimaced at the restrictive EULA (maybe that's par for the course in the Windows world, but I haven't seen one of those for quite a while). I reluctantly hit agree, and entered some bogus registration info. I then got some relatively simple questions about my configuration info; no problem. When it was time to dial the ISP, I stopped, because bouncing was in the middle of an irc session, and didn't want to switch the routing just yet.

I spent a couple hours just poking around on the command line, figuring out where things were, checking out the default configuration, examining the /proc tree a little, and glancing through some of the source files for the web config scripts. Happily, the box runs Debian, although it's an older version than any I've ever used.

I later noticed that bouncing had gone offline, and was apparently asleep, so I decided to try dialing in. I hit the little Next button, and the nightmare began. The web interface stopped responding, all my telnet sessions died, and the box was unpingable.

Nothing I could do seemed to make a difference. Rebooting it did no good. (At this time that I found out that hitting the power switch actually triggers the shutdown script, which runs before the box powers down. Spiffy.) I didn't want to do so, mostly out of pride, but when I determined that I had exhausted all available avenues within reason, I resorted to emailing eSoft.

On Thursday, I took the box in to the office. After some rather extensive examination, it was determined that everything was functioning properly. Well, I felt like an idiot.

But, I resolved to take it back home and try one more time. I plugged it in, booted it up, and tried to ping it from Dagobah. No luck. At this point, I decided that the problem had to be something on festnet, since it had worked perfectly in the eSoft building.

I did some tinkering with Dagobah's routing and network settings, and soon discovered the source of the problem. I had added a route for 192.168.1.0 to the routing table through eth0, so I could access the TEAM box. What I hadn't done was bind eth0 to an address on the 192.168.1.0 network. It was still bound to 192.168.7.3. Once I ran 'ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.3', the TEAM box became accessible.

Tried modem dialing. Worked the first time. Tried routing packets from Dagobah. Slashdot loaded flawlessly. No further user intervention was required.

[Disclaimer: Before long, I will probably own stock options in eSoft. Although I try to be as consistent and objective as I can, readers should be aware that I now have a financial interest in the company's success, as well as being an employee, so I could be considered a biased source.]

The TEAM box certainly does what it is designed to do. For the non-technical user or business, you just plug it in to your network, fill in the ISP info on the CGI forms, and presto. Dialin router, web server, mail server (I haven't really played with that part of it yet), ftp server, and a bunch of other stuff I haven't tried yet and can't recall right off hand.

I remember when festnet was first getting networked, and we were trying to setup IP Masquerading, I read several HOWTO's, recompiled my kernel, played with command line options for ipfwadm (and later ipchains), put the proper commands in the startup scripts and runlevels, and eventually had it all working smoothly. The TEAM box eliminates the need to do all that. Which is, of course, why I would never buy one for myself. ;)

I knew I had to come up with a name for this box, but it was a struggle to find something fitting. I finally decided that Illian would be perfectly appropriate.

Illian (IHL-lee-ahn): A great port on the Sea of Storms, capital city of the nation of the same name. The sign of Illian is nine golden bees on a field of dark green.

A fitting name for a box whose primary purpose is to function as a gateway router. Here's more detailed info, including some other aspects which seemed equally fitting in different ways.

Of course, then there was the Thursday night/Friday morning fest, detailed in the previous rambling. BTW, I did find my keyboard attachment. Turns out it had popped off before ever leaving my room, and I didn't even notice until arriving at Scott's house. That's a relief.

Yesterday, I hacked together the AntiMovielog (hyphenated or not? I'm still unsure), started working on a document which explains the presence of the AntiMovielog in more depth, fiddled a little more with Illian, and more or less zoned out from sleep deprivation. At 1600, I finally gave in and zonked until midnight. Woke up for an hour, made the first AntiMovielog entry (not hyphenated looks better I think), read Slashdot, and went back to bed. Awoke at 0530, feeling rested, got up, made this rambling, and now I'm going to go eat breakfast.