The new business is called “Ytas” (pronounced why-tas). It’s a play on wireless and Tasmania but the Y symbolizes an antenna as well which encompasses what I do with wireless, WiFi and Microwave. You can have a look at the new site HERE.

Working out what I want to do and what is practical has been a challenge.  So after lots of discussions with my wife, I have decided to start my own business offering myself as a partner to businesses who want to provide wireless solutions to their clients but don’t have the resources.

I’ve been in business before and both times have helped me to define my strengths and weaknesses.  That has allowed me to determine where best I can derive income and make my skills available to others to use.

Intersting times ahead…

From the last couple of weeks I’ve been having having some time of work.  My normal work.

It seems that most of my time “on holidays” is spent catching up on the jobs that need to be done and the last two weeks has been no exception.

We are currently getting our house ready for sale but as the house is only in a half renovated state that means finishing off rooms, building a bathroom and a lick of paint around the place.

Our place is close to 100 years old and any new work has to match the old.  That means walls slightly out of skew to match the old ones while still maintaining a reasonable amount of plumness and pleasing aesthetics.  So far I think we have achieved that well.

I’ve been very lucky over the last week to have the help of a stepson who happens to be a builder.  Not only did the work go much (much) quicker but it was done in a more efficient manner.  I have learnt a lot as well but I don’t think I’ll be starting my own building business soon.

So now we have another room almost ready for plastering.  Just need to window replaced when we can get a quote back from anyone during this time of the year.

Maybe I can get a couple of days off now before heading back to work…

I can up with this which works quite well and it also has the choice of opening a seperate form or not. I’m even using it to password protect individual fields on forms. passwd_demo.zip

After a couple of hours I found a very good solution from a guy named Dmitry Streblechenko.

It’s called “Redemption” and it’s a very good work around as well as being free for non-commercial use.

There’s a few other interesting things there as well. Well worth checking out.

I didn’t write this or come up with the concept. I don’t know where I originally found it, so my apologies to the author to whom credit must go.

This file is as close to the original example as I can remember. list_example.zip

You know who you are.. you!… the one that sits on 80Km/hr, making sure that you collect as many cars behind as you can. Then when get to an overtaking lane you decide that 110+ would be better (wouldn’t want anyone to overtake you wouldn’t we?). But of course you must slow down again at the end of the overtaking lane, don’t you!

I get so sick and tired of these drivers and believe me there’s a bloody lot of them. I have a theory, that there are two types of road signs and each is only visible to different groups of drivers.

For some of us, we see speed limit signs that show 110km/hr on the highway. Others see signs that show 80km/hr but they also have signs (ones that only they can see) that at the beginning of overtaking lanes showing 120km/hr, then at the end of the overtaking lane they see a sign showing 80km/hr again so they slow down again. There also could be signs (ones that I can’t see) stating “do not let anyone overtake you no matter what”.

And people wonder where frustrated drivers come from…

As I get time I’ll add more bits to the different areas, so keep coming back to check.

Cheers

Howard.

My previous connection to the outside world was a permanent 56K modem and static IP address. I ran a local DNS server with Web, Mail and gateway setup. All of this has worked fine for 3 years or so, never missing a beat. The change came around because I wanted faster access and also in my case, it turned out quite a bit cheaper for the amount of data I put through each month.

I found plenty of help sites and examples on the web but not one that really help me get my head around my particular setup requirements here at home.

So I now had two NICs, a WAN address and a LAN address (and a wife wanting this to happen asap) to contented with . I had to get the DNS server to be available to the outside world as well as keep the Web server, Mail server, FTP server and gateway for the internal Lan.

The FreeBSD server handled all this fine so the steps I took were:

1. Firstly, before you even start, you’ll need to do a bit a research on Bind and DNS. Just do a search on “freeBSD dns setup” or similar on Google.
2. I setup a new account with a new ISP that I liked, requesting a static IP address (because I’m a bit of purist).
3. Setup my adsl modem (mine was a DSL300+ with pppoe built-in) so that it connected to my new ISP’s ADSL service.
4. Changed to a new Domain registry company and transferred my existing domain to them. I let that go through and set for a day or so keeping the existing delegation in place.
5. Next I changed (after quite a bit of stuffing around) my named server configuration files as per the linked text file below.
6. Reboot server. Cross fingers, legs eyes and anything else.
7. I next tested the domain locally to make sure everything was resolving OK.
8. I contacted my ISP to ask if they could act as a secondary DNS point as two are required (but not neccessary).
9. Finally, I changed the delegation of the domain to the new addresses and waited while everything filtered through. This took up to 48 hours to complete but started almost straight anyway.
10. To finish off, I headed to www.dnsreport.org to check if the world was seeing everything OK.
11. Celebrate, let wife pat me on back, life back to normal (but faster and in control).

Bind (Named) Configuration Layout.