Arp! Rarp! Arp!

Do you know what ARP is? It, or rather a firewall and associated router's improper handling of the protocol, is what kept me from working on my happy little wall.

The upshot? I got to spend an extra four hours at work! Yeah! Exciting! Whoo! I love building address tables by hand! Really! I (don't) mean it!

Want to know what makes it better? The fact that I can summarize a large portion of my day with the following:

Manually configured static ARP entries are only needed when you are trying to NAT to an external IP address in the same network block as a secondary IP (non-primary) address on the firewall’s (or other security appliance’s) public interface. If the IP addresses needed for static NAT are in the same network block as the primary address on the public interface, then you will probably not need to add these manual entries.

See? It looks just like English! Hell, it even passes the spell check! That is actually from my “just in case I get squished by a bus” notes for the day.

Sad.

Anyway, I also got to field strip (complete disassembly!) my beloved little Dell laptop (Yeah SUSE!) and replace a bad motherboard. That was about as much fun as taking the still-full food dish away from a starving wolverine with distemper.

Stupid firewall. Silly Router. Odd choice in careers.

So yeah, I’m fried. Cooked. Toast, even.

I promised to update people on what I’ve been doing lately. The short answer is that I’ve been building stuff.

Like walls. (Walls are stuff.)

And, like wall units. (Assembly is building.)

So, this weekend, I get to finish the walls, then do plumbing.

But now, I’m going to bed. It has been a very long day.

Absent

“Hey, where have you been?” The question was shouted at me from across the coffee house, and resounded about the place like a sledgehammer striking steel.

I looked around, slightly stunned. “Um, adding cream?” I looked around, trying to figure out who in the hell was yelling at me.

“No, I mean lately….” The voice was closer now, causing my eyes to vibrate in their sockets.

“Oh, I’m heading back to work after lunch….”

The sun disappeared as a planet of a man appeared in front of me. I realize that some people qualify as scary big. This guy was like two spots past that. “No,” he said, sounding as if he was speaking to someone fresh off the short bus, “I mean your blog. You have that house fixin’ blog, right? Damn, you need to write on that some more. That was some funny shit.”

“Yeah, thanks, I’ll do that I guess.” Time to run for the door.

“Great! Nice to see you again Tom!”

“Nice to see you as well, man!” Just like that, I was free. I was back on the sidewalks of Astoria, returning to anonymity.

Now, no offense to the linebacker in question, but I still have no idea who in the hell that guy was. I was a bit freaked out, but I quickly got over it, and following an afternoon of furious bit-twiddling promptly forgot about it.

A couple of days later, I was walking about with arms full of various network components when I came across Wend-E. Amongst other things, she pointed out that I have not updated in a while.

I started to detect a pattern.

I came home and my lovely bride tells me that Auntie L and Guy are both kvetching (my words) about my lack of posts.

Well, crap.

I’ve been, you know, busy, in a “kind of” sort of way. Sequestered may be an even better term. I’ve been taking entirely too long to finish things around the house. I’ve been busy being Dad and Hubby. I've been decompressing. I've been uncoiling.

So, I’m flattered, and I’ll be better. I’ll get back to this. Really.