DoomBook

Welcome back, everyone out there on the Internets. Today I noticed something rather striking.

When I was looking for setup instructions to get my newly acquired DD-WRT based Buffalo router back on ATT’s DSL network I found a marked lack of decent information.

There were plenty of people complaining about how they couldn’t get it working, but not a single one stating, “here’s the fields you need to fill in”.

Now, there might be some of that on the actual DD-WRT forums. But that’s not what was coming up in Google on the searches. Which is what led to quite a bit of frustration on my part, as I like to have a bit of guidance in advance of actual setup to make everything go smoother.

So! What does it take to get ATT service running over a directly connected DSL router, where you’re ignoring the DSL-Modem bridging device from ATT and directly servicing the line with the new DD-WRT router? Not much. Just put in the user name (generally user@someurl .com) and your password and you should be all set. I’ll check and see what the other settings do (if the compression works or just breaks the line entirely) as I get time.

I’ve actually had the gumption to write up the first review of the new season. All it needs are some pretty graphs and analysis of the same and it’s good to go.

Graphics-wise there is one oddity that’s throwing up a bit of a sticking point. Running the OpenGL test “glxgears” in a dedicated Xorg sessions prior to starting up an initial X session kicks in at 1500 fps … while starting the same session up after an KDE desktop is running (or after it’s been closed) results in a frame rate of 900 fps.

A roughly 30% drop.

Needless to say this will require a bit more investigation before I go to press with the review.

As the new server lurches to life (thanks to Travis’s timely visit so I could clean up the Automobile, too) I’ll be swapping this machine out with it. Doombook and co. will be running on a swank little machine with a gig and a half of ram, a modern AMD processor, and virtualization up the wazoo.

Pound will be MCing as our delegator of incoming connections, so all the nifty Ruby/Mongrel/Apache connections are transparently proxied out to whomever is requesting them.

Ideally this will all be wired up by next weekend and you’ll never notice (except the speed bump). Miracles do occasionally happen.

The hardware all this runs on is a hodge-podge of servers in my basement. On the one hand they’re likely to fail at any moment, system wise. On the other they’re more reliable than MySpace.

Which isn’t saying much, but still.

So I’ve invested in some decent power supplies and a new case (to replace the frame that one system is currently housed in) to keep the whole mess running for a while longer. The one bright side of the setup is the lack of dust in their current locale.

So here’s for another 8 years of villa-straylight.