The Great Nashville Flood of 2010

Luckily, my house didn't really take much damage during last weekend's big storm and flood.

I did discover a leak in my first floor bedroom, though.  There was some dampness on the ceiling and a little bubbling/blistering of paint along the top of one of the interior walls.  I poked a hole with a needle to let it drain.. It is kind of strange since I didn't see any leaks in the room upstairs.  Right now, I'm trying to find a roofer.  I think I'm going to replace the roof since it is a bit old (installed in 1996).

After hearing that one of my neighbor's crawl space had flooded, I decided to check mine out Tuesday morning.  At first I thought everything was fine since I only saw a few puddles on the vapor barrier (i.e. plastic sheets over the dirt).  But when I tried to crawl in so I could look further inside, I discovered about 2 inches of water beneath the vapor barrier.  Luckily, by Wednesday afternoon, all the water had been reabsorbed into the ground.

Here is a link to some pictures of the flooding:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/flooding_in_tennessee.html

And here is a video:

New Job

After almost 14 years, Friday was my last day on the Wizorder (aka Horizon Clinicals) team.

Tomorrow, I officially join the StarPanel team.

Strange DD-WRT problem

While I was trying to see why the time in my router running DD-WRT was out of sync (a couple of minutes ahead), the WAN connection lost its DHCP lease.  The cable modem appeared to be alright from the status LEDs, but the router would not get an ip address even after releasing or renewing the lease.  I tried powering on and off both the router and cable modem and was able to briefly get a private ip to at least see the cable modem, but then even that lease was somehow lost.

Next, I tried restoring the router's configuration to "factory" defaults.  It still wasn't able to get a lease.  Finally, I tried reloading from a backup of the firmware settings, and then the router was finally able to get a DHCP lease.

I'm not sure, but it is quite possible that the problem was actually on the Comcast side and not with the router.  Until this incident, the router's uptime was over 30 days.

Also, I discovered a workaround for fixing the time drift.  On the Administration->Management page, I added this to cron:

0 1 0 0 0 /usr/sbin/ntpclient -c 1 -s -h 0.us.pool.ntp.org 

The Ballad of G.I. Joe

What do the members of G.I. Joe and Cobra do for fun?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkPEHM38_DA

From Funny or Die.

New cable modem and router

For a really long time, I was renting a Scientific-Atlanta Webstar DPX-100 cable modem from Comcast. The last couple of weeks, my cable connection has been flakey As it turns out, this cable modem was EOLed on 10/29/2008.  So, I decided to purchase a Motorola SURFboard eXtreme SB6120. 

I also decided to get a new router (Linksys 320N) since I was pretty sure that the new cable modem might saturate my old D-Link 704.  Since I read that the Linksys firmware was buggy, I carefully flashed it with DD-WRT, a 3rd party Linux based alternative firmware

Here are some speed tests:

Webstar DPX-100 with D-Link 704:
5 Mbps down/0.99 Mbps up/48 ms ping

Motorola 6120 with D-Link 704:
5 Mbps down/4 Mbps up/51 ms ping

Motorola 6120 with Linksys 320N with DD-WRT
19 Mbps down/4 Mbps up/52 ms ping