One hell of a week...

Well, let's ignore all the hassle we have had over the last month or two trying to get the house refinanced... let's ignore the 8 or so contractors that have been here in the last week... let's even ignore the switching internet providers, etc etc...

let's just focus on installing machines....
After months of searching, we ordered the DLG-4300 gaming router. But then we decided to use Jails in our new freebsd server, and found out we had to have one public ip address per jail. Unfortunately, the dlink wasn't a router, and only allowed one ip address.

we shipped it back, spent a couple weeks finding a router that would work, and ordered the Netgear FVS124g.

21 days later (1/3rd of the way through our free technical support) FedEx finally got it to us. I configured it THEN plugged it into the network, and WHAM everything died. Couldn't even access it, let alone the internet.

Finally, after multiple factory resets, called ISP and they had to release the MAC address associated with our dsl modem (unmanaged bridge). Then we could access the internet.

But what is this? The netgear, though claiming it could, can't do DMZ. Don't get me wrong, I read the manual, forums, everything. Unfortunately, the manual is months older than the oldest available firmware, and the DMZ settings just aren't there. An alternate DMZ setting is there if you view source, but not otherwise. And that isn't so easy to fix.

Did I also mention it was crashing and locking up every 5 minutes or so, killing the internet connection?


So, every 5 minutes we have to unplug the damn thing and on top of that, our DNS/Web/Email have been down for days.

Finally got ahold of netgear and they sent me a new unreleased beta firmware. That seems to have mostly fixed the lockup problems, but still no DMZ.

Around this time is when I started to also try to build all our machines. Hard drives had died in almost all of them, so 3 of the 5 machines had no operating system at all, and one had no internet access.

Windows XP 64-bit and FreeBSD 6.0 Beta5.
The windows box seemed to install just fine once I decided I didn't want a 715GB partition. Once I cut that in half, it finally was able to format without locking up. That was about the 10th 10-hour attempt at formatting before I made that decision. Got the box up and running,and 1/2 the base OS was 32-bit. that sucks.

Then today, I get the smart idea to install a newer motherboard firmware. Oops, raid now shows a missing drive and it won't boot into windows. Downgraded firmware, and raid drive still missing, but got into windows. And what's this, the raid controller software shows the same amount of hard drive space, but with one less drive. That's not a good sign. Called Asus. They tell me:
1) they don't support hardware raid
2) they don't support bootable raid
3) I'm screwed
They said I have to install windows THEN create my raid array (hmm, how do I make windows have redundancy and fail over then?). They gave me an email address for taiwan engineers when I complained, but that email address had permanent failures.

So, I am reinstalling windows from scratch now. Damn.

And the FreeBSD box? Well, it appears that the SiI3114r controller is only sorta supported... IE: it will show all the drives independantly, ignores the raid settings, and if you set RAID5 and figure out how to get the driver to work (which I haven't yet) won't do parity.... um... so what the fuck am I supposed to do? Don't know yet -- still working on that.

Needless to say, computers, firmware and tech support suck ass.