I was having lots of problems last night and this morning with multicast not working correctly on a linux host. As soon as I started tcpdump multicast would work. It is not fun trying to troubleshoot a problem that goes away everytime you try to debug it.

Turns out the realtek r8169 driver doesn’t handle multicast on the newer cards correctly.
Downloading the r8168 driver from Realtek and installing it resolved the issue.

This post is being made so that google will be able to help the next person with this problem.

In a move that caught everyone by surprise including myself I asked my Ladyfriend to marry me while we were in Rome last week. Following only the briefest of pauses to exclaim surprise the Lady said yes.

So while attempting to copy all my photos from the Trans Canadian train journey onto my laptop it started whining about low disk space. It seems I have managed to produce somewhere in the region of 25GB of photos so far and there is another week to go. My short term plan is just to buy some blank dvds in Portland but how do people store all their photos.

Whats the first thing to do in New York. Thats right a trip to the B&H Super Store on 9th Avenue to buy some bits and pieces for my EOS 400D. The initial shopping list was short, just one lens and a flash but with the fact that things are much cheaper in the states plus the extra bonus from the strong euro the list started to grow just a tad. As part of my tidying things up in work before the trip I submitted the expenses claim of doom. From the beginning of September last until the end of June. It was a hunk of change and was my budget for camera shopping while in New York.

Yes that man does have a screwdriver in his face.

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So the flight over was ok but really Aer Lingus what were you thinking, “Showbands 2″ is not an acceptable thing to show to mass murderers let alone tourists who we want to actually remember Ireland fondly. Besides the poor entertainment options the flight was uneventful, just long. It seems I am not cut out for long haul.

Thursday was a bit hectic with trying to make sure I had most of my work stuff handed over to other people and doing things like learning how to setup my voicemail, “Hi this is colin, …”, along with one of those silly out of the office messages on my email. I have not yet gotten used to being without my phone.

So Boston is pretty snazzy and warm, so very very warm. It is Harborfest this week so lots of Tea Party recreation and similar going on. The Chowderfest tomorrow should be most enjoyable. Anyway it is nearly time to meet one of the Ladyfriend’s scary internet friends so until next time.

Live from the count at the RDS

After sitting through Eoin O’Dell (photo below) talking about the legal challenges facing bloggers I am tempted never to post anything on the internet ever again. Barcamp was good fun and I was sorry to have to leave early and miss some of the later talks that I was interested in. Hopefully those who came to my talk got something useful from it.

This was orignally ment to be a write up myself and Peter’s adventures at LAMM last year but I never quite got arround to posting it. This years lamm is fast approaching and I have yet to enter because Peter is not able to take part this year due to PHD deadlines so I need to find a new partner.
If anyone reading thinks 2 days running about the scottish highlands sounds fun check out the LAMM website and see if you would be comfortable doing the novice class.

So yesterday I gave the first airing of a talk I have wanted to give for a while called The Realities of LLU in Ireland at UKNOF7. The Title is a bit silly but such is life.
I am planning to give this talk or a version of it at BarCamp Dublin in a few weeks but I have some doubts over how suitable it is for the event.

The talk covers a number of areas including brief history of irish telecoms that impacts on LLU, How an operator goes about unbundling an exchange, how do we unbundle customers to deliver services and finally what are the coming changes that will impact on LLU. The slides form a lose structure in which I talked about the nature of the ISP market in Ireland and anything else that seemed related.

John having recently joined the UKNOF Programme Committee ment that Colm from Joost and Donal from HEAnet were also giving talks which were really informative and in the case of Donal’s talk on NOC tools it gave me some interesting ideas for tools to use within Magnet.

In the original you can see me reflected in her eyes.