Cricalix.Net

The British Gas work team showed up on site yesterday, and I’m now the happy owner of a new Baxi 50 HE boiler, new radiator, new thermal controls and new immersion heater-type hot tank. It took them one working day to put it all in, including taking up floor boards and ripping out all the lead pipe (that was apparently very porous and leaking gas!). I now owe British Gas the remainder of the charge for the installation and equipment, but that’s life.

Woke up to a nice warm house this morning, so the thermostat works. I’ve also discovered that moving a plastic jumper will change it from a ‘one schedule for all 7 days’ to ‘one schedule for the weekend, another for the week’ to ‘different schedules per day’. I’ll be doing the 5/2 version I think (it’s only on one schedule for all days now), so I can have a different heating schedule on the weekend when I’m home.

The forecast for this weekend was for where I live to be cloudy, but nice and sunny in the west. A consultation with my parents gave me some place names to visit, and I was off to Cymru (Wales) this morning, bright and early (well, sort of early - 8 A.M.). Out of Newcastle via the A34 and the A500, across the A534 and A41, in search of a magic road called the A55 that runs just south of Chester out towards Llandudno (and if you’re not Welsh, you probably can’t pronounce that name [properly that is]). If the forecast was accurate, it’d be a good day for taking photos with the 5D.

The weather forecast was indeed accurate, and the grey skies of Staffordshire and Cheshire gave way to brilliant sunshine and blue skies as I motored along through Wales. It really is a nice easy run, once you ignore the hops you have to take to actually reach the A55. While heading to Llandudno, one has to pass Bodelwyddan (where I saw a wonderful airy looking church, I’ll have to go back there) and then go through Colwyn Bay, and early on a winter’s morning, it’s quite a beautiful sight. The morning sun was just lighting up the headlands, while the rest of the bay was in a bit of shadow.

Decided today that I was going to check for a firmware upgrade for my ZyXEL 660HW-61, and suprise suprise, there was one waiting for me. The changelog looked good, so I decided to apply it. Everything seemed to work - I could call Dad via Sipgate etc and my servers were happy.

Dad was having trouble with the Checkpoint VPN client, so I suggested he upgrade his firmware as a test. Well, who tell me say dat!? Chaos has ensued for the past 8 hours or so. The VPN client still didn’t work, the router refused to see the server, and the server refused to see the router (but the laptops worked), Asterisk broke and in general, madness occured. It turns out my SIP had broken as well, but I hadn’t actually checked it during all of this (I had tested outbound when Dad was still on the earlier firmware).

Getting the router and server to talk involved unplugging the ZyXEL, using the power button to drain all capacitors, and powering it back up. SIP still didn’t work - Asterisk could see the auth request packets coming back, but never finished the conversation, and never registered. Rebooting the router and reloading Asterisk worked once for a few of the connections (I have 4 SIP accounts), but only once. The SIP ALG didn’t seem to do anything either.

One downgrade later and my Asterisk install, and Dad’s Asterisk install are both working happily. I’m not sure I’d recommend that firmware upgrade to any ZyXEL 660HW-61 users.

Went up on Apedale Park today, looking to test the capabilites of the Dynax 5D in the afternoon sun. It was a tad cold, and the wind was making short work of my fingers, but other than that it was a gorgeous afternoon. Met quite a few people, some with cameras (including pen and tone), some with dogs, and some with both - I wonder how many dog owners have cameras, or how many camera owners have dogs? Probably a useless statistic for all intents and purposes, but I’m still curious :)
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