[conspire] *buntu 11.10 (was: Safety at CABAL meetings: NO UNCOVERED CABLE RUNS)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> What are you doing up at 4am.

I was waiting for my knees to stop throbbing, mostly.

Anyway, one of the several things I accomplished, Saturday evening, was
completely recabling my house, running entirely new ethernet 10base-T
CAT-5 cable from my 1000' spool, and swapping out an old hub for a
relatively modern unmanaged ethernet switch.

The new cable runs were the important part:  In several places, people
had crushed the existing cable, which is horrendously damaging to
carrying capacity, because it tends to generate an ongoing stream of
garbage that interferes with real traffic.  This is the likely root
cause of intermittent connectivity problems for many months in my
household, during CABAL meetings, and on the small server farm in the
garage.  Changing out the (outside routable network's) hub for an
ethernet switch will also be a small win if any similar damage occurs in
the future:  Hubs simply repeat all received datagrams out all ports,
whereas switches localise traffic on the basis of destination MAC
(physical ethernet) addresses.

In any event, network reliability and responsiveness are now _way_
better.

With all the repair work and the unplanned shopping expedition for a new
bicycle helmet, I didn't get a chance to play around with the new
Ubuntu-family 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot discs I burned last week:  Ubuntu,
Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu for i386 and for x86_64.  The last of
those (Lubuntu) is new to the official Ubuntu lineup, and is notably
lightweight compared to the other three.