Last night I reinstalled OpenBSD on the 486 and compiled a new kernel with my old custom configuration file. When I was done, I figured both NICs were working fine, but my config file didn't have the PnP line for the 3C509 card, so ep1 never got configured and nat and dhcpd failed (thanks to some info from dmesg).

I'm finding it fairly easy to get comfortable with OpenBSD. It doesn't have the sheer mass of support as with linux and freebsd, but what I've found for what I've looked up has worked great.

For some reason, OpenBSD will grab an IP from the DHCP server on the school lan, but it won't get one for my cable modem. I called Cox and of course only Windows is supported, but the guy said he had a linux box so he'd try to help me anyway. It seemed like everything I said was thrown back into my face as something wrong. He told me that the ISC DHCP client software wasn't going to work with their network configuration. I asked him why since it should just make a broadcast over the subnet, and he said they have several subnets so it wouldn't know which to broadcast over. The solution: set the DNS server IP information in my resolve.conf. HUH? I told him whatever, wished him a good night and hung up. I'll just play with it more on my own and see what I can figure out for myself. My first suspicion is that my MAC address on the windows computer was bound to the dhcp server the first time I grabed an IP, but he said just my static was, not the dynamic. I'm sure the IP I had grabbed before expired before I tried to grab one on the OpenBSD box... it's only a 2 hour lease. It's going to be a matter of me letting IP leases expire and try connecting with different computers with the NICs all switched around to find out if my MAC address binding suspicion is correct. I've found that the tech people don't always have clear details about what the network admins have actually configured.

The freshmen in this new group of people don't look all too great. There are a lot of people stuck in high school, parental rebellion mode that don't look like they'll make it through the first semester.

I still wonder if I configured the timezone adjustment variable in the kernel configuration correctly. I have -6 for DST and -1800 for TIMEZONE and I live in CST6CDT. I could just look more on google, but I don't feel like it... I want to get to using that computer for NAT and figure out if I can get it on the cable modem or if I have to call Cox more about my setup here, even though I'll get a hard time for not using Windows as the machine making the primary connection.

Mmm... running rc5 on a 33 mhz processor... I'm going to do it. I got an email back from the ebay guy who I won 486 cpus from. He sent them, so I should be able to upgrade to 50 mhz this week. Maybe there is even a heatsink on it with a cool thermal compound cement since I won't be able to get a socket7 heatsink to clip onto a socket3 mobo.

Come to think of it, I should probably NAT on the school connection till the marketing project passes over so I don't mess with the server configuration for my webserver that is hosting my fake marketing project. For me to get the NAT on the cable modem the way I want, I'd have to bind a new MAC address to the IP and be sure that all the port forwarding and nat is working correctly.

I have to work tomorrow and it's almost 4 am so I better get to bed.

It would also seem that my previous entry about not being able to take out cardslot, cardbus, and pcmcia when compiling a new OpenBSD kernel was wrong. I just successfully left them out. I wonder how much difference that will make in my available memory. I'll find out soon enough.