Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Our home intranet here is a gigabit network (which allows us easy access to all the movies on the NAS and so on) on a Netgear GS108 switch, and then our actual Internet connection is via a four port combination DSL modem, router, and wireless system. What this means is that when I'm using the IAM.Live message notification client, I have to be plugged into the router since the switch is letting UDP packets out, but doesn't let me receive them correctly.

The problem is that the network has to be running at full speed (ie. 1000 mbps) for Phil to be able to use the BME image updating software (which runs off of a network mounted drive) and the DSL modem is only running at standard speed (ie. 100 mbps)… But I really like my little message tool and don't want to give it up! Anyway, here's my nutter solution:

Thanks to a PC Card based gigabit ethernet, my laptop now has dual gigabit NICs, with one of them plugged into the router, and the other one plugged into the switch. Surprisingly it seems to work just fine — intranet traffic is running at full speed, and I'm connected to the net via the other port, so IAM.Live is working as well. I love it when stuff works just by plugging it in.

Oh, and if anyone has any last minute feature requests for the message notification tool, shoot me a message about it because I'm going to lock down the first version of the protocol over the next 36 hours. The prototype version (download link is a page or two back) is still fine to use, but I'll release the beta client, sourcecode, and protocol specs on Winter Solstice.