Recently I unthinkingly upgraded MobileMe to the new Calendar. Which of course broke all of that for various reasons. And this turned out to be the best thing I could do, as now I have a much simpler solution that seems to accomplish the same goals and work more reliably.

Now my phone synchronizes with the Google calendar directly using ActiveSync. And my desktop and laptop BusyCal synchronize with Google calendar directly but only need to be running when I need a calendar there. So MobileMe solved my occasional calendar problems by becoming useless for me.

At this point I'll have to evaluate if there is any point to keeping MobileMe at all or if I can simply use DropBox to keep the other things in sync that MobileMe does for me, and I certainly don't need another email account, or IM account and their iDisk solution is a joke compared to the ease of Dropbox.

Is there any other value to this service I'm missing?

Basically I start trying to plan out some structure that is used to capture the main things I need capturing, which anyone can tell you are a list of your projects. A list of your next actions. And some sort of calendar to capture the hard landscape of what is happening. And finally a reliable reference file. Where to store stuff you may need to reference later, reliably, in a form that is easy to look up.

Well as a guy who builds systems and programs this is a nightmare, I start thinking this is simple enough to build something. Well it isn't, because all of the sudden I have something way more complex than the [37signals](http://37signals.com/) people have built, and it will take me a good 8 or 40 hours to put together. And then I start thinking about backup, because hell if this is my life I better be able to back it up. And of course I don't have time for this because while I am thinking about this I am shirking all kinds of other responsibilities, and the fires are growing all around me. Then I run around for 3 days putting them out and long for an uninterrupted month where I can construct this super-duper life runner application.

Well I am a father, and I work, and I have hobbies, there is no uninterrupted month coming any time in the forseeable future, which I can't really see much of anyway because I am so busy running around putting out fires, or planning for the utopia in some distant future. I really need to work on my middle game.

Anyway, starting today, I am going to errect a little bit of scaffolding to try and hold my life together. I am going to spend about 10 minutes thinking about the simplest system that can possibly work.

*I am picturing a calendar and a notebook.*

I think the biggest thing here is consistency of putting everything there, and to get in the habit of looking at it several times a day. Maybe I can trick myself and write "email" or "bloglines" on the cover, since I typically look at both of those several times an hour.

I have to convince my brain that it doesn't have to be perfect to start using it.

A company I am associated with has a Cisco Pix 515 in their main office and actually happens to have a spare 501. So they thought it would be a good idea to have a VPN between their main office and their branch office. Their branch office has a Lucent Pipeline 75 for their 128 Kbps ISDN connection. The offered me a nice payday to get the VPN to work for them, so having quite a few years of Cisco and general network experience I happily accepted. Read on for a technical overview of the problems and solutions I encountered.

The initial network I found in the branch office was quite simple. A static IP address on the Pipeline that was configured for Port Address Translation (PAT), or in Lucent Pipeline terms, NAT with a single address. Probably a pretty common configuration for an office like this and most any house network using one of those Linksys now Cisco devices.

The problems began when I realized the NAT/PAT on the Pipe75 wasn't smart enough to do some sort of workaround translation on ipsec packets. The incompatability and workarounds on this are generally well known. Googling for the various combinations of vpn, ipsec, nat, masquerading, etc. will give you some nice background material on the problem.

Well now I run into the first major roadblock and that is that Lucent is terrible at providing information and support on the products the assimilated. I don't have a support contract with Lucent and neither does this company, they just were given the hardware when they signed up for ISDN service many years ago. In order to get access to Lucent's knowledge base and forums apparently you need to pay them for support. Obviously this kills of any secondary free support structures that could arise in their forums before it even could begin. Well I was able to locate some useful documents: Pipeline 75 Users Guide and the Pipeline 75 Reference Guide. Also I was able to get a support account that had minimal access to some whitepapers that Ascend published for the customers years ago, but none of them dealt with this situation, only with trying to get the VPN implementation on the Pipe75 to work.

I was able to get the ISP to issue an additional Static address. So now I have to /32's to work with. The pipe75 and the Pix. Now what I am going to do leave the original static address on the external interface of the Pipe75, I am having the ISP statically route the other slash-32 to the first one (the external pipe75 interface).

And here is where I got a little ghetto or clever, depending on how you look at it. Say the addresses I have are 172.16.1.105/32 and 172.16.1.180/32. Well 172.16.1.105 is the outside interface of the pipe75, and somewhere the ISP should have an entry like: ip route 172.16.1.180 255.255.255.255 172.16.1.105. Now the internal interface of the pipe75 is set to 172.16.1.177/29 and I set the external interface of the Pix to 172.16.1.180/29, and I set the default gateway on the PIX to go to 172.16.1.177. Yeah I am masking out a few real addresses. But it won't effect the ISP and I am severely doubting that the users at the branch office have any reason to go to those real IP addresses I am masking out. Well anyway it is a risk I am willing to take. So at this point all I need to do is turn off NAT on the Pipe75 and I am good to go.

The status at this point is I am waiting on someone at the ISP to enter the route for me. Then I can get into the Pipe75 and turn off NAT. The Pix and everything else are already in place as they should be, just need that route so I can stop doing uneccesary translations which are breaking my ipsec, and all other non-ipsec traffic will just be PAT'd by the PIX to 172.16.1.180.

If nothing else, I have some nice notes here, if I ever need to revisit this configuration.