Sean's Blog

A good friend of mine was getting married in California (in the Monterey area, to be exact), and being the car nut I am, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit and terrorize the PCH. But since I was flying out, I would need a suitable rental car to do it in. In poking around the various rental sites, a BMW was looking to be the best option (at a reasonable price, anyway), but by the time I was actually ready to book it, it was an option no more.

The second best alternative actually appeared to be a Mustang, of all cars. As much as I love small, light, agile cars over the muscle car type, Mustangs have gotten so much praise for being fun to drive lately, and I figured “hey, what the hell.” So, I booked a Mustang V6, and hoped I’d at least get one with the newer 300 HP engine, instead of the 210 HP slug.

And then I get to the rental counter. “Sir, would you like to upgrade to a GT for $10 per day?” You might as well ask me if I’d like to date Adriana Lima. And even better, I got a nearly-new one, with the 5.0 liter V8, and only 2,000 miles on the odometer. It had a terrific sound on startup, but in pulling out and navigating the garage at SFO, it felt big and heavy (especially compared to my GTI). Had I made the wrong choice? Was this going to suck on the PCH?

No, and no. Emphatic nos. Yeah, it’s a bit big and heavy compared to what I prefer, but the more you drive it, the smaller it feels. The harder you push it, the more agile it feels. And taking it down the PCH from Monterey to right around Big Sur was an experience I’ll never forget (ahem, with stability control inexplicably turned off). Had there not been other constraints (you know, like a wedding), I would have gone much further, and Avis would be wondering how a car with so few miles could have tires so well worn. It was that much fun.

OK, so the automatic sucked (good luck finding a rental place in the US that’ll give you stick without charging an arm and leg, which is a bit ironic, since you’d need both to drive it, but I digress), and the gas mileage was about what you’d expect it to be, but it was still buckets of fun. I honestly don’t know if I’d ever get one myself, but it’s something I’d definitely look at—and I never in a million years thought I’d say that about any Mustang. Well done Ford, well done.

When I got my Cat 3550 for home, it came with an ancient version of IOS (12.1, circa 2002). Not ideal, but I didn’t think it’d be much of a problem. It wasn’t until a few weeks after I had it running that I found the first issue that would affect me.

As it turns out, the methods that iTunes uses for AirTunes and DAAP require multicast, and to be more specific, IPv6 multicast. You wouldn’t figure a switch would have a whole lot to do with IPv4 multicast vs. IPv6 multicast, but as it turns out, the MAC addresses that map to the multicast addresses for IPv4 and IPv6 are different (Wikipedia has a great explanation here).

I found this when I was planning on doing some work from home, and wanted to have some music going while I did it. I did the work minus music, and then spent hours trying to figure how why in the hell the new switch broke iTunes. Upgrading IOS should solve the problem, but I haven’t been able to find any references to when Cisco fixed this issue (I won’t call it a bug, since the firmware is so old, IPv6 was pretty much non-existent).