Myke's 'blob.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with this job description? Yikes.
(PDF'd for future reference)

Recently, regions with 613, 819 and 514 (and others) long-distance numbers were switched to 10-digit dial plans... but I don't think this was supposed to happen:

Bell Fails

Last time I checked, the degree symbol, ¿@-¿u!¿ is not a valid DID or CID...

Apparently Ottawa was one of the few regions in the world where one could dial a 7 digit DID and get either the 613 or 819 area-code... Why didn't they just split this up before forcing 10 digits on us is beyond me.

As seen in the men's washroom:

"Don't take extra strokes."

Friday night I took my parents out to dinner at Il Primo, a nice restaurant in Little Italy. My third time there, and the food has always been great, service is excellent as well... I've found that their sister restaurant can take hours for a 2 course meal.

Wine Cellar

Good thing this is the lock on the wine cellar, not the washroom! Is that not an awesome looking lock!? I need one. Lock up my MacBook Pro or something

Late Sunday morning, Chris called me. It might've been to do some work on SVRNi stuff, but also to tell me about his great experience at the cinemas the night before... to which he'd actually invited me to join him - but like drinking, I haven't been to a theater in over 4 years. (Moulin Rouge I think was the last movie I saw... Twice.) After he talked about the youth of Canadia, I informed him that he'd missed an excellent game and that Edmonton had a shot at The Cup. He'd been so unimpressed by Game 1 of the series, that he'd decided not to watch it again until Game 7... even if there wasn't a Game 7. Well, I decided that having pizza and (root) beer would be a good use of a Monday night.

Monday afternoon I sent out a couple invites saying:
Usual complement of geeks. Laptops optional, WiFi available.
Puck drops at 8, figure we'll have pizza and (root) beer.
Just an excuse to have some people over.

I figured it'd end up being like everything I plan, where 20 people say they'll come, and 3 show up, not so. By 7PM, devnull, nightshade, and Chris and Danielle had arrived. While the drinks were cooling, pizza was coming, waiting for the game to start and the Thunderstorm-of-uncertain-doom was blasting through, I ran the recording I'd made of the USA Rock Paper Scissors Tournament rerun I'd caught earlier. Funny stuff! Even the second time over!

Around 8PM, the pizzas and kiroh had arrived, (from the land of no-power) and eventually the game started. I don't think I need to comment on the game itself, beyond that we'd largely lost interest in it from a minute and twenty six seconds in, until the third period... We were so disinterested, we actually missed Edmonton's goal. Luckily we were watching via the PVR and I just travelled a minute back in time

Helno showed up, if I remember correctly, during first intermission, after being held-over at work for over an hour. Shameless, clueless lusers. At one point, we had 4 laptops going... Tho Kiroh was trying to install Knoppix. Complaining that he has to buy a new laptop, Sean and I certainly worked our Apple-Approved iBrainwashing.


Much pizza and (root) beer was consumed.
But in the end,
The score was still 3-1, Carolina.
And we cried.

Then we watched Rock Paper Scissors again!

Oh - and we ordered entirely too much pizza.

- Netgear GS608 passed 9K packets. Not 9004 tho.
- ping in FreeBSD 6.x has a payload growth options
- Mr. Cook tells me that EaKiu will be released with a Universal Binary soon, so I can use my Wi-Spy with my MBP
- Camera toss-up: Canon Digital Rebel or Fuji S9000 ... or both?
- Anyone want SDSL or datacenter facilities in downtown Ottawa? Talk to me!
- 613/819 are now on a 10-digit dial-plan. Have to reprogram all the pizzarias in my iDen phone
- I don't like heat
- Stanley Cup party at my house Monday night!
- ImprovEverywhere freaks out a BestBuy
- This 'blog now attracts appx 70 spam trackbacks per day. Zero have been successful. All the offending source IPs have been blackholed.

The reason I've been so quiet the past few weeks... a client needs to move into a data centre. These guys are ramping for production in a few months, and they've got SLAs to meet at that. The Ikea racks just weren't cutting it, and there's a plan to move to rack-mount gear anyway... tho a 2U case is about $350 a shot. So I was off to Computer Recyclers again, much like last year when I was setting up Server North. Picked up a pair of these blue cabinets and had 'em delivered to the client's site.
Nice thing about getting them at Computer Recyclers is that they're cheap. A few hundred bucks... they'd be a few thousand if purchased new. The downside: They need cleaning. A lot of it.

This is the canvas I have to work with. Seems my tape-measure has gone missing from my toolbox, so I had to measure using the Mykes units. 6' x 10' appx (0.98 Mykes * 1.6 Mykes; 1 Myke ~= 6'2") The company who occupied this cage previously had a half-rack SAN (... they called it a filer) that apparently tossed a disc a week. So, you figure out how expensive a 36GB UW drive is and cry. Not that SCSI HDDs that small are stupidly expensive, but they're certainly not as cheap as a 300GB SATA drive.

The cabinets arrived Wednesday of last week... and I started cleaning 'em. Amusing observation while unloading: The air inside the cabinets was so hot, that once we brought them into the airconditioned building, the cooling fans in the tops started spinning due to air flow caused by the sharp temperature difference. (It's about 18C in the data center, and the outside temperature was about 34C... and I'm sure the air in the cabinets was hotter than that.)

Took me almost 2 whole days to disassemble, clean, scrub and wash the cabinets. Then another half-day reassembling and rearranging the shelves to accomdate the non-rackmount equipment going in. I finished at 9PM Friday night. And I was tired, didn't even eat a dinner. You can also see in this photo the UPS I've swiped from the refuse pile. It needs some therapy... and Dr. Myke plans to give'r. (Remind me some time to tell you about the UPS I picked up last week, if I don't write about it later.) I'm hoping new batteries are all this unit needs. A 2U PowerWare unit for the cost of SLAs and some elbow grease is not a bad deal at all. There's an derelect SUA2200 in another corner of the data centre, but it's in a great many small and medium sized pieces and I'm not so confident I can repair it. You can actually see the back of it on the right of the photo.

After getting my driver's license photo updated, picking up 4 more machines from MBC, delicious Pho dinner with BCRL, and about 12 hours of work, I can proudly present a rack full of equipment that's doing nothing but drawing power, producing heat and lighting LEDs.

Err... doh. But at least it looks good... Right?

About 5 minutes after I snapped this shot, I was working behind the racks, connecting up the Ethernet patches; just as I plugged one of the servers' patches into the switch - all the lights went out. Once my brain figured out what'd changed, I then had another WTF moment as I tried to work out how a GigE link could knock out the lights... Turns out that people leaving the building at 10PM on a Saturday night assume no one else is still there and turn off the lights. Note to self: Bring flashlight and always have something bright on the screen. If I ever have to run in during a power failure, it's going to be very dark.

What're you're seeing here is a lot of redundancy. With the exception of the monitoring machine, which is duplicated off-site, there's two of pretty much everything. For obvious reasons I won't detail much, but the dual-Dells (ugh) firewall/routers are actually doing something really neat: running pfSense with CARP/pfSync so that they're completely redundant. There's an extra cross-over cable between them and they synchronize NAT states, firewall states, routes, rules and a bunch of other parameters, so that if one node goes down, the other takes over completely within a few seconds or less. Quite interesting how this works too because the software actually creates a virtual network interface with it's own MAC address, this is what they share.

8-port KVM switch at the top of each cabinet. Linksys SRW2024 GigE switch below the patch panel on the back of one cabinet. Several medium sized APC SmartUPSes (Symmetra is the next step for these guys.)
There's almost not an inch to space in these racks. What is ironic, or just downright annoying, is that I could consolidate all this gear into one rack, and that's assuming 3U cases (use all standard parts)... if I could use 2U it's be tinier. I'm just waiting for these guys to get a nice big influx of cash and then I'm just going to buy a S4ton of Sun X4200 machines

Just. Damn. Cute.

No, not my cat, not my MacBook.