Update from Toronto

Someone has to teach these people the meaning of cold.

A short lesson for you, the reader:
+20C T-shirt and shorts weather
+10C T-shirt and pants
0 C Long-sleeves and pants
-5 Sweat-shirt
-10 light jacket
-20 ski jacket
-30 ski jacket and sweatshirt underneath

Now, I only consider "cold" to be under -15C, but that's not taking windchill into effect. -20C is quite bearable, but even a breeze can make that very brutal very quickly.

But please, don't complain that 0C is cold. It's not. Especially because there's no significant wind.

On that note, the Element drives quite nicely on the highways, but it does get beat-up by cross-winds quite a bit. (head or tail winds aren't really noticable) I'm not sure if Friday was very windy or if the wind came in strong gusts, but I certainly got shoved over to the side more than a few times.

Last night I went to a friend of a friend's... she loved the Element so much that she had to go for a ride in it. Seems the whole family likes boxes... (ON WHEELS!)

This morning I arrived bright and early (yes, 0730) at Catalyst... only to be followed in by the electrician who said he didn't have the right transformer (... y'know, if you want 120VAC, you need a center-tap...), so the UPS repairs we not made. What did get done, and is just as significant as the UPS fix, was the spare power trasfer switch we (Server North Inc.) had was put into place for Catalyst's core routers and switches at the colo facility, so now I don't care when the UPS gets fixed because my gear, and Catalyst's important gear are on xfer switches... I (Server North) will be completely unaffected by that. Yay!

Continuing the happy news, I've completed the motherboard replacements on the other Server North machines, so now p0, m0 and m1 all have nice, shiney new Gigabyte 7A8DR-H motherboards. The replacement went smoothly, which wasn't a big surprise considering I'd 'practised' on m1 a month ago and knew what to expect. Dave started the SAN resync and it almost immediately hit 600MBps, which is just kick-ass! If we upgrade our GigE switches to something that handles Jumbo Packets (> 1500 bytes), we could really get cooking - not that, at present, we're hurting in the performance department... but these motherboards make everything faster. And that's quantifiable, not just in my head

And then there's the catch... While the GA mobos are great in that they have dual Intel GigE interfaces (em), the Tyans, tho broadcom, also had a 3rd i/f (fxp) which we used for Internet and management.
I can hear you saying "So what? Throw another NIC in there and be done." - Sure, great, yeah... until you remember we're dealing with a 2U rackmount case (p0)... DOH! Well, not so bad, I'd ordered a PCI bender (Riser, whatever.) from a company in .ca.us, but it hasn't arrived yet. I'm hoping it might show up Monday or Tuesday, before I return to Ottawa, but I get the feeling it won't show until the new year. For now I've got an fxp sorta tie-wrapped into place vertically... not pretty - but it works... if no one wiggles the cable.
I live in hope tho.

What irks me, is that they wanted $20 USD for regular ground shipping on this thing. It's the size of wrist-watch and retails for $14 USD. How can ground shipping be $20 USD when I ship RMA'd hard-drives via ExpressPost (1-2 day delivery) with $500 insurance for $8.60 CAD? And these guys wanted $40 USD to air-ship the part to us... ridiculous... pangs of Tiger Direct all over again; "You want this spec of dust? No problem - it's free! Shipping $10 per item." Arg. You buy a big monitor, $10 shipping, you by a CD, $10.... WTF? I think I know where I should invest the money I don't have.

Tomorrow afternoon/evening looks like it's going to be very busy... I'll try and post before I go to sleep.