It has been an interesting week, a busy enough one that I have not had time to reflect on it much until now.
Work Stuff:
Monday I was supposed to meet a Sun support (DecisionOne actually) support guy at one of our company’s data centers to key him into our cage so he could replace a failed memory board on a brand new T5220. He was 115 minutes late. He was extremely good at the hardware, so good that I found myself wondering how many other customers have had T5220 motherboard replacements… We got the new motherboard in and neither of us knew the commands to get Sun’s new ILOM to run diagnostics and post Solaris 10. We got help from Alan (thanks Alan) who got the ILOM into ALOM behavior mode and then discovered that the new motherboard would not post either and we could not get Sun engineering back on the phone. I finally got out of the noisy, cold, isolated data center 4 hours after I expected to.
Once back in my cube, I had to continue pressing Sun for support on their lemon T5220 and try to beat a brand new leased HP Virtual Connection Manager of network switches inside a C7000 blade chassis into passing tagged and trunked VLANs over shared uplinks to our main switches. What I did not know on Monday, and only suspected on Tuesday was that the crappy, expensive in-chassis HP Virtual Connection Manager switches cannot pass trunked VLANS over shared uplink connections. Our super cheap HP GbE2c switches in our first c7000 chassis can handle passing trunked and tagged VLANs over their shared uplinks (though their interface is a pain). The Cisco Catalyst blade switches can certainly handle it; and they are standard IOS commands we are familiar with. The most expensive network interconnect blade switches actually offer the least in features, and have proven the most difficult to configure because (like every product in HP’s massive inventory) every thing is documented extensively, but to put together any single day-to-day operational procedure requires that you find, download, and read only the pertinent parts of no less than 20 massive and random PDF documents. Sadly, our newest c7000 blade chassis is leased from Savvis and they refuse to lease it with anything other than the crappy Virtual Connection Manager; guess we will not be leasing anymore chassis from them. Sun engineering finally passed the case to an engineer who was not on vacation for the holiday week, and now they think it is two bad memory modules…
It was not until Wednesday that we figured out that the limitations of the device we are stuck with and I ended up giving up redundancy by dedicating each uplink to only one network, and then passing tagged and trunked VLANs through the blade switches from each blade server to only the appropriate uplink. DecisionOne guy and I are negotiating when the parts will be available and when to meet by our dead T5220. Unlike Sun support, the DecisionOne guy is actually very good about touching base even when he has no new information to let me know he’s not forgotten (nice touch). We are in a race to roll out code and server capacity for a new product launch. It has been fun building most of the new servers (Suns for database back end, HP Proliant blades with Xen virtualized openSuSE Linux for everything else). The ones we own have been a joy, the leased ones where we did not get to pick the gear, not so much.
Personal stuff:
I’ve been making an effort to get back on top of keeping the house clean. It has been working, mostly, and we are happier and more comfortable. The cats have been very affectionate as it has gotten colder, though they still try to check outside several doors each morning hoping it’s warm outside one of them.
I am getting close to being able to check out of Silver 1, 2, and 3 in Arthur Murray’s Silver program. We did this before, but with the old syllabus, and we’ve been working on learning the new for some time. Our new teacher, Jesse, is very good. At the The Ballroom Studio, I am still working on finer points of dance technique with Darryl who is fantastic at teaching the fine details of how to dance and how to lead others in dance.
We had an excellent Thanksgiving Day feast with Sutragirl’s Aunt and extended family and friends in Washington, DC. The roasted potatoes were a surprise as they had roasted garlic and figs mixed in with the potatoes, yum!
Last night we went up to Dan and Jeff’s open house to see the progress on their home renovating and enjoy some of Dan’s terrific chilli-verde and wine. House looks terrific and it was good seeing people we had not seen in a while.
I just want to say that baklava is an excellent alternative to pumpkin pie when you can get it.
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