William's Workbench

I am back out in the Bay area for a couple of days. A file system corruption issue has put a server down so I have to get it back to a working state. Then I plan to lecture on the importance of a good, tested backup and restore scheme with a certain system administrator…

Imagine a giant mixing bowl, 50 miles across. Inside this giant mixing bowl are thousands of roads being mixed together furiously. Now imagine that bowl was turned upside down and the mixture of roads spread out over an area in Texas. That is Dallas, a mind-numbing maze of roads that go… somewhere. Some of these roads must be poor because I have to throw money at them to continue. I even had to throw money in a bucket to get OFF of a road in Dallas. Now that is a dangerous road. If I hadn’t had three quarters I might still be driving.

The bright side is that I get to play with a 140 node cluster at Weinman Geosciences. Well, I take that back. The bright side is I get to play with a 140 node cluster after I BEAT THIS FOUNDRY SWITCH INTO SUBMISSION. Bad blade, bad! The switch is mocking me. “I have a DB9 serial console connector, and it’s MALE. But it’s NOT going to work with your silly little null modem cable. It has to be a straight-through female to female serial cable.” This makes sense to a Foundry switch designer somewhere. Poor soul.

OK, sleep is good, sleep is good. 🙂

This is a big week. I am out in Salt Lake City, UT, for some training at Linux Networx before catching the red-eye down to Fort Lauderdale Tuesday night. The rest of the week will be finishing a cluster install at Motorola. Flying over the mountains was nice, there is a lot of snow.

It is 46F this morning in San Francisco where I am to perform an upgrade on a cluster at the Federal Reserve Bank. My hotel is about 3 blocks from the bank so I didn’t even request a car for this trip. I can see part of the bay from the hotel so that is pretty neat for a landlubber from Missouri.