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Saturday, October 18th, 2008

An interesting week

This past week I spent mostly doing stuff at my day job while trying not to imagine that the “light at the
end of the tunnel” is actually an oncoming train.

My bright idea was to try to improve the infrastructure at work so that it will be very robust while I’m
away.  I say bright idea because it means making some big changes.  Last weekend we shut the system
down to install a much larger UPS with several hours of potential uptime at current usage.  On Tuesday
we installed a 3 TeraByte NetApp disk array, preparatory to moving all our direct attached data on to it.

Unfortunately the power distribution in the rack couldn’t handle the increased load and blew a breaker.
Anybody who has worked in data centres knows that awful feeling that goes with sudden silence!

Luckily everything came back up without a problem once we added another circuit to the rack.

Then we spent three very long days configuring the storage device and copying all the data and testing
applications and data access.  We completed the job last night relatively early so I have an unexpectedly
“free weekend”

Much thanks for the great work by Paul and Jens from NetApp whose vast experience working on
systems many times our size kept everything moving along.  They also made sure to keep me in on the
process so that I understand what was being done and why.  Not that I will remember much of it 6 months
from now.

Needless to say with all that going on the preparations for my passage and maintenance of the DTI were
on hold.

With three weeks to go before actually getting on a plane  it’s make a list and check it twice time.

If that light I see is actually a train I hope it’s the one from Hogwarts at least

Thanks for reading
KJ

P.S. The photo of the Picton Castle in the Header was taken by my friend John Gareri a couple of weeks
ago. He has been onboard since May.

Check out his blog at http://atlanticrounds.blogspot.com/