![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
karmic debt
Apr. 6th, 2004 12:26 pmSo, obviously after having a most excellent weekend, the world demands that I have a hellish time in LA.
First up, visiting the old colocation facility where our gear is installed. I get there and arrange for an access card. "Sorry, who are you?" Turns out that the guy we'd been talking to was on leave, and hadn't passed anything on. The people in Melbourne who could authorise it were well and truly asleep, so in the end I showed the colo manager the emails back and forth about it. That, combined with the Aussie accent, was enough. After hearing about pain with the building security with out-of-hours access, made sure that was sorted as well.
Then across to the new colo facility, about 3 blocks away. In theory they'd have the stuff mostly built already, so that I could mule a bunch of gear across. I got there to discover... well, nada. Fuck all. They'd hit a question, and hadn't done a damn thing. Yay! Chased up all the questions they had so that I could get Shaun back in Melbourne to answer them when he woke up.
Then back to the original colo. There was a bunch of stuff to be done - repairing a broken web machine, and juggling some phone cabling so that we could handle the inbound traffic surge over summer. The old colo is... not entirely good. The aircon there is still on the blink, so there's a bunch of huge fans in place - these have been there for months. The company that runs that facility just got bought in bankruptcy, so we're not expecting much from them at all.
The cable juggling went mostly smoothly, but the other thing... argh. Because the machines are going to be replaced shortly, we decided to just yank parts from one of the other still-working machines to rebuild it. These things are a pain in the arse to work on - getting the disks out is something like 22 little screws, but before then you have to get them out of the rack-mount. Getting them in and out by yourself is rather tricky - they're heavy, and bolted on at the front. Once you undo the bolts, they just fall, so you have to grab it with one hand while trying to undo them with the other hand. And not drop them.
Much swearing and cursing, I had both of them out, and switched stuff around. Put it all back together, installed them back into the rack (even harder than getting them out). They seemed to be booting ok, and it was 8pm, so I called it a night. The guys back in Melbourne could finish the work over the net.
Went back to the hotel, and found some decent food and beer (the hotel has a microbrewery). Collapsed on the bed at about 10pm and fell completely asleep - body clock was still on New York time, and I'd slept very poorly the night before.
At about midnight my phone woke me - neither of the machines would boot up cleanly, so I had to go back down to the colo to figure out why. Much much much swearing and cursing later, we discovered that the KVM switch (which allows us to share the screen/keyboard/mouse from a bunch of machines to a single screen/keyboard/mouse) was just screwing things up. We still don't know why, or why it used to work fine but is now broken. Finally staggered back after 1.30am and fell asleep. Argh.
Why must the world mock me in this way?
First up, visiting the old colocation facility where our gear is installed. I get there and arrange for an access card. "Sorry, who are you?" Turns out that the guy we'd been talking to was on leave, and hadn't passed anything on. The people in Melbourne who could authorise it were well and truly asleep, so in the end I showed the colo manager the emails back and forth about it. That, combined with the Aussie accent, was enough. After hearing about pain with the building security with out-of-hours access, made sure that was sorted as well.
Then across to the new colo facility, about 3 blocks away. In theory they'd have the stuff mostly built already, so that I could mule a bunch of gear across. I got there to discover... well, nada. Fuck all. They'd hit a question, and hadn't done a damn thing. Yay! Chased up all the questions they had so that I could get Shaun back in Melbourne to answer them when he woke up.
Then back to the original colo. There was a bunch of stuff to be done - repairing a broken web machine, and juggling some phone cabling so that we could handle the inbound traffic surge over summer. The old colo is... not entirely good. The aircon there is still on the blink, so there's a bunch of huge fans in place - these have been there for months. The company that runs that facility just got bought in bankruptcy, so we're not expecting much from them at all.
The cable juggling went mostly smoothly, but the other thing... argh. Because the machines are going to be replaced shortly, we decided to just yank parts from one of the other still-working machines to rebuild it. These things are a pain in the arse to work on - getting the disks out is something like 22 little screws, but before then you have to get them out of the rack-mount. Getting them in and out by yourself is rather tricky - they're heavy, and bolted on at the front. Once you undo the bolts, they just fall, so you have to grab it with one hand while trying to undo them with the other hand. And not drop them.
Much swearing and cursing, I had both of them out, and switched stuff around. Put it all back together, installed them back into the rack (even harder than getting them out). They seemed to be booting ok, and it was 8pm, so I called it a night. The guys back in Melbourne could finish the work over the net.
Went back to the hotel, and found some decent food and beer (the hotel has a microbrewery). Collapsed on the bed at about 10pm and fell completely asleep - body clock was still on New York time, and I'd slept very poorly the night before.
At about midnight my phone woke me - neither of the machines would boot up cleanly, so I had to go back down to the colo to figure out why. Much much much swearing and cursing later, we discovered that the KVM switch (which allows us to share the screen/keyboard/mouse from a bunch of machines to a single screen/keyboard/mouse) was just screwing things up. We still don't know why, or why it used to work fine but is now broken. Finally staggered back after 1.30am and fell asleep. Argh.
Why must the world mock me in this way?
