Baby geekery (by alaric)

Ah, I couldn't resist. I bought some NetBSD "devotionalia".

Including:

and

Jazz in Cranham – Saturday 1st July 2006 (by alaric)

We're now selling tickets for Jazz on the Old School Field, from 7pm onwards on the 1st of July 2006, in our home village of Cranham, Gloucestershire.

Tickets are £12.50 (under 12s £2.50), and proceeds go to local worthy causes via the Cranham Feast Committee

Drop us a line if you'd like a ticket!

(And for the technically inclined, note that I've marked up the Feast web site with hCalendar, so one can use the Technorati Events Feed service to subscribe to a Cranham Feast Committee calendar, if your calendaring software supports it)

First day at nursery (by alaric)

Today, Jean had her first day at day nursery. We dropped her off at 8:30am, and picked her up at 5:30pm, and in between she was in the care of a group of nurses, meeting other babies and playing with new toys and generally being mentally stimulated in ways we can't provide ourselves, while we (in theory) were free to get on with work and relax a bit all day.

Well, Jean had a lovely time - the nursery seems good; such establishments are quite tightly regulated in the UK in terms of adherence to standards, but - more tellingly than the wordy OFSTED report - when we were dropping Jean off all the other children arriving seemed to be looking forward to their day.

While we came home, having woken up at 7am to get her ready after getting to sleep past 1am the night before, so fell asleep again until about 1pm, then headed off to collect a parcel from the post office (my order from the NetBSD Online Store arrived! I now have, amongst other things, an "Of course it runs NetBSD" bumper sticker which I'll attach to the van - once it's running NetBSD) and to do some emergency shopping since we're out of toilet paper.

On the way home, we realised we'd forgotten to actually get any toilet paper, so had to stop off at another shop anyway. We arrived home and I tried to do an hour's work on an empty stomach, with relatively little success, before lunch was ready, which we had to hurriedly eat before heading out to pick Jean up again.

So now we get home, and I take a twenty minutes to write this blog post up while I run down from driving mode to programming mode, and my work day is starting at 7pm. Grrr!

Garden (by alaric)

Sarah was away today, and I was working hard, so for a treat Jean spent some time in the garden with my aunt (her great-aunt) Barbara, watching Barbara gardening.

Alas I was working inside, so have no cute pictures to post, but apparently a good time was had by all, with Jean learning to play peek-a-boo with her blanket (pulling it up over her eyes and down again) 🙂

Silly Globix! (by alaric)

One of the companies I do work for hosts their equipment at Globix's Prospect House datacentre in New Oxford Street, London.

And it's become increasingly apparent over the past couple of years that Globix aren't doing a great job.

It all began to crumble on the day everything went down. Now, Globix pride themselves on the lovely backup power system. They have a giant generator, roomfulls of batteries, and all the usual stuff. They explained to us how they're better than many such places because they test their generator under a simulated load with a giant resistor on the roof.

However, still, the power to the entire floor went down for many hours. Apparently, the external power had gone down. The backup batteries had flawlessly switched in while the generator started, then the generator took over and started recharging the batteries. However, it turns out that the power switching system that connects generator, batteries, incoming power, and the load had a special cooling system, which was... connected to the external power feed. And so it wasn't running. The switch unit overheated, and shut itself down, killing the machine floor.

Whoever installed that cooling system was, therefore, somewhat incompetent.

But it gets worse. Power was restored to the floor. I went in to talk to the machines that didn't come back up cleanly, and couldn't help but notice that it was:

1. Hot
2. Dark

It became apparent that they were running on a reduced load, to keep their switch cool enough. To reduce the load, they'd killed the AIR CONDITIONING SYSTEM. And the lights.

In order to reduce their on-paper downtime, they'd brought the computers back up without aircon, for about a day.

In the year or so since that happened, we've had a lot of hardware failures - which we'd not been plagued with before. It's pretty likely that the roasting the machines had didn't do them much good.

Then about six months ago, we were going to install a new machine. We followed the usual process; on the day, we emailled in to say we were bringing in a machine. However, unlike the zillion past times we'd brought in machines, we got an email back saying we had to wait until there was power available.

Eh?

It turned out that they realised they were running short of power in the data centre. Now, they'd not told anyone this, perhaps because it's embarrassing. Instead, they waited until we tried to put a machine in, then revealed that they'd introduced new restrictions. Since we'd been planning this machine insertion for several weeks, had we known, we'd have gotten into the "power queue" sooner. Instead, we had to wait weeks until somebody else removed a machine, freeing up amps for ours.

We have space in our rack. We have spare IP addresses. We have spare sockets on the switch. Yet we are waiting on other customers to remove equipment before we can put our own in.

But it gets worse.

We receive an email telling us that our machines are in the rack the wrong way round. Apparently they want to line machines up so that alternate aisles are used to take air from, so the other aisles receive all the hot air for taking away. And they've just noticed that our machines don't fit their plan.

Now, the machines were initially installed long before my time at the company. Since I took over, I've just been putting machines in the same way as the original ones. And, in fact, putting them in the other way would be very hard, since Globix's power strips are down the mounting rails on the 'rear' of the rack. To put machines in facing the other way would involve rerouting the power supply to the rack.

Oh, they say, perhaps our engineers put the power strips down the wrong side of the rack when they set it up for you. Sorry. Please spend a day powering down all your machines, taking them out, moving the power strips, and putting them all back in. As soon as possible.

I understand your point of view. Globix had obviously placed the power strips in the wrong side of the cab leading your technicians to understandably put the kit the wrong way round. However in order to ensure that the data-centre is practicing best practice and ensure that all customers are having their cabs cooled on the correct side it is imperative that all customers are facing the right way round. We will offer you hands so all we really need is for someone to over see it but I'm afraid we have no other option other than to turn the kit around.

Grrrrr!!!!