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A rather frantic couple of weeks is finally over…

Firstly, a week in London on and Exchange course. Course was a tad slow (as were the single core cpu 2GB machines that we were running 3 windows2003 server VMs on). Still, good to meet up with Phil again (Emma, are you sure you know what you are letting yourself in for bringing another Gladwin into the world??). Following a week on the course, we spent bank holiday Monday shifting 3 racks of kit out of our machine room in preperation for the big refurb that is happening soon (if we ever find a contractor…).

Tueday was a long day and kinda merged into Wednesday - started work at 8am and then left the office at 4:45am having put our new webserver (sexy T2000s) into service (well, Ben did - I largely offered words of encouragement, a second set of eyes to sanity check firewall rules and a few more braincells to throw at debugging Foos scripts :)).

Got home at 5:15am, woken up by sprog2 at 6:15 :-/ Back in the office by 10:30 (well, in the Gulb for caffeine anyway). Expected a queue of people with whinges about b0rken bits of the website (we had moved from 1 machine to a clustered NFS with a frontend server, php4.old to php5.new, Solaris9 to Solaris10 and MySQL4.ancient to MySQL5.shiny) only to find the most serious problem being some missing cronjobs (serves Martin right for running them out of this homedir!). Amazing painless move all things considered.

Thursday was a day out to Sunny Slough (wooo) to visit HDS. Lots of very clever uber shiny things to look at as well as a great lunch. Remains to be seen if we can actually afford any of the shiny toys but it was interesting at least.

Then onto Friday - Richmonds wedding! Finally after many years of fannying around Rich and Liz got hitched. Woooo \o/. Of course, much interest in what entertainment would be laid on (not a lot of chance of a disco at this wedding :)). Turns out that the Mardi Gras Jazz band played while we ate - with richmond on drums for a fair bit of the set despite his “only one track” promise to his new wife… Later in the evening he Monks (minus harry) played a stonking set again with Rich playing. The first wedding (and probably the last) that I’ve been to where the groom was the entertainment for the night :-). A thoroughly excellent day and chance to catch up with friends who I’m to lazy to keep in touch with properly.

Saturday was spend at work (slightly slow start as I think some of the beer at the wedding must have been off) moving kit out of the machine room into our new “temporary” machine room before dashing off to Eastwell Manor for Lornas wedding - uber posh (and the second outing for my suit in as many days - a new record!)

Sunday was then spent wiring it all up again and bringing service back. Everything went really well with only a few minor hicups until on monday afternoon the UPS engineer while working live on the power feeds with his uber rubber gloves had a bit of an “oh shit” moment and dropped the power to the entire room Still, it all came back ok in the end.

All in all, a rather manic couple of weeks that I’m quite glad are over. Still, it all seems to have worked out in the end…so far

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.