A simple matter of…

I struggled most of Friday and for a few more hours tonight (and probably more time last week I can’t recall) on setting up [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_File_System GFS] for work. GFS is a cluster filesystem – where more than one box share the filesystem amongst themselves – useful for HA (High Availability) clustering. Now an additional complexity [...]

Today I finally remembered to take my camera along to one of our customers. Since I’m only there a few days a week I don’t have a proper desk, however the desk I do have is right against the window – I only have to look up (or down since it’s on the 7th floor) [...]

At least in my experience. In fact, I don’t like Cisco: * you can’t get new VPN clients without a license agreement (which then means you need a friendly network guy) * they just don’t seem to fix bugs * and then they [http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11260 threaten people when they point out unpatched security holes] I suppose [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using [http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/ puppet] to manage my machines at home – deploying config files, packages etc. Just search for “puppet” and you’ll find my earlier posts. This was in preparation for rolling it out at a customer which we’ve now done. The timescale is now: # add machine to puppet [...]

Today a friend^W aquaintance^W some bloke asked if I’d run Xen in production. My answer was “no, not really”. I do use it a fair bit, but I’m reluctant to but anything critical on it since I’ve had a problem a few times (as has this friend) where I received the dreaded “unable to communicate [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of interviewing recently and generally I’ve been very unimpressed with the candidates. I’ve seen CVs so poorly written (or retyped by agencies) that I’d personally dismiss them there and then (this is _after_ someone else has already weeded out the worst culprits). The biggest problem by far though is people [...]

Well after being without email for just about four full business days, it’s finally been resolved. Last night about 10pm I received a phone call asking if the new mailbox was okay. Well I had a look via IMAP once they told me the details (it hadn’t been enabled) and it was _very_ unhappy. The [...]

So, I woke up hoping that the corruption would have been fixed. But no Instead I got a reply saying that they hadn’t found any corruption (but they obviously havn’t tried IMAP….) They suggested two approaches: reboot. disable anti-virus. create new profile they’d recreate the account and merge the data back in For Pete’s sake. [...]

Well that’s had the desired effect, 30-40 mins after sending an email to Mr Greeson, he replies. An hour later and I receive a phone call which explains _why_ they want my password. Which is that their main support staff don’t have sufficient access rights. Alternatively it could be passed to someone who did have [...]

So, another day and no more progress. As I expected level three did nothing – no updates eight hours later (giving them until a generous 11am if I’ve done my timezone calculation correctly). So another call, when the support staff found the ticket, to confirm he had the right one he said “is this the [...]