Sun - Week Fifteen

The small things

Monday morning started with the subtitle. I saw a pigeon fall from the sky, frantically flapping it’s wings causing some leaves to scatter, it made me smile. This week I shall try to look for the small things that make me smile, and report them here with the rest of my news.

The morning brought a job which I have already had too much experience with, unpacking boxes which hold products…Leekes brought me much experience in how to open a card board box, and take out products, it’s a boring task, but this morning the mundanity was lifted with the fact these were new products, and there I have to stop and tell you no more :P My lunch break ended with me setting up another monitor….A flat screen for extra windows and the like, however, I have retained my ten workspaces for various things…8 of which are still as full as ever… The afternoon was spent working on some console problems with a machine in France, hunting around GMP02 for a T3 storage array and a couple of other little tasks, as well as the weekly meeting about what happened what is happening and what is going to happen…

Tuesday started with setting up a 280r with a D2 array, these were customer systems which were to be worked on. The small thing for today, is that with swivly chairs (the ones with wheels) you can scoot around the lab quite happily with very little effort, it makes every job fun :D Late morning and the afternoon was spent documenting the partitioning and mirroring of disks at jumpstart level. I’m also testing out the steps using X86, if I remember, I shall post back to say whether it worked or not….

Wednesday saw me running around and cleaning up my queue of tickets. I cleared about four away which was good, still got a number left. I spent the afternoon troubleshooting why a customer system (a V240r) wouldn’t net boot, as well as looking at some documentation, both stuff I needed to update, and other stuff I needed to understand and implement. The small thing for Wednesday almost didn’t happen, but then, waiting for the bus, the wind picked up and swirled some leaves about in a kind of whirl wind fashion…

Thursday was the start of a two day TOI (Transfer Of Information) on X64 machines. We have so far looked at what CPU’s our servers have. Then went into details about the interconnections of CPU’s/memory/north bridges. We learned how HyperTransport worked in AMD systems, and how Intel’s FSB was being replaced with QuickPath. We moved onto looking how the BIOS is loaded in such a legacy fashion, and builds up to booting the whole machine…Then the last thing before lunch was looking at how Service Processors work, how they connect to the outside world, as well as to the host itself. After lunch we looked mainly at RAID and how the chips we use for hardware RAID don’t change much from revision to revision, so we can keep similar drivers and maintain them over several platforms easily. After the course I looked at my 880 and applied some patches, I also booked out a T5440 which I am going to use to test some features of ZFS. Hehe, my small thing for today was the fact that I half followed, half made up a recipe for lasagne, and it turned out pretty good! :D

Friday went slowly, with us looking at the theory behind IPMI tool and then some IPMI in action.

Friday night is what I want to blog about now…Bill Bailey! Me and Faye went to London to see Bill in his guide to the orchestra! It was brilliant, after leaving work early and driving through London to the Royal Albert Hall, we sat there waiting for Bill to come on stage. He finally entered and began his guide, from the 1970’s villain themes played by the trombone, to the interesting fact that all oboe players love the BeeGees…. My little thing of the day, came from the ride home, when I saw a sign for yawbus, then realised that it was actually a sign saying ‘Subway’…Made me smile…