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If you look after storage arrays you may have come to a situation like this.

You have a disk array, you want to turn it off (for whatever reason, age, replacement, it smells of old cheddar.. whatever).  Alas there is some customer still using a portion of it, you now need to wait for them to leave before you can decommision it.

Well I have had an idea to ‘help’ them in their exodus from the shelf.  Quite simply you enact storage Jenga.  How does this work?  easy, every day/couple of days/ weeks  (depending on your desired timescale/array size), you send a member of staff to site, once on site, that member of staff removes, physically a single disk from the array and leaves.  Now the customer has a chance of surviving this, depending on your configuration and hot spares, but each disk removed increases their odds of goodbye

I imagine this will work with maximum excitement with RAID 10 arrays with a couple of hot spares, possibly pulling a disk JUST before the time it takes to rebuild the hotspare

Wonder if management will let me try it some time? Hmmmmm

I am sure everyone has strange dreams, but this one seems to have stuck even after waking.. anyway..

1st off it started in a Cats & Dogs way with talking dogs seemingly trying to sort something (not all the details are still there), these later became actual people.  I think at the point of transition, a white poodle whith a pink mohecan was found dead, drowned.. after this people seem to be the main characters.

The drowning seemed to stick, and ended up with people seeming to flit between two realities, one where everything was normal, the other where there was no atmosphere, just water.  However the two bled together causing the sight of people ’swimming’ in air and drowning.  Later one it transpired that looking in though a window at a certain temperature would cause the reality flip!

Someone gets killed, someone else gets blamed and there is now a seeming battle between red and blue armies (denoted by their uniforms being red and blue, and their dugouts being painted in their colours!).  Possibly leading on for the killed person or something, kinda just flipped.

Lots of running and then someone saying “The Owl is coming!” and “The Owl has returned”.  cut to an over city view of red and blue dugouts converging on a single point where ‘The Owl’ is and is kicking bottom!  The Owl in this case would be of the AtariOwl variety (I know because I saw him).

I then woke up wondering what the hell, but also.. COOL!

Well it was entertaining at least

Spotted that mr slick had posted an update from his blackberry wordpress app, so not to be out done I am posting this from my iPhone wordpress app

Nothing much to put, well I suppose there is but nothing in a sensible mental format at the moment

This is going to be my 1st xmas away from the kids, up until a few days ago all was fine.  Not so much now, I see why this is said to be the hardest time of year for parents away from their kids.

Spent last weekend in Koln, Germany with friends.  Main reason for going was the european JagFest in Kaarst on the Sat, but we padded it out a few days either side turning it into a long weekend and more of a holiday.

The event was superbe, my comedy German phrases seemed to both work and be understood as well as giving everyone a giggle.  Bonus.  I didn’t win anything (again) but did get to catch up with friends and some retro authors I respect (snagging a copy of S.Quornhorsts game Encaved for the 2600).  Also almost begging Matthias Domin to sell his new game

No plans for the next few days, other than meeting up with an old WoW ex-guild mate who is German, so back to the bar for an early night.  Turns out my most used German phrase is not only funny but an excellent ice breaker, and we ended up joining up with a group of ladies also staying in the hotel, and much mirth and idiocy was had.

A trip around the chocolate mueseum, some mighty tastey epic Bockwurst, big catch up with friends, and back to the hotel, where the nights plans for Karaoke had been canceled due to sleepy ladies (someone kept them up until 5am the night before!).  Bit of out of the box thinking and we soon had the hotels iMac as a stand in for a Karaoke machine, with YouTube as a source for lyrics and music.  There was much rejocing, well not from Mike, but it was a good giggle and much fun was had by all the other singers until the interwebs broke

Not so late a night for me, which was good as the following day was the trip home and having to drive from Luton airport.

Can’t wait to go again. Ich Lieben Deutschland

Its been quite a while since I wrote on this blog, partly that was due to the FaceBook abomination (hate it but, well, its becoming an annoyingly common part of life).  Still its not as permanent as a blog, and well I like owning my own thoughts thank-you-very-much so I am not getting rid of this just yet

As well as those changes, life itself has been somewhat complicated, the most complex portion of this being my home life.  I am not going to go into any detail, not everything needs to be on the net for the world to read, but suffice to say I have seperated from my wife and am now lodging with an old friend who very generously has allowed me into is home (cheers mate, massively appreciated and huge help).  Things are different but thankfully amicable between myself and my ex, she is being very good about the whole thing and we are both getting on with our lives.  The kids are naturally the biggest concern and both myself and my ex are taking every measure to ensure they are not ill-affected by all this.  Little man was concerned that the internet would go away and the PS3 taken.. *wipes tear* that’s ma’ boy   he has his priorities sorted.. good lad.

Work is going immensely well, and I am finding my place in life again.  Hopefully I will get back into all the things that interest me over the next few months and find time to comment on them here.  There are so many groups of individuals who have helped me come though this difficult period with their support, kind words and thoughts.  Big thanks to my WoW Guild Fallen-Shadow and to my Jaguar related friends whom have been a big help (special shout to GazTee for getting me to Watchmen with Dave Gibbons and JFUK’09  cheers m8)

Now, ONWARDS!

Decided to take the plunge and get this setup on my own little slice of interwebs. Have been chatting to a colleague about the joys and the problems that lie ahead. So rather than wait until they bite me in the arse at work, I am making use of my colo (sorry for those who suffer hosting outages because of it.. but it really is for the best ).

Alas however it would seem that one major problem I need to address is my secondary DNS server which resides off my work network, a paid for VM. As it uses virtuozzo for its virtualisation I am told by the nice chaps at 1&1 that its not possible to have IPv6. The kernel that it presents to its VMs is a 2.6.9 and has no IPv6 module They of course did not use this as an opportunity to try and up-sell me a root server package.. oh no.. of course not…

Well until I get my finger out and move that VM somewhere else at least I can get the rest of it happily co-existing in IPv6 and IPv4 space.. I hope. Today was fun, got myself a /48 from SixXS.net and once I figured out that deleting the multicast link addresses from the interfaces was bad (NUBTARD!) I was soon happily pinging google from my server. Huzzah!

Hopefully tonight I can improve the config to ensure the servers keep their addresses on reboot and can start seeing about getting me some traffic over those there links. None of this crazy auto address stuff for me thanks, I want to be able to remember my v6 addresses

Managed to grab some tickets to see this show which I have heard several people raving about. Looks like I just managed to get the tickets in time, as they were pretty good seats, same level as the stage pretty much and to the side. Looking at the floor-plan of the Liverpool Echo I honestly thought we would be sat right at the side of it, thankfully we were not, and had a great view of the whole stage.

Never having been to this kind of show before, I was expecting something more along the lines of a play, rather than a band and singers. So was a little unsure at 1st. However that soon changed once it kicked in. It was very impressive and awe inspiring, didn’t find myself bored at all. Pretty much whistled by!

Really impressed with the stamina of the musicians, and the quality. Superbe! Told the story really well, and although the CGI was cheesy as hell, I can let it pass, not sure if its intentionally bad or not, but it worked. (PS3 or X-box 360 could have produced better in real time tbh).

Very enjoyable night out it was. Added to the awe of the show was also the pure hilarity of idiots and completely un-courteous fools in a full carpark. One women who we spotted on arrival taking 6+ attempts to reverse into a parking space (no car in either space to her sides), subsequently stalled the lift not once, not twice but 3 times! Later on leaving she was cursing every car that didn’t give HER sole right of way and nearly crashed into 2 or 3 others. I just sat and actually laughed (as Diane can attest) at the ballet/dodgems of people battling to get out NOWNOWNOWNOW!!!!!

But that aside (I expected parking drama tbh.. in their credit Liverpool Echo parking staff I think did a top notch job of keeping it going as smoothly as they could) top night out, go and see it if you can.

Ah they learn so quickly. Had a complaint from Monkey (aged 7) that his younger sister Froo (5.5) had called him (and I quote) “an ignorant pig”

Sometimes I wonder just how old she really is

Is good. Just because you are covered and wearing a helmet doesn’t mean the damn sun won’t sneak through the HUGE vents in your helmet and cook your skin… making you look somewhat a burk… much to the delight of those I work with.

Just seen the following Interesting Article about the BBC creating a BotNet and then using it to do tests. Although this is IMHO questionable anyway I do wonder if they will be reimbursing people who incur traffic and usage costs for their connection. One of the tests was to DDoS a test site they had setup, which is obviously going to use resources on the source machines.

What gives them the right to do this, they may have had good intentions but what would have happened if that botnet was compromised itself?

They claim to be contacting the affected machines owners to let them know, quite how they are going to do this I am not sure, perhaps the hack was done after credentials were entered into a site and confirmed? Still a very worrying thing to be done.

I have come down to Reading to see Nightwish thanks to a very generous offer from friends (cheers guys) who are also putting me up whilst I am here.

Last night I drove down, thinking ahead I thought I would set off quite late so as to miss all the rushhour nonsence. It seemed to work, nice empty ish flowing motorways.. great, I even stayed on the M6 instead of using the Toll (credit crunch and all ).

Big gripe? (there has to be a gripe I am updating my blog! ). road works.. millions of em! (well about 3 per motorway on average).

I can understand the speed restriction stuff, its a fair point, it does bug me a little when there is no one at the site in the evening, perhaps a slight loosening of the restriction would help us night time drivers, but I can live with it 50’s not too bad for a few miles.

What does annoy me is when they take the piss because they can. The M42 has long been a personal peeve of mine, tonight was no exception. Due to its gantry based speed cams (they are on, I saw them get someone) you have to abide by the dynamic speed signs. Which should be fine. But at around 23:00 on an empty motorway 40MPH is somewhat annoying… this is further compounded by the limit being removed and then a new set of road works about 500yrds further down the road. This time, completely empty motorway, no workmen in sight (found them putting cones out a mile or so later), restriction? 20MPH!!!!!

WTF!

really annoyed me, there was much slamming on from people and a seemingly confused pause as we crawled past the camera on this massive empty stretch of tarmac. Only to speed back up to something sensible later.

Yeah protect workforce, but don’t take the piss.