Al’s WebLog

Well, today was the end of it, almost. All the IT equipment went today, though oddly the chaps didn’t have room for the 42u Dell cabinet, so a quick call soon found it a new home up the hill at the CS department via the back of a Volvo estate! Rah! The last of the desks/chairs goes tomorrow then its lock up and drop the keys through the letter box and become unemployed. Until Monday at least. I had not realised how stressed I was getting about sorting everything out, but hopefully after Saturday’s riding I can zonk for a bit and get some proper sleep.

In other news my Mavericks have a new home thanks to EBay, which is cool. Still no sign of the new Bullit though. I must catch up with peeps soon, I have not seen many for to long!

Well, .us0 (Open World’s main hosting colo) is no more. Verizon have, at my request, turned off the power bars.

Tomorrow I get to gut .uk1, the main UK colocation which holds internal and extranet servers.

I prefer building systems…

So today is the first day of the end. I turned off the web servers yesterday (scripted) and today I have to start copying anything the Administrators wanted onto an external disk and then erasing all of Open World’s servers. By Friday everything should be blanked and removed by the chaps that have bought all the kit. It seems weird demolishing everything I and other have spent years building, but it needs to be done.

My employer has formally gone into administration today. I am being retained and paid. 8 people are being made redundant from the UK now [update its over 13 now], all non-UK staff are out (there lies its own odd legal issue). Not a nice day, I am the one working with the administrators (who themselves are nice chaps, but its still upsetting).

Quite why I am up at 6am to watch some cars drive round and round a track I don’t exactly know, but hey!

An odd day yesterday, it also started to darn early but since it was light outside the children got up and thus I was woken, bah. Had to go into work in the afternoon to ‘switch off’ works largest single client (Le Meridien), which went well. LM got bought by a larger group (Starwood) and they are being merged into the group web site. It was amusing to call them to say things were done on our end and their project coordinator refer to the “war room”… come on folks, you are migrating data between systems, this isn’t the crushing of a hostile invasion! It did make me chuckle.

Whilst I was back in Bath I stopped by my flat to kick my ADSL. Recently it keeps dropping out (and I still need to move a few things off Avoriaz and onto Morgins!) for some odd reason. I really need to either make the router reconnect (which ATM requires unplugging the USB modem and restarting the speedtouch daemon) but I cant make that happen automagically. I may, as suggested, buy myself a PCI ADSL modem and see if that helps. Failing that I do have an Alcatel/Thompson/Speedtouch router box thing, but its functionally lacking (no SNMP for banwidth monitoring and no firewall), though I would expect it to reconnect all by itself. We’ll see, ad if anyone know about reconnecting with the Speedtouch CI cards please let me know!

Right, breakfast and more coffee before that start!