Has it really been 3 days since my last post? I guess it has, a weekend and then a snowy trip to the FDA's Twinbrook MD facility will do that I guess. I did spend some time over the weekend on a semi-blog related topic, I set up a page on privacy related laws and regulations which may or may not stay right where it is now, but will be updated as I remember to.
I am very glad the snow did not significantly stick to the roads yesterday. As stated above, I found myself headed out to visit the FDA to update their cluster. When I left the office, it was just starting to snow significantly, and was not sticking. I was expecting to go out there, update a single box, and head home. Two, maybe 3 hours tops. I was wrong. They hadn't finished backups when I arrived, and they wanted me to go go ahead and reconfigure the cluster from the three cluster testing setup (One scyld which I was making a clustermatic, One oscar, One clustermatic) into one large cluster, all clustermatic. Problem: they have 65 nodes, half-rack units, with units mounted on each side of the rack. And oscar nodes boot from the hard disk while clustermatic nodes boot from the network. So I had to reach between the nodes to plug in a monitor and keyboard to change the boot order in the bios. Oh and these are labeled on the front but not on the side. And did I mention that they are not fully sequential and that order does matter? You begin to see why I was there till somewhat after 5pm now. By which point significant snow had accumulated, but fortunately not much on the roads, so I was able to get home without too much trouble. Quite an adventure.