www.lewiz.org

Seems to have come awfully quickly this year.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to 2008 either, especially as 2007 only seems to have just gotten going.  The joys of being ‘old’.

I managed to book one of my days of holiday off on the 24th, which will give me a nice long Giftmas break.  My last day is Friday 21st and I’m back at work on Thursday 27th.  Just today I was asked to do two late (1.30PM until 9PM) shifts, 27th and 28th of December.  This is good as it means I get a little more time to drive down south after Christmas (it also comes with a little more cash in my pocket).

I’ve barely begun to buy the necessary items for friends… I have a few covered, but I’m stumped for ideas.  When I think about what I really want, I’m pretty low on ideas… I don’t really have any needs and as I’ve been earning more cash for the last few months I’ve been able to afford a few bits and pieces for myself (e.g. a fancy push-bike).

I’ve scraped some ideas together and updated my Wish List... the item I could really do with is a decent pair of stands for my Quad 11Ls… I’m going to start some reading now in the hopes of updating it with a specific stand that suits my needs.

What surprises me the most is that what I really want isn’t something that I or anybody else can buy… I need money to do it, but that’s more of a means to an end.

Ah, well, maybe when I win the lottery…

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!

For the past few weeks I’ve been going to Mandarin lessons at Reading University on a Thursday night, right after work.

The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc.  These things I’ve muddled my way through during my time in China.  Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren’t any major revelations.

So far we’ve covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I’m pretty good at…), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation.  Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers… as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.

Last week’s lessons was really good.  I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn… really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.

As I’m at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I’ve been taught.

Sometime last week my new boss called me and a colleague into the ‘goldfish bowl’... first thoughts are always negative ones and as I’m still learning the ropes, I assumed that I’d ballsed up somewhere along the line.

As it turned out, I hadn’t… Steve wanted to offer us the chance to participate in Sun’s annual conference for engineers (CEC), this year being held in Las Vegas in mid-October.  The thing has been running a fair while now and by all accounts is a chance to meet other ‘Sunnies’ from around the world, do a bit of tech swotting-up, and get incredibly drunk in the evenings… certain tales I’ve heard haven’t limited the drinking to just the evenings, either.

Unsurprisingly, I jumped at the opportunity and earlier on today, I booked a flight to Las Vegas.  I’ll be flying from Gatwick on October 6th, and flying back on the 11th.  By the sounds of it, I’ve got a window seat (my choice—less being disturbed by other randoms) flying direct, non-stop to Vegas.  As the conference is during the week, hotels are supposed to be dirt cheap—this basically means that Sun is putting is up in a decent posh hotel.

As I find out more about what’s going on, which ‘break out sessions’ I’ll be attending, and what I’ll be doing on my free Sunday before the event, I’ll get some updates posted.

Until then, I’ll be answering the ‘phones.

http://blogs.sun.com/lewiz/ now exists!

I’ll probably be sticking the techy stuff on there from now on, probably.

Talk about a mouthful…

This Monday I started a new job as a support engineer in the Solutions Centre. There are product/technology ‘verticals’ in the solutions centre, and I’ve joined the BT group… this isn’t actually a technology vertical, it seems to be a remnant of an older model where verticals were built around customers and industries instead of products.

Starting a job as a permanent Sun employee means a number of things:

1. I get an awesome-looking yellow Sun badge (I’ve still not actually got this… hopefully I should be able to get it sorted on Wednesday)


2. I get to have a blogs.sun.com blog!


3. I get to actually speak with customers and help them resolve their problems (as opposed to engineers in my current temporary position)


4. I get to forget everything I’ve learned as a lab guy


5. I get more money

This is actually not a very representative list of what new stuff happens. There’s a lot more to it than this, but it’s hard to properly talk/explain about things that I’ve not yet done… I’ll attempt to motivate myself to write a follow-up entry once I’ve felt my way around some now.

There are also a couple of downsides to taking this new job:

1. No more messing around


2. No more access to the good stuff in the lab (I guess I’ll have to tag along to the organised tours)


3. No more root access to a bunch of production servers

And of course one really big thing that will change is my boss—Paul.
Over the past year (to the day, I think) I’ve learned absolutely loads of stuff about Sun, working in a company, being a member of a global team, dealing with engineers, and of course about how the global labs work (which I get to forget).

Now seems an entirely appropriate time to say thank you to everybody that I’ve been working with… Paul and David, the other lab guys (so that’s Chris, Anton, James, Liam and (sort-of) Wilson), wdvs, Keith, JonCA, PTS people (Chris Gerhard, Tim Uglow, Matt Finch, John Alderson, Mick Mullins and plenty more) and the other lab guys around the world.

So… thanks a lot, it was fun :)

Today I decided to set up vpnc on my Linksys WRT54G router. I want to be able to connect to the VPN at work, and the Linksys is an ideal place to do it.

The setup I’m aiming for (where a single port gets VLANd off and becomes the only available to connect to the inside of the VPN at work) is trivial to do and I’m 98% sure one of the guys at work has already done it (although probably with some slightly different software, I’m not sure).

I run OpenWRT WHITE RUSSIAN 0.9 on my Linksys, which was the latest at the time I installed it. I believe there is a new development release, but this still seems to be quite current.

First step was getting vpnc installed with the necessary bits and pieces. OpenWRT comes equipped with what can only be described as a very streamlined version of apt: ipkg. I searched for vpnc over at www.ipkg.be, found a hit and as such added the necessary line to my /etc/ipkg.conf file. A quick update and I could install vpnc, kmod-tun and libgcrypt as required.

With my VPN config file in place, I quickly received an error:

/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script: 222: Syntax error: Bad for loop variable

What’s on line 222?

for ((i = 0 ; i < CISCO_SPLIT_INC ; i++ )) ; do

I did some searching and it seems this is perfectly valid Bourne syntax, so what gives? Well, OpenWRT uses ash as the default shell, not bash or sh. I decided to replace it with something equivalent:

i = 0;
while [ "$i" -lt CISCO_SPLIT_INC ]; do
// there was some stuff here, I added the next line just before the "done"
i = `expr $i + 1`

I had to make this fix a little further down too, but this did the trick and vpnc now correctly adds all of the default routes and properly updates the /etc/resolv.conf.

Saturday was largely spent catching up on sleep (i.e. in bed).  But I had a really super idea towards the end of the day (i.e. too late to actually carry out said good idea)... I could walk to work.

Right now I live in a town/village called Yately, which is the other side of the A30.  Each day my drive takes me along Cricket Hill Lane and Minley Road to work—in total the drive is almost four miles.

I had a go at sketching a route with Google Earth, Google Maps, etc. before finally asking my Dad to have a look for me (as the shops were shut and I couldn’t pick up a decent OS map).

He plotted roughly the same as I’d come up with in Google Earth, but of course the OS maps have much more information—public footpaths, bridleways and other useful details.

Here’s a very quick estimate of the route using Google Maps… it’s largely inaccurate, but it gives a good idea of the route.  Up top is where I live and Guillemont Park is down at the bottom right.

With the map sorted I drove to work at 4PM yesterday and proceeded to walk home.  There’s a really handy pass-operated gate to get out of the carpark and into the area surrounding Hawley Lake.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I arrived home.  I must have covered five or six miles on Sunday, thanks to my utter inability to follow a map.  This isn’t entirely true, as in the woods around Guillemont Park it is very easy to get lost—if you’re on a bike it’s no big deal as the area isn’t that large, you just backtrack and set yourself right.

But on foot you can spend quite a while… but the bigger problem is that you come out at the wrong area, and your whole route is now buggered up.  On Sunday I ended up at the Blackwater A30 roundabout and had to walk back up the A30 to make the crossing over the road into the carpark.  Here I got lost again and ended up taking a slightly different (longer) route home.

With all of this in mind, I set off to work this morning at 6:50AM, thinking it would take me at least an hour and a half to two hours.

In reverse (and with a little knowledge of) the route is much more straightforward.  As I do the suburbia sections first, I’m guaranteed to hit the entrance to the wooded area at the right spot, which makes getting through it much more straightforward.

All in all it took me one hour and ten minutes to get to work—an improvement of well over an hour.

Some days things just don’t go right… but for those not involved these days are clearly the best.

Vlad showed me the first one (which is easily the best), but the second two are also pretty good :)

In an unusual spate of activity and compassion I’ve spent the last two days configuring IPMI on all of the compatible hosts in our main lab.  In every Sun support lab we have a lot of hosts, any of which an engineer may book for his escalation.

The job of the labstaff is to sort out any physical hardware requirements they have… e.g. install a fibre channel host bus adapter, hook up some FC array goodness, etc.   In addition to this we support them on these machines… this means that if it breaks, we fix it.

A side effect of this is that if somebody comes along and types “init 5” (aka shutdown and power off), it is us that get called to the rescue.

IPMI is awesome… the first machines Sun shipped with IPMI support (that I know of) were the Cobalt lx50s.  Unfortunately the lx50, v60x and v65x machines require a reboot with the most bizarrely non-standards compliant CD going to get the IPMI going.  This means that I wasn’t able to sit at my desk and do it all remotely… I had to actually go down to the lab (!) and put CDs into the drives!

But the work paid off, once I was done we could use the excellent “rpower” utility written by Keith Harvey to query and control the power status of the hosts.

So impressed I decided to take it further and configure IPMI and rpower for all of the other compatible hosts in our lab… this includes the v20z, v40z, X2100, X2200, X4100, X4200, X4500, X4600 machines.

As Keith, kami of the rpowerness, will have us know: it’s all about consistency.  And now that rpower works for almost every host in the lab, we are getting close to living the dream.