Sunday blues

I'm at work today. There was a scheduled power outage in the building that holds our server room. It was set for 7am to 11am; I got in at 6am 'cos I'm a keener and wanted to make sure I had lots of time to swap to the backup website.

Power came back on at 10:30 or so. 10:45 I wandered over to the building to see if that was it; didn't want to rush anyone, but thought it'd be worth asking. There was no one there. Sweet, thinks I, let's head down and turn on some machines. (Most are Sun machines and therefore work just fine remotely; some are older IBM machines, where I haven't figured out how to do IPMI over the network, and some are Dell machines where, whee! who knows how it'll work today?)

Turns out A/C's still off. Call the university folks; turns out someone's still working on it. But they're off for lunch, so no idea just yet how long that'll be. I'll be calling back in an hour to see if we have any idea. If they're working on it 'cos something went wrong, well, that's life. If they're working on it 'cos they had scheduled something, then I'm irritated I wasn't told beforehand. Oh well, we'll see what happens. (Update: Our rooftop A/C failed to come on after the power came back on. A full investigation, with twelve helicopters full of determined journalist-engineers, will be launched tomorrow. THIS GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, PEOPLE.)

In other news, it wasn't a complete waste of time today:

• I found the Python LDAP module and used it to add a bunch of AutoFS entries to the tree. The simplebrowser.py script included in the examples is quite nice. (Though it does make me wonder why I haven't started using one of the billion-and-three LDAP browser tools instead of a) complaining about phpLDAPadmin or b) trying to remember the syntax for ldapsearch).

• I got to wear my safety shoes.

• Downloading Rocks to try installing it on three old servers haning around.

• Discovered that a workstation's hard drive is failing; fortunately it's not needed right away.

• And, erm, that's it.

Loadsoflinks:

• OpenParliament.ca has opened, and it's 'way cool.

• Via my boss comes this detailed legal analysis of the recent US court ruling against gene patents; interesting stuff

• Shades of O_PONIES (via Bob Plankers)

• Alberta privacy commisioner OKs U of A move to Gmail; must read up on this. I heard about this at LISA '09 from a U of A sysadmin

• A down-to-earth, remarkably non-panicky talk (MP3, overview) on Advanced Persistent Threats. (The Loyal Opposition: here, here and especially here)

• How a Sandwich Makes You Its Bitch in 11 Easy Steps

• Gource and Logstalgia

And just one more thing: my younger son turns two on Tuesday. We had an early party: