Hopping

Been busy lately:

• 3 new workstations with OpenSuSE. Can't figure out the autoinstall, so it's checklist time, baby.

• Software upgrade for a fairly important server + 3 slave nodes. Natch, after rebooting one of the ILOMs for the servers just...went away. Can't ping it from the network. Works fine with an interactive ilom shell from Linux. Sometimes I really hate Dell software.

• Got a call from the reseller for a major hardware vendor who just got taken over by a major database vendor; said db vendor has just turned off educational discounts we'd spent THREE MONTHS negotiating/waiting to have approved. I am unimpressed. Strongly tempted to call up random hardware vendors and throw money at them 'til they give us stuff.

• Finally got leak detection working in the server room. Stupidly long time, it took.

• Working on a "Lessons Learned" presentation for LISA that'll include mention of the leak detection (among other things). Not sure how it'll be received, but I figure it's their job to tell me it sucks, not mine.

• New term coming, so about six new people coming. But at least I know about them in advance.

• And this...and this...just amuse me. (Warning: Flash eats babies and sells them to Chinese hackers.)

• Taxes.

But hey! Turns out we live in a constitutional democracy after all. There was some debate about this at 24 Sussex Drive, I understand. Score one for the good guys.