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Deep breath…

istartedaproject365andamnowmorethan150daysintoit(whichshowshowlongitsbeensinceiveblogged!)
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ibecameweirdlyaccustomedtodrivingontheriverinmytruck
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I will try to blog more. I usually can’t be bothered and end up with short updates on twitter or Facebook. If you’re wanting to keep up, that’s probably easier. And my flickr photo stream.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Jeff and I headed way up the Gweek River camping. It was great fun, the weather on the Saturday was just awesome, well in to the 70F’s with clear blue skies. I have a few photos I’ll post, but the second camping spot we ended up at gave us an amazing sunset and moon rise. We were both a little tired when we got back on Sunday, but experiences like that all add up. It was quite weird to be way up the Gweek to the point of needing a canoe, and to then end up drifting back down to camp covered in camo duck hunting. It got me thinking whilst grilling salmon how much of a difference a year makes.

I never really think back on my times in Tunt and long to be back or wish for things to have turned out differently, but have thought a few times over the summer how different it must be for the teachers that find themselves stationed around Bethel in Napaskiak, Oscarville or Napakiak, or up around Kwethluk; or west coast sites like Mekoryuk, Toksook Bay or Tununak. The southern coastal sites like Tunt, Kong and Kwig are quite, quite different, and feel a lot more remote and desolate. I couldn’t imagine trees like I’ve seen around the Kwethluk or Gweek Rivers, and even small rolling hills or the abundance of bird life or fishing when I was living in Tunt. A year ago this past weekend I was spending the Labor Day weekend moving up to Bethel, and I can first remember feeling something not quite right after my second day on the job here whilst phoning back that the evening.

Contrast to today where I was calmly balancing so many district-wide servers, networking and licensing issues, whilst also taking my first college class through UAS where I’m enrolled on a bachelor’s course, and tonight have been running Facebook and Skype through my iPhone. I own a truck and a boat, and my snowmobile came back home last night and work started on replacing the rear suspension assembly for the coming winter. I would never have believed I could have found myself living in such a situation.

My first political science class went really well and seems like it will be pretty interesting. I spent the rest of the evening working on my readings for next week. The first of my oceanography classes is Monday afternoon and I have some readings to do over the weekend for that.

I also finally got an iPhone up and running out here today It’s taken a lot of patience, but other than the same restrictions on any cellphone out here in Bethel with regards to lack of data coverage, it works great. There are a few apps I’ve installed such as Facebook, Tweetdeck, Skype and Shazam which are cool, and I have a friend coming in to town next week that am sure will point me in the direction of even more. It really is an awesome little device, and even things like text messages bring on a whole new meaning when it’s formatted like iChat conversations. Very happy with it!

On Monday I implemented some routing and switching changes with the help of AT&T and our awesome network support guys from Integrated Logic. This finally let our iSCSI traffic for our Equallogic SAN units talk to each other between the district office and our off site location, Gladys Jung, across a 100Mb fiber line. To say I was a happy monkey upon seeing the LUN replications firing up is an understatement! Tomorrow I plan on bringing one of the LUN’s online, connecting to the DR VMware ESX host and seeing if I can actually bring the virtual machine online. At that stage, I will definately be beyond happy. We started planning our VMware infrastructure at the end of September, and has been a long project to get to the finish line, but totally worth it in terms of the set up we are now running, especially for the middle of no-where Alaska!

Today I bought the bullet and plumped for OS X and iLife updates, taking my MacBook from OS X 10.4 to 10.5 and iLife ‘06 to ‘09. Was literally 3 years ago last week I got the little guy, and I have to say, after a 2Gb RAM upgrade pretty much right away for under $80 and then a hard drive replacement, also around $80, after 18 months of abuse (literally – more than a dozen major airline flights, bush airlines, and 2 month road trip!), it’s been flawless and still powers everything I need without leaving me wanting. It’s probably the most impressive piece of computer equipment I’ve ever bought (I would say electronics in general, bit I do love my Canon EOS 50D!). Given I’ve seen hundreds of new machines passing through the office and workshops this past week for imaging and inventory, I know what the current crop of MacBooks run at, and for general day to use, this 3 year old baby is holding it’s own still!

This is why I run a 30″ Apple Cinema display. Days like this make me think I either need another one, or another job:

18 Apple Remote Desktop connections plus a Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection I had to quickly work on one chain of our site servers. As Ted pointed out – a computer can multi-task, but can Iain? Will be glad when it’s the weekend and the schools have all broken up so it will quiet down for the summer.

Today, Ted S, Brent and I packed up and headed for Kwethluk to deploy their new Open Directory server. First we brought up internal DNS and configured recursion back to the central DNS server in the district office, and then configured the new X-serve as an OD replica. It all went pretty smoothly, and then we spent the afternoon migrating quite a few members of staff from local user accounts to new mobile OD accounts which was slow, but effective.

Kwethluk is a smart village, and a good size school, and was nice to get out the office again and feeling like we were really accomplishing something. Getting a good number of users running off the new server was good too, and we’re planning on returning to Oscarville to bring some more of their users online as well.

Driving along the ice road to Kwethluk, a mile or so out of town we came across a rather interesting marker:

The rear of the sign read ‘April Fools’, so nice to know there’s a little good humor going on

Heading back to Bethel this afternoon, the ice road started getting busy with a number of cars on the road. Still felt a little weird being on the river doing 40-50mph in a truck!

When we got back in to Bethel I saw Dean and arranged to meet up tomorrow evening to check over new apartment and get the keys for moving in. Will try to head to city board and utilities to get water + sewer and electricity set up tomorrow (along with paying the quite outrageous deposits…) and plan for telephone to be switched over and see if I can grab DSL with them too. Am wanting to ditch cable completely as new apartment has Dish Network for TV, and GCI is already expensive for internet service really, although good, and will have extra charges if I’m not taking cable TV and stuff with them. Nuts to that!

Since I was quite happy with how the server room reconfigure turned out, thought I’d grab a quick photo earlier on today:

Not a bad setup out of the DO now – 14 Win 2k3 servers, 8 Apple X-Serves, a VMWare ESX 3.5 box, the obligatory Linux server, a couple of 7.2Tb DAS fiber channel arrays, and an off-site 2Tb NAS for storing backups. Throw in 27-ish remote sites with at least one X-Serve in all of them except Platinum and that’s a good number of servers to be looking after Still seemed like I had too many meetings today, buggered up my plans to dodge out of work early.

Last night I was out for a pizza + games night which was good fun, and met some cool new people. It was then Halloween carnival at ME school (K-2) today, but I was conveniently in work at the time of the carnival upgrading out e-mail server But, I did let one of the ladies borrow one of my Sunderland football shirts (haha, 2-1, sad day to be a Mag!) so hoping that didn’t end up little kiddy puke or spilled orange juice all over it!

As I was hanging out at the office, figured I’d snap my current desk setup – MacBook Pro with a 30″ Apple Cinema display and Jabra Bluetooth headset into the phone system which works right through the building and out-buildings (though not convinced that’s always a good thing!).

Very comfortable work environment, though still a little weird to be running a monitor bigger than any TV I’ve ever owned! It came in about 3 weeks ago, and when I disconnected it today and ran off the 15″ MacBook Pro display it felt so weird with so little screen to work with But, I did get a 6×3ft poster printed for sponsoring the K300 dog-sled race by purchasing a mile (I have mile 44!) which is going up in the BNC building as a good advertising idea. The HP DesignJet 800ps is pretty nice – up to 42″ wide paper on a roller.

I’m off to a wine of the month Halloween party tonight which should be interesting. I’m not entirely sure I want to step out the apartment in the costume I’ve been given… I’ll see if someone can get a photo of me. I’ve also made up some ‘finger food’, which again I’ll try to get a photo of as I’m quite proud of

Wind chill down to -20C doesn’t make for fun walks to work at 7.30a.m. And if you’re a duck, you’re clucked, cos the river is freezing. In the middle of October.

Yesterday evening, only 10 feet or so along the edges of the Kuskokwim here in Bethel was frozen, now there’s ice pretty much all the way across. Hopefully no-one tries walking it.

I officially hate W-4’s today. My day wasn’t as bad as the skipper of the boat in the distance though:

I like people that are putting candy on their desk in the run-up to Halloween

This afternoon at work I got my MacBook Pro Very nice machine, and was good to get a chance to really give OS X 10.5 a go. After imaging it from the netrestore server it was set to go and works a lot faster than my MacBook (though that is over 2 years old now), though it still surprised me a little as the MacBook Pro is only running 1Gb RAM compared to the 2Gb in my MacBook. Still, will look nice driving a 30″ Apple Cinema display…

Coming home this afternoon, figured I’d also get a photo of the outside of the apartment since the weather was quite okay and I already had the camera in my backpack. Riverside apartment, but only the back bedroom gets the view! I’m over on the right hand side:

The inside is a little bare as I only brought a few pictures to put on the wall and that was about it – I’ll bring some little bits + pieces this next week:

Nothing too flash, but by Bethel standards pretty good! Everything works, it’s clean, and pretty quiet, although having the utility room between me and the next apartment isn’t all that helpful really given the washer + dryer running and hot water heater kicking on + off But, on the positive side, my pizza has just arrived – after Ramen noodles for dinner all this week and sandwiches for lunch I fancied something a little more appetizing!

All in all, a pretty good day Work was interesting, but good fun. I got some office space sorted (I’ll be living in a cube!), and started looking over the current setup. The other guys there were real friendly + helpful and we started going over the servers they’re running, and tomorrow we’re all going to get together and start to work out what my responsibilities will be in terms of maintaining the core server functions leaving the other guys to concentrate on the actual server role. Shouldn’t be too complicated and makes things a little easier.

There’s 11 Windows Server 2003 systems, a mix of Dell PowerEdge 2550’s, 2650’s and 6850’s, as well as half a dozen Mac X-Serve servers with another 4 brand new ones sat in boxes ready to go. There’s also a ProLiant E5405 Windows Storage Server 2003 acting as a 2Tb NAS, with a VTrak E610f 6Tb NAS just hanging out that isn’t up and running yet. So, not hurting for storage space! The trick will be aggregating all the backups from the multiple servers onto the storage devices. First task will be moving one off site I guess. But, this was a photo I snapped at lunchtime – the district office is the green building on the left, with Bethel Regional High School on the right:

I also saw an ad in the offices about a house for rent so called up this evening – turns out the guy has a bunch of houses around town and came picked me up and toured me around them which was real nice of him. He had one apartment in a tri-plex right down by the river near Swanson’s, so fairly central, pretty much fully furnished and including all water, heat, sewer and electricity for $1150 a month which I took. Is a nice little place, nothing too fancy, but clean and tidy and somewhere to sleep! Is literally right at the end of the trail from Tunt up to Bethel just off the river so stupidly easy to get to if I ride the snowmobile up in the winter, and being right near Swanson’s, one of the major grocery stores, will help too. He’s going to sort out a rental agreement and bring it round tomorrow so I can move in next week (cos I’m going to have soooo much stuff to move in…). Real nice guy – Jimmy Guin (not sure on the spelling), and he’s a contractor around Bethel so would fix anything right up if something broke.

But, I swear I’ve never met so many people with English connections or stories! 8.05a.m a lady came with a MacBook that wouldn’t power up – had spent a year or so teaching in Newcastle. Ted, the technology director, had grown up around the north east and visited last summer. And then Jimmy’s daughter and her husband and currently living in Liverpool studying for her master’s degree! Have met more folk with connections to England than when I was living there