good day
I managed to do three “got my shit to work” victory dances today. Yes, I actually do a physical dance, almost as goofy as most NFL players endzone dances. The first was a minor thing, I got the MyBook mounted to the Logs server via USB and started to move off 500GBs of access logs from last year. It happened easily, how I planned it and was doing it’s thing by nine this morning. Any plan that goes that well at the start of the day deserves a dance.
For a more deserving task I managed to get the BigIP setup on the network, access to the admin tool running, failover in good order and my first virtual pool load balancing six rails app servers and it all works damn well. I can hit the site virtual server ip with jmeter and when I flipped the power off on the master BigIP and the secondary one took over while traffic stalled for about two seconds (if that). When I power the master back up it takes back control without any manual intervention. That’s some good stuff. I’m to the point where I need get into more specifics, so it’s into the docs tonight.
Last up was getting my VPN connection to work in Ubuntu. We’ve had a terminal server connection available for a while and that shut off (un)intentionally recently, which for safety is probably a good idea by the guy that handles the office network. Generally I can do most my work via a SSH connection but there are a few instances where having a VPN connection is just handy. I think the last time I had VPN setup and working was Fedora 5, and if I recall correctly, getting the client setup was a painful and aggravating experience. This time around I’m on Ubuntu 7.04 and using Kvpnc, I would say it was easier, but not Windows VPN creation easy. The initial connection was Windows simple, it was mainly setting up the routes I need and getting DNS to redirect correctly that caused more of a hassle. Still it’s done now and working exactly like I want.
It was a good Friday with all that and a few other accomplishments during the day. I highly suspect it was the fact that I worked at the hosting facility today and avoided the office entirely that greatly contributed to getting things done.