sabbatical.ipng.nl/content/blog/wk8day2.md

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Week 8, Tuesday: Quinn made us dinner	2024-09-17T21:55:00+02:00

{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/9T9_DnB.png" alt="Credit: 9T9_DnB, YouTube" >}}

Marina had a terrible night, it seems. She kept on waking up, then it was too warm, so she turned on the AC, which made a lot of noise. All in all, I did not manage to notice much of anything, as I slept through the whole night with only one quick bathroom break in the middle somewhere.

At 09:30 we bounce from the hotelroom. I still think it's cool that you can get hotel rooms for budget prices, as I don't need all that fancy stuff that I don't use anyway. I'd personally rather pay € 63,- for the room and know that it'll be simple, than that I pay € 350,- and feel I'm being ripped off all the way. This is my kind of place!

The day was actually quite light on excitement. We drove from Nancy through the Elsace into Basel, and had a chuckle as a car in front of us was trying to weave their way into the 'shorter' of the two lanes at the border, while we decided to stay in our 'longer' lane and make a little chicane through the border crossing; but they got flagged and had to have a chat with the popo, while there was nobody on the 'longer' lane. So once again: taking shortcuts is not always smart!

In Basel we switched drivers just one more time, and I chauffeured us the last leg home, where we arrived at around 13:00 or so. Our driveway was blocked by some semi truck with a trailer and a lot of mud. It turns out, they're rebuilding/refurbishing the playground in the neighborhood behind ours, and it seemed easier (for them anyway) to use our street to gain access to it. But, Marina walked into the ground-zero and quickly emerged with a coffee drinking brother, who moved the truck so I could pull into our driveway. No harm, no foul!

We unpacked our stuff, had some lunch, and then I went downstairs. First of all, to finish the journal entry for the day-before-yesterday (Yes, all this traveling is taking its toll on my timing!) but also to do a little bit of nerd-prep:

• I have these two nice Checkpoint 48x25G + 8x100G switches, but they refuse to load the linux switchdev driver, so I spent a few hours messing around with mfa2 and mstflint and mlxfwmanager and such. My buddy Vlad gave the correct tip: just download the flash from a working switch, and then burn it with mstflint while allowing the tool to change the PSID (== device SKU). Result: two new Debian running 48x25+8x100 in my stash. Yaay!
• Tomorrow I get to deploy IP-Max at the Stollen datacenter in Lucerne, and I still have a bunch of ASR9001s (including one that I took out for a spin a few weeks ago). They need to be staged, cables and things arranged, so that tomorrow morning I can shuttle it all to Lucerne for a smooth deploy.

I spend the rest of the afternoon doing these things, and as well preparing the IPng equipment for the site: One VPP router (Dell R630, 2x25G, 4x10G, 2x1G); One Hypervisor (Dell R730, 2x10G, 2x1G, 256GB memory and 3x3.84TB enterprise SAS); One Centec switch (8x1G RJ45, 8x1G SFP, 20x10G SFP+, 8x25G QSFP); and One APU6 out-of-band with WiFi. That's my "standard issue" point of presence and it's going to be super fun to bring this all up. I boot the machines and give them their IPMI and management IPs in IPng Site Local, connect them together, and tidy up the configs. These should be 'shoot and forget' tomorrow.

By the time I'm done with these configs, so is Quinn. Such a sweetheart, he has promised to make us dinner tonight, to welcome us home! His dishes are a pasta with caramelized onions; and a lukewarm potato salad with vinaigrette. He aces it, and it is absolutely scrumptious. I take seconds and embellish a little bit with thirds: it's that yummy, that I forgot to take pics!!

After dinner, we hang out on the couch and watch one Black Mirror, and at 22:00 or so, I turn in for the night as I need to trek to Luzern tomorrow with a stack of computer and network gear with Fred. I can't wait!

Pictures of the Day

{{< gallery-category >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-17/IMG_1357.JPG" caption="The totallu cute micro Pavé d'Affinois that Marina used for breakfast" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-17/IMG_1359.JPG" caption="The very last picture of the car with IPng sticker - it's coming off before we hit the Swiss border!" >}} {{< /gallery-category >}}

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