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Tidbits from December

December has flown by, and I’ve already written about much of it! But I do have a little catching up to do.

On December 10th I met up with Benjamin Kerensa who gave me a tour of the Mozilla office here in San Francisco. I’ve walked by it plenty of times, but this was the first time I’d actually been inside, and to their stunning roof deck that has a great view of the Bay Bridge.

I’ve been having some trouble with Comcast outages lately, so a couple weekends ago MJ completed our multi-homing setup so we now have automatic failover, and wifi connects over the secondary connection by default. These improvements also inspired research into finally building our home storage servers – one for serving media (movies, music) over DLNA and photos, and a second server for backups. The specs for both are identical, a basic mini ITX motherboard w/ AMD cpu, 2G of ram, CFI A7879 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis, 4 3T harddrives and a small SSD for the operating system (which in turn required a PCI-E SATA controller, since the motherboard only had 4 connectors). Over the past few days we got them put together and installed with Debian. Unfortunately we’ll have to RMA one of the eight harddrives but everything else seems to work well so far. When we get back from our travels we’ll finish configuration of the systems and get them installed in their permanent home in my office.

I was able to catch up on a lot of Ubuntu work last weekend, including getting out the Call for Instructors for Ubuntu User Days. Nomination emails also went out for new Ubuntu California leadership, hopefully we’ll get some more names on the list! This morning I got the latest issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter completed, the next issue will cover 2 weeks since many of us are busy and the holidays tend to be pretty slow for news anyway.

This past week has been busy too. Monday and Tuesday of this week I spent at the silicon valley office meeting with my team and on-boarding some new folks. Two days of commuting cemented my determination never to do that commute on a regular basis. This work continued into the rest of the week as we worked through some of our infrastructure configurations. I also had a lot of work to wrap up before holiday travels, which I found will quickly bump into my Australia trip, I come home the night of December 31st and fly out the evening of January 3rd to go to Perth. On Monday night we had a nice team dinner here in the city. Tuesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour in Mountain View since I was in the area anyway. MJ and I went out to a nice dinner on Wednesday and then Thursday night was his company holiday party.

In the midst of this, it’s been nice to get out and go for walks (and runs) when I have time or need to do errands as the weather has been beautiful.

Finally, I’m excited to say that my Haecksen talk was accepted! So my schedule for LCA is as follows:

  • Monday, January 6, 2014: “Open Sourcing your entire puppet configuration” at Sysadmin miniconf (link)
  • Tuesday, January 7, 2014: “‘But the audience won’t like me!’ and other myths” at Haecksen miniconf
  • Wednesday, January 8, 2014: “Systems Administration in the Open” at linux.conf.au main conference (link)

Here’s hoping jet lag doesn’t get the better of me (too much).

Speaking of which, time to finish packing for our trip to Miami to visit family and beaches! Let the jet lag begin.

One Comment

  • brian

    I am so envious of MJ. I have wanted to work for Google for many years. I truly believe they will lead us into the future. ATMs, PoS machines (cash registers), handheld devices, vending machines (!)… I can see Android on all of it.

    Anyway, I hope you have a happy and exciting new year!