Views from The Ruif

Views from The Ruif
Originally uploaded by radix999

So I spent the first half of the day learning a bit of the webgui api and a little perl - scanning through webgui source code trying to understand the functions they provide for doing sql calls - and then trying to learn the perl syntax so I can actually write code using it - fun stuff in anyone's book I'm sure.

After that Koen from ProcoliX asked me if I wanted to take a trip into Amsterdam with him to see their datacenter and give him a hand. I've never really been in a proper datacenter before, so said yes. Koen likes to drive, and took me in his silver BMW 540 - it's an older car, but cruised very nicely on the Amsterdam highways. I got to take a photo of a few more dutch windmills as we went past - one old one, and two new ones and it was a smooth drive in with not too much traffic (as a lot of people over here is on holiday this time of year prettymuch).
Koen explained that one of their client's servers had gone down, and they needed to find out what had happened to it - as a remote reboot hadn't helped and these were old servers so couldn't do anything else remotely.

When we got to the building he signed me in as ProcoliX employee and we got badges and then headed up to the datacentre. We had to put shoe covers on before we could enter the room too - apparently to stop dirt and some sort of anti-static measure. Koen didn't think much of it really.
The datacentre was fully temperature and voltage controlled, brightly lit with rows and rows of racks. Procolix had three racks at this datacenter - and run all of their servers from here.

When we hooked a monitor and keyboard up to the server and restarted it, it appeared one of the scsi drives on the raid had failed - and the other was corrupted. Koen tried a few things to get it to work but without much success. He'd already moved a copy of the data onto another server, so he was content simply to take the failed hard drive out and head back to the office.
Koen said he wanted to replace those servers anyway, so this was a good reason to look at getting a bunch of new blade servers.

We headed back t the office after that and I headed home not long afterwards as it was getting late.
Now I'd ridden in with Joeri that morning, but here was my chance to ride home by myself. Luckily I have TomTom (GPS navigation Software) on my phone with all of the european maps, including Netherlands.
I don't have a GPS though, so it's kinda like a portable map - with a few extra features like automatic route calculation. I'd plugged in the office address and my home address, so generated a bicycle map and checked it with Joeri - he said it was almost right, but we took a more direct route. I tried generating it again and this time selected walking method and this time he said it was the same route we'd taken this morning. Armed with a map I was prepared to head off home.
Of course I still took a couple of wrong turns and got a little off track, but I was able to retrace my steps and correct myself once I realised and soon I was home.
I dumped my laptop, changed clothes and then headed out again for dinner as it was getting close to 6pm by this time. I took a meandering route and took a few photos along the way - this time on 100 ISO (not 1600 ISO like I'd inadvertantly done the day before). Joeri had suggested a restaurant for dinner near the New Church in Delft called The Ruif, so after wandering around for a bit I headed there for a meal. I ordered a lovely meal for which I don't remember the full name (except the bit 'alles is best') - but consisted of a couple of shishkebabs with meat in a satay sauce, a salad and chips on the side. I washed this down with a big glass of Jupiler league.
The Ruif, like many restaurants around here, has a large boat platform that sits on the canal - I sat right in the corner with lovely views of the canal and a bridge over it - so I got to see lots of people strolling along over the bridge and heading off to their destinations as I sat and ate - was nice.
When I got back to the hotel I found that though I could now connect to the wireless link they had - their internet link itself was down - so I settled back in bed and watched a little tv then headed to bed.