Bug Unit

This week has been a week like any other, except for one piece of bad news: we are getting kicked out of the Rigg. The Rigg is the place where we live, for those of you who Googled Rigg looking for stuff about oil (you also may have spelling issues)- and our landlord has decided that it is costing him too much money. Woe! Woe, woe woe!! We love the Rigg. It has a jaunty little garden and a river and a park, and a playground that comes in useful for realising important facts, like the fact that adults have legs that are to long for sitting on one of those wiggly round-about things, and also, a 2m slide is not what it used to be, excitement wise. The Rigg also has big sunny windows and some fresh basil growing in the kitchen, and basically, it is home. We don’t want to leave it, but we must. So now the process of web surfing, house visiting and decision making must begin. The bugger of it all is that you can’t simply sign up with an estate agent, because they want to charge you around £60 for the service of taking you to properties. However, if you find the properties on the internet, phone them up, ask to view them, and meet them at the door of the property, they don’t charge you anything. Wierd, but convenient, because let’s face it- we’re internet people. Web 3.0 and all that.
So we are looking for places, and we are hoping to find something worth about £1,5 million, owned by someone who needs a tax break on a very expensive property. Failing that, we might have to look in our own price range, but hey! All will be well.

I don’t , as a rule, hold with the idea of coming all the way over the sea (or over the land, technically, for those of us from Africa) and then proceeding to hang out day in and day out with the people you knew at home. However, this sensibility obviously has a flaw, in that Kyle is my built in South African buddy, so really, I am being a bit of a hypocrite. But anyway- my point being, we broke the rule a bit last night and went to a party thrown by Warrick Bus Guy. We met Warrick Bus Guy on the bus waiting to go to Canonmills. We asked him when the next bus arrived, he answered in an all too similar accent, and the next thing we knew we were singing Nkosi Sikelele Africa to a bus full of bemused passangers. Since then Warrick Bus Guy has been very good about inviting us to a couple of his parties, and we have, for a bizarre range of reasons, been unable to attend any. To his credit, he kept inviting us and last night we went to a masked party where the punch was lethal but the people were nice. We chatted to a range of Poles, Scots, Aussies and South Africans and generally had an amazing time. Then we came home and ate pistachios.
That’s what you call a good evening.

Well, once again we are bad bloggers who have not fulfilled thier civic duty. I am getting over it. I am generally tired a lot of the time. During the week I can eat, sleep and travel on the bus. There isn’t really room for much else. Although I am aware that it is not necessarily a good policy, I seem to be living for the weekends at the moment. Luckily we have had three good ones.
3 weekends ago- Heather, Kyle and myself went up to the beautiful Isle of Skye. It is just desolate with these puffy cobbled hills and endless water, and the sky curves differently, as though it were actually about to reach an end. We drove through loads of rain and storms, but the mountains of Glencoe and Skye are well worth it, as is the thrill of coming around the corner in some deserted mountain area and seeing a busker in full tartan standing on the side of the road, piping to the glens, and to whoever else happens to be listening. Going to Skye has made me even more eager to go further and further north, to try and find mroe desolate places with larger tracts of diminishing sky.

2 weekends ago- Isje, Jack, Kyle and I went down in England to the lake district. We had a brilliant time, notwithstanding torrential rains, Kyle and myself sleeping on a sliding downhill slope, Isje and Jack sleeping on nothing at all, since they left their mattress at home, and eating more sausages than is healthy for an average human being. We also had the best meaty meal I have had since arriving in the UK (if you are ever in Paterson, go to the White Lion Inn. The food is all amazing, but we had the lamb shank, which was a steal at £10). On Saturday we went on a meandering drive through the mountains to Windemere, taking in all the waterfalls, hills and scree slopes that the lake district is blessed with. We also took in some amazing ice cream at Some Like It Hot (try it if you are ever in Windemere). I came to a conclusion: I am passionately, madly, deeply in love with…flower boxes. What? Those little boxes or baskets of flowers that the British hang everywhere in summer, brightening up even the dullest street. Paired with the black and white of the Tudor-esque houses, a flower box or two can make anyone’s day. Just a thought- use it, don’t use it.
On Sunday, Jack bullied us all up a mountain. A big mountain. And me not having done a spot of exercise in around 2 1/2 months. I was puffing, sweating, red faced and generally pretty grim. I cursed, but to no avail. I swear I only climbed to the top because I wanted to push Jack off the summit, with his cheerful grin and his un-puffed face. Fortunately, once at the top, I was given some chocolate to assuage my homicidal feelings, so the boy had a lucky escape this time.

This weekend- Kyle and I agreed that we needed to ‘bumph’. If you have never bumphed before, here is a howto:
1. Find your most comfy clothes- tracksuit pants, jerseys and warm socks will do. Make sure you have a puffy duvet handy.
2. Get some comforting food going. Spaghetti bolognaise or other warm starchy meals will do (stew!….), also, biscuits, esp. chocolate, and lots of sweets (Magnums and chocolate milkshakes were our food of choice).
3. Build a nest. Our nest was an inflatable mattress on the floor of the lounge. Make sure it is at the right angle so you don’t even have to move to see the tv.
4. Every tv programme or movie you have meant to watch but haven’t had the time to.
5. Lie back, and enjoy.
6. Repeat for best results.

Then there are the days when you don’t *want* to be the systems administrator of a film company. Take yesterday, for example. At around 4pm, one of the 5 main servers, the one that carries over 4 terrabytes of information, decides that it’s not cool to work anymore, burns up all the fans in the process, and refuses to boot up again. Panic sets in. What went wrong, how do I fix it, how quick can I get it back on line. These are just some of the questions running through my mind.

Haul the server out of the server rack, and take a looksie. Repair the fans that are needed to cool it, hoping that this is all that went wrong. 6:30pm, fans fixed. Fire up the server again… Nothing. Panic some more.

Lets freeze there for a few seconds… Why panic in a situation like this, you ask? Well, a couple reasons. The server that has died has a RAID array of 8, 500Gb hard drives. These drives are all striped together into two big arrays, making them look like 1tb each, along with a mirror. This means that this server, when dead, is the only server that knows how these drives are lined up and, subsequently, the only machine that can actually look at the data on these drives. To any other machine, when plugging those same 8 drives into it, it would just look like garbage. It’s freaky. Things like this are very freaky. They are made even more freaky by the fact that the information (whilst I cannot explain exactly what is on them on a public web page) is incredibly important. And on top of it, although there are backups made of the drives, the last backup was a week ago, and since then, we’ve done more work on that server in the last week than we’ve done in the last 2 months. This means huge data loss. Project goes on hold for a week whilst we scramble for the data… who knows. Well, I know, and thats why I was stressing so much.

Back to the story… So, after 7 hours of overhaul, I managed to get the exact same RAID array working on another PC, by transferring the entire RAID controller from the broken machine, into one of my other servers, and then replicate the exact same arrangement to trick the controller into thinking nothing went wrong. It works! Hooray! But thats not where the story ends… You now have 4tb of hard drives hanging off the side of a server that is also used for critical information… that server is now offline whilst you work on restoring and temporarily moving the information off of it. Theres no room for any other hard drives in any of the other servers because they’re all pretty much running at capacity. It’s tight, but I manage to sort it out, moving all of the offline servers information on to another hard disk so that I didn’t have to move the 4tb of data anywhere.

So, at midnight, I walked out of here, everything pretty much sorted, but so incredibly not keen for today. Today is the day that everything has to be re-thunk. Thunking sucks.

System administration for a company can have it’s ups and downs… It’s highs and it’s lows. It’s also not that great being The Man behind a lot of enforcement of safe internet usage through restrictions and logs and whatnot. Though it is amusing. And sometimes I find myself being so incredibly cunning that even a fox wouldn’t have thought of it. Take the last 24 hours for example…

I’ve been instructed by the producer to restrict internet access on the animators line testing machines. Line testing machines are in each of the animators’ rooms, and they have a camera attached to them that faces down on to some well lit paper. The animators put their drawings down in front of it, and then interact with the PC in front of them to capture the images into a sequence that they can then review on the computer. Fix timing of the animation, correct mistakes etc. It’s all very interesting stuff. But what they also use the computers for, is reference material. Reference material for their animations, and they usually visit YouTube and a couple other video sites to get some video reference for what they’re animating. So, that is the one site that should always be allowed… YouTube. The producer wishes to block all other non-production content from these machines, and I’m at the forefront of that process.

It’s easy-peasy-sleazy. With the nice and fancy routers that I chose, we can build groupings for certain PC’s, which I did, and then apply firewall rules to those selected groupings. Attach a schedule to those rules, and the result is a block on those machines that stops them from being able to access the internet outside of business hours. The last main task is to make them unable to access certain sites. For this, you can use all types of random “cybernanny” and the likes, software, but only if all your traffic is routed through a server which you administrate. Thats not the case here. Because we don’t have hundreds of PC’s accessing the internet, the standard firewall/router/switch is more than enough to route all the traffic for us, and give us protection from the outside. But the drawback to this is that you lose a bit of customization in the process. Things that you want to fine-tune become impossible, without a little bit of creativity

Note: This is where the creativity starts. (It may also get a bit geeky, but just bear with me, you’ll most probably understand it in the end)

All internet traffic is just shot straight at the standard firewall/router/switch that we have, meaning that I cannot track much of it because of the fact that I am limited by the router’s software itself. So I needed to come up with a sneaky way of intercepting the traffic before it’s being passed on to the actual router to pass it out on to the internet. I need to do this, because I need to formulate a list of all the sites that people are requesting off of those machines. So I came up with a plan… I run the DHCP server, so my first task is to add a new nameserver to the config file, which will then propogate through the network as all the network leases come up for renewal. I add one of my Linux servers that I maintain to be the first nameserver. Now, all requests will first be forwarded to the Linux server I maintain, and then it will pass it on to the router once it realises that it can’t resolve the addresses that are requested. This will take time, so I set it up yesterday so that all the machines will be on this new configuration in the morning, after they’ve renewed their network leases on the DHCP server.

Now, I add the list of sites to block to the router. All the common ones that I can think of off the top of my head. Facebook, Gmail and the likes. This comes to a list of 20 domain names, which is great and all, and although I think that I’ve covered most of the personal email sites and other non-production related resources, there will always be j-random free email site that someone is using, and then they’ll be able to use their email whilst the hotmail idiots of the world won’t be able to. I want to be fair… so this is where the whole nameserver interception comes into play.

I place the new ruleset on to the router and make it active. This means that the site blocking and everything comes in to play for the first time. At the same time, I distribute all the letters around next to the line testing machines, stating how there are now blocks on some sites and that restrictions are now in place. Seconds after putting the notices up, and run back to my server room and tell my Linux server to log all DNS (nameserver) requests, and (with some nice little scripting) filter out all of the requests from the machines that I have no interest in, and also link the IP addresses of the machines requests, to the actual machine names that I have, which results in a nice real-time display of all the web requests coming from the line testing machines only.

Why is this ingenious, you ask? Well, as soon as the people see the sign, typically, they will want to check whether their email site still works, or whether they’ll still be able to connect to the latest social networking site that there is… or maybe some porn. Who knows. Well, I know. I know now because of the logs that I set to record the requests. I know now because of the sneaky way all the machines are requesting sites from a random Linux server first and then passing it on to the actual server that will route their traffic for them. Voila! A list of all the sites that I forgot to add to the blocking list.

Now… hold on for a second. Before you all attack me for being a mean old system administrator who is out there to kill. I am righteous in some kind of way. I realise the fact that I have become the person who I have always been trying to work around my whole life. Within seconds on a new network I am always trying to establish the restrictions that are being imposed upon me, and ways around them. It’s just a way of life really. I hate being restricted, and in most cases, you can find ways around those things. This is why I feel righteous about the whole thing. Although I am imposing these restrictions, I am also aware of ways around them. I have left some doors open to be tested, should anyone want to test them. Although I will know if someone tries to do something like that, I have left it out there to be tried (from the internal machines, of course). It’s like locking the front and back door, but leaving a key somewhere on the roof underneath a cat, so that if a clever person comes along, they will be able to figure out how to get in. But if I see that the cat has moved, then I know that someone got in, so I need to check it out.

Look, it’s a story about cats. That’s all I know.

Two blog posts in one day. Whilst this may surprise you, it doesn’t surprise me. This post seemed too weird to add on to the end of the last posts eco-rant, so I decided it’s better to just do it in a seperate one. Just by explaining this to you, I have successfully taken about 1 minute of your time that you will never get back. It reminds me of Ducklight Travel’s and how our slogan is “Our memories, your time.” This is also all relative, because this in fact is the exact reason why I was making this post in the first place. Now where was I?

Ducklight Travels.

After about 3 weeks of “fiddling” (not playing) with my new server that I bought about a month back, to run from our house here in Edinburgh, I have successfully created a nice new web-world for Ducklight Travels. Some sort of culmination of all the aspects of our travels into one single entity, named Ducklight Travels, in it’s entirety. No more reliance on websites like FlickR, or WordPress, or even Vimeo (to a certain extent). From now on, everything will be infused into one powerful website which hosts the Ducklight Travels Episode releases, as well as the Bugunit web blog, *and* all of the fancy-wancy pictures that we’ve taken. As well as a couple cool features on the site that I won’t get into now, but will rather leave you with an air of uncertainty as I whisper some of their names… names like “The Bug Pit”, and “Who the Bugs”… just two of the features of the new website/worldsite that will be released in just a little while. Whilst we await the registration of the domain name, and some final tweaks are made (thanks Darb for bits and pieces of web experience) you can enjoy the last remaining words of the bugunit.wordpress blog, and keep it fresh in your memories so that one day when you’re telling your kids about how *you* were around when Ducklight Travels was just a mention in a small blog on WordPress, they won’t all throw poo in your eyes and call you a liar.

Beware the poo throwers of the world. How can you ever trust someone who throws their own poo?

Well, I realised yesterday that I have not written on the blog for about three weeks. In fact, I think I have hardly done any personal web usage or fooling around at work in the last two weeks at all, which might be a good thing for the company, but is probably a bad thing for me.

Ok, so I am working at Visitscotland.com. I am their brand spanking new web analyst, and I have not really done any work yet. It is day 7 of me being here. The whole of week one was meeting people and familiarising myself with their (nightmarish, behemoth) website. I say that because the site from top to toe is about, approximately 90 000 pages big (Or is it wide? Or long? Anyways…).So, it is a big site. I am part of the business development team, and as far as I can understand (day 7), I am to look at the stats, tell people what isn’t working and then we as a team can try and fix it. It seems like a cool company, and thus far everyone has been very nice. The CEO even sat with me for an hour and a half, when he hardly has five minutes to spare. It was cool.

I am also now an official commuter. Every morning I wake up at 5:30, shower, eat breakfast and put on my suit. Yes, my suit. I leave the house at 6:30, and catch two buses to get to Livingston at 8:10. Then I work til 4:50, get on two buses and usually walk into the house at about 6:30, making it a nice round day. I have been struggling to get used to it, as my last job didn’t take much travelling and I could roll out of bed at 7:30, but it is all good and I will get used to it.

Two exciting new developments have occurred:

1. Heather
2. Italy

Now obviously, the existence of these developments pre-dated the blog. Especially Italy, which was founded in 1957.

Anyway…Heather has arrived in Edinburgh for a few weeks to soak up the sunshine (joke…that was a joke: weather more miserable than it has been since January at the moment) and check up that I am taking care of her ‘little one’. It has been really cool having her here, and so nice to see a friendly face from home.

Italy is pretty self-explanatory. We went to Italy this past weekend, and it was fantabulous.

We woke up at 2:30/ 2:45 on Saturday to catch the 3:30 bus to Glasgow Prestwick airport. We then checked in and hopped on the 6:20 flight to Pisa. Pisa was beautiful and sunny and all the things you would expect from Pisa (having been to Pisa before, I knew what things to expect. Cunning.) We saw the tower and a massive military parade, frolicked, took photos, frolicked some more and then dragged big heavy suitcases across the length of Pisa.

We then got on a train that managed to be raining (leaky aircon) in spite of the sunny skies out the window, and headed for Florence. The entire floor was wet by the time we arrived, so it is probably good that we weren’t booked for any kind of onward journey.
Florence was also absolutely gorgeous, with small clustered streets and window boxes full of flowers and ice cream and good looking Italian men…um…I mean, lovely scenery. We had a slight hiccup while trying to get to our accommodation- we arrived at the street, and it wasn’t there. What? Well, it simply wasn’t there. The address that we were given (a street address) contained no One World Apartments. No problem- we phone them. No problem- they send a man on a bicycle, armed with a note.

Mr Whittington
Your apartment is not here! Please now go across the bridge into a totally different part of town where you actually didn’t want to stay or you would have booked there, to inhabit an apartment which we have fraudulently claimed was here when actually it was not.

Ps: the key we have provided you with does not actually open the front door. You will be stuck on the street for half an hour while we ignore your calls. We apologise for the inconvenience.

[Ed’s note: phrasing not exact]

Ok, so we have not slept since 2:30 am, we are dragging suitcases in the Italian heat across town, it is mid-afternoon, and then the key didn’t actually open the door. The apartment was five stories up (no lift- tiny small footed Italian concrete stairs), and it was hot. But, it was actually really pretty, overlooking a tiny piazza, and once we had had a nap and recovered our sense of humour, it was actually a cool place to stay- there was always something happening. We went to sleep with a concert underneath our window and woke up with a market clanging away selling cheese, soap, fish made of candle wax and other essentials.

Florence itself is as beautiful as it was last time I saw it, streets filled with tourists, buskers and people selling handbags. We shopped a lot, we ate a lot, we soaked up the sun and the scenery. As for the rumours that there was wine involved, I cannot comment.

My only other negative about Florence was a grumpy waiter who mis-understood me when I was ordering. I ordered a pasta (starter portion) and a margarita for Kyle and I to share (he was also ordering a pasta, and Heather was about to order a pizza). I was speaking to an Italian man, so I foolishly used swirly hand movements to say ‘bring it all to-geth-er’. He thought I meant that we were sharing the food, freaked out at me, told me he would not serve us, to get out of his restaurant and go to the self catering place down the street. No jokes. When he realised that we were bona fide customers, we received no apology. He received no tip, so the scale was evened out.

Otherwise, special memories are listening to a busker on Ponte Vecchio late in the evening, pasta, laughter and generally walking around the beautiful streets, absorbing all the best of Italian culture.

For the second part of our trip we Eurostar-ed our way up to the great ancient city of Roma. We caught a taxi to our hotel. Outside there was a little man waiting with a note.

Dear Mr Whittington

Owing to repairs in the Chiara Stella Guest House, we regret to inform you that you have been moved to the Gioia Guest House instead. The guest house is under the same management and is of the same standard as Chiara Stella. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Having been moved around in Paris, Florence and now Rome, I was beginning to wonder why Europeans bothered with the sham of ‘booking’ when they obviously had no intention of letting you stay where you wanted to anyway, but then we saw the Gioia guest house, which was a haven of nice fittings, tiled floors and aircon. I was content.

We headed out in the afternoon to see the Colosseum, which was quite intense. Knowing the history of the place, it is hard to pair your knowledge of the pain and suffering that occurred there with the enjoyment and interest you have in such an old and unique building, so the two emotions sat uneasily side by side. I will say though that seeing it was truly fascinating.

Kyle and Heather then opted to sit under an olive tree (!) while I went and explored the ancient ruins of the old city, temple of Saturn and other things to charm your average history nerd into a coma. It was really amazing, and I would love to go back sometime to give everything the attention it actually deserved.

Evening came and we found a small pasta bar overlooking the Colosseum to have dinner at. We had a drink at a small Italian bar and then went back to bed- no market underneath our window this time, but the silence was a welcome change.

Day 2 in Rome was limited in terms of time, but we did our best, being bullied by an Italian woman, visiting St Peter’s Square at the Vatican, walking the streets and absorbing the yellow/green and white beauty that is Rome. Rome also completely awakens both the Christian and the history nerd in me, and I have an appointment to go back and see more, and more, and more, and…The problem is, I don’t think you could ever see all that Rome has to offer- but I would like to try.

5pm, back on bus. Bus-airport-airport-plane-plane-chairs in airport- bus-taxi- home. Home, 2:05 am. Sleep.

5:20 am alarm clock. Argh.