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October's Journal
December's Journal
30/11/2023
I'm writing this a little late (read: December), but it's not like it really
matters given I'm not doing these entries daily these days (years).
Since last we spoke a whole month has gone by, and there's been a lot happening
(even if I won't tell you exhaustively everything). It started with a lot more
LEAPPing (converting installed instances of RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 or even then on
to RHEL 9) of physical hosts, which means no fall-back to VM snapshots if
anything went wrong. Also the last of the V2V of some RHEL 6 KVM guests to the
VMware cluster where they'd be a bit safer from RHEL 6 KVM host hardware
failures. They all went well, so that was a few fewer RHEL 7 instances and
five RHEL 6 physical hosts retired. That leaves me with twenty RHEL 6
instances which I don't think will be going away quickly, which is going to be
an issue next year. More on that later.
In the second week of November I had a pretty busy few days with more LEAPPing,
a trip to London for a Red Hat Summit Connect thing, lots of OS patching, and
even more LEAPPs, this time of some Drupal hosts, which really complicates
matters given the massively upgraded versions of Apache, PHP, Varnish, and
more. Still, everything seemed to work perfectly, which was brilliant. At the
end of that week I had the second half of my birthday present from Rel, which
was entry into the Alton Towers 10K. This was a "just for fun" event we
decided to run together (which means Rel gracefully ran with me, rather than
leaving me in her dust). We got reasonable times considering the terrain, and
then were able to take advantage of the park entry to go on a few rides. Sadly
a lot of them were closed as it was out of season, but we did get to have
some food, go on a water ride, and generally enjoy ourselves. After that we
drove into the lower Peak District and stayed in a really lovely place just
outside of Buxton. The weather was atrocious and the first walk we did ended
up being pretty boggy. I managed to find us a reasonable running route the
next day, which satisfied our need to be outside and enjoying the scenery (that
could be seen below the clouds). After we'd had some lovely time there we
drove on to Manchester to see my parents for ~24 hours, which was fab.
Driving back from Manchester we got back to the nearest mainline train station
to Rel's where I took the train home. This allowed me to be back at my desk
the next morning for more OS patching and LEAPPing. At the end of that week
Rel and I had lunch in a pub in town here with a gentleman called Richard, who
is certainly an interesting person.
Then it was the third week of the month and a succession of early morning
starts for me to do OS patching, LEAPPing and reconfiguration of VMs with raw
mapped LUNs to not have them any more. This was all part of the process of
moving off our old SAN and onto the shiny new one. All through the month we've
been storage migrating all the VMs from the old datastores on the old SAN to
new, thin-provisioned ones, on the new SAN. The space savings on top of the
deduplication have been astonishing. Coupled with all of that has been my work
with another member of our team who's more of a developer on the replacement
SAN API scripts. His first language isn't English, so I've had to do a bit of
polish on the help text/documentation for his code, which otherwise works
brilliantly.
And now it's the end of November and after a bit more patching and the LEAPPing
of a very important physical host I'm off work tomorrow to get trains to Rel,
who will be meeting me at the station with her mum so we can drive to the Lake
District to see family for her mum's birthday celebration. I'll tell you
something about that in December's entry some time around Christmas/New Year.