It's been a busy August & September, but I've finally managed to find some time (and energy) to work a little on the site.

As you may have noticed, I haven't been keeping up with /scraps, my link roundup posts. I got to 7 editions before a hiccup in the schedule, but that hiccup turned into a choke and now it's suffocating somewhere far down on the todo-list. I've just been too busy to keep up to date with the goings on.

Work has been pretty hectic, as it always is this time of year. The August break is our opportunity to knuckle down and smash out projects we've been building up to during the rest of the year. This year had extra challenges, as we needed to migrate our server infrastructure to a new location with zero budget due to some pretty major power work happening at the site. We had committed to keeping everything digital working, and happily this work was planned and executed ready for the two weeks of no electricity, which ended up only being a one week long event.

This went well from our perspective - everything got moved where it needed to go, minimal disruption. Hosted services stayed online (mostly) and we had no issues or incidents... except, well, we ran off a generator for that week, and half way through the week, at the end of the day... it exploded.

Yep. And, yes, there was only one generator - the cost for redundancy was too high, given the temporary nature of the power situation (and the fact that almost everyone except for us had this time off or worked from home that week) so everything crapped itself. Luckily, UPS kept things stable enough and we had no breakage due to power surges or anything like that - the servers went offline and by the next morning they were back up humming along nicely.

Following the completion of the power works we hit the ground running, getting as much done as we could, and, sustained by nothing more than grit and momentum, we reached the end of August, at which point everyone else turned up to start their jobs. Most of those people had just had five weeks off, and came back fresh faced to see our bleary bloodshot exhausted eyes staring back at them.

As is tradition, in flooded the tickets - a few hundred within the first few weeks. Not out of the ordinary. But it was busy. Not hard, just... frantic, I guess. Things have calmed a little, I typically write off September as I spend most of my time jumping into the support queue and taking on the more annoying issues. People don't believe me unless they've experienced it for themselves, but there are holiday gremlins - they follow you around and watch you fix up all the machines and projectors, configure all the new switchess, tidy up all the cables, test all the new patch panels, build out your ACLs, then on the morning of the first day, those gremlins come in and just fuck your shit up. Suddenly, thirty of the three hundred things you know were working the day before are just fucked for no reason at all. So you rush around, fix them, then the next day a new 10% of your previously working shit is ballsed up. I swear, these gremlins haunt me. I've never seen one, but when I do, I will catch it, and I will ram a punch-down tool so far up it's... anyway, things are a bit calmer now, I'm ready to start easing my way back into web stuff. I've already done a few bits, another blog post coming soon.

Until then!