Successful Trip

The test was a success last night, we actually got done “early” as we were finished by 3:00am and got to go back to the hotel and get some sleep. We potentially could have been done much sooner except we had some unforeseen issues that caused us to contact support for the encryption devices. After six hours of them not being able to help me figure out what the issue was I resolved it by taking an alternate configuration route. The device is not set up in a cluster like we originally hoped, but rather in a stand alone mode and technically this is the vendor supported configuration. We also had some issues with the backup server that was solved when Bob decided to try to run the server on a concatenated file system instead of a striped JFS2 file system. We are still not sure why we got better performance this way than we did with the stripped file system, it does not make sense. We lost a few hours with that but likely it overlapped with my vendor issue. Once I solved the encryption problem things went fine and we were done in a few hours.

We got back to the hotel around 3:30am, after walking back from the test site. Walking through Philadelphia at night brought back some memories. It’s odd how comfortable it was walking through the city at such a late hour. I would never walk through Detroit at that time, but I never worried about stuff like that with Philly. I also didn’t realize just how much I missed Philly. I woke up around 7am and considering I was having such a hard time sleeping I decided to get some breakfast and walk around the city for a bit. I took a number of pictures of City Hall with my phone, and they will eventually be added to the gallery. This building is the largest and tallest Masonry Building in the world. Oddly enough when I lived in PA just outside of Philly, I never made it into Center City to see this building. I’m glad I finally got the opportunity to see it, even though I got no sleep.

The plain ride back to MI was fine, and I even got to take a little nap. I think I will be heading back to Philly in September for another, much larger, DR test. I probably wont have any time to walk around then though, I guess only time will tell.