It’s been a long long day to cap off a long long week.
So, much work today during work hours, not crappy work, regular work. Actual productive work, just lots of it. The whole week has been like this. Then, off to the charity benefit of Serenity, bumping into all kinds of people I know, which was great. Just before we went in, work rang – complaints from corporate customers about telstraclear users getting shitty speeds to my network. And I fucked around with that link today, so it’s probably my fault. I revert some changes from my PDA over GPRS and tell work to call me in a couple of hours after the movie, and tell me if it’s still shitty. They call after the movie. It is still shitty.
I drop Annette off at home, go up the damn sky tower for like the third time today, and revert the rest of the changes I made today, which involves physical cable patching. Run some tests. Everything appears fine.
The jsr.com sky tower core router chooses this moment to choke and die in flames. Horribly. There are worse places I could have been when this happened, than standing a couple of meters away from it. But yeah, it’s dead dead dead. I have no backup. There’s a cisco 6506 router arriving next week with my name on it – that’s intended to replace this very router. Naturally, it’s not here YET, or anything. So I have no backup router.
I ended up grabbing an ex-Weta digital SGI1100 that I’ve been using as a staging server, threw some spare NICs into it, installed debian and quagga, went to grab the backups of the router config and…
It’s zero bytes long. No idea why. No time to cry. Harsh language is used instead. I swear at myself for not properly rotating these backups like I should have been, but instead just relying on the most recent backup instance to, like, actually work. More fool me.
So now I get to hand-roll a router config from memory, cos I’m stuck in the tower and don’t want to have to go away and come BACK again. I make a valiant effort to recall who has what subnet assigned to them, who’s on what VLAN, and what all my connection subnets back to various peers were.
I’m pretty tired now, but seeing the BGP sessions come up and my netblocks suddenly become reachable from various looking glasses around NZ and the rest of the planet resulted in an entirely pleasing surge of geeky network dork pure happy time.
Once I’m back at work next week, I’ll fix my APE peering and whatnot. For the moment, as long as everything is reachable via IP, even if it’s routed via internets.borat.kz, then I’m happy.