My systems engineering team has three open positions for which we are hiring. We'd ideally like to hire in the greater SF bay area since that's where the bulk of our developers, managers and non-production systems are located, but we won't turn down telecommuting talent we can locate elsewhere on the planet. I've been caring for our production data center for 4.5 years now, most of it telecommuting from home --and now you can too!

My team needs some moderately senior Linux engineers with some Solaris experience and network knowledge. Web app stuff like Java, Javascript, Apache web server and such is a definite bonus.

Here's the official job description/posting:
https://careers-reardencommerce.icims.com/jobs/2349/job

If you're interested or know someone who is, let me know and I'd be happy to fill in more detailed background.

Got a recommendation for a standalone utility for wiping hard drives? My Dear Employer has sold a division of our firm to another so I'm wiping the drives of two racks of equipment before they are turned over to the new owner. A USB-based or CD-based autoboot wiping utility would be very, very useful. Any ideas?

I haven't had much time to read or post lately... life has been busy and will continue to be so for another couple of months. This lack of spare time has been keeping me away from LJ, FB and Twitter, among other things; on the flip side, it's amazing how much spare time one can recoup by staying away from LJ, FB and Twitter.

In the past couple of weeks, I've:

• finished my employer's performance evaluation;
  
• attended the CALLERLAB convention in Cary, NC, where I was a panelist & moderator and representative for the GCA;
  
• worked several night shifts, racking up new servers, retiring old ones, and upgrading existing ones, as well as preparing equipment to be shipped out as we've sold one of our divisions to an outside firm;
  
• attempted to de-winterize our trailer at Roseland Resort (the campground water hadn't been turned on yet so we couldn't flush the antifreeze from the water system & tanks, and we ran out of propane for the furnace at 3am Sunday morning);
  
• worked more extended shifts (did I mention we're a bit short-handed and hiring two more staffers for my team?);
  
• had my old netbook die on me;
  
• helped a friend assemble some furniture;
  
• collected a dresser from another friend;
  
• and prepped to head to Wilmington, DE, for the Independence Squares' fly-in this weekend.

In short, I'm up to my ears in a lot of projects. The good news, at least, is that I've completed a lot of smaller projects in the past 48 hours so I'm at least experiencing a significant degree of satisfaction and progress.

Tonight, we held the annual membership meeting and board elections for the DC Lambda Squares.

For the most part, there wasn't any dramatic news. We're making a bit of money off our fly-in festivals, losing a bit on our community dances and club nights, and losing a great deal off our classes. On the whole, we had a financial deficit but there's more than enough cash in the bank and certificates of deposit to handle that.

We've created a committee to re-evaluate how we do our community dances. I proposed the board offer a list of items or projects and ask the members to consider sponsoring these special expenses; to demonstrate how it could work, I also committed to covering 50% of the caller's fees for our next dance (another dancer volunteered to cover the other 50% after the meeting).

Four of the five board positions up for election were all re-elected by acclamation. I think it speaks volumes that the folks who are staffing the presidency, membership chair, secretary and one of the two at-large positions were willing to continue for a second term and are comfortable working with each other. They are, as a certain upcoming movie would say, an effective team.

I kept out of the volunteering trenches, for the most part. I've already spent some years on the board and on the 2009 IAGSDC convention executive; further, I have a lot of duties related to my square dance calling for several clubs and my vice-president's role with the Gay Callers Association. I'm not getting burnt out, but I stretching just a wee bit past my comfort level at the moment so some restraint is a good thing.

There were lots of good ideas for recruitment and fundraising offered at the meeting: I'm looking forward to seeing many of these put into operation, as well as whatever we can learn from the upcoming CALLERLAB convention this weekend.

Recently, I noticed my jeans were labelled 'straight slim cut.'

And then I realized I'm none of these.

My life wardrobe is one big fraud.

*sigh*

I escaped the snowy doom of DC this week for a quick trip to visit my corporate overlords in California.

When I booked my tickets back in February, it was going to be a normal trip to visit with the team, work on some joint projects and help out in the Santa Clara data center. Since then, my original manager left the team, the new manager's father died so he's gone to Hawaii to settle the estate and another guy left the firm. Our team of six is now a team of three and I'm filling in as interim manager. This is definitely not a normal trip.

Among other little challenges, the powers-that-be have declared that my official hotel will be the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, about a four mile drive from the office. I used to stay at the Marriott Courtyard, immediately adjacent to the office so I'm not really keen on the longer commute. Fortunately, it's not turn out to be as bad as it could be.

When I made the hotel reservation, my firm hadn't issued me the group code for our corporate rates so the Hyatt had no clue I was there on business and was therefore going to charge me for both Internet and parking. The kind desk clerk, however, waived both for me, noting that I was a Hyatt Honours member. That I looked like an unkept, sleep-deprived drowned rat at the time might have elicited a small sympathy response too.

My room is on the 6th floor but it faces outwards instead of into the beautiful interior atrium. Not a big deal, but my external view is directly onto 101 and the noise levels are a bother. And the room has feather pillows --I'm allergic to feathers. Still, the pillows were swapped out and the room itself, while not as large as the Courtyard, has a better arrangement of furniture and is definitely a better working space and a more comfortable bathroom & shower.

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, their sales director emailed me to apologize for not realizing I was there on a corporate group account, sent a bottle of wine & sparkling water with glasses to my room with a personalized greeting card, and offered to move me to a room away from the 101 today, as there would be additional rooms available shortly. OK, I can deal with this.

The Hyatt itself is near, well, nothing but more hotels: a Crowne Plaza, a Holiday Inn, a few non-chain places. There's not much available in the way of restaurants or shopping so the food I have in my room I bought at the Safeway near my office during lunch.

It's the commute to & from work which is annoying. There's no escaping some driving on the 101, but pklexton pointed me to Third Street which I can use to minimize the highway congestion. The on/off ramps for my hotel is a nightmare but I figured that out after a few panic attacks. Still, walking 100 feet the Courtyard Marriott to work will always be a tough act to top.

BTW, my car this trip is a Kia Soul, a cube-like car which has actually been pretty nice. It handles well, has a quiet & smooth ride, has great surrounding visibility and appears to be light on fuel although I can't say I've driven it enough to really have a good handle on that quiet yet.

Heading out to lunch now... more to come later.

I'm 5'9", 180lbs currently. According to the Body Mass Index (BMI), I'm overweight. Indeed, I need to lose about 12lbs to fit their definition of a healthy weight.

I am working towards a better body --just as soon as I finish off these boxes of girl scout thin mint cookies-- but cutting back by 12lbs is a bit extreme.

This work week has been all about hard drives.

The expansion units for our Fujitsu storage array arrived late last week so we scheduled time with the field engineers to install the disk enclosures and hard drives, then configure the whole lot. Unfortunately, Tuesday night, an existing disk died in the same array. Swapping it out was easy, but the Fujitsu's firmware prevents any configuration changes until everything is green, so while we could install the new hardware, we couldn't do the config updates until the RAID rebuild was completed.

The configuration was finally completed this morning. We now have an additional 13.5TB of raw disk space on that array.

While all of this was happening Wednesday, a disk died in our Network Appliance array. The support agreement on the NAS had long since expired since a renewal would have been equal to purchasing a brand new NAS. Two hard drives, a replacement for the failed disk and a spare, were ordered and arrived today. All is now good with that beast.

A 70GB disk died Tuesday night in one of our HP blade servers. Fortunately, the boot disks are mirrored by hardware RAID so there was no system interruption. I pulled the dead drive and inserted a new one --I have spares in hand-- and the array reconfigured itself automagically.

A 600GB disk died in a Silicon Mechanics server. Again, the disks are mirrored and I had spares so I swapped out the dead disk. Because of the cheap-ass disk controllers shipped with these machines, we're using Ubuntu Linux's mdadm software mirroring so I had to manually enter the extra commands to force the array rebuild, but that was easily done.

By lunchtime Friday, all arrays and configs were current once again. No data or servers were threatened in this period, but I did think it unusual that so many disks in such diverse hardware should all expire in the same week. Considering some disks in the Fujitsu have been working 24x7 for five solid years, it's a wonder we don't have more failing there than one per month.

DC Lambda Squares' Advanced & Challenge square dance fly-in weekend has come & gone for another year. In all, we had just under 100 attendees, slightly less than last year. While we heard from some who needed to cancel at the last minute, there were at least five people who had registrations who neither cancelled, rolled-over their registration to next year or gave us instructions of any kind.

This was the first time we had used the Four Points Sheraton Hotel, just 1.5 blocks from our past dance location at the Almas Temple. It's so nice to have the hotel rooms and dance spaces in the same building. Sadly, the only room kent4str, cuyhogarvr and I could get was at the Embassy Suites hotel another two short blocks away. The Embassy Suites was a very nice hotel, BTW --I'd stay there again-- and the weather was very nice so the walk wasn't a bother.

A high school girls volleyball competition also has been descending on down DC this weekend the past couple of years. The kids are fine, but wow, they chatter a lot and the high-pitched giggling in every public space was beginning to make my ears bleed. Perhaps it's just my personal bias, but I can't help but think having the same number of boys in the same space would have been much louder and even more obnoxious so I'm choosing to count my blessings.

The dance spaces at the hotel were adequate. As much as I'd like to say they were flawless, there's no denying that the load-bearing pillars were badly position two of the smaller halls. We worked around them: the caller's table was placed at the opposite end to provide the best possible sight-lines, and the rooms were (largely) allocated according to dance population (Advanced got the largest hall, C3B the smallest). It worked out but I wish those pillars weren't there.

kent4str hosted an hour of GCA C1 guest spots, while I handled the Advanced. To provide padding in the middle of my A2 hour for the guest callers to scamper from Kent's to my hall, I called a brief tip which I thought was so-so: it was half sighted, half-read and while it was OK, I scored lower than I would have liked. Fortunately, there was a brief 10 minute block at the end of the hour in which I called a final set which was damn near perfect (sight-called the entire thing) so I believe I redeemed myself. Yay for second chances!

Half of the GCA board was present so we had a mini-meeting, just to catch up on the status of the caller school and convention planning for the upcoming IAGSDC convention. One board member who shall remain nameless continues to be as clueless as ever: he can't figure out why some people aren't responding to his email requests. I wanted to scream, It's because you never ask, you order, instruct, insult & belittle, but never ask! but decided it wasn't a battle I wanted to fight.

I'm interested in seeing what the surveys say about our ACDC event. We asked for input on the selection of callers and the hotel facilities, among other things. My gut feeling is that one particular caller isn't going to be receiving big accolades: one dancer who didn't know the caller previous asked me "Is that caller new? Seemed inexperienced and not really altogether here." Ouch. I also suspect the room layouts may get some comments --we may need to reevaluate the possibility of booking the same hotel again for next year.

I did get one good idea from a caller though: we should put clocks on each of the caller tables. I didn't realize it, but true, each room lacked its own clock so something to help the callers know how much time is left in their block would help. I'll see if I can find something suitable in time for our next fly-in.

I'm writing this on my flight from Phoenix back to the DC area. We've been in the air about a half-hour now, and this is the first breathing space I've had in nearly three days.

I had flown to Phoenix to meet with several others with my firm and visit three candidate data centers to replace our Savvis SC4 facility in Santa Clara, CA. The SC4 site is one of the oldest data centers in Silicon Valley and, frankly, it looks it: the air conditioning is subpar, the internal power distribution is insufficient for current-day server densities and so on. The place needs to be gutted and renovated from the ground up. We have our non-production machines housed there and while that was adequate in the past, our future plans require more than SC4 can offer.

Why Phoenix? We already have offices and staff there. There are a number of competing data centers, all cheaper than anything we could find in the Bay area. The climate lacks the hurricanes of the east coast, earthquakes of the west coast, tornadoes of the central south and terrorist threats of the capitol region. Still, I thought it was a bit insane to stuff equipment requiring heavy air conditioning into a desert, but Phoenix has become a regional nexus for a vast amount of cross-continental optical fibre networks: connectivity is easy and cheap here.

The folks in the contracting & purchasing division of our firm had already selected candidate sites; they and my upper management would be making decisions largely weighted by the cost of the facility and the overall negotiated package. My purpose was to was to look to how my systems engineering team would deploy, maintain and decommission equipment and our degree of satisfaction that the facilities each met our minimal power & network redundancy.

After a flurry of meetings and site visits Monday and Tuesday, I'm comfortable putting our equipment into any of these sites: they're well built, well connected, accessible with appropriate levels of security and meet our paycard compliance requirements. That said, each site had interesting quirks of their own.

The first location was CyrusOne, a new facility still under construction in Chandler, AZ. One bay is completed and ready for occupation: if we moved in, we could be among the first. The front office space is still being built out but will be done within a month. As a new building, they've built in a number of interesting architectural features to help channel hot air away from the floor into peaked roofs where the air is collected, chilled and recirculated into pressurized side wall containments which then channel the cool air to the pressurized floor. Rain water is collected for use in the chillers. Solar panels are being considered for supplementary power. It'll be a gorgeous, sexy building when it is completed.

Next, we looked at IO in Phoenix proper. The facility was originally built as a designer bottled water plant, although that firm went bankrupt, killed by its own fraudulent accounting. IO picked up the building for a song and rebuilt the factory floor into an extraordinary data center facility. Wisely, they kept the stunningly opulent lobby and front offices, some of which they rent out to firms with servers on the data center floor. Walking into the building was like walking into a luxury New York hotel.

The building is just down the street from the Van Buren street fibre nexus. Indeed, it's close enough we could get huge bandwidth with only two cans connected by string. Oddly, while we can make connections through this massive meeting point to nearly every major telecom player in North America, Comcast isn't one of them: they don't serve Arizona.

The data center itself had two flavours: the older “phase one,” a traditional data center floor with individually walled cages for each client. Their newer and vastly preferred “phase two” area uses their proprietary modules. These modules look like stainless steel cargo containers: one can install 14 cabinets down the center of the container, power & network connections fed from overhead trays. The air conditioning and power distribution systems are in separate lockers under the floor. This allows the maintenance to be performed on a module without ever entering the customer space above. Each modules has its own fire control system and its own entry lock system (your choice of physical key, badge, fingerprint scanner, iris scanner or any combination thereof). While these modules are all inside a common warehouse, they're designed to be weather resistant and could be deployed remotely as needed. IO also offers a larger version we affectionately called the “double-wide,” but that's larger than we need.

The third facility is a Digital Realty site located next door to the previously mentioned CyrusOne location in Chandler, AZ. It's an older building, originally constructed as a data center by a financial securities firm for their own use. Of all of the sites, this was easily the most bland and unglamourous. That said, it also probably has the longest track record and best uptime record of all of the facilities we examined. Our cage there would look largely like our existing facilities: a standard cage on the data center raised floor inside a nondescript building. What caught our eye with DRT, however, is how transparent and open they are about their maintenance procedures and their logs. They were open to letting us look through any of their log books to examine their past preventative maintenance, corrective actions, root cause analysis and more.

As an older facility, DRT's site wasn't up for LEEDS consideration and they used an open water system for their chillers, taking water off the municipal system and then returning it again after use. I've been burned by that kind of dependency on a constant outside water source at a previous employer and am not keen on that again. That said, they do maintain their own two 60,000 gallon tanks for backups and despite being in operation for years, have never had to tap their stocks.

DRT's facility, like all others, have onsite generators for backup power. They own their own electrical substation instead of simply having the utility's substation on their premises like CyrusOne. Since generators take a few seconds to spin up and reach required power outputs, all facilities have some sort of bridging power, typically a huge bank of batteries to provide up to 30 seconds of continuous megawatt-hours of energy. DRT offered the choice of batteries to bridge the power gap, or hitec flywheel generators. These are 12,000 pound flywheels in constant motion while there is external power: once external power is cut off, the flywheels continue rotating and begin acting as generators themselves while the diesel generators rev up. Personally, I prefer batteries: they're easier to check remotely to ensure they're charged and ready, and they're trivial to replace as they wear out. 12,000 pound flywheels aren't exactly trivial to fix or replace when the bearings go.

At the moment, I have no idea which data enter we'll go with: it'll 80% based on the bottom-line price for each. If Savvis plays ball with us, we might stick with SC4 for one more year but would hit the road in June of 2014. If Savvis doesn't play, we're outta there by June of this year. Exciting times!