A beautiful dusk shot I happened upon!

Battery Backups and The Lord's Wind.

Adminisk8or

04/02/2023

It's been a more busy week than I would've expected. I guess I'll start from the beginning.

I've had a long standing project at work (it's gone on for months) trying to solve the mystery of why a battery backup wasn't providing power at one of our clients with a pretty important network infrastructure. Finally, Monday, with the help of our electrician, we solved the issue... the only thing is, I'm not entirely sure how we did it, but we did. To explain the specifics would be more boring than most people would care for (2 phase power, step down transformers, etc.) but suffice to say, it was a fantastic load off of my to-do list!

I also decided to try something brave and bold. I obtained a 24-port SPF 10 Base-T Dell switch some time ago, and never got around to actually utilizing it, because I was afraid it would be too loud in our kitchen closet. I pulled it out, and after a little dust off, and after it booted up, I found it was actually not too loud! Excited to use this to replace my UniFi Aggregate switch, I decided to set it up one night this last week. I got it all preconfigured, and mapped the ports to the right VLANs and trunks, and then replaced it. After doing so, I gave the usual quick test of "can I get to the internet" and it was a success! ...or so I thought. I then tried getting to some of my network servers and resources, and found that something was afoot, as everything was connecting... but hardly so. Some hours into the early morning of diagnosing later, I came to the realization that for some reason, the switch wasn't playing nicely with Jumbo Packets. And of course, by then, I had already decommissioned my old switch. I was about to give up and set my whole network to just use normal packet sizes... but seeing how much of a headache that was going to be, I realized it would be just as worth it, and more, to replace the old switch and reconfigure it. To make a long story short, it was a long night for nothing.

But on the bright side, I found time this weekend to clean out my storage closet, and in doing so, found a UPS I really needed to install on my network rack, so that's much better, now!

But the best story of this week was an unexpected journey- and no, it wasn't to The Lonely Mountain. Early Saturday morning (like 5 AM), I got up to use the restroom, and check some on-call related things for work, when I noticed my in-laws family group chat had a few posts- not uncommon. But the post I saw was from my brother-in-law, who is going through school right now with his wife and almost two-year-old baby. They are superb people, and very wise, and pretty poor; and he's nearing finishing his computer science degree. The message was that he was using his laptop to do some coding, when his charger started smoking and then kicked the bucket. He ordered a new one, but it wouldn't be there in time, and the only other thing he had was a MacBook- and as anyone anywhere knows, switching operating systems mid-project is pretty much one of the worst things to try and adapt to. Seeing his plight, a thought came to me. I had read, or listened, or something- a story about some missionaries who were traveling between pacific islands, and as they were on their way, the winds on the sea seemed to come to a halt. They prayed the winds would come back and bring them back on the right course, but it seemed that their prayers went unanswered, and no miraculous wind from The Lord came. Then, one of the men who were with these missionaries went to the rear of the boat, and untethered the rowboat, and told the missionaries to get in, and they began to row towards their destination. As one of the missionaries came to realize, this man, that day, was The Lord's wind.

Remembering this story, I realized it was exceptionally likely that I had something in the way of a solution sitting around at my place to fix the problem my brother-in-law described. It turns out, that was mostly true- I had to craft together a charger, because I had one that was the right current, but the wrong tip- thankfully I've had enough experience doing this that I don't feel sheepish about doing it now. But then there was the other obstacle- my brother-in-law lives one state over, with a drive of about 3 hours one-way. Still, I remembered being in college pretty recently, myself- and not only that, but he's going through with a child to take care of. I decided to offer to bring it up his way, and later that day, that's just what I did. After my wife got off work, we drove all the way out and I brought him the rescue supply needed. We also enjoyed a dinner and a brief hour or so together, before we had to split back down the freeway to our place- but that day, I was very grateful I could be "The Lord's wind".

And that's pretty much the stories for this week; I think that's enough rambling, anyway. Until next week, see ya!