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Back on the Fire

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Well, I arrived back on the scene of the Cavity Lake forest fire today. After driving all day yesterday to get back from AdTech in Chicago, it feels good to no longer be in a car, even though it’s 85 degrees out. While I was gone, Jay added the directional antennas to the towers, so we’re getting 87% signal strength at the basecamp now, so the directionals are helping quite a bit.

While I was in Chicago, there was a changeout of some of the crews that were reaching the end of their 14 day rotation. Now there are crews from NY, CA, and other far reaching places, so it’s neet meeting and talking to these people, many of which this is their first time in northern Minnesota.

Well, even though I’m at the fire, it doesn’t mean that there is a shortage of work for me to do. Especially after everything that went on at AdTech, I now have enough work to keep me busy for a couple months, so my time is spent keeping the Mesh Network working, and getting things in line for Wi-Fi Guys, and our new project.

From AdTech:

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So Tom, Chris, Eric and I have spent the past 2 days running around Chicago to their hotels, converting them to the new Radius platform, as well as getting the ads set up on the redirect pages. In the middle of all this, we have spent a majority of time at AdTech. So far, the show has been very good, very insightful, and now we have a good contact list of people / businesses to partner with for this upcoming ad project.

Going to Chicago

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It’s been a week since I arrived at the Cavity Lake forest fire incident, but today I needed to leave to go to Chicago for an Ad-Tech conference. I’m going down there with Wi-Fi Guys, another one of my clients, because it ties in well with a project that we are working on that deals with advertising/marketing.

So last night, after finishing up at the basecamp around 2200, I packed up and drove back to Duluth, arriving at 0130. I woke up this morning around 0730, went to walmart to pick up some stuff for the Chicago trip, and am now at my office getting things in order here. I’m going to meet Chris and Tom at my place around 1030. We’ll drive down today, and drive back on Wednesday. Then Thursday morning I get to drive back up the Gunflint Trail to the incident again, and stay for the remainder of the fire, which will probably burn until the end of August, lest mother nature put it out with a good rain.

I don’t think that I’ve eaten healthier, or felt better in the past few years, than I have this past week. Living and working on a forest fire crew has been a great experience. I havent had pop in over a week, drinking TONS of water, and eating large, hearty, well balanced meals. Sure, I’m tired and exhausted, but I’d rather fall asleep tired, than lay in bed wide awake, just because it’s time to go to sleep, when I’m not tired.

I’m thinking long and hard about taking the 4-day class to get my base certification for forest fire fighting. Then I’ll be a little more qualified to walk around camp, as well as know what to do and what not to do should the fire suddenly spread and overtake the camp. If I were to stop doing my business, I would most probably go and train to be a fire fighter (structure fire) and then do wildland/forest fires in the summertime. Although, I foresee continuing to do the Tactical Satellite stuff for a long while yet.

5 Cups of coffee

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5 cups of coffee is what it took to get me going this morning. Last night we were back in a cabin, but I was so tired last night, that I passed out, and woke up in the same position I fell asleep in (I normally roll around a bit). So today I woke up with a stiff neck because I wasn’t in the best position when I fell asleep.

Today, the basecamp is transitioning from a Type 2 command team to a Type 1 team. This is due to the complexity of the fire, *not* due to any deficiency in the existing team. The current team has been doing a fantastic job, but with the size of the fire, the number of people involved, and the fact that the fire is pushing the Canadian border, a Type 1 team is recommended.

Along with the transition, the basecamp is moving down the road to a patch of land the county cleared off. So that means that Jay and I get to go place Mesh repeaters to feed the new camp with internet and phones. Perhaps today we’ll get to trek out on some ridges to deploy the masts.

Yesterday, the National Guard showed up with a blackhawk, and I got some pictures of it, along with a video clip of it taking off. Here they are:

Blackhawk takeoff
Blackhawk approach

The power of Raid

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So the other week I was in the datacenter doing a routine check on one of our servers, and I noticed that Chimera (our MySQL server) had a blinking orange light on it, and it was making this *beep beep beep* noise.  Great!   The Raid array has failed, or possibly the hard drive.

Well it doesn’t really matter now, because I’m at the datacenter again preparing to fix this problem.

Thankfully, we use RAID.  RAID stands for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (some claim the I stands for independent).  In particular, this server runs RAID 1, or mirroring.  That means that it has 2 hard drives, and one mirrors the other in real time, so both drives contain the exact same data.

This is a good thing, because in the case that the hard drive is actually bad, I just call up Dell, they send me a new hard drive, and I re-image the array off the good disk.  But hopefully the case is that the array just broke it’s sync, and I just need to rebuild it.  In any case, it means I have to take our database server offline to do this process, which means thousands of databases for our shared hosting customers are going to be offline for a wee bit.

I feel really bad about this, because it means that they will have an interruption of service, but then again, they are only paying $10/mo to share a server cluster with hundreds of other customers.  This kind of stuff comes with the territory.  Unlike our major dedicated server customers who have their own database servers and redunant load balancers etc.  Then again, they are paying hundreds of dollars per month for the assurance that they will not have an outage.

This is a little off topic, but as I’m sitting in the datacenter here backing up the server before this process (in case we need to do a bare-bones re-install), a centipede like bug just ran across the floor from under the rack.  I think I need to tell the DC techs that there are bugs in the datacenter.

Anyways, the main point of this little tirade is that any reputable web host will have redundancy built into their system for cases like this.  Modern hardware and computer equipment is not infallible, rather it is quite fallible and will break or fail at some point.  The key is to know what you are going to do when it happens, and what you are going to do to minimize the situation with pre-planning.

Possibly deployment any time now

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I just got a call from Jay, one of my clients, that we built a rapid deployable emercency communications system for.  It looks like there is a 90% probability of being called out to deployment within the next few days.  If we are deployed, it means I get to pack my bags and head to Wyoming.  So right now I’m scrambling to make sure everything is all set with the system so we can get out there and it works.

I’m excited about this, I had a blast last summer when we deployed the system at the Alpine Lake fire, so I’m looking forward to this now.  The only downfall is that my friend Will is getting married the 24th of June, and I wanted to go to his wedding.  It also means that I’ll be away from Melanie and my son for a while.

On my to-do list.

  • Complete the startup page for the system’s intranet
  • Make sure all components in the system are functional
  • Do laundry, pack a suitcase
  • Reconcile my bank statements and get as caught up in my billing as possible
  • Quick test my remote access capabilities to the office, so I can still get work done on the road.  (Remote desktop is going to be a pain through the satellite)
  • Pick up another TV series on DVD to watch

Well, back to work!

Paintball Fun

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So tonight is Monday. That means Monday night paintball at Pastor Jeff’s house.  Jeff has 20 acres of land up on McQuade rd off of HWY 61 north of Duluth.  Every Monday, a bunch of people get together there and play paintball in his woods.  Tonight, we had about 20 guys, so we had some good sized teams.

During the 3rd game (capture the flag), I was defending our flag.  I was hiding behind it up on a small ridge, shooting down through the trees at the opposing team as they were rushing for the flag.  One of them got a lucky shot and hit me in the face.  Everyone thought it was a Kodak moment, so I grabbed my phone and had some pics snapped.

The ball hit me right in the mouth area, and splattered on through my cheek.  I still have a faint paintball aftertaste.    It definitely was a fun time tonight, I look forward to next week!

Segway Police!

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Well the other day I was walking to work, and I saw a Duluth Police Officer riding down the street on a segway. I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of it at the time, but luckily, when I was leaving work, I saw an officer on the segway again. So I whipped out my phone and took a picture. Well, I thought I did, instead, I ended up taking a short video clip.

Why does the Duluth Police Department waste money on Segways for their officers to ride around on? I have a lot of respect for our police force, but with the city facing bankruptcy, why do they waste money like this? I’d rather see the police riding around on bicycles than segways.

Although I do think that it is an interesting idea, and I look forward to snapping more pics & vids of the segways when I get the chance.

What goes around comes around…

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I came across this site today : http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/ where this guy is telling the world about how his friend’s sidekick was stolen, and he is shaming them into apologizing and giving it back.

I like what this guy is doing, he is standing up for his beliefs, and making a public example of a group of people without moral conscience. I hope that his friend gets her sidekick back, and I hope the people involved each learn their lesson. I also think that it’s nice to see he’s not using all this publicity to make a buck. Heck, I’d probably put adsense or yahoo publisher network on there if I was doing that, just to recoup some of the bandwidth costs.

As of now, it looks like he’s gone through a couple different hosts to host a forum for people to chat on, and they’ve all crashed. I’m going to contact him and see if he’d be interested in giving it one more go with a forum, since I do have a couple dual xeons that are not active right now (although they are earmarked for another client, they are not yet in use). And from the looks of it, the other hosts had set up phpBB2, while I would set up punbb. And use a separate dedicated mysql server.

We’ll see. Hats off to Evan!

So, Funny Story!

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Last Thursday, I was registered to go to a Microsoft training seminar for Registered Partners.  My business is a Microsoft Registered Partner.  So I woke up at 6am on Thursday, and hit the road by 7am to make the long trek from Duluth Minnesota to Madison Wisconsin (6hr drive).    The conference started at 1pm.

Well the 2.5hrs to Eau Claire Wisconsin went well, but when I hit Eau Claire, it started to snow.  The snow then proceeded to turn into a blizzard with limited visibility.  This of course brought back memories of driving through Wisconsin over new years during a snow storm (when I went into the ditch and totalled my car).  And here I was, driving my brand new car that I hadn’t yet fully learned how it handled in snowy conditions.

Thankfully the hand of God was upon me and I made it to Madison safely, and by 1pm!  As I pulled into the Alliant Energy Center, I saw on the big billboard in big blaring letters: “Microsoft Seminar CANCELLED”.  Oh great!  I drove 6 hours through a blizzard for nothing!  So I called up a friend who used google to give me directions to the nearest Panera Bread so I could at least use their free Wi-Fi internet access to try to get some work done.  I also stopped by Best Buy and picked up Microsoft Streets & Trips with GPS for my laptop.  I hung around Madison for 4-5 hours and left around 6pm.  I wanted to wait and see if the storm would subside.  Nope, it got worse!

By the time I left, there was 8-10 inches on the ground, the roads were not plowed, so I was driving around town in at least 6 inches of snow, thankfully my car is like a tank in the snow with its nice winter snow tires.

The drive back to Duluth was long and tiring.  A 360 mile trip at 45mph with limited visibility.  Every few miles I would see someone in the ditch.  By the time I made it back to Eau Claire, it was around 9:30pm, I used my Mapping software with GPS to find a restaraunt, I didn’t want to eat McDonalds again, and didn’t feel like getting out into the storm to ask for directions.  The GPS navigated me right to a Fazolis Italian Restaraunt.

I got back to Duluth around 11:30pm, and went to my office to check my email.  And that is when I found out that I had a meeting at 10am in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis / St.Paul).  So I had to get up early again on Friday and drive to the cities to meet with a potential client.  Luckily the meeting went well and I closed the deal and now have another web-design contract.  So I guess it was worth it.

Just too much driving and getting up early this past week.