It’s time to talk a little about what has been going on in my life.

New contract work

I started working for Guru Labs as a full-time contract employee on Wednesday. I will be helping them with a number of consulting projects, courseware development, and possibly doing some training at their Bountiful facility or out of state.

The contract is for 90-days. What happens after that remains to be seen.

From Wednesday to Friday, I worked on a very interesting project for a Guru Labs client which involved setting up a cluster of two HP/Compaq Proliant DL380s and a MSA1000 storage array.

Each of the servers was to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9). SLES9 includes the High-Availability Linux utilities like heartbeat and I used these to set up a cluster with failover capability with these two servers.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I set up two test machines with SLES9 and set up the heartbeat across an crossover ethernet cable. After putting the test machines through the steps of demonstrating they were effectively failing over and so forth, I did it for real with the client’s machines on Friday. Everything went well.

Incidentally, this was my first experience working with SUSE Linux. I like yast — the SUSE installer/configuration tool — but I haven’t dabbled enough to determine whether I like it more or less than Red Hat/Fedora.

So what’s up with Iodynamics?

Iodynamics is still here. In fact, Iodynamics is very busy right now which means my partner Mike is probably feeling like he should grow an extra set of arms. The truth is, we’re currently looking to see if we can find a person or two to work part-time to help us out.

I’ll be working on Iodynamics projects in the evenings and on weekends.

The end result is that Christine and the kids probably won’t be seeing much of me for the next three months, but that’s okay, right? We’ll have a decent Christmas this year.

XMission at eleven

Yesterday, my dad and I joined my brother-in-law Adam at XMission’s customer appreciation party held at the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple. This was a celebration of XMission’s 11 years in the Internet service provider business. XMission was the first ISP in Utah.

Pizza was provided for all who came (and a lot of people came). Pete Ashdown, XMission diety, spoke at 5 p.m., told a brief story about how XMission came to be and answered some questions from the audience.

After the party, I took Adam and my dad down to XMission’s data center, gave them a quick tour of the facility and showed them where our server is and told them of our plans to put more servers there.