Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Despite myself, I found today's training course on the Bribery Act 2010 more interesting than expected.

Obviously written in response to the worst excesses of the arms industry, it casts its definitions of bribery and corruption impressively wide: not only is an offence to accept a bribe, but it is an offence to agree to accept a bribe; and, because the act deals in intentions rather than outcomes, it is an offence to attempt to obtain an advantage even if the expected advantage doesn't actually materialise.

I'm on an ITIL course which, despite the best efforts of the trainer, must rank as the most appalling boring thing I've ever done. And I've still got two more days and an exam to go. Goodness only knows how I'm going to make it through without suffering some form of catastrophic mental breakdown...

More GPFS training, this time focused on troubleshooting and problem diagnosis. Most of the information was familiar — check the network connectivity, query the waiters, test the health of the disc subsystem — but it was useful to see the information packaged up as a series of case studies and to see the commands in use.

Whenever I get asked to look into a GPFS performance issue, I tend to look at each end of the problem — the application performance, then the disc and network performance — and skip GPFS in the middle, just because the default logs are both spectacularly unhelpful and distributed over every node in the cluster. So having a chance to see IBM's diagnostic methods in action, to see just how much information is available via the mmdiag command.

Our Friday afternoon webinar on IBM's Toolkit for Event Analysis and Logging (TEAL) proved less successful than Tueday's on ISNM. We started late after being hit by a range of technical problems — the speaker ended up having to dial in from his cell phone — while the combination of the material and the time of day meant that engagement was somewhat suboptimal. But it wasn't a complete bust: some interesting points came up and some came out with the observation that if the interconnect is shared but the two TEAL instances are separate then some alerts may be duplicated by the separate instances will not be able to correctly identify neighbour down events.

As of this afternoon, I am now officially trained in fire safety. Having completed a slightly patronising on-line course, I now know what fire exit signs look like, what sort of fire extinguisher to use on what sort of fire, what a fire triangle is, and what not to do when the fire alarm sounds.

So, far so obvious, especially for those us with a background working in physical science labs, but I guess these things need saying. Most people in HPC remember the great NCEP fire of September 1999, which saw their C90 totalled after the fire department used dry powder extinguishers on the still running system — the consensus in Princeton, a week or two after the event, was that the methods used to put out the fire had caused far more damage than the original conflagration.

Still, I picked up a few interesting bits of info from today's course. I discovered that a clear desk policy is vital if fires are to be prevented from spreading. No big surprise this; I can't think of a single civil service safety or security course that hasn't recommended locking up documents as a universal cure for anything that ails you. I also learnt the temperature at which human muscle tissue starts to break down, which might come in handy if I decide to move into crime scene forensics or necromancy or something...

Course wasn't as bad as expected, thanks to the combination of a good instructor and bulk quantities of cheap but effective coffee/battery acid. As time went on and we learnt extra details about DiskXtender, I started to notice more and more similarities between DX and FileTek's StorHouse right down to Centera integration...