TGIF

SWMBO quite surprised me today by suggesting we disconnect our VoIP service.  Suits me fine, I've been pushing it for about a year now.  With two $400 cap mobiles in the house I don't see the point any more, so why pay the monthly tariff?

Interesting day at work today... brains trust tier 3 team and our vendor locked themselves out of a rather significant piece of kit 700km away from anywhere convenient.  :)  Idiots.  And firewall problems currently mean the disaster recovery solution is a no go.  My solution:  SSH to a small alarm collector box in the site, which I know is hardwired to the out-of-band management interface on the isolated device.  Set up the port to simulate a console session, then bind a TCP port to the physical serial interface.  Now spawn a telnet session in loopback against the TCP port, so the session is aimed out across the physical link to the network element.  Bewdy, login prompt!  Dig through a log from a couple of months ago for the encrypted CLI auth details, and now I have root on the box.  :)  From there it's a simple command to enable SSH cut-through from the EMS and tier 3's bacon is saved.

Go tier 2!!!!  The look on the tier 3 manager's face was priceless.

24/7 roster starts Monday, how did I end up with Monday as an SDO??  Can I live with the strain?  (Who wrote the bloody roster...)  Frankly the best part is we're all no longed in the same place at the same time, so a lot of the management bullshit will die away naturally, and we should have some peace and quiet to get on with it.  Got a lot to learn, and I need to get the hangers-on out of the road so I can get some quality hands-on time going.

Must put a brew down tomorrow, I am down to about 30 litres of hooch.  This is unsatisfactory.