2005-07-26 13:53

by Vasil Kolev

Day one(23.07)
We managed to get up in the early morning (5:00) and got to the airport. There we found that Yavor had forgotten his documents, so he was sent back real quick with a cab to get them. We managed to get through customs in time, and to get on the plane (we almost lost chervarium, he hadn’t heard the call for the flight, and they had to call him individually).

The flight was nice, although we were in a plane with three seats at each row, I made Yavor to sit at the window, to see the view (the clouds were great). We landed normally at AMS, and after that with some trouble we managed to get train tickets and went to the train station. The trip was interesting, it was faster than the bulgarian trans, but everything around was flat…

We arrived at Boxtel, from there we got a lift from one of the volunteers, put up our tents for something like 20 minutes, and then we went to help where we can.

We helped in raising of some ot the big tents (we carried/put some big pillars, I climbed some ladders and did some interesting exercises), we cleaned up one of them, it was somewhat a day for hard work. I got a DECT phone (2170, if someone else is here :) ), it help a lot with the internal communication. In the afternoon we made a meeting with the main guy of the NOC, tomorrow we’ll be going directly there to make things work.

The place itself looks great, it (still) quiet, calm, soon there will be power everywhere (right now I’l powering my laptop from a socket in a pole-lamp).

Day two, morning (24.07,7:1

I woke up at 5am because of the cold. Got up with some hot swearing (which couldn’t make me warm), and after that I went to the showers (where the water was warm), go get a bath and to come to my senses. Coming back I saw chervarium smoking and shaking because of the same cold. We spoke a bit and went to the bar where there was hot coffee, and the sun really rose and made the day look pretty normal.

I really can’t remember the last time when I was awake at this hour and didn’t hate the whole world…
(interesting, looks like there are only a few people awake at this hour)

Day four, morning (26.07, 8:48)

Two exhausting days passed. We pulled all the cables for the network, I configured some servers and ran some services on them (two of the machines are in a HA cluster, they switch between them some services and have a dhcp server that replicates between them). I saw how a juniper M40 is configured (the interface is pretty nice, and the whole thing looks a lot better that most of the things I’ve seen).

The place is great, if you can get used to the thought that most places are wet, and that it’s raining a lot. Now most of the lights are working and through the night you can see some magnificent views, and when I put in my earplugs, I hear only the buzzing of the generators, which makes me go to sleep.
(I think that I haven’t mentioned that, but the place doesn’t have a connection to the main grid but about 10 generators, which we get power from)

It’s full with interesting people – in facf, I think that I still haven’t seen a boring guy :)

As a funny story I can mention that yesterday some water dripped on my laptop, the enter key stopped working, and I had to put it next to the air conditioner’s exhaust pipe to dry…

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