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Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:37:28 -0700
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@lsi.com>
To: Brian Stark <brian.stark@lsi.com>
Subject: general status update
Message-ID: <20090831103728.37d1f78d@ripper.onstor.net>
Organization: LSI
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Lab:

Had phone conversation with Karen Something, and later with Andy
Fernandez, and things are looking pretty good.  Just as I'd hoped, they
are completely on board with my plan to switch to copper for LAN in the
lab.  They have some budget to replace all our LAN and SAN switches
with Cisco kit, and so that's what we're going to do.  I'm going to try
and get some small 10GigE capability at the same time for a bit of a
backbone and for future needs of QA and Dev.  That effort will be
continuing this week.  Cisco 3560e and 3750e switchess.  Andy F. said
they would whip up a mini-design of the layout, and I can tweak it from
there, so that will be good.  I have to get them some sort of rough
port count.

Rich is now 40+ hours here, so that's good news.  I believe you got
Larry's report that there's a bit of a confusion with LSI help desk
regarding what to do with Lab tickets.  I'm assuming you'll be handling
that bit.

I asked if Shawn or Dave could help by doing the storage part of the
Lab upgrade, but I believe Dave said that wouldn't work, Shawn is too
busy or something.  So I think I'll try and get Rich to whip up
something in his copious spare time. You can view the lab plan on the
wiki as I keep updating it.

http://wiki.onstor.net/wiki/Lab#Bold_New_Lab_Plan_.28But_not_too_bold.21.29

TuxStor:

We're back on track somewhat, although I'm having a touch of trouble
with Bill telling Rendell to do the opposite of what I tell Rendell to
do, at least it seems that way to Rendell.  Nothing I can't handle.  I
think.

Max is apparently pregnant, because that's how he's acting.  We should
talk about how to handle the guys in India going forward, because right
now it seems like a real struggle to try and manage what they're doing
through an "extra hop."

I failed quite completely to get Max to agree to let me move the
opensol directory.  The only thing I can think of is that his ego
somehow got tied up in the whole thing, and when that happens he
apparently loses all ability to reason.

Grain of salt time:  Bill says that Max is completely refusing to work
on anything TuxStor related, doesn't want to port the threading
subsystem, doesn't want to manage the guys in India beyond passing
excruciatingly detailed task lists to them, etc.  It sounds right to
me, but I didn't personally witness the conversation, which means it
could be true, it could be false.

IT:

Folks are running around miffed about the Citrix situation.  I phoned
Arnaldo and he said he would dig up the Citrix credential information
so Larry or someone could administer it, but so far he hasn't responded
to my email.

Mightydog is similar.  Trin is saying they can't do anything because
they don't know what's going on with the machine or who to ask about
how it's configured, where various bits are located, etc.  Arnaldo says
he made a spreadsheet for them and gave it to Trin and Mini & Tonica.
Trin says he doesn't want to start backups until data for Ops,
Accounting, Support ... is moved off to somewhere else that they have
set aside for that, and since they don't know where that data is
located, they can't move it.  I'm not sure why moving that stuff is a
prerequisite, but that's what he told me last week.  I'll fire off an
email to see if I can coax that process along.

I had a relatively short conversation with Kathy Gauthier.  She tried
to lay some complete line of BS on me about how it's a requirement that
you have a minimum of 8 reports before you can be a manager.  I didn't
mention that that would seem to be not true.  They are going to install
whiteboards in the two tiny conference rooms, and phones and wired
ethernet in all the conference rooms as well.

That's enough for now.

Cheers,

a
