Chris

Bocas del Toro

On Saturday we set off from Boquete straight after breakfast. The trip to Bocas del Toro was a little simpler than the one to Boquete, due to a lack of anyone available to travel with us the Spanish school had upgraded us to a minibus that would go directly from Boquete to Bocas del Toro without going via David. The minibus arrived at the hostel and we could immediately see an issue. It appeared to be totally full of people and luggage. The drivers set about unloading all of the luggage from the bus and loading it onto the roof, something I can’t remember seeing since our time in Africa!

After a few minutes all of our luggage was on the roof and Alex, Laura, Luisa and I had commandeered the back row where we soon realised we were slightly less squashed than the rows in front of us.

Luisa is another of our classmates. She’s 19 and from Switzerland, very sweet and like the rest of the younger members of our group, very intelligent! She’s also on her gap year and aspires to become a vet. She has never studied Spanish before and so was originally placed in a lower Spanish group than us but, probably because she already speaks Italian, she has been quickly promoted through to our group! Luisa had a somewhat traumatic start to our trip with her bag being lost and then delayed for a few days. When it finally arrived everything was complete and intact, except for all of her underwear which had disappeared!

Climbing Volcan Baru – the highest mountain in Panama!

When first reading about Boquete, where we’d be spending a week with our Spanish school, Alex noted the opportunity to go up Volcan Baru, at 3,443 m (11,296 ft) the highest peak in Panamá, and the highest in Southern Central America. Alex was keen but when we looked up the hike we realised that a climb of 1,636 m (5,367 ft), starting at an altitude where you can experience altitude sickness, might be beyond us considering that neither of us do well at altitude without acclimatising!

The last thing that really made me think this was a bad idea was that in order to avoid the heat most people attempt the climb at night starting at midnight for a 6 hour hike to the summit in complete darkness.

There is another way though. You can visit the summit in a modified 4×4 that climbs up the rough track in 2 hours leaving at the only slightly more reasonable time of 3:30am.

Volcan Baru – as seen from our hostel on the outskirts of Boquete

As we approached our week in Boquete, there emerged two camps in our group. One group wanted to take the 4×4 up for $95 each, and the other wanted to hike, which without a guide is nearly free. There was, in fact, a 3rd group of two who thought the whole idea was insane and preferred to get some sleep.

Learning Spanish in Panamá

One of the main reasons for choosing Latin America for our travels was to improve our Spanish. We found a Spanish school whereby we can travel and learn at the same time.

On Sunday evening we had our introductory talk for the Spanish school. Our teacher, Sergio, had been detained by another engagement so it came to Camila, who was assisting us for the week, to give the introduction. After a brief intro she took each of us in turn for a one to one Spanish oral test. I was a little nervous and it didn’t help that the first question she asked me was “Que has hecho en Panamá?”. This uses the preterito perfecto tense which is not one that I’ve used before. I managed to answer some more questions but I didn’t come away feeling confident. Alex seemed to fare better, but her Spanish is better than mine so I wasn’t surprised.

Getting started in Panamá City

Our last few days at home were a bit of a blur, Alex finished work on Friday as planned. I had some extra work to finish off on Monday and Tuesday. Preparing to leave home for three months isn’t a typical experience. Last time we were leaving London permanently and it was barely managed chaos, this time has at least been a little less brutal. Even though we thought we were pretty much ready by Thursday morning, I still spent the day running around and predictably a few things didn’t get done. Our friend Terry gave us a lift to the station and we headed to London for a night in an airport hotel, before a 6:30am flight to Madrid and a connection to Panama City.

On the road again..

We returned from South America in April 2016, and in the last nine years, a lot has changed. After living in Bristol for a year, we moved to the Cotswolds and bought a 10-year renovation project house. After two major building projects and a whole raft of smaller renovations, the house is nearly finished. In this time, we’ve also both moved companies, experienced good and bad times, but along the way we’ve made a whole new set of friends in our adopted Cotswolds home near Stroud.

It’s time for another adventure. We’ve managed to arrange a three month sabbatical after some careful planning with both of our employers. While three months is the maximum that I can take, Alex has a little longer, so is taking the lead on getting us ready so that we can travel for nearly the entire time that I’m off work.

Throttling VMware Site Recovery Manager 5

In my day job as a VMware Architect I often come across strange problems which require some internet based research to solve. I generally assume that if I have a problem there’s a good chance that somewhere, someone else will have experienced the same or a similar problem and documented the solution. In this case I found almost nothing online so here’s a writeup!

I’ve been building a small SRM 5 implementation (licensed for 75 VMs) for a client who use NetApp FAS at both the primary and recovery sites with SnapMirror to replicate the data. The client have Fibre Channel disk at the primary site replicating to a single filer head with SATA disk attached at the DR site (with some additional fibre channel disk for VMs that are always powered on). When we first ran a simulated test we found that after the first 5 or 6 VMs had powered on the majority of the remainder experienced timeouts waiting for VMware Tools to start and looking at the VM console it was obvious that the VMs were hitting a disk bottleneck. The actual cause of the disk bottleneck wasn’t quite as simple as the fact that we were using SATA disk to recover from (this could form a completely separate writeup on the joys of deswizzling) but it was a big part of the problem.

The client has an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of 24 hours and SRM was completing the recovery plan within 1 hour. Even considering that there is additional work to fit into that 24 hour period it would be perfectly acceptable for SRM to take up to 10 hours to recover the VMs. While SRM was only taking 1 hour to recover the VMs we were seeing failed services in the Windows OS on the VMs and, since the task that waits for VMware tools was timing out after 300 seconds, VMs in subsequent priority groups were being powered on before their pre-requisite VMs were fully booted.

Muang Thai, Brighton

Muang Thai is situation near Brighton’s remaining pier, one road back from the seafront. From the outside Muang Thai looks like any other pleasant but fairly generic Thai restaurant. Inside, the decor is clean and light but very obviously a Thai restaurant. My meal consisted of a green papaya salad and a vegetable Thai Green curry with steamed rice all washed down with a couple if glasses of the house red wine.

Continue reading “Muang Thai, Brighton”

Day 2 – Sights, Sounds and Saris

First a photo:

Day 2 is our formal kick off. Formal because we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. We all introduced ourselves in turn. I’m used to the standard “Hi I’m Chris and I work in ITS, Server SPL, Microsoft and VMware delivery”. This time we all spoke about our background and how we ended up on this adventure. I was amazed to discover that everyone in the group had a fascinating story to tell. I’ve rarely met a group of people who are so open and honest amongst a group of virtual strangers. This could have easily been a stage for the more senior members of the group to talk about themselves at length, we are no stranger to self promotion. However everyone seemed keen to listen to everyone else and nobody used this as an opportunity to show off.

Continue reading “Day 2 – Sights, Sounds and Saris”

Bangalore or Bust

The following is my post from the official CSC blog:

Firstly, a quick introduction. My name is Chris Greenwood. I am an IBM employee based in London, England and this is the very first post from a journey that promises to be a great adventure.

I was lucky enough to be selected to participate in IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. I was assigned to the ‘India 9’ team (or Blue Tigers as we are commonly known) along with 11 others from 9 different countries. Unfortunately before we even left a broken ankle reduced our team of 12 to 11.

It’s now the end of my first day. I’m sitting in my hotel on the roof terrace. I’d like to say it’s peaceful but I’m surrounded by the noise of cars, rickshaws and bikes and the incessant sound of horns that seem to permeate everywhere you go. What follows is the story of my first 24 hours…..

Continue reading “Bangalore or Bust”

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31