For those who are just joining us, and for anyone else, these are archived at http://petroiniraq.blogspot.com.

I've put a couple pictures up there, nothing dramatic, just pictures of "home" and work, plus a picture of me taken early last week.

I've been here almost a month, and the routine is settling in. I did have a bit of excitement last week--one of our SAN guys was going to do an upgrade && hardware replacement at our installation in Balad, and I was sent up to backstop him--in case something blew up...umm...if something went wrong I'd be close at hand to fix it, rather than having to go over a high latency network.

Speaking of which, I finally got internet access working in my room. I did a ping back to mutiny.bounty.org, which is sitting in a colo facility in Santa Clara California, and was getting TTLs of 46, and round trip times of over 6000ms.

Not going to be playin Counter Strike over *that* link, lemme tell you...

Anyway, so we were scheduled to go to Balad, which is about 45 or 50 miles up the road.

The preference in theater is to travel by air. The Army doesn't really consider the roads around here to be safe enough for us to just drive. Apparently the people in charge have never done rush hour in Chicago. Actually, I think the streets here, at least on Victory Base and in Balad are in better shape than most of them in Chicago.

When a Contractor/Civilian is traveling around Iraq on military assets you're basically going "Space Available", which means that you make a reservation, then show up, then *if* they have room you get on. Military people have priority, and Generals *always* have priority.

We flew up to Balad with Dell's "Service Delivery Manager". He was intending to fly up on Tuesday evening, fix a couple servers[1] and fly back on Wednesday Night. He was most annoyed that his helo got *50 FEET* off the ground and was called back so a Navy "4-star" could get where ever he wanted to go. RHIP and all, right?

The SAN upgrade went about as smooth as any of these things ever go. He had to upgrade the flare code on both sets of storage processors, and the firmware on all four switches. He actually had to bump it three times to get to the latest. Fortunately he did everything right, and things actually worked.

Yeah, I was shocked too.

But that meant that I didn't really get a chance to do anything. Which was cool.

Balad is a *LOT* nicer base than Victory in most respects. They have more sidewalks, and better facilities. Or at least I think they do because they have an indoor pool, which I took advantage of twice. There is a pool here on base, but (1) it's a smaller outdoor pool, and (2) it's in the brit's compound. Rumor has it that as soon as the brits pull out the Army is going to drain it.

There are lots of rumors, but that's the Military for you.

Balad also gets hit more than Victory does, so I guess it's a bit of a tradeoff.

I still haven't noticed any attacks since I've been here.

We flew back on Thursday evening with no problems. I guess god was just punishing the Dell Rep for being a Dell Rep.

Anyway, not much is happening, so there's not much to talk about. Which is probably good.

Regards,
Petro.
:wq


[1]Rumor has it that last year there was a big push to source a lot of our computer equipment through "local" (meaning Iraqi) companies. Some of these companies would get a bid from Dell's Federal group, then turn around and purchase the machines from the commercial side *without* the warranty, giving a MUCH larger margin. Apparently the push to source our hardware through local companies has greatly diminished.