Lesson for the day
When somebody provides you with a password for a system, sit down with them and make sure that it works. Especially if they're going away for six weeks. Don't just ask if they're sure that's the correct one, have them watch you as they try it.

Better still, install ssh keys on the machine once you have access.

I have a client who's been handed to me, and my first experience with them has been "Oh dear, that password doesn't work. I don't have access to your system."

We do have physical access to the machine, so if we need to it may be possible to boot the machine from CD and directly change /etc/shadow. I really don't want to be doing that, especially given that root lives on a linux software RAID-5 drive, and I have no idea if my regular recovery tools will mount that without complaint.

The good news is that a person who may know the password will be back on Monday. Let's hope that solves things.

A moment of rest
The next month is pretty busy, with short-staffing and training courses. However I do have a small moment of rest before that starts. Both Friday (tomorrow) and Monday will be spent in my own office, and while I don't have a hope of completing the huge amount of work that I have outstanding, I expect to complete a significant portion.

Yes, I'm calling work "rest". It's restful in comparison to the remainder of the month. There's also the weekend, which will probably also be spent "resting".

SAGE-AU 2005
I've been accepted as both a tutorial presenter and technical speaker (with a double-slot) at SAGE-AU 2005. While the tutorial is on Perl (no surprise there), the presentation is on the joys of starting a small business, and how it can be very different to what most people expect. I've got plenty to write about, my main challenge (as always) is judging my audience.

For those who haven't attended a SAGE-AU conference before, they tend to be extremely well catered, and be filled with incredibly clueful people. It helps that this year has a lagoon, heated swimming pool, beach, and five-star accomodation.

The next month...
My plans for almost every weekday in May look something like this:

Rabbit
No luck in finding our lost rabbit, Shadow. We've looked throughout the property, bombed the surrounding area with leaflets, and put up posters. We're in the process of contacting animal shelters, in case he's turned up at one of them.

I'm not confident that we'll get a result, especially since we can't find any means by which he would have left the property. We're also at a loss as to what could have happened. A fox attack is a possibility, except Shadow would have had plenty of warning hearing the fox as it came over the fence, and has a great many fox-proof hiding places to which he could have run.

Handover
Our primary sysadmin is dissapearing for six weeks, so some of today is going to be spent doing handover for all of our customers' systems. I'm expecting to have a very busy two months coming up.

If you live in Melbourne, are experienced with Debian, and have six weeks of immediate availability for irregular sysadmin work, then now's a good time to get in touch. Moonlighters need not apply.

Paperwork
Jacinta tidied my desk and sorted my paperwork into stacks based upon priority. This makes me feel much better, but I can still expect to spend most of the day sorting it out.

Diving
On Friday Jacinta and I travelled to Portsea in order to get a few dives in. We stayed at the Portsea Hotel, who informed us that while "we were not directly above the live band, some sound may travel". It was true that we were not directly above the band, but if we were to have taken three steps into the corridor we would have been. Luckily the live band was very good, and so I slept quite happily despite the walls vibrating around me until 1am.

In the morning (6am) I awoke and visited Dive Victoria, and discovered that the 9am dive we had intended to go upon was cancelled, so we could all go back to bed.

Later, after breakfast and buoyancy checks, we departed upon an 11am dive to a shallow (10-16m) reef out in the bay. The dive went pretty well, but I didn't properly apply defog to my mask beforehand (meaning I had to clear it regularly), and Jacinta experienced a few minor difficulties.

The first dive got away late, and so there was a bit of running to-and-fro for our 1pm dive, particularly to get replacement tanks of air. This dive was done in a kelp forest, and was one of the best dives I've ever experienced in Victoria. A wide range of ascidians in a variety of colours, and blue devil fish everywhere. I'm used to having to look into caves and under ledges with a torch to find a blue devil, not being able to swim nose-to-nose with them in open water.

Our third dive was at 3pm, and of course by this stage we had to keep a close eye on our nitrogen levels. This dive was out to Castle Rock, a site that we'd dived a number of times before. The water was lovely and clear, and we saw a cuttlefish near the start of the dive. We were sharing the site with a number of new divers doing their open water, and we generally kept out of their way. I sure hope their buoyancy skills improve with practice.

It's well known that heavy exercise (especially carrying around heavy tank and belts filled with lead) acts as a flavour enhancer for food, especially Mexican. So on the way home we stopped by a fantastic Mexican resturant and finished our meals very quickly, not too surpising considering we had also missed lunch. After dinner it was just a long and tiresome trip back home, and a morning of rinsing and cleaning gear to look forward to.

Missing Rabbit
Our dear pet Rabbit, Shadow, hasn't been seen since Thursday evening. It could just be that with the unusually warm weather he's been snoozing under the house, especially since he's now grown his winter coat. However Shadow is a very companionable rabbit, and so takes many opportunities to check in on Jacinta and I, and distract us from whatever task we're performing to be petted.

We're a little concerned, because if something has happened to Shadow, we're not quite sure what it would be.