Yes, I've been assigned to this new Letter Ops project for 2 days now. I've not actually met anyone from the project team, I have no idea what's expected of me, and the last thing I've been told is that we've told the project management that we're not providing any Linux boxes because 'it's a platform issue, not an ECM one'. Goody goody. I'm already the bad guy! On the plus side, I am going to be colocated over in Trent – which means another beefy desktop to play about with. I think I'll stick the latest build of Ubuntu:Dapper Drake on it, assuming the project is going to have the Linux-y slant I expect it to.
I've been beating my head against Solaris networking and Resonate the last 2 days, in an attempt to get the SIT/UAT environment ready for a deployment of Capital One's new Mortgages/Insurance website. It's utter madness, the legalities around having to have a separate domain for selling different projects. The thing that really gets to me is the fact that no-one even thought to worry about how the redirection would work in dev/test, meaning that every environment we have with the code in points at the as-of-now-defunct capitalonemortgages.co.uk. This is such a simple thing to parameterise (thanks to our wonderful build/deploy tools, 'envmgr'), and the dev team seem adamant that it's too complicated to worry about for now. Muppets, frankly – it's as simple as simple can be, and I'd do it myself if it weren't for the new audit compliance junk that's recently hit us with regard to group write access within ClearCase.
Anyway – I've been struggling through some mad old documentation for our website/ecommerce setup, and have only just discovered that resonate requires a loopback logical address set up for the Virtual IP that it's hosting. I've scripted up the config and told my team – it's the kind of thing that shouldn't change, but will. So, I discovered that the DNS entries pointing to our shiny new resonate-clustered IPs hadn't had appropriate firewall mods raised. This meant that no internal desktop could even resolve the IP the new DNS entries pointed at. Thrilling stuff. I had a fumble about, and ended up hacking a different environment's main DNS/IP pair to host the new site code. No-one seems particularly bothered, which is a good thing for me. If this all goes smoothly on Thursday, it'll be one to remember for end-of-year performance ratings!
Angry with old letting agents for charging me for providing a reference to new letting agents. £22.50 'admin' fees are ridiculous, and should be banned. Time for a cup of decent tea.
