More than three weeks after Katrina came ashore in Louisiana, the Coast Guard says the storm’s surges and winds unleashed at least 40 oil spills — 10 of which are major — from ruptured pipelines and battered oil-storage facilities. In total, at least 193,000 barrels of oil and other petrochemicals were blown or driven by tides across the fragile marshy ecosystems and populated areas of the Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, southeast of New Orleans. The spills, the largest ever loss of oil in the state, approach the scale of the famous 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill, which dumped 240,000 barrels of crude oil in the fish-rich waters of Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

So it’s just not true. But it’s being repeatedly stated to support this idea of expanded drilling. And even if we did lift the moratorium tomorrow, how much oil would that produce and what benefit would that realistically have on gas prices.? I suspect that an reasonable cost/benefit analysis that includes and honest risk assessment is going to find that the benefits simply aren’t there.

And as long as we’re on the subject of risk, a commenter to YRHT’s post points us to this map of Natural Gas piplines in the Continental US. Look at that existing concentration of pipelines in the Western Gulf and particularly over Southern LA. Is it not abundantly clear that protecting South LA is critical to national Energy policy and security? Is it not abundantly clear that in exchange for providing Natural Gas and Oil to the rest of the continental US, we’ve sacrificed our own coastline and protection from hurricanes? Do people outside of LA have any idea what Port Fourchon is? Can we really afford to massively expand oil drilling and exploration and increasing the associated risk when we haven’t yet protected the resources we already have? Have we fully exhausted the possibilities in the existing areas where drilling and exploration are permitted?

It’s an entirely man-made problem and risk. And the consequences of not addressing it has potentially catastrophic national consequences. This is not hippy-dippy “environmentalism.” If you think we’re not the proverbial canary in the coal-mine, keep a close eye on our neighbors to the North. And keep enjoying those gas prices climbing ever higher. The first big jump, if you recall, came after 8/2005 and it’s been steadily climbing ever since.

“I was for the pay raise before I was against it” heh.

In the meantime, boy-wonder governor Bobby Jindal has repeatedly stated that even though he opposes the raise as “irresponsible”, he won’t veto it because legislators are “responsible for their own affairs. Well, of course the problem is, Jindal promised during his 2007 campaign to veto just such a pay raise.

Hilarity ensues.

In the meantime, John Alario withdrew a bill to raise firefighter and police pay approximately $500/month because he knew it wouldn’t pass muster with legislator’s for this session. Here’s an idea. How about legislator’s decrease their pay raise by the amount needed to fund Alario’s pay raise for police and firefighters? I mean, as long, as we’re doing the “Louisiana 2 Step” and all.

Of course most of the talk ’round the office this morning concerns the NOAA model details published yesterday. in many ways, this is not news. But, a lot of people don’t have a clear understanding of their current risk. Maybe now they have a little bit better idea.

Oh, and I’ve had my problems with Legato, er, EMC NetWorker over the past few years, but none of the above was NetWorker bug-related and it handled all that mess far more gracefully than I would’ve expected. It failed and restarted backups automatically, and recoving indexes was a simple process. I’ve done some bootstrap recoveries for DR tests in the past, but this was the real deal. So hoorah for NetWorker for doing something right and not being the cause of sleepless nights (yes. 7.3.3 is very stable in our busy,big, and hopelessly complex environment).

And of course there has been the inevitable management foolishness. Most of the above didn’t affect anything outside of “my world” but as soon as some manager sees a status update, they try and correlate some technical issue they’re having to my event and I have to answer all this foolishness. Politely. With little or no sleep. Not to mention, more foolishness sending me out of town for what looks to me like pure politics and little technical merit, but maybe I’m missing something. Nah, probably not. it’s a dog and pony show. I wonder if I’m a dog, or a pony?

Anyway, if anybody out there has some really super secret vacation ideas they want to share, send em my way. My wife and I really haven’t been on a vacation alone since 2004, our honeymoon. And, apparently, travel is, like, really expensive right now.

Vegas a few weeks ago didn’t do much for me for the vacation side, as mentioned below. But as a technical/educational trip, it was pretty cool. I’m not much of an EMC fanboy. We use both Netapp and Sun/HDS storage here in addition to EMC. There are things about those platforms I like a lot better than the mish-mash of storage options EMC presents.

I attended a ton of technical sessions. There was a large VMWare presence there, which was pretty cool. We are deploying VMWare ESX, though I’m not directly involved in that activity. We handle the storage for ‘em though as well as the backups. To that end, I got really interested in Avamar for doing our VMWare guest backups. We did an eval here and it looks pretty good and it looks like we’re actually going to get it. I went to several sessions with that as well and feel a lot more comfortable with having stuck my neck out for this solution.

I’m sure there will be headaches in the deployment, but it should help. And I’ll be able to remove some complexity from our Networker deployment and free up some index space, by potentially removing 100 or more clients and putting them in Avamar. File servers, vmware guests, and some DMZ-resident hosts are all good candidates for that. Unlike a lot of EMC NetWorker customers, we aren’t initially interested in using NetWorker 7.4 with nominally-integrated Avamar. One of my goals is to reduce my complexity and index space in our huge NetWorker setup. So dividing and conquering actualy simplifies things for me rather than having one global namespace. I had some conversations with some EMC techies (and not sales techies) and they said that was unique in their experience.

But the reality for me is, even if the software can technically scale to 1000+ clients processing 100s of terabytes/week of backups (and DR copies), can it really be managed by humans at that point?  At such a scale, can you even get a window to patch things, do upgrades, etc? And if you do have a problem, the pain you have and the pain that problem can cause can be quite big indeed.  Obviously for me it already is with ~800 clients and about 70TB/week. (see paragraph one)
I’m still digesting material from the convention and looking forward to getting my hands on the presentation material. Like I said, it was pretty interesting stuff. If you’re, ya know, a geek.

Note: Yes. this is the most technical/geeky thing I’ve posted in years.

One thing about venturing into the great world outside of the Isle d’Orleans is the trepidation I had about encountering others and telling them where I lived. There are so many misconceptions about New Orleans and so little real news. And of course, there are the haters and the wingnuts. Would I encounter any? Would I be able to contain the rage that so easily bubbles to the surface and instead be a coherent witness and ambassador for my home?

I am pleased to say that to a person, everyone I encountered was sympathic and genuinely open and interested to here a bit about what has really been going on here. They all had an awareness that their understanding of “what is going on down there” is limited to traditional press reporting. Still, it’s hard to answer the inevitable “how’s the rebuilding going?” in any easy, short fashion.

Some wanted to hear a bit more than others and I always warned that I could literally go on for days on end about this subject. One guy was really surprised to learn that 80% of the people got out in advance of the storm and that from the perspective of those who had the means to escape, this had been the most successful evacuation yet. “When you see it on TV it looks like tons of people stayed behind.” “No,” I said, “the poor people who didn’t own cars and didn’t have any option to escape even if they wanted to stayed behind” “Wow. I didn’t realize that”.

I never once encountered the negativity others have when they’ve travelled or that I’ve seen on the net. I found it encouraging.

I had never been to Vegas prior to this trip. It was … okay …. It didn’t help matters that I was by myself on this trip. If the wife had been able to break away, we could have made a vacation out of it. As it was, I decided to hang on to my cash since someone else was footing the bill and get the most out of the EMCWorld geek experience. I’ll have a bit more on that thorough geeking out a bit later.

I don’t mind the occassional work travel, but this trip just wasn’t as productive as I’d have liked.

It’s still okay to laugh. This picture from Jazz Fest this past weekend was taken by a friend of a friend and forwarded to me

“That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do -rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is,” McCain Said

What a MORON. Hey Johnnie, how about you do some research and get back to us. You can start with today’s latimes editorial by John Barry and sorta work your way backwards to 8/29/2005 through the tens of thousands of words that have been written since then. Maybe get your priorities straight instead of seeking endorsements from complete nutjobs.

h/t: thinknola.com more here

Besides, I kinda like working from home every once in a while.

It’s a little hard to work with all the screeching tires and ruckus. The stunt shot is for “Final Destination IV:3D“. Sounds like that’ll be a classic. Apparently it’s not time for this particular character to do so the actress walks casually across an intersection as cars go careening and skidding around her. They filmed it about 30 times, presumably to get all those 3D angles. The stunt double had nerves of steel and eventually the actress was able to overcome her fear and do the shot as well. My little Saturn may have made the cut in the background

They managed to wrap up around the time the Coast Guard copter started buzzing the neighborhood and probably ruining their sound. I’m trying to get a handle on how this was supposed to be an “undisclosed location” for the Summit dinner. There were cops and guards and guys in government badges all over the place. There were temporary No Parking signs on two major thoroughfares for 4 hours leading straight from downtown to Commander’s Palace stapled on every pole and tree two days ahead of the event.

We decided to talk our daily workout through the neighborhood. We were thwarted about a block and half from Washington Avenue. We were both amused by one of the neighbors complaining as he tried to walk his little dogs. “Apparently this isn’t America anymore when HE comes to town. Might as well move to Puerto Rico. Can’t even take a walk in my own neighborhood.” He ranted at anyone who was nearby.

We rounded a corner and I noticed former Gulf Coast Recovery Czar Donald Powell getting out of a car. J sorta recognized him, but sorta didn’t. Eyes met and they started chatting about the craziness in the neighborhood with the movie shoot and the presidential visit. Powell asked if we had been in the movie. Jennifer tells him know but we thought our dogs should have been in it. Powell agreed. It was all really kinda strange. When I told J who it was, she said she wished she could have asked for where to send the bill for all the appointments she lost out on today because her clients couldn’t get to her office.

We saw the motorcades blow by a short while later. We also chatted with a neighbor. She’s apparently taken a new job as an assistant to an actor working another movie filming in town. We actually received a UPS delivery from Amazon for him that was misaddressed to our house and had both thought, “I wonder if….nah.”

It’s pretty entertaining being in the center of the universe on an off Monday afternoon. But I’m ready for the more “normal” excitement of the next week and a half of Jazz Fest activity.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a rep with $unnamed_vendor and was actually glad to get the call. While supporting a few small OS instances isn’t a big deal, it becomes unweildy fast in a shop like ours. We need to be able to support Linux as easily and seamlessly as possibly alongside all that Solaris. Building servers from CD, ad-hoc patching, etc just doesn’t work at this scale. So $unnamed_vendor set up an on-site meeting after we discussed some of the potential and some particulars about our environment.

So last night I got an email from the rep. He and his engineer had gotten to their hotel and just wanted to confirm our physical address so they could google map it and head on over in the morning. So I sent it on over. I got a call at 7am this morning. The good fellas from $unnamed_vendor had flown to Little Rock. While he had been calling a 504 area code and talking to me in the New Orleans area, all of the sales were coming through Little Rock. We do have ample staff there and a full scale data center, but the people they needed to talk to were all here. I could have put him on site at the Little Rock office at least, but we’re short at least one guy up there right now and I didn’t think I could round up busy, non-management staff for a sales pitch on such short notice.

Gave me a good chuckle for the day. I had to rub it in a little bit, too: “y’all come down and maybe we’ll have some lunch or dinner when you come? So how was the BBQ anyway?”