Our first port of call

And so, here as requested, and for a few more posts, is a mini-journal of our Great Tour to attend our friend's wedding in Fiji. Hopefully this will also provide a decent aide-mémoire so we'll be better able to reminisce about our travels long after we've returned to the grind of normal life.

Saturday saw us install the holiday custodians who would be looking after things in our absence and then it was off to Heathrow in our (upgraded to a Volvo XC70, Tom was very pleased to see) hire car. By the time we'd returned that, checked-in, got through security and had taken the trek across T1 to our gate it was almost time for us to board. The flight across the pond and beyond was very comfortable, Air NZ doing a great job as we've come to expect.

Despite worrying noises from the crew when we landed at LAX, US Immigration wasn't too bad at all and we were quickly sorted and in our hire car, this time a (ridiculously large) Chevy Tahoe. With him and her pretty much asleep I faithfully followed the sat-nav to our hotel. It wasn't until after a good hour's driving with no sign of a freeway that I realised the sat-nav had been left calculating the shortest route. This would have been great in the day as I was following the old coast-hugging Pacific Highway but as it was pitch dark I replanned to the fastest route and we arrived to our hotel shortly after.

Sunday: Up for breakfast reasonably early and then out. With the coastal weather being a little overcast we decided to have a look inland and headed for Julian and the Cleveland forest beyond. We managed to find a very quiet parking area in the woods and Tom had his first taste of taking control of an all American V8 monster; needless to say, he seemed to quite enjoy the experience. From there we headed down at a leisurely pace to San Diego and headed further south to San Ysidro, just on the Mexican border facing Tijuana. By now the sun was out in all it's force and I for one could not stand too much time in the open. As we set off north the lack of decent signage almost caused us to head towards the border - scary! We stopped in San Diego old town for a while, saw the immense Midway at the harbourside and gently headed north, eventually finding some more retail and then tea in Carlsbad.

Monday: An early breakfast again and it was off to Sea World in San Deigo. The day was overcast and almost damp. Thankfully this kept the number of visitors and therefore the queues down to very reasonable levels - I can't imagine what the place must be like when the carparks are full. The sea lions, Shamu and everything else lived up to expectations and it was easy to stay there for the bulk of the day. We called at the hotel (to dry off from the water rides) and then returned to Carlsbad to explore more of the retail we'd clocked the night before. To finish the day we ate in Ruby's all-American diner, the Fifties must have been a fun time.

Tuesday: One more early breakfast and we set off for Mojave. The drive up through LA was interesting, seeing lots of names that we recognised. Climbing up from the coast was spectacular, as was arriving at the edge of the first desert at Palmdale. I was quite excited to get some photos of an airplane graveyard at Mojave itself and it took us a while to figure out what the massive tubes were resting on the railroad carriages. Looking north-west provided the answer - they were all tower sections for windmills and I suspect I'll never see a larger farm of the things. We continued along the route of one of the settler's trails to Tehachapi and then followed the descent to Arvin. Again, the change in landscapes was nothing short of amazing and I think I understand why arriving settler's felt the need to turn to religion.

When stopped for Starbucks I'd spotted Hungry Valley on our route back to LA so we decided to investigate. This SVRA (State Vehicular Recreational Area) is a huge valley dedicated to burning around in 4x4s, quads and bikes. It was deserted and we had a fantastic couple of hours scaring ourselves silly driving around goat-tracks and tackling far too severe slopes. As it was so very empty, Tom took his next driving lesson and even my good lady had a go. Top, top fun for $5. The last stop was the Holywood hills (nice) followed by Hollywood proper (not nice) and then back to LAX to prepare for our flight to Fiji.

Silence is golden

Many moons ago I posted a happy tale of LAN renovation and my delight in then owning a "cool and quiet" switching infrastructure. Alas, 30 months of dust and uptime had resulted in one of the devices becoming a bit of a problem, not least to my wife who had to endure it constantly whining (I hope those words are in the right order!).

The SRW2008MP 8-port PoE switch has a fan in its (huge) power-brick and also a fan within its case. Both of these now sound very unhappy with varying degrees of vibration and volume. Whilst I was searching t'Web for replacement fans I stumbled across what seemed to be a much better solution. Cisco now offer a fourth tier of product, fitting neatly after their SOHO and "Business Series" but before the fully-featured Catalyst range. An ESW-540-8P-K9 is the smallest (8-port) gigabit model of the new "Small Business Pro" ESW 500 range. Apart from increased performance and many other supported features, crucially this device is listed as "fanless" - hopefully that would be true of the PSU as well.

Setting the thing up was a breeze using the web-based interface. Rather than simply transposing the settings from the old device I took the opportunity to do some proper tidying up. Following a little re-patching (the new model has a separate combo-fibre/copper uplink and so is effectively a nine port device) everything sprang back into life. Of course, there was one major difference. Apart from a smaller device and power-brick than its predecessor, there were no fans - in fact, no noise at all. Happy days!

Or so it seemed.  When I looked to confirm syslog messages from the new switch were reaching my Splunk server I discovered that this (virtual) machine was apparently AWOL. I'd configured three switch uplinks and two VMware ESXi hosts as trunks and had allowed the necessary VLANs for my environment. Therein lies the gotcha. Looking in the logs on the switch I saw...

%2SWPORT-W-LOCKPORTACTIVE: A packet with source MAC 00:0c:29:81:21:a7 tried to access through port g6 which is locked

...and sure enough, looking deeper down in the configuration, I discovered all eight ports were configured by default with port security, allowing only three active MACs at a time. Some sort of warning when configuring a port as a trunk would have been a nice touch. Fixing the problem was easy but I bet this setting will be the cause of many a support call.

I suppose, bearing my mind my day job, I should be happy that Cisco thought some on-by-default security would be a good thing. I can't help but feel my experience is a typical example of why most people will simply turn off all that good stuff and enjoy their life just as they've always done.