If you’ve been following any of my previous posts you are probably aware of my last trip to Coronation which was, shall we say, less then a total success. As a quick recap, I found myself left with a satellite tuner server that was inaccessible and a backup Internet connection that reset itself every 3 hours. The situation was less then ideal, and I knew that if I left the status quo it would bother me endlessly until my next trip.
So…. I looked at my travel budget for the year and determined I had just enough leftover to squeeze another Coronation trip in for me and my good friend Mikhail.
Because I had just two very clearly defined goals and enough lead time to plan every aspect down to the last detail, I estimated I would only need two hours to work in Coronation, which meant I could theoretically pull this whole thing off over a two day trip. My biggest challenge was to book the flights as soon as possible since it was already October and I wanted to make sure I would arrive before snow and ice became a major concern on the roads.
I spent a couple days looking at flights and eventually settled on a Friday, November 1 departure with a Saturday return. It was late enough so that flights were still reasonably priced, but early enough so that it was before the snowy season. We would depart Victoria mid-morning on Friday, drive to Stettler where we would spend the night, leave early for Coronation the next day, do all the work and then drive the three hours back to Calgary and catch a 6:30PM flight home. It was a tight timeline, but I figured it would leave me at least 4 hours in Coronation – double my estimated amount of time.
Of course, I rarely seem to have a trip go as planned and before long more things would get bolted onto this trip before I even set foot in an airport.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my hosting company has some infrastructure in Calgary. While the immediately pressing issue of a failed RAID controller had been resolved by using a local friend as remote hands, it wasn’t long after that two of our RAM modules had failed, leaving our server with barely enough RAM to do it’s job. This bloody server was cursed! I figured since I was supposed to arrive in Calgary around noon, and the drive to Stettler was just 2 hours I would have enough time to stop by the datacenter and replace all the RAM modules in the server (why wait for another one to fail!) I also decided to bring an extra server with me, just in case replacing the RAM revealed even more problems. It was a lot for one trip, but I figured it would be do-able.
Of course, if this was the only scope extension the trip might even be considered reasonable, but in my life, things seem to snowball and my trip would quickly get even more complicated.
It just so happened that a good friend of mine who lives in London wanted to come out to visit me before the end of the year and of course I suggested that she join Mikhail and I for shenanigans in Coronation – after all it would be a truly unique experience of Canada she would be unlikely to get any other way… and wouldn’t you know it she accepted! My tight timeline was about to get even tighter!
My revised plan was as follows – Mikhail and I would fly to Calgary Friday mid-morning and we would pick up a rental car before proceeding to the datacenter to replace the RAM in the server. Afterwards, we would head back to the airport, pick up my friend and then the three of us would drive to Stettler. It meant we would arrive in Stettler a bit later, but I figured it would still be before 9pm and we could keep our original Coronation timeline. I booked an extra room at the Ramada and began planning the work which I would need to complete in record time.
Turning now to the work in Coronation. Recall there were two major tasks that I wanted to tackle. The first one was trivial – install a 24V boost power supply to bring the 12V from the battery up to 24V to power the WISP antenna. The converter was already in the shed, so all I needed to do was pre-make a wiring harness that I could plug directly into the converter. Easy.
The second issue was more complex. During a previous upgrade, I had completely broken my remote access to the satellite tuner server. Rather then messing around with the on site server, I decided to build out a new one, burn in test it at home, and then simply swap the servers in Coronation. I could resurrect the old server at some later date when I had more time.
My preparation went fairly smoothly; I cobbled together a new tuner server out of some spare PC parts, tested and mapped each and every tuner port for easy connection and burn-in tested the whole thing for more then a week. The night before my departure, I packed it all into a box (coincidentally the same box I took with me on my first trip) stacked it ontop of my Free Range Cloud server box and headed to bed for a full night of rest before my travels the next day.
Friday arrived, and my father was nice enough to pick me up and take me to Mikhail’s house before taking the two of us to the airport.
It was at this point that I discovered just how over-prepared Mikhail was.
Sometimes I forget how minimalist I can be when I travel. Enough fresh underwear and socks for each day, a toothbrush and basic toiletries along with a laptop and chargers was enough to keep me happy. Mikhail, on the other hand, was not a frequent traveler and had packed a bursting carry-on suitcase along with a full backpack. Because I had booked low-cost tickets they didn’t explicitly include carry-on, and while I briefly considered transplanting Mikhail’s items into my two boxes, I decided it would take too much time and figured we could probably just pay a fee at the gate for the extra baggage.
We arrived at the airport on time, the weather was nice and our flight had only been delayed 10 minutes. I skipped the baggage drop line and proceeded right to the oversize line with my two boxes. My Coronation server was fine, but the Free Range Cloud server was clearly very suspicious and the CATSA employee needed to open it and manually inspect the contents. First time that has happened to me with a server, hopefully it doesn’t end up being a trend because I seem to travel with servers a lot.
While the box inspection delayed things a bit, and the security line was long, we managed to breeze through in plenty of time to make our flight.
Recall how I mentioned Mikhail doesn’t travel often. I forgot to explain boarding groups to him, and that because we had the cheap tickets we were last to board. Imagine my surprise when he was not only allowed to board in one of the first groups, but the gate agent never even mentioned his bursting carry-on bag. Another airline hack to keep in mind??
Our flight into Calgary was uneventful, which is exactly what you want in a flight, and by 1pm we had managed to de-plane, walk across the entire airport, locate our boxes and head to the rental car counter.
For convenience, I had booked the rental car with the flight tickets, since the price difference was only around $10, however, once I got to the rental counter I was greeted with sticker shock. My $60 rental had magically ballooned to nearly $200. Apparently the price I was quoted conveniently omitted a bunch of bullshit fees and surcharges. I missed Turo already.
With my budget blown to smithereens, Mikhail and I managed to find our car and proceeded to the datacenter for part two of the day’s activities.
We arrived at the datacenter and I located the RAM modules and dragged the server box inside just in case we needed it. I got on the phone with my business partner Blair, had him power down the server and I managed to pull it from the rack. I quickly replaced the RAM, spent way too long trying to put the lid back on the server, slammed it back into the rack and reconnected the cables. Since Blair was still around, I had him login remotely and confirm that no other problems were showing up on the server. The entire operation had gone smoothly, almost too smoothly, and I eyed the replacement server wearily. Should I just replace the whole thing? Would we experience any more issues?
After a burning in the server for a few minutes, I decided to risk staying with the existing server, and we loaded the unopened server box back into the car, along with a parts server (used to harvest the RAID controller in the previous episode of Chris plays Coronation) that was being stored in the rack and headed back to the airport to pick up my friend from London once she arrived.
It wouldn’t be a complete trip if I didn’t try to bolt yet another stop onto my already action-packed day after learning that my Calgary friend had a stockpile of Juniper switches he was selling for cheap. On our way back to the airport, Mikhail and I stopped at his place to pick one up. While there, he happily reunited us with a long-lost bucket he had borrowed from my shack in Coronation on a previous trip. And so with the switch and bucket in tow, we headed back to the airport.
The Calgary airport has designated meeting areas for arrivals from different parts of the airport. This is actually a really useful system, and it’s super convenient to be able to tell someone “follow the signs for meeting place D,” rather then trying to describe in excruciating detail where in the airport I was.
The customs and immigration line was long, but by 7PM the three of us were reunited, and left to grab some dinner.
Dinner would end up being some reasonably expensive steaks at the Cattle Baron steakhouse near the datacenter, and while dinner took longer then I had hoped, I figured we could still make it to Stettler by 11PM, which would only set us back an hour the next morning. Sadly it meant that we would arrive after the hotel’s pool was set to close, but it was a small price to pay for a delicious meal.
I remembered the headlights this time, and before long we were back on the highway.
Not far outside of Calgary, we found ourselves in some of the thickest fog I had ever encountered. The entire experience felt like something out of Stephen King’s “the Mist” and I fully expected hoards of zombies or something worse to come shambling out of the fog towards our car. At it’s worst, I had maybe 5 car lengths of visibility and had to slow down. More time added to our commute.
Fortunately, the fog lifted by the time we reached Red Deer and we turned off the main highway and onto the two lane road which would take us to Stettler.
While I forgot about Mikhail’s lack of airline experience, I also forgot about his predisposition to car sickness, and it was not long after our departure from the main highway that we needed to pull over so he could catch his breath.
Some fresh air made him feel a but better and we all piled back into the car, Mikhail holding the bucket ‘just in case’ to complete our drive to Stettler.
Turns out the bucket was a good idea, because 20 minutes later I hear “Pull over I’m going to be sick” and immediately after the sounds of Mikhail throwing up into the bucket. How serendipitous that we had the bucket! I shudder to think what the cleaning bill for getting vomit out of a rental car would have been.
The rest of our drive to Stettler was uneventful, and we managed to check in before midnight and headed to our rooms to get some much needed sleep.
I slept like shit that night. I’m not sure if my brain was working overtime; worrying about the work the next day, or if I just didn’t like sleeping in a new bed, but I kept waking up every couple of hours and by 7AM I was ready to stop trying. Breakfast at the hotel was good – basically all the staples you could want (including bacon!) and Mikhail and I even managed to sneak a swim in, which helped me wake up a bit. The waterslide at the Ramada would have been better then the Canalta, had it been running, but because it was Winter it had been shut down for the season. Didn’t stop me from giving it a try though, but without the water running behind me I quickly got stuck and had to crawl out, much like being in a storm drain!
While the swim blew our timeline a bit, we still had more then enough time for the work I needed to do in Coronation, and by 10am the three of us were on the road again.
Our drive to Coronation was almost uneventful, except for the fact that we had to stop to pet some horses who were hanging out at the side of the road. It set us back another 15 minutes, but it was fun and I was actually quite surprised at how friendly the horses were.
By 11:30 we arrived in Coronation, and I began executing my remediation plan.
I got Mikhail mounting the power supply to the wall, while I turned to the server. Everything went generally according to plan, and I only blew my 2 hour estimate by about 15 minutes! By the time I locked up the shed, I had a functional server I could remotely access, and a WISP internet feed that stayed online reliably. A job well done!
The three of us stopped for lunch at the Coronation Cafe and had a really great conversation with the Filipino guy working the counter, learning all about how this was to be his first Alberta winter and about how challenging navigating the Canadian immigration system was. I wished him luck with the cold temperatures to follow!
We departed the cafe around 1:15, which would put us back at the airport for 4:15 – roughly 2 hours before our 6:30 flight home. I wanted to leave plenty of time since we had the box to deal with, along with the return of the rental car.
Google Maps took us on a different route then I had travelled before, and we actually got to see some really cool sights including a massive canyon and some beautiful bare trees with frost – basically like something out of a Christmas movie.
We made good time and got back to the airport just after 4:30 PM.
I pulled into the rental car drop off, and began unloading our bags and boxes from the vehicle. As soon as I opened the back hatch, I let out a groan of frustration – the goddamn junk server which I had planned to store in the Coronation shed was still in the car. In my rush, I had forgotten to unload it!
Being that I was at an airport and unattended items generally cause a major incident, I decided I was stuck taking the stupid server back with us – somehow squeezing it into the same box as the Free Range Cloud server.
We made it to the terminal, and I busied myself by re-packing the box, now with double the servers! Thankfully, they both fit although it was tight, and the box was now much heavier. We proceeded to oversize baggage and in a routine that was becoming all too familiar, the CATSA agent informed me he would need to open the box.
I felt a little bad for him since re-packing the box turned out to be a pain in the ass, but he’s the one who needed to open it in the first place, so ce’st la vie.
Security was a breeze, with only a handful of other people in the line, and it wasn’t long before the three of us found ourselves waiting outside the gate for boarding to begin.
Sadly, Mikhail’s confusion about boarding zones didn’t help us this time around, and we got an earful from the gate agent about his carry-on bag, but at least they let it on the flight (albeit as checked baggage) and we made the trip back to Victoria without incident.
My big take away from this experience is that I need to be more in touch with my travel companions – check in with them, make sure they know the situation and maybe pack bags together ahead of time. In the end, everything did work out and I continue to be impressed with how much stuff I managed to cram into extremely short trips. Sometimes, action-packed crazy town trips can work out for the best.