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Today was the first full day on the road with the tour group, all of us piling into the van at early o’clock and starting our journey to the monuments of the Gallipoli campaign.

A few things we learnt on the way out, before the scenery started…

Istanbul’s a city of 17 million people and 4 million cars, thankfully we were going in the “outbound” direction this morning so traffic wasn’t terrible. We’re traffic going the other direction, I have a feeling we may still be there. It was surprising to me that it seems that people just hang out on the side of highways, waiting for lifts. There were literally hundreds of people as we left the city, just hanging out, looking like they were ready for work.

Realising that breakfast was part of the hotel stay really made my morning. Procuring that which sustains me was a little bit concerning after last night’s adventure, and I really wasn’t looking forward to stumbling out into the street, half asleep looking for food.

We weren’t due to meet up with the tour until 1300 today, so we went back to Gülhane park for a wander and to explore more of the space. What a lovely area - beautiful parkways and even thought it’s clearly all due to be replanted soon - the gardens are lovely. We got our first good look (on foot) of the “new city” across the bay; it’s truly amazing how many people clearly live in this area, the gateway between Europe and Asia.

Transit day, our flight was due to leave at 10:15am, so to get there in time we were up before 0600.

Caught the train from Covent Garden to Green Park, transferred to the Victoria line down to London Victoria station. From there it was a rather pleasant journey on the Gatwick Express to the airport.

Victoria station is a bit of a mess, there’s construction around a large section of the outside and GPS doesn’t work so you can’t find where you are until you do half a lap.

Given it was raining before we arose, we chose a few things on the things-to-do list which were generally indoors. The first of these was the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunker complex that was used for most of the second world war to run the show. There’s a lovely self-paced audio tour of the facilities almost exactly as they were, along with an expanded museum area dedicated to Churchill’s life. A truly inspiring man, well worth learning about.

All the tube!

Heathrow Express to Paddington station, what a lightning run. A lovely transit system that whisks you away from the airport to the city at great speed, depositing you at a central hub of transit. In this case, Paddington station, which allowed us to navigate our way through the myriad tunnels, all alike, to London Victoria Station via the tube.

We found the location of our first night’s stay after doing a lap and a half of Victoria station (I had forgotten that Google Maps works offline on my phone :)) The Holly House Hotel is an adorable converted walk-up with 26 cosy rooms. Ours had two double beds and a king single along with an ensuite, which for 50 quid a night was amazingly good value. The four floors of stairs was a test of my knee joints which I would have rapidly failed had we stayed much longer. The included continental breakfast made the start of the day much easier as well.

I’m travelling with AuntyMary to London for nearly a week, then heading to Turkey for the balance of a month. This’d be a lot easier if it weren’t for a few niggling issues:

• I live in Australia, so it’s taking us at least 25 hours and change to get there.
• I’m a freakishly tall biped with a busted knee.
• I can’t afford business class flights.

The first flight was pretty good, a 3/3/3 layout Boeing 777 with a spare seat between us for stretching out. The second flight’s been a little squishy, packed into a 3/4/3 layout Airbus A380, completely filled to the gills. It’s a lovely quiet plane, something I couldn’t say for the 777, and well fitted out for all and sundry. It’s just not made for giants with shoulders that hang over the arm rests and poke people in the ears. :(

Not much to talk about in this post as you’d imagine, I’m still sitting in the airport waiting to leave.

On our final itinerary check a couple of days ago, we realised that somehow I’d completely messed up the time zones of the flights about four months ago, booking one less night of accommodation than we actually need! Bookings.com to the rescue, and we have found a “cosy” little place near London Victoria Station which is cheap, if nothing else :)

Editing backups isn’t possible on VSX clusters, which is ridiculous, and checking their full config isn’t possible from any of the GUIs, so it’s shell time.

SSH to the appliance you’re trying to deal with, and run show configuration backup-scheduled from clish. This’ll show you both the specific backup configuration and the schedule as well.

Here’s an example of a backup that SCPs to a remote host, twice a week at 0130.

Just for future reference, to update the management certificate…

• You’ll need to upload the cert/key as a PKCS12 file, with a password. Given it’s a single password per file, put the same thing in both the fields.
• To find the “alias” run keytool -list -storetype pkcs12 -keystore <filename> and look for the line ending with PrivateKeyEntry
• You have to edit manager-web.cfg in the installation directory to reflect the new key name, the field is https.key and the value is the key name you gave it when uploading.
• Once you’ve done that, restart the JSCAPE MFT Server service.

Go find some cute puppy pictures to look at, you’ll need them to feel better about yourself. :)

Sunday, rest day. A day to find peaceful ways to explore culture and ourselves. Thus, we had everyone over for bacon and eggs with all the trimmings. :)

The National Library of Australia has an exhibition entitled “Melodrama in Meiji Japan” all about the last years of the original use of traditional woodcuts, through the eyes of a collection curated by a UNSW professor over many years, recently donated to the LIbrary.