Submerged!

Been a bit busy lately. So much so that I've almost submerged out of sight.

With the closure of my place of work we've been working extremely hard to decommission a pretty significant computing service. It's been tough.

Our kit (aging but still serviceable) has been split up and sent off to a number of other departments - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - not to mention some kind people who actually paid us for some of our older kit.

While our service has been shut down, it lives on in spirit.

Actually shutting down a large system cleanly was quite interesting. And, by and large, it did go down cleanly in an organised fashion, while being essentially functional right up to the bitter end. We've been shutting down and decommissioning kit steadily for weeks, and consolidating services onto fewer servers. Shutting a system down is the easy part - we've spend the last two days untangling the spaghetti of ten years worth of patch cables. One of my colleagues was still answering user support queries mid-afternoon yesterday - by early evening the system was down for good. This morning it got put into a lorry and the new owners should be receiving it soon. It just remains to send the last few bits of junk off to the local recycling company, hand in my keys, and put my feet up.