the worlds gone mad

Now I had a design and a half empty shell it was time to get work. The biggest problem with working on a boat is space, you are forever moving things and constantly tidying up. All the materials had to be orderd to arrive just in time for when they were needed as there is no space on the boat to store them. The remoteness of the marina and not having a car didn’t help, I wasted a lot of hours getting local buses to go hire a van or waiting on deliveries.

I purposely bought a boat that needed work so that I could customise it to my needs and learn how everything works. The wooden interior was dated and gloomy, it only had 1 DC socket, no working AC (no fuse board or inverter), no hot water (water heater broken) and a rusted up stove with 1 radiator run off it. After 5 months of hardship and an ever decreasing bank balance whether that was a good idea is debatable…..

When it comes to working with steel it is a bit outside my comfort zone so I got the professionals in to do the blacking of the hull and a few different things to the cabin shell.

Oh a boat, how do you know it wont sink………..

The initial idea behind this blog was to have a medium to store and share notes on the different technologies I worked on in an searchable manner. I have decided to step back from work and take a year out so this new life tab of the blog will be for all things non-IT related. I still plan to write technology based blogs over this time (got a few automation projects and Azure tips to share), however this is unlikely to start happening until later into next year.

This post goes through the deployment of a HA pair of F5 BIG-IP LTMs in Azure. Like with most vendors the F5 solutions is documented as part of ARM templates, I personally prefer to pick these things apart and first build them manually to better understand what is going on under the hood. A more cynical person may suggest they do this on purpose to try and hide all the fudges needed to make their solution work in a public cloud.

Information on running packet captures and debugging commands to follow traffic flows.