Casual Conversation

So, I had this idea a few months back, where I was thinking of bringing my kid along. The gist of the trip in question was that I was setting up a server cluster at the head office, and there was no real reason why I couldn't bring one of my kids along. And a few Lemmings wanted me to report back, so here I am.

Before making a decition and a plan, I kind of tried to poke and prod my son (I'll be referring to him as E from now on), trying to see if I could spark some curiosity with computery stuff beyond roblox. So I asked him open questions such as "When you're connecting to a roblox game, what are you connecting to? Where is that game running?" That way I got him curious about the concept of servers in general. At first he was a bit baffled how a 10000$ computer didn't even have a screen and keyboard, but I got to show him a few screenshots of IPMI, which was easy for him to understand.

After making the call that I could bring him along, I asked my boss, and he was fine with it. I then booked us hotel rooms "for free" as I had enough bonus points to use. Same thing for airline tickets, so there was no real extra cost to bring him along. Plus school doesn't start until 17th of August, so there were no conflicts either.

So, last sunday, the night before leaving, I sat him down in the kitchen to explain what we'd be doing, how, and why. I drew a basic network diagram of the server cluster and how we were going to wire up the network. I also was sure to let him knew that this wasn't something he needed to remember, I just wanted to show him the underlying concept. Besides, I know that his ADHD would've made it hard to remember it without physically tinkering with it. I had some SFP transcievers I could show him so that he could recognize a fiber connection when he saw one. Afterwards I showed him on a map where we'd be flying to, where our airport express train would take us, and where we'd be both staying and working. Afterwards I helped him make sure he had everything he needed for the trip; clothes, charger, etc. In addition to that, I suggested that he could hit the download button in the Netflix app on his phone so that he'd have something to watch while we travelled.

Monday:
The next morning I told him that he didn't really need to take his ADHD meds. There'd be so much for us to do anyway that there wouldn't really be many quiet moments where he could bounce off the walls. Plus, his concerta tends to mess with his appetite, and I've learned the hard way that traveling on an empty stomach is a really bad idea. Eat when you can - There aren't many opportunities to do so. We left the house after saying goodbye to everyone, and after a quick stop by the store to pick up some road snacks we were underway for the roughly one hour drive to the rather small regional airport. I've traveled through it enough times to know exactly how much time we needed, so we were done checking in and all that 10 minutes before boarding. After takeoff I suggested that now would be a good time to watch some of those downloaded netflix shows. But no, he was perfecly satisfied just looking out the window for an hour.
We touched down around 10:15, and went through the airport without much of note. We grabbed our checked bags we headed for the airport express train. Actually, both checked luggages were mine, but one of them was on his ticket. I had a bunch of spare parts and stuff that I wanted to bring to the office permanently. It wasn't heavy, it was just big. I had to chuckle when I saw how people reacted to a 12 year old kid rolling behind him a Pelicase that looked like it weighed more than him.
Oh, and one thing: We live in a very very small town that someone somehow managed to squeeze into the terrain, between a fjord and two mountains. While we've traveled through larger cities, he's not really used to anything else than this pretty quiet place. When we got off the airport express train and out of our station in the center of The Big City his first sentence was "I can now see more people than I've ever met in my entire life". Yup, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring him in the first place - The world is big, and our corner of it is very very small. Some perspective is always nice.
We went straight to the office where he got to meet my boss and a coworker. Yup, we're only three people. We're a pretty small company, but it's a standalone unit that serves as a support arm for one of the biggest corporations you've (n)ever heard of, so we have all the resources we need without much of the corporate wank that comes along with large companies.
I was then showed the pile of hardware that was waiting for us. Servers, switches, cables, and PDUs. No server rack, though. After getting an update from the vendor, we sadly learned that the rack wouldn't arrive in time, but we worked around it by building what I refer to as a server pile: Everything stacked, connected, and ready for use, just so we could get started.
But first I wanted to show him something: The office we have is in a building that basically rents out office units to smaller companies, but the building as a whole is rather large. And once you have a company owning a building like that they want to make it as cool and attractive as possible in terms of decorations, including getting some novelty items. So on my phone I now have a picture of E sitting in the drivers seat of a DMC DeLorean in the buildings lobby.
After that, as well as some lunch we got to work by opening boxes and making sure we had everything we needed. We then started wiring up the basics just so we could prepare the machines. So now E knows how to check the Meraki dashboard to find the DHCP address of a server, log in to IPMI on that server, and configure its static address. This took most of the day. After that we checked into the hotel, and as we got up pretty early, we just decided to get some fast food delivered and and chill at the hotel for the rest of the day.

Tuesday:
First we carried it all into the "server room" (It's another office right next to our actual office, but we use it as a server room), and then we ran all the cables we needed. It was actually pretty convenient to have his small hands available for reaching into the hole we drilled in the walls to get the cables done. After this it was time to begin setting up the servers. As these are operating in a cluster, they would all be set up the same way, except hostname and IP, so the plan was that I'd set up the first server, then he'd set up the next two with my support, and then we'd see if he could set up the last one by himself. It took some time for me to figure out how to get the procedure ready, but once done it was fairly straight forward. So E know knows how to set up Debian 12 on mdraid with redundant grub install to two harddrives.
After work we visited a reptile park right around the corner. While it's called a reptile park they have other stuff as well, and since E has always been fascinated by turtles he really enjoyed being able to touch a rather big one, as well as a bearded dragon.

Wednesday:
Last day for E. He would be traveling home in the evening, while I stayed behind. I figured it probably wouldn't be very interesting for him to see dad pushing buttons for five days straight. Most of the day was spent doing some basic setup stuff like installing packages and managing all of the disks installed in the servers. E now knows how to configure RAID6. Later in the day we got a call that our rack was right around the corner. And hoboy, this turned out to be quite the adventure on its own. Well, when we were ordering the rack, we basically just wanted to make sure that it was big enough for any future needs, so we ended up with 42U. And it's a pretty old building, so ceiling clearance wasn't always there. I think we had 5mm to spare when we were manhandling the rack into the elevator. This took the rest of the day - When we finally had the rack in the server room, it was time to head back to the hotel and pack his things.
The return trip was pretty uneventful. Turns out that at 12 year old you're allowed to fly alone without someone from the airline escorting you everywhere, and as he's flown before I didn't really feel like he needed it either. I just got one of those security gate passes so that we could get something to eat in the terminal together. "But I don't know where to walk when I land?" He asked. Well, I just told him to follow the other passengers, and eventually he'd meet his aunt. Afterwards I walked him to the gate and made sure he got on his plane. Once the plane took off I headed back to the hotel. While on the train I checked flightradar to make sure that his flight didn't have to divert or anything. He landed while I was still on the train.