Railroad pictures of the day
![[Portland Union Station enjoys the sunny winter weather]](/~orc/Portland/unionstationsilhouette.jpg)
![[Two Amtrak F69s peek under the trainshed at Portland Union Station]](/~orc/Portland/twotrainsatunionstation.jpg)
A few years ago, I was a systems administrator for a Portland-area nonprofit, and I set up an internal network for them that had some, um, interesting compromises; this nonprofit, as nonprofits often are, is perpetually short of money, and one of the ways that it saved money on its network was to piggyback off the internet connection of another local nonprofit. This other nonprofit didn't have a permanent system administrator, and worse yet there wasn't any sort of formal agreement on how the network connection was attached, so basically at any time the network connection could go *poof* in a puff of logic when someone who didn't realize that it was serving two organizations went in and, um, fixed it.
Eventually this situation cleared up, and both nonprofits shared the network connection with minimal fuss for 3-4 years. A couple of weeks ago, I got a phone call from someone at the nonprofit I adminned for (doing work for a nonprofit is somewhat like checking into the Hotel California) saying that "Oh, we moved the server and now the network won't work." I asked to make certain that there were no other changes, and was assured that no, everything was the same except that the server had been moved, so I said that as soon as I got over my winter cold I'd come down and try to fix it.
Today the cold was better enough so that I decided to run down to fix the server. The server turned out to be fine -- it was balanced on the top of a file cabinet, and it didn't have a monitor plugged in, but other than that it was fine. The network connection, on the other hand, had been completely reprovisioned and our connection to the outside world was sitting inside a little Linksys firewall/router/switch box, which was cheerfully refusing to route any of our traffic and, furthermore, was refusing to offer dhcp connections so I couldn't even get the server to talk to this Brave New Network.
So, since I'd already eaten my lunch hour up to get there and see that "nothing" was not quite nothing, I had to bail and flee for work after suggesting that we bail on the shared network connection (I said "let me know when it comes in and I'll reattach the server" as I bolted for the door), and here's where the railroad picture comes in. This nonprofit is at Union Station, so I managed to get a couple of pictures of the station and Amtrak before I walked over to the bus stop for the 20 minute bus ride across downtown.