Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

The dining-room ceiling was repainted yesterday, along with the kitchen and living-room ceilings, too, because they run seamlessly into the dining-room. I must say, the painters did a nice job; better than the gang we had in last time.

We’re almost back to normal. Tomorrow afternoon, the lamps will be rehung over the table and the smoke detector reseated.

At that point, it’ll be as if the leak had never happened. Well, almost. There are a few tell-tale signs of the trauma that the ceiling has endured: the painted surface is visibly rougher in a couple of places and there are some slight seams at the edges of the former hole, where the filler meets the original ceiling.

All in all, though, I’m amazed that there’s so little evidence of the very intrusive work that was done. Everyone involved in the chain of repair has done an impressive job. That fact alone is quite surprising to me. We’ve had a very good contractor orchestrating the repair and I must say that it’s been great to be insulated from the process by this fellow. I’ve had to deal only with him and he has organised and dealt with everyone who needed to be brought in.

That’s how it should work, of course, but all too often, I find myself fulfilling the role of project manager. It’s been particularly nice to have a different experience this time, given the complexity of finding and fixing the problem. There’s been a minimum of fuss and the work has been completed quite quickly. It’s great to be able to leave on holiday this Sunday without any fear of the state we’ll find the place in on our return.

Our reclusive, vexatious leak has finally been tracked down.

A professional leak detection company, called in by our insurance company, came in with infra-red equipment and a very impressive-looking endoscope and proceeded to go poking around the house.

Eventually, the leak was tracked down with the endoscope to the most obvious area, directly above the brown stains on the dining-room ceiling. The workman showed me the image picked up by the endoscope and I could see translucent beads reflecting light. According to the workman, these were unmistakably droplets of water on a copper pipe. I had to take his word for it, because, to me, they looked like lens flare.

A few days later, the workmen I’d brought on board to fix the leak came in and started removing a big chunk of the dining-room ceiling. I quickly left the room when the work got under way, because, quite apart from the dust and other debris flying around the room from the plaster and insulation, I find the spectacle of a part of our house being destroyed vaguely stressful.

After a while, the contractor came and found me to show me the work they had done. A gaping rectangular hole now loomed above the dining-room table. Pipes and conduits led from holes in the upper layer of plywood and crossed the space to some unseen destination. Water stains were clearly visible on this plywood layer, as well as on the beams.

Unfortunately, though, the source of the actual leak remained a mystery. The water had clearly come from above the plywood layer, which meant that it was actually located somewhere in the bathroom on the first floor, not in the ceiling. The ceiling was simply where the water was ending up, because there was nowhere else to go until the ceiling tore.

Interestingly. there was also no sign of the alleged copper pipe that had supposedly shown drops of water on the endoscope’s screen.

This was quite a downer. Not only had the leak not been found, but its origin lay somewhere in the bathroom, where there are no visible pipes. That spelt more destruction upstairs.

Since the leak had previously reared its head three times, but only while we were on holiday, we were now forced, as a last resort, to emulate the circumstances of such an absence. This meant putting the thermostat in holiday mode, which effectively meant shutting off the heating and the hot water supply. It was warm outside, so maintaining a comfortable temperature in the house wasn’t a problem. It did, however, entail embarking on a period of cold showers.

Sure enough, after a couple of days, drops of water finally started to fall from the hole in the ceiling. This time, I was glad, because the leak was revealing itself; somewhat.

The water was emanating from a hole in the the plywood board, around the area of the worst staining. This confirmed what we already strongly suspected, namely that the leak was somewhere in the bathroom on the first floor.

I went upstairs to the only area of accessible pipes, behind the shower cabinet. I unscrewed the wooden panel that provides access to the shower’s steam generator unit and dangled a builder’s lamp down the inside of the wall.

After threading my fingers through and around various obstacles that I could barely negotiate, I felt a sudden drip of water.. and then another… and then another.

It was a minor miracle. The leak had been found in the one tiny area of the bathroom that could just about be examined without hammering holes in the wall.

A couple of days later, the workmen returned and I showed them where I had found the leak. They then sawed a hole in the bathroom wall to reveal the pipes and, sure enough, there was a dripping valve at the back. Quite why someone had felt it necessary to install a valve in a place where it’s physically impossible to bleed the system is a puzzle that none of us has been able to solve.

In fact, there were actually three of these valves and two of them were leaking. The plumber removed all three of them and plugged the connectors to which they had been attached.

Downstairs, the workmen stuffed the dining-room ceiling with new insulation and covered it with plasterboard. That was a week ago.

Today, they came back and plastered over the boards, sealing the hole and creating a smooth and seamlessly even surface with the old ceiling. They also placed a wooden hatch over the hole in the bathroom wall upstairs, which is conveniently located between two shelves in a storage niche, so it won’t require further repair work.

Next week, the painter comes to paint over the plasterboard, at which point the ceiling should theoretically be as good as new again. I’ll be amazed if no visible trace remains of the demolition they performed in that spot.

It’s a great relief to have finally found this stubborn leak. First we thought our leaking boiler had caused the damage, so we had the boiler repaired and the ceiling painted, but then it happened again. This time, we thought it was a leaking towel radiator, so we had that repaired, too. Then it happened again, only worse then ever, with the ceiling actually bursting on this occasion.

Assuming there isn’t a fourth leak somewhere, we’ve finally got the bastard. Now we can go on holiday without fearing what kind of carnage will greet us on our return, although I suspect we won’t truly believe the problem is fixed until we get back from our next holiday and find the house in the same state we left it.

This is becoming a recurring theme.

We returned from Disneyland yesterday evening at about 21:30. The thought that our dining-room ceiling might once again have suffered a large amount of water being released onto it in our absence didn’t even cross my mind. After all, we had finally located the cause of that leak: a towel radiator in the bathroom above, right?

Well, I wish brown stains had been the only problem to confront me this time.

It turns out that our leak, wherever it is, isn’t fixed; far from it, in fact.

This time, our dining-room ceiling had burst open under the weight of the water and a very large pool of it was lying on the floor. The ceiling is ruined, as is the parquet floor, which has warped and popped out of place, due to the large amount of water it has absorbed over the last few days. This probably happened on Sunday, within hours of our departure.

‘Pissed off’ doesn’t even begin to describe how I’m feeling at the moment.

‘Trying to keep things in perspective’ is the battle I’ve been waging against myself today. My children are fine, no-one is injured, it’s just bricks and mortar, blah, blah, blah. But just as telling someone whose girlfriend has run off with his best mate that ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ does little to console the affected individual, so, too, am I enduringly fucked off, no matter what pseudo-inspirational pearls of wisdom I might utter to myself.

This is going to be a big job to fix now. The ceiling will have to be ripped out and possibly the bathroom floor upstairs will have to be dug up. Presumably, the problem is one of pipes contracting when the house is empty and the thermostat has been turned down. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that the problem only occurs while we’re away.

Bollocks.

I forgot to mention that the carpets we purchased in Istanbul turned up last Friday afternoon and no import duties had to be paid on them. That was quite a relief.

Both carpets are now brightening the areas in which they have been laid and look beautiful.

I still need to find some time to put up those photos of Istanbul.

The trusty Netgear GS116 that serves as our core switch had recently found itself the victim of unexpectedly rapid growth in the number of networked devices in this house, its 16 gigabit-capable ports filled to capacity. When I purchased it, the proposition of needing more than 16 ports within the next three or so years had seemed an unlikely one. It just goes to show.

With the growing number of networked devices comes greater network complexity and so I started to look for a replacement switch that would provide more visibility into what’s going on within the network.

Having enjoyed reliable service from various Netgear routers and switches over the last few years, both professionally in the US as well as at home in Mountain View and Amsterdam, that company’s offerings were my natural starting point.

Amongst other devices, I looked at the GS748TR and its beefier brother, the GSM7248R. I preferred the latter, but was put off by its relatively high latency, 20 µs for a 64 byte frame. 5 µs is more typical these days.

Ex-colleagues from the Google networking fraternity were adamant that no switch other than the HP ProCurve 2848, a large, heavy, not to mention expensive slab of a device, should even be considered. Such a monster would be overkill for my needs, to be sure, but with the knowledge that I’d already misjudged our growing networking needs in the recent past, I had all the justification I needed for indulging myself with the purchase of this industrial-strength bit-pusher.

After a bit of poking around, I found a Dutch supplier selling the switches quite a bit cheaper than his competitors. I could have bought one second-hand on eBay, but the purchase was expensive enough that I didn’t want to risk possible problems with a used unit.

The switch arrived the very next day, if I remember correctly. I placed it in the server room (a grandiose, but nevertheless accurate name for the cupboard under the stairs), but there was nowhere to really put it, because of its size. The GS116 was sitting on top my patch cabinet, but there’s no way the ProCurve 2848 could be made to balance there; it was much too big.

I was therefore forced to simply place it on top of the box it came in, which put it far enough away from the patch cabinet that I could only connect a few devices to it for testing. It was important not only to conduct a burn-in, but also to get to grips with configuring the switch, prior to putting it into full service.

Not being a consumer grade device, the switch’s factory state meant that some work on it needed to be done before letting it loose in production.

First of all, I upgraded the firmware on the switch to the latest version, I.10.70.

Next, I had to figure out which features were turned on by default and which were off.

For example, the switch’s DHCP relay was turned on, but needed to be turned off, because DHCP service on our network is provided by a different device on the same subnet. ssh was turned off, but needed to be on. Jumbo Ethernet frames, desirable on a gigabit network, are similarly off by default.

The lack of proper housing for the new switch provided the perfect opportunity to dispense with the existing patch cabinet, which had, in any case, also reached full capacity, and replace it with a larger model in which the 2848 could be properly mounted.

A first attempt at this yielded a new patch cabinet that was welded together and couldn’t be dismantled, which meant that it was too wide to pass through the door of the server room. I would need a patch cabinet that could be assembled in situ.

It took a while to find a cabinet that was deep enough to house the new switch, but also available in kit form. Actually, that bit was quite easy: my installer did the homework for me. What took rather longer, however, was waiting for the cabinet to arrive, once it had been ordered.

Last week, finally, the new cabinet came through and I had my installer come over to do the rewiring. It was a huge job, as every cable had to be unwired from its port in the old patch cabinet, labelled, and then later rewired to a port in the new patch cabinet.

Because the patch panels in the previous cabinet had already reached full capacity, there were also a number of CAT 5e cables emerging from holes in the wall or gaps in the ceiling, from where they fed straight into the previous switch, bypassing the patch panels. These errant cables would now also need to be wired into ports in the new patch panels.

The work took a very full day to complete, thanks to the assembly and mounting of the cabinet on the wall, all of the rewiring, and finally the testing of every port to make sure they were all functional. Only one port turned out to be incorrectly wired and that was quickly rectified.

Thanks to the new switch, I could quickly ascertain that all of the ports that should have been operating at gigabit speed were, in fact, doing so.

The home network had been down for the entire day, which, in this house, makes the telephones unusable and even renders watching TV a tricky proposition. You really realise the value of your network at a moment like that.

Thankfully, though, the work has been completed. I’m very pleased with the new hardware and, at the risk of being proved wrong a second time, I’m confident that the new patch cabinet and switch will allow our network to grow for the next several years without running out of capacity.