It’s been ages since I did an update on the main network machine here, and I bit the bullet over the weekend. 250+ packages emerged with surprisingly little trouble, and all I was left to do was build the updated kernel and reboot.
I usually end up with something that doesn’t restart after the reboot, usually because of a kernel module that needs to be rebuilt after the kernel (because I forget to remerge the package before the reboot, oops). This time the culprit was Asterisk (the phone system), which I also often have trouble with after an update due to a couple of codec modules external to the Asterisk build. This time however the problem ended up being due to the Asterisk CAPI channel driver failing.
Thinking it was the usual didn’t-rebuild-the-module problem, I went looking for the package I had to rebuild… only to find it was masked. Turns out the driver for the ISDN card in the box, a FritzCard PCI, is no longer maintained and doesn’t build on modern kernels, which has resulted in the Gentoo folks hard-masking the entire set of AVM’s out-of-tree drivers.
Help was at hand in the form of a Patton SmartNode 4552 ISDN VoIP router I’d bought months ago to replace the Fritz card. Even though there isn’t much information about how to configure the SmartNode for Asterisk around, I managed to get the setup working in only a couple of hours. I even managed to get the outgoing routing for the work line set up right!
Eventually I’ll get something posted here that goes into a bit more detail about the configuration. Let me know in a comment if you need to hurry me up! 
Amsterdam trip report
May 30
I recently spent a week in Amsterdam, attending the Novell BrainShare conference there. This visit to Amsterdam was unlike any I’ve made before: certainly unlike the last one, where I barely made it halfway from the airport to the city and was there for less than 40 hours.
Firstly my arrival was disrupted by the Iceland volcano. About 45 minutes away from Amsterdam I noticed that the little diamond that represented our destination on the flight-map display had jumped somewhere into western Germany, and the plane’s direction had changed — we were now flying almost due south instead of following the gentle arc that traced almost all the way back to Hong Kong. About 5 minutes later, the captain announced that due to volcanic ash we had been diverted to Frankfurt: “we’re 40 minutes away from Amsterdam, but they’re closing the airport in 20″. To the credit of Cathay Pacific, however, they had arrangements for our “connection” to Amsterdam underway before we had landed. Cathay’s airport manager at FRA boarded the plane almost as soon as the door opened, and made an announcement that we would be bussed to Amsterdam and what the process would be. Once we made it into the Frankfurt terminal we only had a couple of hours wait before we got to shuffle ourselves to some waiting coaches for our unexpected bus tour of north-west Germany and north Holland.
The bus ride was uneventful — except that I don’t ever tire of seeing fine German automobiles at-speed in their natural habitat: the autobahn. As it turned out, the whole event actually solved a problem for me: how to fill in the nine hours between arrival at Schiphol and being allowed to check in to the hotel (S thought I was being way too positive when I told her that). It actually was not an unpleasant way to spend a day post-long-haul-flight.
After catching a train from Schiphol to Centraal, finding my hotel, checking in, and cleaning up from the trip, it was time to get a bit of rest before meeting the rest of the Australian contingent to BrainShare for dinner. We dined at Restaurant d’Vijff Vlieghen, a fine restaurant that (unbeknown to me beforehand) is one of the best in Amsterdam for traditional Dutch cuisine. I’m amazed I stayed awake through the five courses, but luckily my travel didn’t catch up with me until I made it back to the hotel.
I had Tuesday pretty-much to myself. I did quite a bit of walking around, trying to push through the jet-lag. Early afternoon I walked with a couple of colleagues from Novell to the conference venue to register, and had a late lunch afterward. By late afternoon I realised that I wasn’t over the jet-lag and decided to rest up for the start of the conference.
The next couple of days are a bit of a blur. Keynotes, demos, technical sessions, product launch parties, beer, food, sunsets after 10pm… It was an incredible week. As far as the BrainShare content goes, even though Linux is just a part of the Novell “story” I was never really starved for something interesting. I enjoyed the demos of SUSE Studio, and learned some things about the High Availability extension for SLES and the Subscription Management Tool.
I had a great time. The crew from Novell that hosted me were fantastic, and every time I go there I fall a little bit more in love with Amsterdam.
Network virtualisation
Feb 21
I’ve been doing a lot of mucking around with KVM with libvirt (I keep promising an update here, don’t I). In my desktop virtualisation requirements I had a need for presenting VLAN traffic to guests: simple enough, and I’ve done it before. You can do what I usually do, and configure all your VLANs against the physical interface then create a bridge for each VLAN you want to present to a guest. The guest then attaches to the bridge appropriate to the VLAN it wants access to, with no need to configure 8021q.
(The other method of combining VLAN-tagging and bridging is to bridge the physical interface first, then create VLANs on the bridge. I couldn’t work out how to get VLAN-unaware guests attached to this kind of setup, and it didn’t work for me even to give IP access to the host using a br0.100 for example. Still, it must work for someone as it’s written about a lot…)
I realised that from particular virtual machines I needed to get access to the VLAN tags — I needed VLAN-awareness. Now I knew up-front that the way I could do this was to just throw another NIC into the machine and either dedicate it to the virtual guest or set up a bridge with VLAN tags intact. I really wanted to exhaust all possible avenues to solve the problem without throwing hardware around (as I’ve been doing a bit of that recently, I have to admit).
First, I tried to use standard Linux bridges as a solution, but discovered that an interface can’t belong to more than one bridge at a time, which put paid to my plan to have one or more VLAN-untagging bridges and a VLAN-tagged bridge. I figured it could be done with bridges, but I envisaged a stacked mess of bridge-to-tap-to-bridge-to-tap-to-guest connections and decided that wasn’t the way to go.
Next I checked out VDE, which I had first seen a couple of years ago — but something gave me the impression that VDE either wasn’t really going to give me anything more than bridging would, or was not flexible enough to do what I needed. I like the distributed aspect of VDE (the D in the name) but I’d rarely use that capability so it wasn’t a big drawcard. I widened my search, and found two interesting projects — one that eventually became my solution, and another that I think is quite incredible in its scope and capability.
First, the amazing one: ns-3, “a great network simulator for research and education”. As the name suggests, it simulates networks. It is completely programmable (in fact your network “scripts” are actually C++ code using the product’s libraries and functions) and can be used to accurately model the behaviour of a real network when faced with network traffic. The project states that ns-3 models of real networks have produced libpcap traces that are almost indistinguishable from the traces of the real networks being modelled… I’ll take their word for that, but when you get to configure the propogation delay between nodes in your simulated network it seems to me it’s pretty thorough. Although the way that I found ns-3 was via a forum posting from someone who claimed to have used it to solve a similar situation as me, and ns-3 does provide a way to “bridge” between the simulated network and real networks, the simulation aspect of ns-3 seems to be more complexity than I’m looking for in this instance. It does look like a fascinating tool however, and one I’ll definitely be keeping at least half-an-eye on.
To my eventual solution, then: Open vSwitch. Designed with exactly my scenario in mind–network connection for virtualisation–it has at least two functions that make it ideal for me:
- a Linux-bridging compatibility mode, allowing the brctl command to still function
- IEEE 802.1Q VLAN support (innovatively at that)
The Open vSwitch capability can be built as a kernel module (there’s a second module that supports the brctl compatibility mode), or very recent versions have the ability to be run in user-space (with a corresponding performance drop).
On the surface, configuring an OvS bridge does seem to result in something that looks exactly like a brctl bridge (especially if you use brctl and the OvS bridging compatibility feature to configure it), but its native support for VLANs really brings it into its own for me. In summary, for each “real” bridge you configure in OvS, you can configure a “fake” bridge that passes through packets for a single VLAN from the real bridge (the “parent” bridge). This is exactly what I needed!
For the guest interfaces that needed full VLAN-awareness, I simply provided the name of my OvS bridge as the name of the bridge for libvirt to connect the guest to–OvS bridge-compatibility mode took care of the brctl commands issued in the background by libvirt. The VLAN-unaware guest interfaces presented a bit of a challenge–the OvS “fake” bridge does not present itself like a Linux bridge, so it doesn’t work with libvirt’s bridge interface support. This ended up being moderately easy to overcome as well, thanks to libvirt’s ability to set up an interface configured by an arbitrary script–I hacked the supplied /etc/qemu-ifup script and made a version that adds the tap interface created by libvirt to the OvS fake bridge.
The only thing I might want from this now is an ability for an OvS bridge to have visibility over a subset of the VLANs presented on the physical NIC. The OvS website talks about extensive filtering capability though, so I’ve little doubt that the capability is there and I’m just yet to find it. From a functionality aspect, OvS is packed to the gills with support for various open management protocols, including something called OpenFlow that I’d never heard of before (but I hope that some certain folks in upstate New York have!) but is apparently an open standard that enables secure centralised management of switches.
Detail of exactly how I pulled this all together will come in a page on this site; I’ll make a bunch of pages that describe all the mucky details of my KVM adventures and update this post with a link, so stay tuned!
LDAP groups in Postfix
Feb 10
For a long time I’ve been managing virtual e-mail addresses (the ones you create when you sign up to a web service, so that you know where your spam is originating) using Postfix’s LDAP alias capability. At the time I was still putting every bit of configuration I could into LDAP–particularly if it was user-id related–and I’ve never had a need to change what was working really well.
N’s school recently decided to distribute the weekly school newsletter via e-mail, and had allowance for one e-mail address per family. Not wanting the additional overhead of having to have either S or me receive it and then having to forward it to the other, I thought it would be neat to have a single common address that, when items arrived, distributed the mail to multiple boxes. Of course I took the stupid path of providing the school with a yet-to-be-created e-mail address, foolishly trusting my ability to set the system up before they tried to send anything to it… but in the end it was not so foolish after all, as unbeknown to me I already had everything I needed to achieve my objective.
Unfortunately the first thing I did was assume that I needed mailing list software. I installed Mailman, and started to read-up on the process to get it working. I did this on my yet-to-be-commissioned KVM-hosted mail server (a blog post for another day), and started trying to diagnose why mail wasn’t getting delivered. I had set up Postfix on this mail server to point to my existing LDAP to test, and thought that there was a problem there (but also started to work out if there was a way to use the LDAP server to manage the Mailman aliases). I re-found the Postfix LDAP HOWTO, and stumbled over the section entitled “Example: expanding LDAP groups”. Et voila: multidrop incoming mail without the need for a mailing list manager!
I had always assumed that e-mail aliases were a one-to-one mapping of alias address to real destination. Not the case: an alias can have multiple destinations. It doesn’t just apply to LDAP alias support, either: as per the “aliases” man page you can do
name: value1, value2, ...
In my LDAP situation, all I need to do is list the alias in the “mailLocalAddress” attribute of which ever users need to receive mail for that alias. Done!
I may have to keep Mailman, however. Shortly after this success, I wondered how cool it would be to have the notification SMS messages for voicemail received at home, that currently go only to S, come to me as well. I’m using a hosted email-to-SMS gateway service for this, so the “alias” would have to expand to multiple external e-mail addresses. I’m not sure if you can alias mail addresses that are not in your domain… I’ll have to try and see–might be easier to do that than subscribing to a Mailman list via SMS-to-email!
Since I’ve been back home now for almost a month, it seems silly to call these posts “travel updates”.
With the experience of visiting le Viaduc de Millau still buzzing in my head, I pointed my trusty Peugeot back toward Montpellier for the journey to Germany. The run down the mountain back toward the coast was a really nice drive, but by the time I was back in Montpellier it was back to nasty busy city driving. I think I made a little bit of an error: instead of following the path that Google found for me to get to the A9 (which was more-or-less back through the middle of town), I followed the first sign I saw that said “A9 NIMES”. This ended up taking me on a Cooks Tour of bypass roads around the south outskirts of the city, past industrial estates and the consequent heavy workaday traffic. The city path was very likely to have been quicker and easier. Oh well.
Once I made it to the A9 for the trip north, I was able to settle in and enjoy the drive again. The autoroutes in France are excellent, with a great smooth driving surface (in spite of the heavy-vehicle traffic they carry) and plenty of visibility and clearance for cars to be able to carry the 130km/h speed limit (again, in spite of the heavy-vehicle traffic, which is only permitted to do about 90km/h). Mind you I ended up paying around 50€ in tolls while I was in France! If it’s a demonstration of how tolling a road can lead to better quality, I don’t mind at all.
The traffic bogged down a bit going through Lyon, but soon opened up again. I was starting to get a bit worried about the time: I’d left Montpellier three or four hours before, yet seemed to be only a third of the way there! Night was starting to fall as I turned east onto the A36 — the car was at last actually pointing toward Germany! A short while after that, I stopped for some dinner before making the last part of the drive. I was not far from the border by this time, and it looked like I was making good time after all.
I hadn’t planned for my first drive on an autobahn to be at night, but that’s how it worked out. About the only indication that I’d actually crossed into Germany was the change in the road signage! The speed limit dropped to 120km/h, but a little while later I saw a sign that showed the 120 crossed-out. This, I eventually worked out, was the only indication I would get that I was on one of the famous speed-unlimited autobahnen (well, the Mercs and Beemers and Audis rocketing past me were another indication). Because it took me so long to work out what was going on, I almost didn’t get to go for a rocket myself — I had wound the Peugeot up to about 140-150 and was still getting passed like I was stationary, so I decided to give it a run. In a few seconds the little Pug was at 195km/h, and seemed like it could have gone a bit higher, but slower traffic ahead meant I had to back off. As it turned out, I didn’t get another chance to wind it out because we were in and out of roadworks for the last part of the run to Stuttgart.
Eventually I found the last motorway exit I had to take, and I was on the streets of Sindelfingen. I had made it all the way from Montpellier, without a single wrong turn! Before congratulating myself too heartily though, I had to find my hotel… and this was a bigger challenge than I had thought. I found it, eventually, but not before I’d driven up the same street three times (at least) and done at least one U-turn in front of the place without realising it…
Seems like ages ago I watched that episode of Top Gear where they took a Ford GT, a Pagani Zonda and a Ferrari F430 from Paris to the Millau Viaduct. At the time, I didn’t figure that I’d have any opportunity to see the bridge in the near future, but nonetheless subliminally noted it as one of those things to see, if I got a chance to, sometime in the next forty-or-so years. As it turns out, the chance came up sooner than I thought: not only that, I somehow remembered about it before the chance went by!
As I was planning my drive from Montpellier to Stuttgart, I suddenly remembered “that stonking-great bridge somewhere in France that those pommie tossers drove those cars over”. I really had no idea where it was — I couldn’t even remember the name of it. Somehow, however, I managed to locate it — and found that it was only a bit over an hour’s drive from Montpellier.
So Google Maps told me at least, and my record with that site was not great. When first I consulted the Googleplex for how to get from Montpellier to Stuttgart, I’m sure it said it would take 3-4 hours. Just before I’d found le Viaduc de Millau, though, I asked it again and it said more like 8 hours. More on that later… but now I was contemplating making my 8-plus hour trip to Stuttgart into at least 11. I was seriously considering giving up on the tentative plan to see the bridge. Then I thought: how would I feel if I went home, knowing that I was so close and didn’t bother going? I made my mind up: I was going to Millau.
I planned my departure the following morning to be a little earlier than originally scheduled, and packed the bags the night before. The next day I got moving nice and early, right in the middle of Montpellier weekday-peak morning traffic! It didn’t take long for that to clear, though, and I was on the A750 heading west. The A750 joined the A75, and then I was heading up into higher altitude. The diesel Peugeot I was driving ate up the twisting climb with no trouble, and before long the road had levelled- and straightened-out a bit.
I saw a tourist sign saying “Viaduc de Millau”, and realised I was almost there. Then, I was there!
Darned windscreen wiper! Actually it doesn't matter really, since there's no way a photo from a moving car could do it justice.
You can see the towers of the bridge pylons in the distance: the seventh (and most distant) one is still over two kilometers away! The sign in this photo is for the tourist stop on the north side of the valley, which is three kilometers down the road, and the bridge starts just past the sign…
I tried to take a couple of photos as I was going over the bridge to get a sense of the height and distance involved, but it was a wasted effort. Not only was the camera unable to focus on anything but the blurring side barrier of the bridge, but the valley floor below was probably too far away for a camera to be able to convey the scene from a car. So I concentrated on driving the rest of the way over, and trying to enjoy some of the view.
On the north side (as the signpost said) there is an information kiosk and observation area, so I pulled off the road and stopped there. The observation point turned out to be the peak of a hill accessed by a very steep climb up a bitumen path… but when I made it to the top, the pain of the climb was soon forgotten.
The bridge actually looked to me like it was from another world: it is so big, so high, so amazing and different, that it just doesn’t seem like it could have been made here. It was truly an amazing thing to see, and it didn’t matter about the lung-bursting climb up the hill or the finger-numbing-face-freezing wind blowing up the Tarn valley or the drizzle of rain that just refused to go away — I could not bear the thought of having to leave there.
Le Viaduc de Millau. I'm surprised I got these photos, I was beginning to wonder about my chances of frostbite thanks to the wind and rain!
I took a stupid number of photos, and stood for a while and just gazed. I realised it was still (just) daytime in Australia and phoned home, but must have sounded like an idiot just banging on about a bridge.
Eventually I realised that I would have to leave in order to get to Stuttgart in a reasonable time, so reluctantly I set off back down the hill. I went through the souvenir shop and picked up a trinket or two, along with a brochure or two that N might take an interest in. Then, with even more reluctance, I got in the car and departed. I wasn’t able to avoid the toll plaza — 12 euro (6€ each way) in tolls! It was a small price to pay though — besides, I got to drive over it again!
The Millau Viaduct is a wonder of the modern world, and I am so glad that I didn’t talk myself out of driving up to see it.
There I was, standing in the Paris Gare de Lyon looking like an idiot staring at the trains on the platforms. I was about to experience my first trip on TGV!
I took a few photos then loaded my gear on the train (big bag in the luggage space at the end of the carriage, smaller stuff in the overhead rack), then went back onto the platform to get a few more photos. I’m sure I was still acting like a stunned mullet as I wandered around the station!
As departure time drew closer, I headed back to my train and got comfortable. I faintly heard the sound of the doors closing and then, without a sound, the train started moving. It picked up speed as it started to snake along the lines heading out of Paris: there were a couple of curves where I could see the front of the train as we went. Even though we were still in the suburbs and the tracks were eight-wide, the TGV was moving at quite a pace as we headed south.
Some breakfast came by, and the next time I looked out I noticed that the other tracks were gone and we were moving a lot faster now. At no time had I felt any great acceleration, I suppose for comfort’s sake they let the train wind up gradually.
Then we got faster still. And faster. And faster. And faster.
Again I have to reiterate: if you’re not a train-fan, you probably won’t appreciate how exciting, exhilarating and mildly terrifying it was for me. I realised that I was actually on the ground at 300+km/h, and that if I was in a plane I’d be airborne by then! In the dark the night before, I hadn’t been able to appreciate going through tunnels or passing under bridges at that speed. The line ran near a highway at one stage, and I just couldn’t get my head around seeing the cars that I knew were going in the same direction as I was moving backward!
I could see trackside distance markers, and did a rough timing of our travel over one kilometre: “one-onethousand-two-onethousand … 12-onethousand”. Math it out: that’s 300km/h.
I expected that the train would stop a couple of times, but there was only one stop (Nimes, about 100km from Montpellier). The remaining run from Nimes down to Montpellier was fast, but not TGV-fast. As we pulled into Montpellier, I gathered up my gear and got ready to leave the train. My first TGV journey was over!
When the train did arrive, it was three minutes late. I was amazed: over all those hundreds of kilometres, we only accrued a delay of three minutes.
I used a map in the Montpellier railway station to find that my hotel was literally a stone’s throw away. I hauled my bags up the street and into what seemed like a dingy alley to the hotel and checked in. My room had a dodgy double doorway onto the dingy alley, and I looked out at the street and watched a few cars go by. I also got my first spectator view of French contact-parallel-parking! That evening I met up with my residency colleague and a couple of his workmates over a couple of Belgian beers, and went for a stroll through the city after taking a slightly wrong turn when I was dropped off near the station.
The next day, since the plan to go to IBM didn’t work out, I had a chance to look around. First order of business was to do some planning for the drive to Germany the next day, so I did some internetting before going to pick up my car. The car was a diesel Peugeot 308, and I went for a bit of a drive to familiarise myself. Thankfully the streets of Montpellier are a bit more forgiving than metropolitan Paris! I managed to get lost a couple of times, but did my usual Zen navigation to get back on track (thank-you, Douglas Adams).
After the car adventure, I went for a bit of a walk around the old part of the city and took a couple of photos along Esplanade Charles de Gaulle. Once again I saw that although large cities around the world are starting to become more and more alike (town square, shopping mall, etc.), European cities still have the charm of the “old town”. I really like the narrow cobbled streets with people walking along seemingly day or night, and the food stalls and shops every couple of doors — real food shops, like a patisserie or coffee shop, not your chain-of-the-week like Starbucks or McDonalds. Yes, I could really get the hang of Europe: I need to put more effort into learning more of the local language though. I found myself too cautious about my inability to order from those patisseries and coffee shops to be able to enjoy them. Dinner one night in Montpellier was Subway, and as I walked back to the hotel to eat I found myself looking at the local shops and regretting that I wasn’t confident enough to try.
The time came for me to leave Montpellier though, and start my journey to Sindelfingen in Germany. My research on the route yielded an interesting fact: the Millau Viaduct is only a little over an hour’s drive from Montpellier…
I listen to a few netcasts from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. For a while about 18-24 months ago a few shows on the network were sponsored by VISA, flogging their fraud protection capabilities. ”Safe, Secure, VISA” was something I heard ad-nauseum a while ago (and started hearing it again recently, as I listen to old Security Now episodes).
While my Thalys journey to Paris was coming to an end, I got a phone call. I wasn’t going to answer it for the combined reasons of being in a foreign country, being on a train in a foreign country, and being in a small room not normally associated with telephone communication while on a train in a foreign country. Something made me answer the damned thing though.
It was someone claiming to be from my bank in Australia, asking me if I’d just used my credit card to buy something from the Apple Store in the US. Now I did very nearly say yes, and to stop bothering me with such stuff: this was the card that had been associated with my Apple ID, and there was a chance that N had picked up my iPod and stumbled through and found the App Store and bought something. They’d never contacted me before about App Store purchases however, and then I remembered that card was not on my Apple ID any more. So I replied non-committally (and very helpfully, in hindsight)…
“Well, maybe.”
“This was only in the last couple of minutes,” said the bank.
“Oh,” said I. That changed things. Knowing that the card was not linked to my Apple ID any more, there was very little chance that N might have done something. It definitely wasn’t me either, given where I had been during the few minutes in question. ”No, then,” I replied.
At this, the VISA machinery sprang into action. Within seconds I had been recited the standard dialogue about how my card(s) had now been cancelled and that I would soon receive new card(s) and PIN(s), so on and so on. Being none too happy about having to re-arrange scheduled charges to the account (the only use that particular card gets, as it turns out) I started to think about how the number had got into the wild.
In spite of knowing that there are card number generators that the bad guys use to generate valid card numbers to try on unsuspecting e-commerce sites, something gave me the thought that it was more likely I had lost the small wallet that card was kept in. I started thinking about the other cards that were in that case. Hotel/car loyalty cards: painful, but not a problem. Unused AMEX: cancellation drama only. Travel-backup credit card: hmm, that might be a problem. What else…
Oh, wait a minute…
OH CRAP.
Last I saw that wallet it was wrapped around…
O. M. F. G.
My PASSPORT.
Instantly I understood the feeling described by the term “heart in my mouth”. There I was, standing on a train pulling into Paris Gare du Nord with my knees buckling contemplating the possibility that my passport was lost.
I started to look through the bags I was carrying, the places where I knew the wallet should have been. Nothing. By this time the train had stopped, and I alighted the train with the other passengers and took my frantic search to the Gare du Nord platform. Still nothing.
My mind was racing. Do I continue my journey to Montpellier as planned, and sort out the passport later? Maybe ironically, the thing I was most upset about was having lost all the stamps in my passport!
I decided that I couldn’t think properly standing on a train platform and that I had to get to my hotel and sort it out there. I managed to find the subway that links the SNCF station to the RER, but halfway through the subway I realised that I couldn’t go any further without having a proper search. So in the middle of a railway station subway in Paris I started rifling my luggage like a sniffer-dog looking for the stash (and it wasn’t until later that I realised how much trouble that might have got me into).
FOUND.
The wallet, all cards secure and still encasing my passport, had worked its way into the lowest portion of the wheeled laptop bag I use. I suffered the joyous feeling of my heart returning to its rightful place, combined with the return of my ability to breathe. As I put stuff back into my bags and resumed my journey, I tried to concentrate on the task of getting the right ticket, the right RER line and the right train to get me to Gare de Lyon (thanks to the signage in the station, this was made very easy).
Once I was on the RER, with other commuters around me and me trying to marshall my luggage, I realised how I could not have done the trip thinking that I had lost my stuff. I also realised that that was the closest I ever want to come to actually losing my passport while overseas.
Oh, and the credit card? Like I said, it was in the wallet all along. The card hasn’t been out of that same wallet for over twelve months, and the regular deductions (and my automatic payment to cover them) have been the only transactions on the account for at least that long, so I guess a card generator just happened to get lucky with my number.
So if you happen to get that phone call from your bank, think seriously about your card’s whereabouts and recent activity… and for heaven’s sake don’t do what I did and jump to the conclusion that the card was lost or stolen — your imagination might just take you someplace you really don’t want to go.
Update: Before I left Australia I had asked the bank to reissue the card for a promotion they were having, but the new one didn’t reach me before I left the country. When I got home, I had a look at the card that had been issued — the one that got hacked. I think I know now why I got pinged: the CVV number (the three-digit printed number on the back of the card that is supposed to increase security) was the last digit of the card number followed by “00″ — I’d have to think that would be about the weakest CVV number the card could possibly have had! I feel much better now that this was simply a random selection by a card-number generator, facilitated by a stupidly-insecure CVV.
When last you heard from me, I had arrived in my Amsterdam hotel. The weather was a bit rainy, so I postponed the planned orientation walk and caught a bit of a kip, had some dinner, and made sure I was ready for the presentation the next day.
I’m not going to talk about the work stuff in these updates: for one, this is not actually a work blog so I probably shouldn’t anyway. Secondly, it’s a bit on the boring side of things and I’d rather talk about the travel. So, with that decided, let’s continue…
So Monday arrived and I did my presentation, then picked up my bags from the hotel and went to Schiphol. I made use of the NS HiSpeed lounge (a little bit like an airline club lounge, but on a smaller scale) to have a refreshment before heading down to the platform for my train. My final destination was Montpellier, France, but because of the time I thought I had to be there I had to overnight in Paris: so it was Thalys to Paris on Monday, then TGV to Montpellier on Tuesday morning.
I feel the need here to reiterate what I mentioned in the previous post: I’m a rail-fan. When TGV was introduced in the 1980s, I made it one of my life’s goals to make a TGV journey one day. I marked the goal halfway complete when a colleague and I travelled on Thalys in 2006: half-complete because we only went from Amsterdam to Brussels, which is not true high-speed (although I saw that it has been upgraded, and Thalys will run high-speed to Amsterdam from December 2009).
As I boarded Thalys for Paris that Monday night, I realised that my goal was about to become fully-complete. I settled in as the train departed into the Dutch night, and started to enjoy the comforts of Thalys “Comfort 1″. I hooked up to the Wi-Fi and made a couple of silly Facebook updates, and saw a nice little map feature they provided on their portal page:
My train was just south of Antwerp at this time... Cool, eh!
Due to the dark outside, it was difficult to get a sense of how fast the train was moving: the only way to know for sure was the occasional lit-up building or car that went by. As I said, having travelled on Thalys before I knew that the best was yet to come (in other words, after we went through Brussels).
Eventually we pulled into Brussels, and my excitement built a little more. The wait in Brussels-Midi station was almost unbearable! Finally though, we got moving again.
I read an article by a UK travel reviewer when the TGV first ran. He described a dramatic surge of acceleration as the 1k5V standard French pantograph was lowered and the 25kV circuit was activated on the high-speed line to Lyon. I didn’t experience any such hard surge, but as we picked up speed out of Brussels I just knew that something was different. I guess I was seeing enough points-of-reference outside to know that we were moving much faster than before, but whatever it was I could tell that now we were really moving.
I sat and enjoyed it all for a while: the surreal feeling of approaching the continuous lights of a stream of traffic on a road or highway impossibly fast, and realising that the train was actually going to pass over it… and then the lights were gone as the train flashed over the highway. The thrilling hum and vibration of the train itself: not disturbing at all, just the feeling of being on board a piece of machinery that was working hard. After a while I checked back on the ThalysNet map, and realised that the map was clickable… I clicked, and was rewarded with an enlarged view, with a speedometer! I refreshed the view a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t something static…
I did refresh and get one that said 300km/h, but it looked a bit staged 
I refreshed each time I felt a large change in speed (and before anyone asks, no at 300km/h you can’t tell a change of 5km/h), and saw enough change in the display to be confident that it was a real representation of the train’s speed.
Unfortunately the journey had to come to an end. I’ll write a separate post about the terrible experience I had as I arrived in Paris, but once I got over that I worked on the task of getting myself from Gare du Nord (where Thalys operates from) across town to Gare de Lyon (where the southbound TGVs run from, near which I’d booked my room for the night). I ended up managing very easily to find the way to the RER station, buy my ticket, find the right train — a direct train, where my research had told me I’d need to change trains — and hop off at Gare de Lyon. After a little mixed-up street navigation (unbeknownst to me I’d left the station from the back entrance, and ended up walking all the way around to the front) I made it to my hotel, checked in, and negotiated an old-style elevator (with a swinging outer door!) to my floor and my room.
The next morning I went for a little walk. I realised I was quite close to the River Seine, so thought I couldn’t go home without seeing it. What can I say: yes, it’s a river. I thought I’d be able to see perhaps just the top of the Eiffel Tower, but there were too many buildings in the way. Back to the hotel then, to check out and go to the station.
When I got to the plaza in front of the station, I had to pause. There I was, actually standing in front of Paris Gare de Lyon! Okay, a railway station… but which railway station! This is where TGV basically started it’s first passenger services. I was having another one of those dream-about-to-come-true moments. Then I went inside and saw a real TGV! If you’ve seen the movie Cars, you’ll know the scene at the end when the Michael-Schumacher-Ferrari drives into Luigi’s Casa Della Tires and Luigi ends up fainting (“a REAL FERRARI!”). For me, seeing not one but at least five TGVs was much like that. Okay, they aren’t the old TGV Orange that I knew when I was a kid, and the design is a bit updated, but they’re TGV and they’re where modern high-speed commuter rail began.
Next update I’ll describe more of my TGV experience, as well as my first European drive!
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