virt-viewer remote access tricks

Posted on 2012-08-04 by Jethro Carr

Sometimes I need to connect directly to the console of my virtual machines, typically this is usually when working with development or experimental VMs where SSH/RDP/VNC isn’t working for whatever reason, or when I’m installing a new OS entirely.

To view virtual machines using libvirt (by both KVM or Xen), you use the virt-viewer command, this launches a window and establishes a VNC or SPICE connection into the virtual machine.

Historically I’ve just run this by SSHing into the virtual machine host and then using X11 forwarding to display the virtual machine window on my laptop. However this performs really badly on slow connections, particularly 3G where it’s almost unusable due to the design of X11 forwarding not being particularly efficient.

However virt-viewer has the capability to run locally and connect to a remote server, either directly to the libvirt daemon, or via an SSH tunnel. To do the latter, the following command will work for KVM (qemu) based hypervisors:

virt-viewer --connect qemu+ssh://user@host.example.com/system vmnamehere

With the above, you’ll have to enter your SSH password twice – first to establish the connection to the hypervisor and secondly to establish a tunnel to the VM’s VNC/SPICE session – you’ll probably quickly decide to get some SSH keys/certs setup to prevent annoyance. ;-)

This performs way faster than X11 forwarding, plus the UI of virt-manager stays much more responsive, including grabbing/ungrabbing of the local keyboard/mouse, even if the connection or server is lagging badly.

If you’re using Xen with libvirt, the following should work (I haven’t tested this, but based on the man page and some common sense):

virt-viewer --connect xen+ssh://user@host.example.com/ vmnamehere

If you wanted to open up the right ports on your server’s firewall and are sending all traffic via a secure connection (eg VPN), you can drop the +ssh and use –direct to connect directly to the hypervisor and VM without port forwarding via SSH.

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How Jethro Geeks – IRL

Posted on 2012-08-03 by Jethro Carr

A number of friends are always quite interested in how my personal IT infrastructure is put together, so I’m going to try and do one post a week ranging from physical environments, desktop, applications, server environments, monitoring and architecture.

Hopefully this is of interest to some readers – I’ll be upfront and advise that not everything is perfect in this setup, like any large environment there’s always ongoing upgrade projects, considering my environment is larger than some small ISPs it’s not surprising that there’s areas of poor design or legacy components, however I’ll try to be honest about these deficiencies and where I’m working to make improvements.

If you have questions or things you’d like to know my solution for, feel free to comment on any of the posts in this series. :-)

 

Today I’m examining my physical infrastructure, including my workstation and my servers.

After my move to Auckland, it’s changed a lot since last year and is now based around my laptop and gaming desktop primarily.

All the geekery, all the time

This is probably my most effective setup yet, the table was an excellent investment at about $100 off Trademe, with enough space for 2 workstations plus accessories in a really comfortable and accessible form factor.

 

My laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X201i, with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD and a 9-cell battery for long run time. It was running Fedora, but I recently shifted to Debian so I could upskill on the Debian variations some more, particularly around packaging.

I tend to dock it and use the external LCD mostly when at home, but it’s quite comfortable to use directly and I often do when out and about for work – I just find it’s easier to work on projects with the larger keyboard & screen so it usually lives on the dock when I’m coding.

This machine gets utterly hammered, I run this laptop 24×7, typically have to reboot about once every month or so, usually from issues resulting with a system crash from docking or suspend/resume – something I blame the crappy Lenovo BIOS for.

 

I have an older desktop running Windows XP for gaming, it’s a bit dated now with only a Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM – kind of due for a replacement, but it still runs the games I want quite acceptably, so there’s been little pressure to replace – plus since I only really use it about once a week, it’s not high on my investment list compared to my laptop and servers.

Naturally, there are the IBM Model M keyboards for both systems, I love these keyboards more than anything (yes Lisa, more than anything <3 ) and I’m really going to be sad when I have to work in an office with other people again whom don’t share my love for loud clicky keyboards.

The desk is a bit messy ATM with several phones and routers lying about for some projects I’ve been working on, I’ll go through stages of extreme OCD tidiness to surrendering to the chaos… fundamentally I just have too much junk to go on it, so trying to downsize the amount of stuff I have. ;-)

 

Of course this is just my workstations – there’s a whole lot going on in the background with my two physical servers where the real stuff happens.

A couple years back, I had a lab with 2x 42U racks which I really miss. These days I’m running everything on two physical machines running Xen and KVM virtualisation for all services – it was just so expensive and difficult having the racks, I’d consider doing it again if I brought a house, but when renting it’s far better to be as mobile as possible.

The primary server is my colocation box which runs in a New Zealand data center owned by my current employer:

Forever Alone :'( [thanks to my colleagues for that]

It’s an IBM xseries 306m, with 3.0Ghz P4 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 2x 1TB enterprise grade SATA drives, running CentOS (RHEL clone). It’s not the fastest machine, but it’s more than speedy enough for running all my public-facing production facing services.

It’s a vendor box as it enabled me to have 3 yrs onsite NBD repair support for it, these days I have a complete hardware spare onsite since it’s too old to be supported by IBM any longer.

To provide security isolation and easier management, services are spread across a number of Xen virtual machines based on type and risk of attack, this machine runs around 8 virtual machines performing different publicly facing services including running my mail servers, web servers, VoIP, IM and more.

 

For anything not public-facing or critical production, there’s my secondary server, which is a “whitebox” custom build running a RHEL/CentOS/JethroHybrid with KVM for virtualisation, running from home.

Whilst I run this server 24×7, it’s not critical for daily life, so I’m able to shut it down for a day or so when moving house or internet providers and not lose my ability to function – having said that, an outage for more than a couple days does get annoying fast….

Mmmmmm my beautiful monolith

This attractive black monolith packs a quad core Phenom II CPU, custom cooler, 2x SATA controllers, 16GB RAM, 12x 1TB hard drives in full tower Lian Li case. (slightly out-of-date spec list)

I’m running RHEL with KVM on this server which allows me to run not just my internal production Linux servers, but also other platforms including Windows for development and testing purposes.

It exists to run a number of internal production services, file shares and all my development environment, including virtual Linux and Windows servers, virtual network appliances and other test systems.

These days it’s getting a bit loaded, I’m using about 1 CPU core for RAID and disk encryption and usually 2 cores for the regular VM operation, leaving about 1 core free for load fluctuations. At some point I’ll have to upgrade, in which case I’ll replace the M/B with a new one to take 32GB RAM and a hex-core processor (or maybe octo-core by then?).

 

To avoid nasty sudden poweroff issues, there’s an APC UPS keeping things running and a cheap LCD and ancient crappy PS/2 keyboard attached as a local console when needed.

It’s a pretty large full tower machine, so I except to be leaving it in NZ when I move overseas for a while as it’s just too hard to ship and try and move around with it – if I end up staying overseas for longer than originally planned, I may need to consider replacing both physical servers with a single colocated rackmount box to drop running costs and to solve the EOL status of the IBM xseries.

 

The little black box on the bookshelf with antennas is my Mikrotik Routerboard 493G, which provides wifi and wired networking for my flat, with a GigE connection into the server which does all the internet firewalling and routing.

Other than the Mikrotik, I don’t have much in the way of production networking equipment – all my other kit is purely development only and not always connected and a lot of the development kit I now run as VMs anyway.

 

Hopefully this is of some interest, I’ll aim to do one post a week about my infrastructure in different areas, so add to your RSS reader for future updates. :-)

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MS Volume License Service Center

Posted on 2012-07-30 by Jethro Carr

Occasionally I have to touch Microsoft software, thankfully most of our customers have their licenses entered into the Volume Licensing Service Center these days which makes finding the install media a lot easier than rummaging through CD wallets in the office.

The volume license center isn’t perfect by a long shot but for the most part it’s a pretty effective way of getting keys and software downloads for purchased software [1], with the glaring exception of a major defect with the download functionality:

So close, yet so far

The download interface helpfully gives you some advice to use a download manager – because lets face it, browser downloaders suck universally – Firefox, Chrome and IE all have poor quality download functionality.

However by download manager, Microsoft actually mean “some Microsoft application you should download and run to download the file”. I’ve *never* had a good experience with vendor download managers, not to mention the fact I’m wanting to download this file to a GUI-less Linux KVM host, so this option is right out.

The next logical option is to download with the browser and just grab the download URL – however as shown above, clicking the download button won’t provide a real URL it instead runs a bit of javascript which then directs the browser to the actual download URL.

It’s not uncommon behavior, but it’s damn annoying – browsers know how to download a file, you don’t need javascript to make it happen and it breaks the ability to copy and paste the link directly into a download manager.

When annoying companies use javascript to obfuscate the download URL, the next trick is to start the download with the browser, then go to the download window and copy the real URL out from there.

However, this still fails:

Thou shalt not pass!

Looks like Microsoft is doing some clever checks, possibly with cookies, user agent and IP, or some combination of all of above and refuses the download manager you’ve chosen. >:-(

With a bit of digging around it would be possible to make a solution to work around this, but it’s a major PITA that they do all this pointless obfuscation and I don’t know if I do enough downloads from there to justify the effort to find and make a proper solution to work around Microsoft’s failings.

What really annoys me, is that I’ve already BROUGHT the product and you need a license key in order to EVEN USE IT after you’ve downloaded – it’s not like someone else is going to figure out the randomly generated download path for my session, download the ISO and somehow get a free copy of Windows Server….

I can go to The Pirate Bay and download Microsoft ISOs in a matter of minutes, there’s no point trying to restrict the download ability of your paying customers, the ISOs are already shared – usually pre-hacked to remove activation.

The result is needing to download the ISO over a DSL line to my workstation and upload it back over that same DSL line (oh god the slowness) to get it to the customer’s server, something which is extremely annoying and wasteful for my data cap.

I wish Microsoft would just make their ISO archive available for download off FTP already. :-(

 

[1] As a side note, I really, really wish I could just buy MS software online via this center and be done without having to deal with NZ’s resellers who don’t add any value, just overhead to purchasing this stuff.

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IRD online services registration

Posted on 2012-07-30 by Jethro Carr

I recently signed up with IRD’s (New Zealand’s Tax Department) online Kiwisaver service, so I could view the status of my payments and balance of New Zealand’s voluntary superannuation scheme.

The user sign up form is pretty depressing (and no, not just because it’s about signing up to tax rather than cool stuff):

The 70s called, they want your security consultants back.

My first concern is passwords being limited to a maximum of 10 characters, it’s way too short for many good passwords (or even better, passphrases), any system should take at least 255 chars without complain.

Secondly, the “forgotten password phrase” is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen, it’s basically a second password field – if you forget your password, you can contact them and give them this second password…. except that if you’re stupid enough to forget the first password, how the hell are you going to remember a secondary normally never-used password?

I’d also love to know how secure the secondary password phrase requirements are, because since it gives you access into the account, the security is no stronger than whatever you put in here – and how likely are users to choose something good and secure as their “backup phrase”?

This is some pretty simple security concepts and I’m a bit dismayed that IRD managed to get these so wrong – at least it shouldn’t be hard to correct….

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Exchange, I will have my revenge!

Posted on 2012-07-30 by Jethro Carr

It’s been a busy few weeks – straight after my visit to Christchurch I got stuck into the main migration phase of a new desktop and server deployment for one of our desktop customers.

It wasn’t a small bit of work, going from 20 independent 7-year old Windows XP desktops to new shiny Windows 7 desktops and moving from Scalix/Linux to Exchange/Win2008R2. It’s not the normal sort of project for me, usually I’ll be dealing with network systems and *nix servers, rather than Microsoft shops, but I had some free time and knew the customer site well so I ended up getting the project.

The deployment was mostly straightforwards, and I intended to blog about this in the near future, I honestly found some of the MS tech such as Active Directory quite nice and it’s interesting comparing the setup compared to what’s possible with the Linux environment.

However I still have no love for Microsoft Exchange, which has to be one of the most infuriating emails systems I’ve had to use. We ended up going with Exchange for this customer due to it working the easiest with their MS-centric environment and providing benefits such as ActiveSync for mobiles in future.

However with myself coming from a Linux background, having grown up with solid and easy to debug and monitor platforms like Sendmail, Postfix and Dovecot, Exchange is an exercise in obscure configuration and infuriating functionality.

To illustrate my point, I’m going to take you on a review of a fault we had with this new setup several days after switching over to the Exchange server…..

* * *

On one particular day, after several days of no problems, the Exchange server suddenly decided it didn’t want to email the upstream smarthost mail server.

The upstream server in question has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, something that you tend to want in the 21st century and it’s pretty rare that we have problems with it.

With Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008, both components have IPv6 enabled out-of-the-box – we don’t have IPv6 at this particular customer, since the ISP haven’t extended IPv6 beyond the core & colo networks, so we can’t allocate ranges to our customers using them at this stage.

For some unknown reason, the Windows server decided that it would make sense to try connecting to the smart host via IPv6 AAAA record, despite there being no actual upstream IPv6 connection. To make matters worse, it then decided the next most logical thing was to just fail, rather than falling back to the IPv4 A record.

The Windows experts assigned to look at this issue, decided the best solution was to “disable IPv6 in Exchange”, something I assumed meant “tell Exchange not to use IPv6 for smarthosts”.

With the issue resolved, no faults occurring and emails flowing, the issue was checked off as sorted. :-)

Later that night, the server was rebooted to make some changes to the underlying KVM  platform – however after rebooting, the Windows server didn’t come back up. Instead it was stuck for almost two hours at “Applying computer settings….” at boot – even once the login screen started, it would still take another 30mins before I could login.

This is the digital equivalent of watching paint dry.

After eventually logging in, the server revealed the cause of the slow startup as being the fault of the “microsoft.exchange.search.exsearch.exe” process running non-stop at 100% CPU.

After killing off that process to get some resemblance of a responsive system, it became apparent that a number of key Exchange components were also not running.

I waded through the maze that is event viewer, to find a number of Exchange errors, in particular one talking about being unable to connect to Active Directory LDAP, with an error of DSC_E_NO_SUITABLE_CDC (Error 0x80040a02, event 2114).

Every time I have to use event viewer I miss syslog, tail and grep even more.

Naturally the first response was to review what changes had been made on the server recently. After confirming that no updates had been made in the last couple of days, the only recent change was the IPv6 adjustment made by the Windows engineers earlier in the day.

Reading up on IPv6 support and Windows Server 2008, I came across this gem on microsoft.com:

"From Microsoft's perspective, IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows
operating system and it is enabled and included in standard Windows
service and application testing during the operating system development
process. Because Windows was designed specifically with IPv6 present,
Microsoft does not perform any testing to determine the effects of
disabling IPv6. If IPv6 is disabled on Windows Vista, Windows Server
2008, or later versions, some components will not function."

I then came across this blog post, from someone who had experienced the same error string, but with different cause. In his post, the author had a handy footnote:

"The biggest red herring I found when troubleshooting this one from
articles others had posted was related to IPv6. I see quite a few people
suggesting IPv6 is required for Exchange 2007 and 2010. This is NOT
true. As a matter of fact, if the server hosting Exchange 2007 or 2010
is a DC, then IPv6 must be enabled otherwise simply uncheck the checkbox
in TCP/IP properties on all connected interfaces. You don't need to
buggar with the registry to "really disable it"....just uncheck the
checkbox."

The customer’s Windows 2008 R2 server is responsible for both running Exchange 2010 as well as Active Directory

To resolve the smart host issues, the Windows team had disabled IPv6 altogether on the  interface, resulting in a situation where Exchange was unable to establish a connection to AD to get information needed to startup and run.

To resolve, I simply enabled IPv6 for the server and the Exchange processes correctly started themselves within 10 seconds or so as I watched in the Services utility.

This resolved the “Exchange isn’t functioning at all issue”, but still left me with the smarthost IPv6 issue. To work around the issue for now, I just set the smarthost in Exchange to use the IPv4 address, but will need a better fix long term.

With the issue resolved, some post-incident considerations:

  1. I’m starting to see more cases where a *lack* of IPv6 is actually causing more problems than the presence of it, particularly around mail servers.
  2. Exchange has some major architectural issues – I would love to know why an internal communication issue caused the search indexer process to go nuts at 100% CPU for hours.I’ve broken Linux boxes in terrible ways before, particularly with LDAP server outages leaving boxes unable to get any user information – they just error out slowly with timeouts, they don’t go and start chewing up 100% CPU. And I can drop them into a lower run level to fix and reboot within minutes instead of hours.
  3. I did a search and couldn’t find any official Microsoft best practice documentation for server 2008, nor did Windows Server warn the admin that disabling IPv6 would break key services.
  4. If Microsoft has published anything like this, it’s certainly not easy to find – microsoft.com is a complete searching disaster. And yes, whilst they have a “best practice analyzer tool”, it’s not really want I want as an admin, I want a doc I can review and check plans against.
  5. I’m seriously tempted to start adding surcharges for providing support for Microsoft platforms. :-/

* * *

Overall, Exchange certainly hasn’t put itself in my good books, issues like the IPv6 requirement are understandable, but the side effect of the search indexer going nuts on CPU makes no sense and it’s pretty concerning that the code isn’t just “oh I can’t connect, I’ll close/sleep till later”.

So sorry Microsoft, but you won’t see me becoming a Windows Server fanboy at any stage – my Linux Sendmail/Dovecot setup might not have some of Exchange’s flashier features, but it’s damn reliable, extremely easy to debug and logs in a clear and logical fashion. I can trust it to operate in a logical fashion and that’s worth more to me than the features.

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Android via serial to Arduino

Posted on 2012-07-22 by Jethro Carr

Whilst I’ve been pretty busy lately, I recently made another order from Mindkits and got to work with testing some of my ideas for my Arduino-based remote management solution for my home server.

There’s 4 major parts to this solution

  1. Connectivity to the computer’s serial port (a motherboard 10-pin header) and being able to communicate with the serial port using the Arduino.
  2. An Arduino controlled switch to turn the computer motherboard’s reset pins on and off.
  3. Connection into one of my old HTC Magic Android cellphones.
  4. Connection of 1-wire temperature sensors in key parts of the server’s case.

I’m using a stock standard Arduino Uno/Eleven for this project, for two main reasons:

  1. The HTC Magic phone is quite an old model of Android phones, effectively it’s the second generation after the original G1 and was the first officially available Android phone in New Zealand. Whilst I have loaded the last stable version of Cynogenmod released for it onto the phone, it’s only Android 2.2 and doesn’t feature the Android USB Accessory API support, so there was no point getting something like the USBDroid model.
  2. Rather than paying extra for ethernet connectivity, I’m planning to write an Android application that runs on the phone in the background that provides all the logic behind the remote management program for the server and connectivity via Wifi, 3G and SMS – I figure that the Android platform is better places for the management program anyway with a more sophisticated software

I purchased some protoshields for the Arduino, so my plan is to develop all my circuit logic as an addon shield so it will be possible to stack other shields on in future if I want to add some new applications/functionality to the system.

I’m new to the electronics, the Arduino coding AND the Android development requirements, so it’s an awesome learning curve project for me to start getting my head around all these technologies. :-)

The easiest bit to solve is the control of the computer’s reset header – I need this in order to be able to reboot a crashed system, something that has happened a couple of times due to flaky hardware.

To control the reset, I can use a simple transistor switched circuit, there’s a few resources around for novices to follow, I found this one useful. The only concerns I have is that I need to research and find out what the voltage on the reset headers is – I’m assuming 5V, but it could be anything from 3V to 12V….

Tested the switch by using the Arduino to turn on the LED using a transistor.

The connectivity to the server seems pretty straightforwards – I’ll be using an RS232 shifter circuit (like this one) to connect the PC serial port to the Arduino, although I might end up re-implementing that circuit directly on the protoshield and using a 10-pin IEC connector to plug directly into the motherboard’s serial header

The phone will be connected using the debug serial port in the HTC Magic – it seems a number of the earlier HTC models can provide serial over some of the extra pins in the ExtUSB plug they use.

I’m not totally sure how I’ll be connecting both serial ports just yet – the Ardunio has one hardware UART onboard on pins 0 and 1, but I’m not sure if I can use those without losing the ability to manage the Arduino via it’s USB port – ideally I want the capability to still update the Arduino from the server it’s connected to.

It is possible to connect additional serial ports using software and there’s even a handy library for it, so I have that option for one or both ports. I’ll just have to code my software to be aware that the connection might be lossy or imperfect and to be patient and retry stuff.

I purchased an (expensive!) breakout board for the ExtUSB port which will make the soldering a *bit* easier, but considering the size of it, it still won’t be any walk in the park…

From uber-tiny to just plain tiny :-/

Fortunately since I’m using Cynogenmod, all the OS-side software is sorted and the kernel built with the correct parameters to enable the serial port functionality, providing me with a /dev/ttyMSM2 character device out-of-the-box.

Because I wanted to give it a go and see how the phone ran, I used some header pins to connect to the breakout board as they fit in the holes snugly – there must be some better tools available for connecting to PCBs and device legs without soldering for testing purposes, so I’ll need to do some more research for future.

World’s dodgiest serial connection – also GND and TX pins connected only, it sends 2.8V into the Arduino which is OK, but I need to do a step down circuit before I can transmit from 5V back into the phone.

Hacky hacks

VNCd into the phone and sending messages over the serial line, which is connected to pin 1 (TX) on the Arduino, so the messages appear in the serial monitor

Based on these results it’s looking good – at least I’ve validated my understand of what is possible, so the next step is to turn some of this into a proper circuit.

My current plan is to do a short wire run from the ExtUSB connector breakout board into a small PCB which will split the output into the 3 wires for serial (RX, TX, Ground) and also take the 4 wires for USB and connect them to a USB port, so that I can plugin a USB cable to charge and manage the phone. From there, I can run the 3 serial wires to a header on the protoshield I’m building to connect into the Arduino.

I’ll have to work out how the Android phone and the Arduino will communicate for the management functionality, at this stage I’m planning to have an app that would send specific commands to the Arduino via serial and maybe the ability to get the output from the server’s serial port via the serial link to the Android phone by encapsulating the data or some other behavior.

Next steps is to get a better soldering iron so hopefully will be able to do the initial soldering I need for the HTC magic serial connection next weekend. :-)

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Joe’s Garage (Christchurch)

Posted on 2012-07-22 by Jethro Carr

Whilst in Christchurch I visited Joe’s Garage in Riccarton a couple of times to brunch and coffee – I’ve been to the Joe’s Garage in Wellington before, but only ever for coffee.

The fit out of the venue is garage themed, with features such as spanners as the door handles and a neat industrial feel to the place.

The Riccarton branch also must be right on the police route, since we had a number of officers coming in to get coffee on both occasions –  I guess the flat white is the NZ equivalent of donuts. :-)

Joe's Garage in Riccarton

A reasonably decent cup of coffee - nothing flash, but I'll drink it quite happily.

I had the big vegetarian breakfast on my first trip, which was very filling, although I’m a little off-put by the fried egg. Apparently Joe’s will only do scrambled or fried eggs, not poached.

I tend to find a fried egg with my breakfast is just a little too tough and greasy; scrambled eggs are quite a heavy meal in their own rights, so the lack of a poached option is a bit of a let down really. Considering pretty much every other cafe in New Zealand can do poached eggs quickly and efficiently, I struggle to see why they’re avoiding offering this particular item.

Big vege feed! The baked beans are a nice addition, but the fried egg just doesn't suit for me.

Tasty french toast - a little crispier than I normally like, but still quite enjoyable, with bit of a cinnamon flavor.

Joe’s has a pretty delicious looking lunch men, but sadly very little is vegetarian friendly – which is a shame, it wouldn’t be too hard to add a good vegetarian burger option to the list, or a vegetarian version of their burrito.

A rather tasty looking burger with some very excellent chips.

Breakfast burrito

A special hat tip to the chips, rather than the generic fried packaged fare, Joe’s has cooked them in the just the right way to get the great balance of crispy outside and soft inner.  For something seemingly so simple, far too many places mess up with making good chips, so really pleased by Joe’s.

To be honest, I could happily eat these delicious chips for breakfast :-)

Overall, Joe’s Garage has pretty decent meal options, but for a vegetarian, the lunch menu is pretty weak and whilst the breakfast is enjoyable, I think they lose out compared with some of the other breakfast places like Drexels which is only a 5min drive away and has a lot more vegetarian friendly selection.

Having said that, meat eaters will probably really enjoy their lunch menu, I do admit to moments of envy over my companion’s delicious looking burger, so if you’re not worried about satisfying vegetarians, it’s worth giving a shot.

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Drexels Breakfast Resturant

Posted on 2012-07-21 by Jethro Carr

As part of my Christchurch visit, Lisa was determined to take me to Drexels all-day-breakfast restaurant, providing an American-diner-like eating experience, going for big hearty meals and novelties like unlimited filter coffee.

Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee!

Drexels originally had two restaurants, one in the CBD which has been demolished by the quake and another in Riccarton which is still open.

According to their website, they’re in the process of putting one in Wellington down Waring Taylor Street, which will be great since there isn’t a whole lot of good cafe and breakfast options down that end of town and it shouldn’t come at a loss for Wellington quirky cafe scene, as it offers quite a different style of food.

Mmmmm french toast. Fruit optionally available if you want to have a shot any any amount of healthiness.

Mmmmm smother it in maple syrup #healthyvegetarian

The french toast I had was quite excellent, being fried in butter and served with creme butter and a jug of maple syrup, it probably wasn’t my healthiest breakfast, but it was damn delicious.

I do like the sizing options at Drexels – I tend not to eat huge amounts and I find a lot of big breakfasts just slightly too large for me, so having the ability to choose the size of the meal (and pay accordingly), was a nice touch. The french toast comes with 1-3 pieces of bread and I found the 2 piece meal filled me up quite happily.

Being more of a diner and less of a typical NZ cafe, a lot of the extras you might normally expect need to be specifically ordered – eg fruit, toast, special sauces, etc. You can also order Canadian maple syrup if you want something a bit more authentic than the sugar + flavor combination that’s normally served.

Horrible horrible meat from my dining companions.

Fluffy pancakes - with a blob of creme butter ontop. Nom nom.

You can dine at the bar, but the restaurant is mostly fitted out with booths.

I really enjoyed my visit – the remaining Christchurch branch is pretty busy, probably not helped by the loss of the main restaurant, so you’re not going to hang around for an hour afterwards having coffee – if the Wellington one ends up having a bit more space so less pressure to get groups in/out, it would actually be a pretty excellent place for a bunchy hacking session – will have to see how it goes. :-)

It seems like after the quake, Wellington is getting a lot of relocation of Christchurch businesses – we’ve had the Bangalore Polo Club, the Cosmic HQ and now Drexels, possibly some others as well… It will be interesting to see how they fare.

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Christchurch Day 4

Posted on 2012-07-21 by Jethro Carr

On my final day in Christchurch Lisa’s parents were heading off in the morning, so we decided to take our rental car and explore the city a bit before heading to the airport in the early evening.

Started the day watching our breath form clouds in the very chilled rental car.

Coffee. Linux. All systems are go!

After brunch, we headed up the Cashmere hills to Victoria Park to stop for some touristy viewing and photographing of the city. After living in Wellington, it’s so weird seeing such a flat city for a change.

Flat land, then snowy mountains, as far as you can see.

View of the CBD itself.

Panorama from Victoria Park looking out over suburbs and mountains.

Panorama from Victoria Park looking out over the CBD.

There's always a cabbage tree popping up somewhere in NZ parks.

After stopping at the park, we headed off and down around the coast to Port Lyttelton, a commercial port supplying Christchurch and the greater South Island region. Whilst it was interesting to go take a look, there’s not really a lot in Lyttelton other than the port, lots of heavy trucks, the longest road tunnel in NZ and one pretty dead looking town.

Heading down towards Lyttelton Harbour

Trains! Boats! All the win!

After cruising through Lyttelton and not finding much, we headed through the road tunnel full of loud thundering trucks, before making our way around to Sumner.

Looks like the Matrix had a rendering glitch and clipped the right side of the traffic light off....

Beachy area

Shipping containers make a great wall to hold up the cliffs - assuming the top container doesn't fall on your car. ;-)

Along a number of sections, shipping containers have been used to hold back the cliff and to stop any falling rubble hitting cars. It appears that the locals have taken to doing art installations on the sides of them, we say a number of walls like the above covered with giant paintings.

Cave in Sumner (can a cave have two open ends? Or is it some kind of funky tunnel?)

Heeeeeeeelp me, I'm siiiinking.

Christchurch CBD just visible in the distance.

Fishing pier in New Brighton... seems kind of pointless, but the locals appear to enjoy it.

Neat sand drawings viewed from the pier.

Some seagulls just chilling....

Brighton is the first suburb (other than the CBD of course) where I really started noticing clear sights of residential buildings having suffered heavily in the quakes –  numerous buildings were badly damaged, not to mention the roads and foot paths.

Poor beat up Brighton

What happened to this traffic island? :-/

Heading back into Christchurch in the afternoon, we passed yet another demolished church – whilst churches are by no means the only victims of the quake, there’s very few that haven’t suffered a lot of damage from what I’ve seen, and their distinctive construction styles make for some interesting photo shoots.

God hates buildings?

We ended up having dinner with some of Lisa’s friends by getting some pizza from Spagalimis in Riccarton and then heading out to the airport.

Spagalicious!

One thing I did notice lots in Christchurch are the numerous hacky heating solutions for bathrooms – a number of houses tend to have small fan heaters bolted to the wall, with the power feed wired into a switch on the wall – I guess it gets cold in the winter….

High tech Christchurch central heating solution.

Returning the rental car was interesting, we pulled into a parking space and a guy in a high viability vest approached offering to take our key – to which I gave him an education about social engineering and how could I validate the identity of some random guy approaching me in the carpark?

If you want a brand new car, I highly recommend going and hanging around the rental car lot in the evening when hurried travelers are pulling in to park, wearing a high visibility vest and offering to take their keys for them.

Lisa thinks I’m a nut, and sure I agree, the probability of such an occurrence in NZ is low, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen…

 

Overall it was a good trip to Christchurch – not sure I’d live there at this stage, I do love my cities and with the main CBD being down, I think I might get a little bored –  but that being said, it’s got a nice cold climate and isn’t Auckland, which gives it some pretty high points. ;-)

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Christchurch Day 3

Posted on 2012-07-21 by Jethro Carr

It’s been a bit of a gap since my last post, unfortunately a large project (think 80 hr week) took away my spare blogging time, so now I’m playing catchup game, with blog_* folders all over my desktop of content to be posted.

Firstly, a couple pictures missed from day 2:

Trying some local brew picked up from a dodgy bottle store along the side of some highway.

Unimpressed kitty cat is unimpressed!

Day 3 in Christchurch was the big day of Lisa’s friend’s wedding, so I decided to excuse myself from the family madness taking place and went for a walk into the CBD to enjoy a coffee before attending the wedding with Lisa.

Hagley Park

Bit small for a river, bit large for a stream?

One thing I really noticed heaps whilst in Christchurch was the insanely annoyingly low angle of the winter sun –  I guess New Zealand’s South Island is getting pretty close to the bottom of the planet so winter angles are going to be a bit low, but I think it would drive me insane trying to live there with the sun always hitting me in the eyes. :-/

Whilst I'm naturally good looking and tool, the sun is amplifying the effect a bit here.

Aside from the sun however, the weather is amazing, with cool, crisp mornings – setting up on the container having a coffee in the chill air is just an amazing feeling, kind of like being back in Wellington again. :-)

Sitting on top of a shipping container, having a coffee, looking out to a giant demolition zone.... Christchurch is WEIRD.

Even the coffee here needs to get a little shaken first. ;-)

I ended up walking back to the motel in Riccarton – I can get around Christchurch pretty quickly on foot, it’s pretty much all flat so easy to go fast and not even work up a sweat.

I see why the bridge was closed now...

I'm a train!! :-D

More shipping container stores in a random suburb.

Thou shalt not pass!

I spent the evening with Lisa, her family and the soon-to-be-wed couple and their friends in the private function space of a pub, enjoying some amazing food and good times.

Lisa scrubs up pretty well :-P

Amazingly good Sumac and Mushroom soup at the wedding. I must find a way to recreate this.

Whilst it's meaty horribleness, I have to like the presentation style.

The tree of light!

Narcissist Jethro loves reflective skylights!

All up a pretty good and laid back day, skipping all the family business and rushing around pre-wedding was quite a good plan, I greatly prefer the company of a fine laptop and a fine coffee than chaos. :-)

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