Day 59

As predicted, I was woken up by a call at 2am last night – a follow up to let me know that the issue was still unresolved, but that they were working on it.  Very helpful AT&T.  Given that all systems were still up and the problem was with one of our redundant links I politely suggested that any further updates could wait until business hours.

Caught the train from Landskrona station at 8.38am.  The first class cabin was nice and quiet, with highbacked leather seats, tables to put your laptop on and a complimentary drink from the beverage cart.  Spent the three hour trip catching up on some work, talking to mum and Sophie on Skype and watching the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. 

Met Lars at Gothenburg Central Station and caught a taxi out to Volvo IT.  Had lunch with Lars Herstrommer, our customer service manager, in the canteen.  The canteen was much bigger than ours in Landskrona but the food was about the same quality.  Had a beef curry with rice and some salad.

Our meeting was fairly successful.  The aim was to come up with a way to test if Siteminder, a ‘reverse-proxy’ solution provided by Volvo IT, could be used to replicate our current Portwise authentication system.  The benefits of using their service would be improved availability, increased redundancy and a move away from our current ‘single point of failure’ system.  Of course this will come at a financial cost. 

The downside was that we’re no closer to coming up with a Single Sign On solution.  The Siteminder guys think using a reverse-proxy is unnecessary for this and believe the AD and IIS people should be the one’s we’re talking to.  I leave next week so unfortunately that’s where my involvement will end.

The hotel I’m staying in is only 5 minutes walk from the Central Station and the center of town.  Checked in to my spacious room then headed out to wander the city.  Spent two hours walking the streets, seeing what I could see.  Gothenburg has trams, just like Melbourne, but they seem older than ours.  Didn’t really get many good photos, I’ll have to try harder on the weekend.

Had dinner at the hotel buffet - fish, potatoes, salad, bread, apple.  Not bad.  Don’t have to be in the office until 10am tomorrow morning so I get a little sleep in.  Nice.