Wow it’s been a while…
Wow…. what a past two weeks.
Well two weeks ago today I had my last day at Macrovision, the next day I moved up to Lancaster. It’s been a hell of a two weeks. I’m now living with Ali and John for a few months while I get settled, it’s fun.
I was planning to keep a work diary, however it never got finished in time. Not to mention work as been so busy.
On my first day I reported to the departments office, shown about and handled various pieces of paper work. When I got to the networking office I was given a laptop and told to set it up how I liked, so I did. It now runs FreeBSD 5.3 and Gnome 2.12.
My second day was very much the same as the second, I sat and played with the laptop until it behaved how it should. I spent the day with members of staff in the office.
My third day was much of a blur, I spent much of the day trying to aquire passwords for the various systems in the univesity. I was also temporarly given a desk to set up my desktop on.
However it’s not a small desktop, it’s a nice 3.4Ghz Dell box with 2Gb of ram, and 2 x 20″ TFT monitors. This too now runs Freebsd 5.3, Gnome 2.12 with widescreens. That evening a switch was plugged into the university which started a chain reaction.
Thursday morning hit and a lot of networking (including myself) were in early, some how the plugging in of the switch the night before caused the Cisco edge switches to start using VTP and subsequently started removing and adding different vlans on their own.
This had the effect of cutting off many computers and servers, including our managment domain. This ment for the first few hours of the day we were required to run about campus reprogramming the switches and insuring that VTP was set to transparent.
This went on until 10am when the switch that was currently set as VTP MASTER was found, and we were able to reintroduce all the vlans automatically to the campus. The remainder of the day was spent cleaning my desktop and adding more programs.
On Friday we still had some VTP fall out to clear up, so I was given a list of 50 Cisco switches on campus that needed their settings checked. At the end of the day another member of staff moved desk which would enable me to move.
The weekend came and passed very quickly with a trip to see the parents and then one to Ikea.
Monday morning I began to start moving my desk, however I was interrupted by something else that was going on and I was asked to work on something. The rest of the day I set up my desk properly.
Tuesday morning was primarly to do with the network at risk period that we have when we can break things. We reprogrammed many switched and upgraded firmware, one of these failed so I had to swap out a different switch.
Wednesday was entirely eaten up with a training session with Agilent for their N2X product, which can be used for bandwidth testing (and QOS, which is something I will be involved with).
Thursday I was drafted in to assist with the creation of a test resnet system so that we could try the dynamic vlan system that was prototyped. We spent much of the day setting up the network, arranging vlans, etc. During the day the VOIP system had failed, a service tech had arrived from our hardware support vender, and we stayed in the machine room attempting to fix the routers until 8:30pm.
Finally today, we continued the resnet work, with HP and Cisco equipment and tested all variaties that we have on the network. All tests have been successful. This evening and tomorrow the resnet switches will be reprogrammed to use this functionality.
And now I’m tired, I feel like bed :).
Ahh the fun.