Another day, another grind.
Jul. 5th, 2005 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sobriqueToday has been a fairly busy day. We've been commissioning a new NS704 NAS. (Network attached storage). Unfortunately, due the the nature of the beast, it's needing large quantities of cabled plugging into large quantities of networks. So the start of the day involved getting a bundle of 22 CAT5 cables, and a couple of fibers fed under the floor into this box.
Sounds fairly trivial, I know, but the only practical way of doing this is by lifting each floor tile in turn, grovelling below the raised floor, and it _always_ seems to be at arms reach.
The cables also needed to be hooked into a network switch. At the moment, all these cables are hooked into one switch, that's not actually on our LAN. Ideally, we'll be plugging into two, with different physical paths for resilience. However, our network team are a little occupied at the moment, with 'WAN problems'.
Between that, labelling each end of the cable (another annoyingly fiddly task) and getting the cable spreadsheet filled in properly, that was most of the morning gone. We had several visitors onsite for the installation and commissioning of the hardware, but they were kind of having to wait for us to sign off the documentation.
So after getting the cables put in place, and hooked up to the network switch, we quickly went through the config guide. We have a meeting to finalise it tomorrow, but have a few amendments to feed back. Yeah, we're doing a config before actually finishing the design. Good, isn't it?
Our WAN is a bit broken at the moment, we're currently running on the 'standby' 2Mb line. It's basically saturated at the moment, and there's lots of screaming going on (hence our network gurus are collectively looking a little stressed). The provider of our netlink is doing a 'managed service' which basically means they take control, don't let us reconfigure, firewall everything, make life difficult, and take ages to respond to change requests. Oh, and cost more than our previous provider did.
You might ask why we use them, and the answer is, because HQ told us to. Our bill went up by a factor of 4, but 3 sites in france a little reduction on their current. So that's nice for them.
This afternoon, we've also has to re-patch the fibres from our backup server into the new SAN. It's because we have a cheat for fast data transfer - copy small files over the Gigabit ethernet, and large files across the 2 gigabit Fibre channel SCSI adaptors. So it's a bit quick.
I've still got to feed back out config guide changes for tomorrow, and a couple of other updates to migration plans.
I was aiming to migrate a Solaris machine, but that's not happened, because a) I've not got an updated plan for Solaris (I probably could cope, but ...) b) it's the unix print server, so people might get annoyed and c) I can't be arsed, I'm shattered.
Popped to subway for lunch, both because I needed a break, and because I was starving. Found that my ankle is starting to play up, and so lunch was accompanied by a soft drink, a decent book, and a couple of co-codamol.
This afternoon has been more of the same, hooking up networks and configuring our EDM backup server.
We also had our hardware support team come and want to change a power supply on one of our servers, but we I managed to successfully fob that off onto our Ebusiness team.
I've not managed to blag wednesday as holiday unfortunately, although to be honest, I wasn't really expecting to. Short notice, and busy busy :)
I'm definitely looking forward to Maelstrom, although without getting wednesday as hols, I'm going to be a bit shorter on time that than I'd like, but ... well that's how these things go.
Finally finishing up for the day, with troubleshooting an agent on our EDM server. 's still not working, but it's no the end of the world, and it's gone 18:30, so time to call it a day I reckon.
Sounds fairly trivial, I know, but the only practical way of doing this is by lifting each floor tile in turn, grovelling below the raised floor, and it _always_ seems to be at arms reach.
The cables also needed to be hooked into a network switch. At the moment, all these cables are hooked into one switch, that's not actually on our LAN. Ideally, we'll be plugging into two, with different physical paths for resilience. However, our network team are a little occupied at the moment, with 'WAN problems'.
Between that, labelling each end of the cable (another annoyingly fiddly task) and getting the cable spreadsheet filled in properly, that was most of the morning gone. We had several visitors onsite for the installation and commissioning of the hardware, but they were kind of having to wait for us to sign off the documentation.
So after getting the cables put in place, and hooked up to the network switch, we quickly went through the config guide. We have a meeting to finalise it tomorrow, but have a few amendments to feed back. Yeah, we're doing a config before actually finishing the design. Good, isn't it?
Our WAN is a bit broken at the moment, we're currently running on the 'standby' 2Mb line. It's basically saturated at the moment, and there's lots of screaming going on (hence our network gurus are collectively looking a little stressed). The provider of our netlink is doing a 'managed service' which basically means they take control, don't let us reconfigure, firewall everything, make life difficult, and take ages to respond to change requests. Oh, and cost more than our previous provider did.
You might ask why we use them, and the answer is, because HQ told us to. Our bill went up by a factor of 4, but 3 sites in france a little reduction on their current. So that's nice for them.
This afternoon, we've also has to re-patch the fibres from our backup server into the new SAN. It's because we have a cheat for fast data transfer - copy small files over the Gigabit ethernet, and large files across the 2 gigabit Fibre channel SCSI adaptors. So it's a bit quick.
I've still got to feed back out config guide changes for tomorrow, and a couple of other updates to migration plans.
I was aiming to migrate a Solaris machine, but that's not happened, because a) I've not got an updated plan for Solaris (I probably could cope, but ...) b) it's the unix print server, so people might get annoyed and c) I can't be arsed, I'm shattered.
Popped to subway for lunch, both because I needed a break, and because I was starving. Found that my ankle is starting to play up, and so lunch was accompanied by a soft drink, a decent book, and a couple of co-codamol.
This afternoon has been more of the same, hooking up networks and configuring our EDM backup server.
We also had our hardware support team come and want to change a power supply on one of our servers, but we I managed to successfully fob that off onto our Ebusiness team.
I've not managed to blag wednesday as holiday unfortunately, although to be honest, I wasn't really expecting to. Short notice, and busy busy :)
I'm definitely looking forward to Maelstrom, although without getting wednesday as hols, I'm going to be a bit shorter on time that than I'd like, but ... well that's how these things go.
Finally finishing up for the day, with troubleshooting an agent on our EDM server. 's still not working, but it's no the end of the world, and it's gone 18:30, so time to call it a day I reckon.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
damn
Date: 2005-07-05 07:45 pm (UTC)By contrast... nearly all my problems today were managerial/softskill stuff (job specs and objectives for next 3 months) though I did do some database conversions and presentation roadie stuff (yes, roadie stuff for insecure sales execs and senior managers as we need all the good karma we can get due to some bright spark (tm) flexing his political musk glands so landing the whole team dans la merde.)
Tomorrow promises to be different. De boss be on leave and I'm helming his project which is in it's dying days... only the bastard awkward sites left to sort out. Also means I can get that bright spark in a darkened room for a few minutes. It'll be all I need. :)
Also didn't finish till after 6.30 so I'm feeling a bit more virtuous.