Just Thoughts » work

Love Affair

Bloggylife — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:38:58 +0000

I simply love my network

Though it drives me crazy and it leaves me baffled and crazed at times, but I can’t help but smile when I remember that all of it, is mine.

Each time I think I’ve figured it all out, something new comes along, something I missed, and I say now I understand, it all makes sense now, but then it doesn’t and I’m lost again!

My network, from the two core switches, Papa and Mama, to their little children, edge switches, spanning our building across all floors. Sharing love and communication through long colourful cables. Not only do Papa and Mama have the means to run the show and manage their kids, but the smooth flow will continue even if either Papa or Mama went down for a nap

First thing in the morning, I check the reports, how is my baby today. Though I have a spoiled brat, which is the backup, going through a phase, a rebellious one that I can’t understand, thankfully I call in this amazing guy, the shrink, aka support, and he makes it all better

No you don’t understand, you’re in the wrong VLAN. This network isn’t routed to the inside!

Three levels of routing, switch level, firewall level and router level. Aha, take a look at the illustrations, does it make sense to you. No, why, here let me explain one more time. This is my network and I’ll make you understand.

Let’s take it up a notch and introduce you to the bodyguards, we have the elegant twins protecting the network and then another pair tucked safely inside the cores and all our servers are placed behind, not paranoid just being extra cautious

We have the fancy voice infrastructure, with our VoIP, voice mails, faxes and cool messengers.

The neatly distributed IPs, based on buildings, floor and function. It’s the address we follow, gimme the IP, go check this building that floor.

Brings joy to my heart when something new comes along, though not always. When that unwelcomed, so called IPS weaselled its way in, WTH, how do you manage this thing! Turn it off, put it in monitoring mode, I don’t like devices I totally don’t understand, we don’t speak the same language, them and I and frankly I don’t have the time, so put it aside.

Virtualization, a light in my dull word, I go high everytime, I take something physical and magically virtualize it. Just a click of a mouse and all is done, multiple copies and snapshots of different states. Machines and servers come to life by creating and cloning. Resources are distributed, machines have the freedom to roam around looking for more resources whenever needed Simply delicious.

I love our blade center, the blades look alien-like, but I adore it because of its management, I can remotely format Though I can’t have more sessions when I want to but something will come up in the future.

The time we decided to renovate our datacenter, re-cable and organize the server cabinets! Almost falling under shaking floor tiles. The cabling industry have come so far, management cables that are just plugged into patch panels. It’s loads of work, but it’s worth it

You forget what servers you have, some are so old they don’t even have USB ports! Move that brick out of here, I say.

Management applications that keep an eye on everything and report back when something is wrong or abnormal.

The whole company is nicely coated with wireless, for different purposes, business, guest and voice, ain’t this grand

I can go on and on about what we have, we are one big family, we don’t always get along, on times I get this feeling that something is wrong, even if I’m miles away, so I VPN to work and check everything out and sometimes I just ignore that feeling and deal with it in the morning

My network, it’s growing, it’s expanding, some hardware has moved out, some retired, some got an upgrade, you try to explain it all with drawings and documentation but you never get it entirely until you get your hands dirty Even then keep your mind open for the no sense at all surprises.

All in all, I simply LOVE my network

The day I spoke!

Bloggylife — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:59:16 +0000

Unprofessional Confessions

Bloggylife — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:23:31 +0000

I confess I was unprofessional and I apologized over and over again! At that moment, it didn’t seem like a big deal but when I had to deal with it, I was embarrassed. The 5 minutes it usually takes me to befriend my neighbours took 45 minutes! I can hear my mobile ringing from a distance but I was too caught up to go get it.

The guy I was supposed to meet left and I can’t blame him one bit! I received an email stating that their representative was on time, but I wasn’t available. I apologized for wasting his time and efforts and rescheduled to Sunday!

I hate it when people are not professional, wasting my time, so I am so annoyed that I did that to someone else. I hate it when I spend time in useless meeting discussing useless stuff, when all questions can be answered by simply reading the damn document submitted! And yet here I am doing the same exact thing that I loathe to another.

We had a failed hard disk that needed to be replaced in one of our servers, the technician needed to install a software, first thing I asked do you need to restart the server after installation. “No”, came his sure answer.

See when installing a software, sometimes you need to restart the server or the newly installed application won’t start or won’t run properly, some software installations will disconnect all active share session, so you need to be aware of those incidents.

What do you know, we had to restart the server. I inhaled and exhaled before saying, my first question was, do we need to restart the server because this is a file server that we cannot simply restart!!!

I receive calls from people in which my answer should be read the manual we prepared with the screen shots I spent hours preparing, but NO they need to hear your voice reading out the steps and they follow! I don’t understand this. Am I asking for too much here?

But I thought of it as punishment for my un-professionalism today. I beat up myself a lot, I know it’s just work, but I think I do this in my life too, when I am the one who did others wrong. I need to loosen up, it’s easier said than done.

Time Off!

Bloggylife — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:16:35 +0000

I’ve got one week off Not going anywhere as usual, I’ll be spending it here.

I needed it so badly, to relax and ease my mind and prepare for the upcoming month.

Some of my days are planned some are not, I’ll bore you with my daily doings or I’ll try to.

Got lots of catching up to do, reading, learning, cleaning, movies, playing, etc. Hope I manage to do most of them!

IT Diaries

Bloggylife — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:40:37 +0000

Standing in the cold, staring at each other …

“How the hell is it working???“

We burst into laughter!

We just finalized major changes in our network and we discovered we missed one thing, that affected external communication to some of our internal servers. Those same servers were able to perform selected services that had nothing in common!!

It’s too late to put everything back, nahhh, it’s impossible ;P

We resort to … workarounds … and schedule the next change tomorrow …

Timetables are the least reliable factor I came to notice in IT projects, especially if you are working on an existing infrastructure.

The simplest things that go wrong, different networks are not routing to each other, so you need to connect physically to each to troubleshoot and as you connect and configure the IP settings and about to start, the laptop hibernates, you ran out of battery!! You get a cable to connect between two cabinets, one end connected, you’re about to connect the other end, damn the cable is too short! LOL!

You can never say we finalized and tested everything, unless some time passes by. The bigger the project and major changes the more time you need to confidently say, “Yes we completed the task successfully“.

I, for one, want to badly say that phrase, but can’t at this stage ;D

Wrath of the Net. Admins

Bloggylife — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:27:21 +0000

Simple, there is a line, that one shouldn’t cross!

I like my supervisor, and when I like someone I hate to see others mess around with them.

My supervisor got into a quarrel with a person from another department and he came to me to vent.

Me: Do you want me to do something about it

Supervisor: -laughing- kafooo wAllah, picking my side

I wasn’t joking, see we the IT are always at the bottom of the chain, everyone is stepping on us, running crying to management, IT blocked this, won’t allow this, endless ridiculous requests! We really work hard but no one actually feels it, people only notice when things go bad and I don’t blame them for that.

I already was contemplating the punishment and blacklisted that person. Inflect excruciating pain, not necessary block his access but reduce it speed ;P assign lower priority to all activities, loop their requests … luckily for that employee, they apologized and made amends with my supervisor. So all is good, the gloves are off.

Don’t Touch My Mess!

Bloggylife — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:31:35 +0000

IT Diaries

Bloggylife — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:08:52 +0000

IT people and IT problems, it can get personal and ugly!

Really sometimes, the problem baffles you so much it becomes your obbssession until you solve it and victory!

I get a call from another IT person, annoyed because he didn’t solve a manager’s problem immediately. He was explaining the problem and as I was listening and discussing it with him, it hit me, YUP the solution, but I kept it to myself, he needs this, I say to myself, he needs to figure this on his own … ;P

The next day, he calls and happily announces the solution, you know what the problem is, and this is the solution. Yeah just like I thought. He’s so happy, he asks for my opinion should we go this way or that way, no let’s go that way better, he comes over, we do the new configuration, he gets back and tests it and all is great. He reports that the problem is solved!

That was his moment and he needed it Just like in the movies …

The last to know!

Bloggylife — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:03:25 +0000

As I was in Applebee’s getting my soup and salad I see this and tweak it a bit ;P

The life of an IT is hell ….

But somebody’s got to do it

Simple IT

Bloggylife — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:35:05 +0000

How gmail notifier is helping me at work?

Whenever the exclamation mark (!) comes on, something is wrong.

So as you can see, this is a snapshot, from my work PC, our ISP disconnected us again Internationally. wAllah, I don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or not, at home my KEMs 1Mb account, is slow, I’m not sure if they are throttling traffic or not, but when I go to testing sites, it shows 800Kb/sec, but the browsing is slow and no downloads at all. Are they prioritizing these sites, maybe …

What’s with these International fiber cuts?? It’s reported 6 STM-1 lines are down, the data rate of each one is 155Mb/sec, so that’s about near 1Gb … How long has this been going, I believe since three weeks …

These are simple utilities that might be taken for granted but are useful for on the spot detection and troubleshooting. Sij ena once, I got the (!) mark and it turned out that the application itself got corrupted and I had to uninstall it … ya3nee salfa … but it’s a nice way to keep your eyes on things in a simple way.