Apr 1st, 2009 |
7:55pm Tuesday (I think)
We’ve now been building the network for 4 days and things are going rather well (but they can always go better). We have to add that disclaimer. The staff somehow managed to find out it was my birthday (rumor has it security at own home is a bit spotty – ala the wife). I managed to end up with a picture cake me from my 3rd birthday. These people are pretty resourceful when it comes to that sort of thing.
Time…There’s real time, the time that most of us spend pinned to our calendaring systems…and then there’s Interop time. That’s the time where you enter into the “build the network” vacuum and you lose all sight of reality and what is going on in the outside world. Right now I have no idea what the stock market is going…what’s going on in the news…or the multitude of other important events that l should probably be aware of. At least for the most part, we remember to maintain some modicum of personal hygiene.
At hot stage, we eat pretty well. Besides the ample breakfast at the hotel, the UBM staff provides us with catered meals and snacks. WAAAY too many snacks…Tables full of just about everything you would want to grab off the shelf at Costco. Candy bars, pop tarts, dried fruit, trail mix. Pretty much everything our dieticians say we should not send into our bodies. Two refrigerators chock full of water, diet Coke, Juice and who knows what else washes it all down
OK the more important stuff…we’re now talking to the outside world from the warehouse. We’ve rolled all the racks out and connected the out -of-band management network (we call it Access Ether). Console and KVM equipment is up and running. And we managed to sort out a few power “challenges”. We mounted the core routing equipment that supports all the racks (PEDs). Today we hope to start sending packets around the network and perhaps even install the tapping equipment. Looking forward to firing up the enormous VMWare array as well. We’ll have more vendors arrive today with an additional set of goodies to implement. I think it’s going to start to get crazy today. We’ll see.
[...] just over a month from Interop and InteropNet is starting to shape up. It’s amazing to see this massive testament to interoperability and next-generation networking [...]