Wednesday, October 28, 2009

In Barrow Again

No more posts about riding for a while. I'm told that there is now snow on the ground back home and this time, it's sticking. I'm up in Barrow again this week working on the metro wireless. The goal was to get trunking on the point-to-multipoint network using a mixture of Cisco switches, Foundry switches and Alverion radios. It's now working the way it is supposed to and only had to use about a 2 minute outage instead of the scheduled 4 hours. There was a lot of cleanup that had to be done as well and I've been using Google Wave for posting switch configs and proposed changes to share with others. Pretty good tool for this sort of collaboration. The only negative is that if you are working on the network, there is a good chance that you won't be able to reach the Internet when you need to look at the configs. Still, the collaboration part seemed to work.

I took a break when some of the local staff needed to deliver some material from the Coast Guard to Barrow Search and Rescue. I never realized that the rotor blades folded up like that. It makes since for them to fold in order to not take as much room. My only experience with helicopters was over 25 years ago and they were much smaller. Hughes 500s and Jet Rangers. There was also a King Air and a Lear Jet in the Hanger. Kind of fun to look around and it was a nice break.

After that, it was back to switches, wireless access points, VoIP phones, and vlans. With the current configuration, I can assign any port in any of the out buildings to just about any vlan in the main buildings. The wireless access points contain several SSIDs to allow just about any researcher to jump onto the appropriate vlan (after authentication) and most of the VoIP phones have been moved into the same vlan no matter what building they are in. I've been meaning to do this for years but haven't been in a position to do it until now.

2 comments:

  1. Richard:

    That is a really big hangar being able to put all those aircraft in there. I was always fascinated with flying, and the bonus is that you can do it in the snow. Just make sure you don't have a Ural engine (lol), unless you have Dom as your pilot

    bob
    bobskoot: wet coast scootin

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  2. The Ural engine may be fine but you have to run it off of a battery (or throw a Honda genset in the back...) I have also always have been interested in flying and learned how to fly years ago when I was a university student. I never actually got my license since I was having too much fun flying around. Then I moved to Alaska and I couldn't afford it anymore.

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