Back in Barrow

I'm in Barrow again trying to finish up some loose ends as well as get some additional equipment installed. This time, I'm in one of the residential huts instead of the NARL Hotel. It is actually pretty nice as it is essentially a two bedroom apartment complete with kitchen and laundry facilities. It is only about a hundred yard walk to NARL Building 360 where the offices are. The last time I was here, I added an Alverion wireless clients to most of the huts and each has a small Cisco 3640 switch, Polycom IP320 VoIP phone and a 1 kva UPS to keep it all up and running for something like 25 minutes. I haven't tested the UPS yet, maybe after I finish this post. The VoIP phone is using the SIP proxy I set up last year in the BARC (Barrow Arctic Research Center) using the combination of OpenSER as the proxy server and Asterisk as the media server. It has been working flawlessly ever since and I have been steadily adding additional buildings and phones to the network since it was initially set up. Last month, I enabled trunking over the point-to-multipoint wireless network and can now deliver multiple vlans, including the VoIP vlan, into the residential huts. Only one more hut to add to the network and I should be able to get that one done on this trip. This has been a really fun project for me and I'll be sad to see it end next August.

BASC no longer has an agreement with the college to use their gym and workout equipment due to some abuse by some visiting grad students a while back. Unfortunate. I brought up some exercise bands to do a little workout and due to polar bear sightings, I'm not allowed to run outside. I haven't seen any around but then again, I really don't want to since I do have to walk outside to get to my hut. As it is, I end up working for about 12 hours per day so I'm usually pretty exhausted by the time evening rolls around anyway.

So far, everything has been going pretty smooth. I am still struggling trying to get Apple Podcast Producer up and running. I found some guides using Google but it is a pretty complex product. Especially trying to figure out the workflows. It's running now, sort of, but I can't get podcasts to upload successfully yet.