Monday morning catchup

Lots going on today. First off, an apology for not posting more about the Chicago trip. It went off and I had a long entry that I worked up in the car while driving back (well, Nathan was driving). When I synched up with our blogger account using my cell phone, the entry was overwritten. Clearly, there's lesson there.

The short of it is that the suite visit went fine, aside from a few niggling items. There was an unfortunate miscommunication on the time, so we ended up sitting around in a coffee shop for a few hours waiting for the Level3 escort. The 600 W. Chicago building requires a second badge to get in that's completely separate from the Level3 badge, so we'll need to worry about getting those. As the Level3 tech said, they tried integrating them, but one system was "32-bit" and the other was "64-bit". ;-)

Today was spent pushing e-mails to make sure we plant the seeds for some future discussions. We got the HP switch PO out the door, which will make things tight on our management and observatory networks. I'm waiting on a quote for the Cisco routers that we'll terminate our POTS lines in for the out-of-band management network. Oh, and we have to order all the POTS lines. This stuff is seriously keeping me up at nights, so I have a vested interest in getting it done sooner rather than later.

The Infinera grounding screws showed up, so we can now terminate the power at both IUPUI and Bloomington. Of course, the lug crimpers are in Indy, so we need to wait for a mule (Matt) to bring them back. Infinera is coming on Thursday. They're in luck since UITS is throwing it's first ever Chili Fest on the same day. We're thinking of telling the tech that it's all in his honor.

Let's talk patch panels. Seriously, these things are the other reason why I'm not sleeping. We need them for all the connector LOAs. MAGPI and a few others are blocking on fiber orders until we can give them an LOA that specifies the tie-down info within our suite. Caren's got a line on a module ADC panel. We're going to go with 14 pairs of SC-connector fiber at the grooming nodes and up to 24 pairs of fiber at the router sites. Thankfully, the specs show the port positions so we can say with some level of confidence that we know where the fibers will land on the panel.

Now we have to worry about tracking all this. In the old days, we would have done it with a spreadsheet. But this is the 00's, baby. There are wonderful inventions called databases. You may have heard of them. Fortunately, we also have the requisite database programmer that's already been thinking five steps ahead of yours truly. Big props to Ed Balas for the foresight to get this done. Now we just need to hammer out the details. Hoping to do that tomorrow.

We started thinking about the logistics of the management network for the grooming system. OK, we thought about it before today, but now we're doing the "how do we get fiber between this building and that building" dance. Think we have some good solutions for I2.

Picked up the HD video camera for the installs. Yes, it's a bit of a toy, but will be useful. I had fun making the rest of the staff sick by sticking them in front of our 65" video display and making them watch video from my perspective of a walk down the hall. Gotta have fun at least five minutes out of the day.