RedWarriorNet

I’ve been sick and lightly joking that it is “the pig flu” but to be honest, it’s more likley just a nasty combination of a lack of sleep, plus stress, plus a regular flu virus.  2 weekends of major moves in the datacenter in a row have taken their toll on my immune system, with their associated all-nighters.  On the bright side, I have a 4-day weekend coming up this weekend which will involve a whole lot of unplugging from anything remotely network-related.

I did want to drop in before, though, and post updates to the two issues that came up during the moves that I blogged about here.  The first was the problems with the twingig modules and SFP’s on our 4900M’s.  This issue was actually resolved by downgrading the affected 4900M’s to  Version 12.2(40)XO, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1) versus the 12.2(50) code they were on.  Apparently, although the 12.2(40) version is the first that supported twingig interfaces, it seems to be less buggy, at least for what we’re doing.  I’d recommend anyone seeing similar symptoms to give it a try.

DECnet…well, it’s still there, but it’s now contained in one vlan.  Apparenlty, forcing these two systems to talk to each other in a current protocol (heck, at this point I’d even take IPX!!) would cost us 7 figures, so for now, we are just isolating it.  I’m just happy we don’t have to try to figure out how to route it.

These datacenter moves have been grueling for everyone involved, but it is satisfying to see these systems on a network with a tengigabit backbone and the kind of redundant power structure they need.  Not only that, but the cable labeling is gorgeous!  I’m going to go take my next dose of airborne and hope the pigs stop flying.

You know when you move a piece of furniture that’s been in one plac a very long time and suddenly discover something underneath that has been there almost as long?  There’s that feeling of having discovered a piece of the past?  Well, it turns out that moving servers to a new datacenter is often a lot like that, particularly in a large enterprise where things often get lost in memory.  We are currently working on moving one of our main applications to the datacenter and one of the system administrators made an astounding discovery yesterday afternoon.

He couldn’t get some remote printing to work with a terminal server he installed here at the new datacenter.  The only difference is that, unlike back at the old datacenter, there is a new network for these systems at the new datacenter so, until the rest of the application servers are moved, this terminal server is on a separate network.  After much troubleshooting with the vendor, he came over to the network engineering cube area with the most remarkable question I think I’ve been asked at 4:00 on a friday…”Hey, do you guys block DECnet?”  After a moment of thinking back to the first chapter in most of my TCP/IP books, I remembered that what he was talking about was the precursor to IP and a layer 3 protocol in its own right that dates back to the very early days of the internet.  The ensuing conversation was a mixture of astonishment and curiousity mixed with equal parts consternation.

Of course, we don’t “block” DECnet.  We didn’t even know they were using it!  The problem really is that we don’t ROUTE DECnet.  DECnet has its own methods of routing and we have nothing in place to move this kind of traffic from one network segment to another.  This is why we were able to be happily oblivious to this kind of layer 2 traffic going on as long as the two hosts using it were on the same segment.  We wracked our brains, wondering if we could encapsulate it somehow within an IP packet or else use a GRE tunnel of some sort…anything to move that over our routed WAN link to the datacenter.  Finally, we shrugged and suggested using a Metro-E connection to temporarily span that subnet from the old datacenter  to the new until the servers are moved.  The system administrator is also looking for a solution to get this system to use IP rather than DECnet, which is definitely something that needs to happen long term.  A bit of further digging showed that since this traffic doesn’t even use MAC addresses, our switches have likely been treating it like broadcast traffic and just flooding it out all ports in the same vlan.  It looks like the only way we’d be able to route this is using DECnet over TCP.

Before this dinosaur is laid back to rest, though, I’m going to try to see if wireshark will capture some of this traffic.  I feel almost like I’m in a Geico commercial and have suddenly met a Caveman and I’m curious to see how he behaves.  I’m also curious to see how our switches treat this traffic over ethernet.  I’m not sure if the rest of the team shares my fascination, though…they seemed a bit more irritated that we were asked to deal with a layer 3 protocol that should have been taken out of production decades ago and also that we were asked to deal with it a week before a server move.  

Next time I move my couch…I’m going to be prepared for anything!

I’ve been getting more popular lately.  I’d like to think it’s because I’m a genuinely cool person that so many old friends are suddenly getting back in touch with me, but unfortunately, it is more due to the current economic situation.  I’ve been getting more and more requests to join social networking sites or to add connections in the ones I already belong to.  While I do wish that these people had kept in touch (I honestly do consider them friends as well as former coworkers), I can also appreciate the urgency of their need to reconnect and I’m trying to be a good friend and be generous with recommendations and such.

To be honest, I also got busy and didn’t keep in touch, but I always knew I could count on them for recommendations if I needed them, so it’s only fair!

Right now, I feel incredibly lucky to be hired on to a company just before they instituted a hiring freeze.  Every time I listen to the news, (I’m not big on watching the news or reading it, but listening to it in the car works well) I hear about another company cutting jobs, reporting losses, or even just throwing in the towel.  I can’t say I was surprised to hear that Nortel is considering bankruptcy , but it’s still ominous all the same.  Any place I have worked, people were far busier ripping out old legacy nortel equipment than they were interested in installing any new equipment from them, so that tends to translate into a company not doing so well.  Still, it only adds to the dark clouds.

I would have to say, up until the past month, I have believed that this recession was something that the majority of people would weather fairly well and that it would just be a couple of years before the economy was back humming right along.  Now I’m not so sure.  It almost seems as if the entire US and by extension, world economy were just a house of cards waiting to fall, all depending on everyone, from huge corporations to individuals, to keep spending beyond their means, racking up huge piles of debt in the process.  Now it is as if the loan sharks have come calling and even the deepest pockets realize that they are not deep enough to pay up.

I also find it interesting that the huge corporations that blindly spent, paying out incredible salaries to their executives, are the first to be bailed out by the government while there seems to be no intention of helping out individuals or families who are guilty of the same financial crimes as the corporations.  It appears that the very wealthiest portion of society that was at the helm of these corporations is the only portion of society that the government is willing to assist even when they are far less likely to need it.

This blog is primarily about networking, but I can’t help but express my disillusionment in a democratic government that has clearly given up any concern for its people in exchange for being bought by large corporations.

I’ve been away from my blog for a while, busy starting a new job and also busy jumping into the exciting new field of wireless.  I have my ISCW exam scheduled for Dec. 22nd and immediately following that, I’ll be starting on my CCNA-Wireless.  I’ve accepted a permanent position in the company I’ve been contracting with for the past few months and despite the economic downturns everywhere, it seems like Healthcare is booming.

I plan on continuing this blog and also expanding it to include more of my favorite study resources, both for my certification exams as well as my work projects.  I hope to build it into a resource that I can use to share the tools that I use with others.