30 Days of Geek – Day 03 – What does your day job involve?

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#TODO – Insert picture of Ergon Building when not cloudy

I am contracted out to Ergon Energy to their Communication NOC (Network Operation Center)  which manages both private and commercial networks sold by Nexium.

Problem Solving. The key element of my job is problem solving. As a Network Communication Technician, may primary role is ensuring that all network elements are in good working condition, operable and manageable. Along with trouble shooting issues, configuring new services and devices and updating documentation.

Breaking down complex network layers and working out which layer, what element, and how it failed, along with when and why. Managing the networks within Ergon isn’t as simple as rebooting your home DSL connection. Problems can occur at many different layers and locations within the network, and finding the information you require during an outage can be problematic and hard at times. A typical problem may have one or more of the following issues:

  • Ethernet
  • Fibre and Cable faults (Backhoe Fade)
  • 802.1Q
  • IP
  • IPSec
  • PPP
  • MPLS
  • SDH / PDH
  • ATM
  • DSL
  • GSM/3G
  • OSPF, EIGRP, and BGP
  • Power, Aircon, Security
  • Backhaul or third party

My job basically involves using problem solving to find the issue, fix it and finally report on it, which is something I really love to do. No network can have 100% uptime, you just have to plan for outages and ensure you are ready for when they happen.

Networking and Communication is something that I really love, and I think I’ll be in the Communication industry for quite some time.

This post is not affiliated in anyway to Ergon Energy or Nexium.

30 Days of Geek – Day 2 – Preferred programming language?

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While I’m far from a “programmer” I do like to hack up solutions to problems. Mostly my code is far from neat and elegant (however sometimes I stand back and go “Wow, I accidentally made that code really elegant and efficient”), but it gets the job done.

In most cases I use python, mainly because it’s really easy to quickly whip something up, and making use of arrays and dictionaries is so god dawn easy. I learn’t python in a short 1 week course at NCSS.

Since most of my programming/hacking work revolves around importing and exporting data in different file types in one time batches, python allows me to quickly whip something up within a few hours with hassle.

While I use python for hacking around, I still prefer to get the right programming language for the software. C and C++ are my favorites for server applications (I always found JAVA and python clunky on servers), and PHP for web apps. I really do wish people programming had more understanding of assembly.

My pet hate is Mono / Silverlight, which Gnome seems to be loving at the moment, along with platform dependent code.

I would like to see a world where everything is programmed solely in Brainfuck, however I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

30 Days of Geek – Day 1 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?

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So I’ve decided to take part in the 30 Days of Geek challenge after Jack Scott posted his day 1 blog. I think pictures explain more than words, so I’m going to try to answer most of the day questions with pictures with a little bit of text.

C3550 1000Base-TX GBICs

The number one reason I considering myself a geek is because I’m a networking freak. Not in the sense of social networking, but in the sense of data communications (Etherent, IP, ATM, DSL, ect…). While this makes up a large percentage of my geekiness, I do venture into other areas such as software and hardware development, VoIP, radio and photography.

I don’t believe their are too many houses in the world that run an OSPF network, with several default routes/ alternative paths to access the internet, and BGP running to link to other sites (friends and family) running over a combination of IPSec/IPIP and OpenVPN. I’ve always found it amazing how we can data from one side of the world to the other at insane speeds (yes, 9600 baud is still insane to me).

I’d rather hack something up (even if it costs more), than to buy a product to suit my needs, as the fun is in the challenge, rather than the end result.

I’m one of those people that live on IRC channels, and make use of an IRC bot to tell me whether it’s sunny or cloudy outside.

And also, have a look at the header image of my blog, it’s by far the easiest way I know that I’m a geek. If you’re not sure about the source of the image you can find all you need to know here.

Where's My Server?

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Where’s My Server (WMS) is a New Zealand VPS provider, and I have to joy of running a Debian virtual server on their wonderful VPS platform. I’ve decided to write a short review on my experiences. Please bare with me, as I haven’t done this “blogging” thing in awhile.

First impressions were quite nice with WMS, their website is simple, and I like that. I hate nothing more than BoHTTP (Bloat over HTTP). Sign up was relatively easy, and payment was made via PayPal, which works out great for me. Within a few minutes I had my account setup and ready to run.

The welcome emails were nice, and were actually from a real person! I replied to one, asking about Where my “Where’s My Server” server was located, as I use the address in the naming scheme, and within a few minutes got a friendly reply.

The server booted up nice and fast, and I was able to quickly configured up the box, and it was put into production within the the hour. Unlike other VPS servers I’ve used, these are fast! Even on a virtual 400 MHz, it feels like it’s a real 400MHz. I think is contributed by the fact that it’s actual hardware virtualization, rather than software virtualization (eg OpenVZ). This also helps in the fact I need to create tun and tap interfaces, along with using IPSec and messing with the routing table, which in some VPS systems is impossible. You can customize your server as you want, yourself, without waiting for approvals or admins. WMS also allows for free snapshots of server, and easy rebuilding via their custom built console.

The console for WMS is great. Very light and easy to find what you want. It’s 100% better than any other console I’ve seen, however it can be improved in two ways. First is that there is no breadcrumb, or menu, which makes going back (eg, from the server list to bandwidth) annoying, requiring the use of the browser back button. The other annoying thing is that the remote console requires Java, which was a bit hard to work out when you don’t have Java installed. I believe that it just sets up VNC session, so it would be nice if the console could just provide you those details as well, just so you don’t have to bow down to the Sun/Oracle Java License.

Apart from those niggling annoyances on the console (which is still the best I’ve seen), the only other real problem with WMS (apart from them not supporting Gentoo) is the fact that it’s cost for more bandwidth, and hard drive space is insane. I can believe that the bandwidth issue is more of a New Zealand issue, rather than a WMS issue, but considering I can get for $50 USD a month a dedicated server along with 2TB traffic, vs $6000NZD a month for international traffic seems a bit excessive. Disk space I can’t understand, $90 a month for 60GB and $30 for 60GB of network disk space.

In summary, apart from the pricing issues WMS is awesome.

HAM

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HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM HAM

Ian Macdonald

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Hi Senator Ian Macdonald,

First of all, thanks for your personalized email to me. It’s nice to know that there are senators out there that care. While I agree with some of your points, I would like to ask a question regarding the “Stopping the boats” statement. Can’t we just move New Zealand to be in between us and them. We wouldn’t be stopping them, and gives New Zealand a chance to actually do some work rather than ski, and bungee jump.

I also noticed that the signature on the letter you sent me is quite large, in fact several lines down, and nearly the whole page long. I’ve always wanted to see a senator standing up for the people that want form to have large signature boxes. It’s a great idea, because I usually run out of space writing my name on tax and medicare forms, let alone my signature, which is in fact a picture of a Eskimo, cooking a fish outside his igloo (hence why the small box is annoying!). That aside, I suggest we don’t increase the size of credit cards to fit a signature that size. It would very annoying to find a wallet that size.

I would like to also thank you for inviting me to www.liberal.org.au. I still haven’t got a chance to look at nationals.org.au because I haven’t been invited. Having to be invited to each website makes surfing the internet quite hard.

Regards,
Michael Wheeler

Heads down thumbs up

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Dear girl in my grade 2 class (I’m sorry that I can’t even remember your name),

Back in grade 2, I cheated (by accident) in a game of heads down, thumbs up. I would like to say I’m sorry, and I hope that this message gets to you somehow. This memory keeps running through my head, over and over and over again. I will do anything for forgiveness.

Regards,

Michael Wheeler.

The election begins…

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Hi Kirsten,

Thanks for the letter drop. You have beat everyone else to the game in regards to pamphlets, and your views are quite nice. Before I place my vote on election day I would to voice my concerns. My biggest one that I would like to point out, and question you is the left hand section of the pamphlet, about “Helping local organisations”.

At first I thought that the pamphlet was a little folded or on an angle, but upon closer inspection I noticed that it wasn’t a rectangle or a square. My first thoughts was that it was a rhombus, but latter googling and wikipedia research revealed that it was infact a parallelogram. What I would like to know, is why did you choose this shape? It’s far different from every other on the page and looks quite odd. Maybe if it were in the middle it would be better placed.

Another thing I would like cleared up is the placement of the title text. Most humans are taught fairly early to read top down left to right, while your text is placed right bottom. Is this a hint that you will changing our eduction system, and possibly changing English for a language that is read back to front than our norm, or was this an attempt to get votes for people from these nationalities?

Finally, could you please quickly comment on why your pamphlet colour scheme is superior to your competitors.

Kind Regards,
Michael Wheeler