PixieLog » Work

Nightmare

Bram — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:41:38 +0000

Ofcourse it wouldn’t be a real monday, if it wasn’t for a little trouble. Or actually, a lot, in this case. For some reason, the EVDO system went down, so none of the residential customers had internet access. After some hours of physical tracerouting, changing cables, switches, configs, etc, we figured out what the problem was. Apparently, someone found it necessary to pass all traffic through 2 small happyhub-style 5 port Netgear switches. Right. One of which appeared dead, but not completely. A little fiddling later, we blamed the powersupply. Once replaced, life was good again, yay!

Obviously, the broken adapter had its punishment after a colleague and I “treated” it with 2 rusty old hammers. In the end, that silly thing costed us all morning. To be honest, it was the lack of documentation and reverse engineering that took the most time, but that would be much less fun to blame (and more painful for a certain person .. ;)

Nightshift

Bram — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:10:05 +0000

And another night of work. This time, the plan was to clean up one of the wiring cabinets. It really was a big mess, though no where near as bad as this (The picture is real, made a while back at our NL office). We got a fair bit cleaned up, and might only need one extra day to finish it up :)
Oh, and it’s real “fun” to drive here at night. There’s almost no traffic, but no streetlights either. And traffic lights are merely for decoration purposes, it seems, since noone actually pays attention (for good reason, or so I’ve heard). Other than that, I got to work in under 10 minutes :)

Now let’s hope this will be a quiet day..

VoIP

Bram — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:50:37 +0000

Today I did some interconnect tests with Global Crossing. After a little exchange of information and configuring, we were able to make some successful testcalls from here to the US and back. Fortunately, this will help speeding up $project in the near future ;)

Yay for a competent and clueful test team :)

Broken..

Bram — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:37:37 +0000

Yesterday, one of our larger basestations decided to give issues. It wouldn’t respond to arp requests, or ping. When I added a static arp entry, it replied with a bunch of DUPs. But still, the thing was unmanageble. Service was not really affected though, since packets were forwarded just like it should. Troubleshooting is a bitch this way :)

Today, 2 technicians went on site to check things out. After swapping around some cables and switchports (and some elevator trips of 12 minutes each) and documenting old stuff in the process, we finally found the problem. For some reason, the basestation decided to forget its IP confuguration.. And, when I took a closer look, the “management” address is somehow connected / assigned to each terminal (client) as well. At least that explains why we got a shitload of dupes (because each terminal would respond to that IP. Recalculated that, the amount of dupes matched the amount of terminals :) And, it also explains why I could still reach the “management” address from my home: it was my own antenna responding. Kind of figures, with the 1ms replies.

Let’s see how long it’ll hold this time, I fear we might have to replace the puppy. Which might be tricky, given the fact that it’s on one of the hardest places to get to, on top of the chimney :)

Sipura

Bram — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:13:43 +0000

When trying to make a little script to post data / configuration info to a SPA-2102, I saw the following:

Right. That’s going to be very helpful.

Customer trouble..

Bram — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:15:37 +0000

Always fun to hear a customer-complaint. “All phones (10) are broken! Nothing works!”. Right. So, you check up with the helpdesk. They tell you something similar, so we decided to drive by, as it was only 5 minutes away. When we arrived, it appeared that ‘only’ 4 phones weren’t working. After a reset of the VoIP ATA, only one stopped working. Turned out to be bad cabling..

So much for “Big Urgent Catastrofic Problems” :)

Curacao

Bram — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:41:31 +0000

Well, time to post a little update. At the moment, I’ve moved to Curacao. My boss thought it was a good idea to send me here for ~ one year, which I obviously didn’t mind. Currently busy doing work, filling up the house, arranging paperwork, car, bank accounts, and about a million other things I’m sure I’ll forget ;)

Anyways, more updates soon. Or not. When I’ve got time. :)

Home again.

Bram — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:37:37 +0000

So, today, I got back home :) After a 8.5hrs flight, I arrived this morning back at Schiphol. The flight itself was quite ok, way better than my flight to Curacao.. Almost no babies/annoying kids, and I could actually sleep. Got to sit by the window again, which was a bit useless. The view in order of appearance: Curacao (Hato Airport), Caribbean Ocean, St. Martin, Atlantic Ocean (for like 6hrs), England, Amsterdam.

On my way to Curacao I had a similar experience (AMS, Ocean, Puerto Rico, more Ocean, Curacao). I believe we even saw a piece of the salt-thing in Bonaire. One of the passengers was convinced they did that “for the winter, so the roads won’t get slippery”. Oh well. :)

Anyway, made lots of pictures, including some I made during a visit to one of our POPs.. (The chimney in the middle) Quite an experience. It took us 5 minutes by elevator to get there, after a shitload of paperwork to actually get inside Refinery Isla Mirant, and permits to go inside the tower. But, it was worth it. You don’t go into a serverroom at 200m height everyday.. (pictures here)

More later ;)

Business trip

Bram — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:32:25 +0000

So, I took this month off. I had way too many days to spend, so it just seemed the logical thing to do :) Anyway, after about one week, my company called me at home, asking me if I’d like to help out at our office in Curacao. As I was starting to get sick of doing nothing anyway, I accepted, and left on the 10th of August.

And now I’m there, sitting on a nice island. Temperature is around 32 degrees and I haven’t seen a single cloud yet..
View from my room

arp

Bram — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:48:33 +0000

A quick trick to tell your router you’ve just moved an ipaddress from one box to another (run on the ‘new’ box):
arping -S 193.28.47.16 -s 00:11:43:ce:ab:be 193.28.47.1
.. where 193.28.47.16 is the IP you moved, 00:11:43:ce:ab:be your macaddress, and 193.28.47.1 your gateway :)