I am having a very busy life these days. Another month has passed at BDS and I didnt realised it till this time. There is a lot of work pressure here and so time flies…
I am not even finding time to check my personal emails before the weekend. My day starts at 05:00 when I get up and ends at around 23:00 when I sleep. I normally come back from work at around 20:00
Highlights of the last month
- New name for BBC Broadcast
Since the parent company of BDS , BBC Broadcast is no longer a part of the BBC group it has to change its name to remove the words BBC from it. The new name was decided to be RedBee Media Ltd.
- Changes in network and A bit of History
Looking at the ongoing problems with our network which is flat and depends on badly configured and dying HP Procurve switches, it was decided to move to a properly designed network around Foundry switches and Cisco Pix Firewall. All this happened and the design finalized before I joined BDS. The new network is supposed to have two fast Foundry switches acting as a CORE which will house all the servers connected through CAT6 cables and four Foundry Edgetron switches acting as EDGE switches connected through Gigabit links to core and meant to house the desktops. Almost all end user desktops except the IT team use Wyse Terminals (dumb terminals based on Linux and Windows) using Citrix metaframe and Windows Terminal Servers. So the emphasis is on fast network. All the cables are either CAT 5e or CAT6.
The stuff was delivered quite recently and a consultant was hired to configured the Cisco Pix firewalls. He configured the firealls but as per the plan the firewalls cannot be replaced till the entire network is moved to the new switches and cables. And guess what.. there was no one who has configured switches before. So I volunteered to do this massive task. Took four foundries (EdgeIron 4802CF), connected to them one by one and configured the switches with one VLAN for desktops as these were the lighter switches meant to be EDGE and connected to the two Foundry FastIron switches meant to be the CORE. Next step I took the two CORE switches and then configured various VLANs. All this I had done for the first time and it was so simple. Just by reading the documentations. I can configure the Foundries now 
What happened today?
Today we laid out cables and migrated the Cisco 2600 router (which will eventually be removed as the CORE foundries are layer 3 switches supporting VRRP), the old Pix Firewalls, the Edge switches and the Citrix servers. So most of the office is now running on new network. Only Linux servers and some windows servers are left out for tommorow.
Quite a lot in one day