Finally I am relocating to India. I was thinking about it from quite sometime but obviously it was a difficult decision. I finally decided when I got a very good offer from ITC Infotech India Ltd. My resignation on 22nd December 2006 came as a surprise to colleagues and managers in office. But I was firm on my decision. I was asked to give more notice on the basis that this is christmas period and it will be difficult to find a replacement so soon. But I stood firm. After all, my contract of employment says only one month notice is required and ofcourse I was not getting more period from my new employers.

Its become quite hectic after that, cancelling contracts, selling mobile phones at throw-away prices as they were locked to a UK network and unlocking softwares were not in market for them. Good things is that ITC is paying for all my travel and cargo expenses as per actuals as per their relocation policy. I dont have many things to take, but still this means that I dont have to sell my TV and computer. I am still trying to find out a good door-to-door cargo deal.

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

The first month at new job was hectic and I was so busy during the weekdays that could find time for my family, let alone creating a blog entry. Annanya, my 4 year old daughter missed me a lot as by the time I used to come back home, she was already asleep and next day morning again the same routine. Situation has eased down a bit as I have started understanding my servers and the organisational systems a bit.

On the first day itself on 26th Sep 2005 I was asked to move an LVM filesystem to a seperate physical disk. Not a difficult task, but since it was to be done in production servers, out of core business hours after 18:00 BST. I reached home at around 22:00 BST. And since then  I never reached home before 19:30 BST. Some people might think that this is normal in a SysAdmin’s life, but I got used to the luxorious life at British Airways where I used to leave dot at 17:00 BST.

Quite surprising that no proper monitoring system was in place except the HP Insight Manager and RRD-TOOL. The first few tasks which I initiated was to establish a HA monitoring station in place using Linux-HA project , Nagios, RRDTOOL , Cacti , Cheops. To start with I have been configuring and building Nagios in my development box which runs Slackware 10.1.

I also found that the only method of remote access to office network from home is using Cisco VPN client as we have Cisco Pix firewalls. I was finding it difficult to compile the Cisco VPN client for my  linux box at home due to I using the latest kernel and the client demanding 2.4. To provide myself a remote access I had to make use of OpenVPN without opening up any additional port on the Pix firewall. You can read more about that in my techlog here. Since my role was Linux Systems Administrator I decided to use Linux desktop for my self. I quickly installed Fedora Core 4 on one of the desktops and Slackware 10.1 on another. I decided to use the slack box as a test/dev machine to try out various new things.

Overall things have eased down a bit and I am really enjoying my new job and see a lots of opportunity.