The wonderful things about wibbles….

I’ve been working in the ISP industry for some years now. During the past six years, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with a couple of Telcos, and am well experienced with the argument “it’s not our problem” when in fact, yes it is your problem and would you please damn well fix it. I’m accustomed to dealing with Telcos who at the very best mislead you, and tell you they’ve someone working on it, when in fact their definition of working on it appears to be “we’re trying to find the ticket”.

So let me apologise to Colt. Recently we moved to the new INEX location, and ordered a ten meg circuit from them. We plugged the circuit in, and it got very tempermental. In fact the problem was narrowed down to the A end seeing what the B end was sending it, but the B end couldn’t see what the A end was sending (yes, this constitutes a problem in my book). So I ask Colt to have a look at the circuit. They test it “everything’s okay”. Now I’m accustomed to hearing this from certain other $TELCOs when the circuit was working fine, stopped working and then eventually had them admit “oh yeah – we put something wrong there”. So I take none of this – have another look. Ring Colt. Colt send engineers. Hmmm… still not working. Play with it a bit more – make more discoveries. Colt agree to send out an engineer again – but want me onsite (fair enough). Talk to engineer at B end – have him test the presentation point – everything’s okay. Have him test to wear the connection is going into the router…. Aha! We have a problem.

Turns out you see the problem is actually on the patch panel. So its not Colt’s fault. So apologies to Colt for judging them by the same low standards as certain other telcos (not that I’m naming names or anything), and thanks for your patience. INEX traffic working beautifully once more.

Just speak for themselves. On IRC today:

“Damned if I can get this box to see the network, and it’s distressing. I think it could be related to the driver being for a different board.”

Think people think!

The war has started. Frankly the only thing left to do is pray for a quick finish. This is clearly no more futile than protesting about it (for those of us who are believers, it might make a difference – for those of you who aren’t – do you really think your protests will turn Bush and Blair off the current road).

People are dying. This is not good. Bush says that he’s sending humanitarian aid into Iraq. Good. Lets hope it includes lots of those medicines allegedly “denied” to Iraqi hospitals by UN sanctions. I don’t really care who is right – the right who claim that Saddam’s officials where siphoning off the goodies, or the left who claim sanctions are to blame. Its not relevant to the child who can’t get the drugs he needs.

On the subject of being a believer, which I am, I just reflected on the use of a certain expletive below. There’s little doubt I swear too much, though I am cutting down and it’s got to the stage where certain blasphemies are really starting to get to me. I dunno if it’s the seminary training getting to me in the end or what – but it really does start to bug when people use “Jesus” as a swear word.

On a more geeky level – this is the week when finally we redesign the network. Maybe. If the first link works and we can get the second one up we could be sucking diesel as they say. Or something.

So here’s me, innocently heading out of the office at just before 1pm to go and install a router in the DEG facility on the Nangor Road (for non dubs, this is about ten miles from the city centre, and at least 40 minutes in a car if you’re lucky). This is fairly okay – plug router in, plug link from other place in, not working. Bugger. Try lots of things to make sure its not me, and then ring $TELCO and ask them to fix it. Spend afternoon in data centre bored out of my tree, waiting for them to do their test it, fix it, routine etc. etc….

Anyway, about five o’clock it becomes apparent that $TELCO aren’t going to get this fixed (its clearly getting to the send engineers on site to test stage, and the other end closes at 5:30 and its not urgent enough to justify paying for it to be kept open). So I decide to ring a taxi, as I have a very important (to me) appointment in the city centre at 6. We ring four taxi firms – best we can do when we reach the fourth is an hour. Decide said appointment will have to be cancelled.

BUT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Every single time I get into a taxi the driver when asked will tell you there are too many taxis on the road? Really? So why is it when I’m in one of the remaining large data centres in the so called Digital Hub that I can’t get a taxi for an hour? This isn’t New Year, this isn’t Christmas. This isn’t even three o’clock on a Saturday morning when the night clubs close. This is a comparatively normal Thursday evening and I’m sitting in whats left of Ireland’s Digital Hub. Woe betide the next taxi driver that says there are too many taxis on the road – there clearly aren’t enough.

One day back in Ireland – and already its lashing rain, thundering and generally being miserable.

I did a practice CCIE lab last Saturday – it was frustrating (firstly one of the routers wasn’t accessible and then another one crashed with memory errors…. very annoying). There’s a fairly complicated and interesting BGP issue with next hops and network statements and route relectors. It makes you think alright. Certain I feel more challenged and experienced – but I definitely have to learn more about the 3550.

Now call me an academic snob, which I am. I’ve been spending the last fortnight in the UK, and not just in the UK, but a part of the UK where the average person would struggle to tell you whether Galway is in Northern Ireland or the Republic. So instead of reading the Irish Times of a morning, I’ve been reading the Daily Telegraph. In the coffee room, we also get the Mail (no hyper link for them).

Britain, when not debating the morality of the war on Iraq, is getting its knickers in a tizzy over university admissions. Now I will declare an interest – my uber brainy, dead smart, brilliant at Maths, younger brother has just been offered a place at Cambridge to read Maths (he was second or something in the country in the Maths Olympiad last year – he’s good). Younger brother (YB) goes to an average, “bog standard” Christian Brothers school, and will be doing the Leaving Cert not A Levels.

Anyway, apparently Bristol university have been “discriminating” against students from the independent sector in favour of students from “average” state schools, allegedly because the government is offering more money to the colleges for students from certain post codes. This is an incredibly difficult issue to resolve in the context of the UK (I seem to recall reading something like 40,000 students in the UK last year got three A’s at A levels) thats more than the entire intake for Oxford, Cambridge and a couple of other universities put together (the fact that both Oxbridge universities average three applications for each place means that at least three times their combined annual intake expect to get three As). We need to have more faith in the university application system – do people in the UK really want to adopt the Irish system which means for the most popular places admissions would be decided by lottery?

So I’m still on this CCIE course, and this morning we’re doing DLSW and IP Custom Queuing (the later is quite nice, once you get past the complicated maths involved). In order to do DLSW and then custom queue the traffic based on SAP type, you must use TCP so that you can have several queues where by you stick priorities in or something like that. I’m too confused at this stage to make more sense of it than that – so I won’t.

The main reason for writing though was to rant. I’m pretty good at this. We were doing a complex discussion of DLSW and my head was hurting. Anyway, a discussion of Web editors came up and I was asked for my opinion on MS Frontpage. Being a normally polite person (ha!) I refrained from expressing my full feelings on the subject, confining myself to the observation that it was a pile of crap and the questioner should consider something (or indeed anything) else.

There’s someone in the room that clearly has a MCSE background, and he says “Frontpage is alright, and its easy to use”. That’s not the point – it produces crap html, and has server extensions that leads its users to believe that this is a normal part of web editing. I wrote my first web page using vi, but I suppose in this modern day and age thats not good enough. Dreamweaver or Homesite would be much better choices for doing web pages.

I’ve been spending the last week and a half at a CCIE lab training course. I’d strongly recommend it – it’s an excellent course, and it’s amazing the amount of stuff you learn. Whats even more interesting is Cisco’s adoption of the Perl slogan – there’s more than one way to do it. And the chances are that in the exam, the three ways you know will all be excluded so you have to work a fourth out.

Anyway – in a moment of insanity I’ve decided to try for the lab exam on April 15th. I’m scared – I thought I was okay on the routing stuff last week, but the bridging stuff is new, and the amount of new dial stuff I’ve learnt, is amazing. And I’m supposed to be good with this stuff.

Pron has been hassling me for a few days to do this – seems to me to be better to use a blog here than the old one at http://www.wibble.to/wurble.

Anyway, I thought I’d start with a rant about the anti war movement. I would start by saying that I am opposed to the war, but mostly because I’m concerned it will destablise the region and the US don’t seem to have had a coherent plan for what to do when they win.

But the debate in Ireland is reaching the depths of pure banality – there’s a statement that as a neutral state, we shouldn’t be involved in the campaign. This is idiotic – Ireland has never aspired to the level of neutrality that the likes of Switzerland have (Switzerland only join the UN a few months ago). We’ve simply refused to join NATO – but all this does is allow us to make our own decisions rather than being part of some alliance. Neutrality in an Irish context means we should make decisions on a per case basis, rather than NATO membership which means we’d have to go along with the consensus despite our reservations because thats what we’d signed up to do. A few months ago there was a serious discussion about pulling peacekeeping troops out of Kosovo because the UN mandate was under threat (due to the US threatening a veto over a dispute over the International Criminal Court). But this is daft – this is saying our foreign policy is dependent on the US, the UK, France, China and Russia all behaving like responsible countries and agreeing not to veto each other.

Neutral because we’re neutral is a daft argument. Yet it seems to be what is passing for debate in Ireland – at least if some of the letters to the Irish Times are anything to go by.