Busy Thursday

I've never been busy like this since I was the duty network engineer for the entire December '07. I've been away my desk for most of the time, much even less time to do the usual blogging and Internet surfing... Oh well, it's one of those days... Or rather, one of those weeks...

Well, it's not like I had a good time during Holy Week last time I was in the Philippines. Holiday or not, as long as it is a day between a Monday and Friday, we go. Here at least, we don't have to go this Good Friday. :)

Particularly busy was this Maundy Thursday. With this being the last day before the upcoming event this Monday -- the campus will be holding a laptop configuration event thingy for all the students; lucky kids! -- everyone was scrambling to get all things ready.

Sadly, though, someone has messed up the configs of some switches (someone deleted the damn VLANs) causing all the test laptops connected to it to be disconnected. Well, at least that was easily resolved once the "damage" was seen from the switch-side. I had to go to the switch, though, which was holed up in a a very small, cramped, and somewhat smelly room.

I wanted to find out what the hell happened that the switches got messed up! Oh well... Too tired to track down the who, the how, or the why of it all.

Earlier...
So let's see... I had to carry a switch from my place to the event site which was about five buildings away. I had to get the keys from the other support center which was another two buildings away. The switch is not that heavy -- just a small 48-port switch... I think it was a Cat3750... Well, doesn't matter.

When we're done with the event, I'll play around with the switch for a little while... Better to experiment and do tests on spare switches than the ones in production.

There were also these three switches in computer laboratory which cannot be accessed remotely via CiscoWorks servers, telnet, or SSH... Well, okay SSH will not work for two of those which are the old Cisco Catalyst 3500XL switches. Still, it's getting in the way of me getting rid of my three-month-old task of upgrading the IOS images of all the hundreds of devices in the network -- did I mention they have hundreds of devices? Hehe...

Hmm, I actually learned a great deal about that... Maybe I'll post it on my other blog.