Proof of Life

So, what have I been doing?

First of all, a lot of things are currently changing in our company. We got a couple new accounts, some of which are rather big and work-intensive. We were struggling a bit to get that stuff other projects, but now we are doing fine. In addition, we are changing the layout of our network rather radically. As any company that grows with demand and extended customer base, our network was not really planned but just deployed as necessary. After all, we started out with 1/2 rack and currently have over 40.
We first had all our IP uplinks organized (and routed) by AboveNet, who were hosting us. After renting a room in another facility, we also added another upstream provider. Both providers gave us prerouted traffic and IP addresses, we were not concerned with routing. This led to us having two completely separate networks with no interconnection, which is kinda nice (due to the redundancy), but also clumsy.
Now, we are doing our own routing (with AS 47215 being our Autonomous System number) and are using two upstream providers to balance routes, but also provide us redundancy. A link to the German Commercial Internet Exchange DE-CIX gives us the possibility to exchange data with other providers (called Peering). Setting up the routers, the required fibre and IP uplinks and organizing peerings has been a task I’ve spent most of the last 3 weeks.
Now, we are moving as many customers as possible onto our new network, partially abandoning our old “single-homed” solution. This requires assigning new IP addresses to some of our customers, negotiating maintenance windows with all customers and, of course, actually implementing the changes. We’ve been on this for about 2 weeks now and it wasn’t all fun and games.

Of course, I have also been working on my university job, where we had a mid-term review for the GDI-Grid project I’m (partially) in charge of. That review went rather well, but was a lot of work. Now, some changes in our department will occur soon and some of us are actively working on our PhD projects a lot of the time. That includes me and I went to a conference in Valencia, Spain with a colleague a couple weeks ago (I twittered some of it). We’re preparing some papers for upcoming IEEE conferences now and have already submitted one for IEEE Grid 2009. In addition, I have submitted my PhD project as a Globus Incubator project. Another conference invitation for Lisbon is due in late June - until then, we will hopefully have a decision on the Grid 2009 paper and the Globus Incubator project.

In my free time, I’ve been doing some World of Warcraft (which was less than I actually would like to), and am currently about 50% in Tier7/7.5 and Naxxramas gear. My guild has Naxxramas cleared, OS with one or two drakes up (not sure actually) and is on 2nd or 3rd boss on Ulduar. I’ve been maintanking some Naxx, offtanking some other stuff but generally, my time is too limited to delve into raiding in WoW more intensely. This is a bit sad, since my guild mates are all fine people and I find WoW generally relaxing.
I have also been preparing the 2009 medieval market season, going to training on sundays and training in Colin Richard’s Arts of Mars academy during the week. I have been to markets in Hildesheim and Neustadt - only as a day guest, though. Next week, I will take a 200km drive to Rastede and partake in a 3-day market there. This is my season premiere and I hope everything will be alright. Futhermore, I really hope there’ll be people to fight there.

That’s all I can think of right now - I’ll post another update when I feel something interesting has happened.