McBlog

Been a while since I made an entry here – a tad busy and hectic with lots of work to do and some travel around the place. Have survived the Christmas experience and enjoyed myself a lot. Yesterday was, in fact, the first day I’ve managed to feel relaxed for a while.

I’m in the process of loading up lots of photos, including my birthday party, the Monolake concert, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. If I get the chance, I’ll try to tidy up some of the other sections in the photo gallery so they’ve all got the same look. Scoot on over to the photos section to check them out.

The Monolake concert was great – I was involved over the whole weekend as Robert (Monolake) Henke’s driver. I picked him up at the airport, drove him around and we all had a great time.

My trip to Sydney was generally successful – the office is now using ADSL instead of a slow modem. Took a bit of effort but I put in (yet another :) linux based firewall, reorganised the network and started sorting out the workstations as well. I was unable to complete all the work I wanted though due to a hassle in Melbourne.
On the morning of my last day in Sydney, I received a call from the Melbourne office to say that they had no Internet connection, couldn’t print, couldn’t get shared drives, etc. Ooops. Fortunately I was able to get on a flight quickly and was back in the Melbourne office by midday.

A quick check of the servers revealed all was well so I recycled the switches and hubs to see if they were OK. Sure enough, one of them failed to restart properly, so I yanked it out and repatched everything across to the spare hub and one of the units with spare capacity. Admin staff were up and running quickly enough but it took until 7pm to get everything right (mostly because I took advantage of the moment to re-run some of the leads that were getting pretty messy).

A bonus was that the next day, everyone was reporting that the network was running much faster. Now I finally know what was causing that network slowdown… The dud switch is going to be replaced under warranty so I’ll try to do that while everyone’s away. At least everything’s working again (touch wood).

Things working OK – getting ready to go up to Sydney to work on a new ADSL link for the National Office up there. Murphy’s Law says that everything will go crazy in Melbourne while I’m in Sydney, just when I can’t do anything about it. Just you wait! :)

Working on some issues with the back-end of the AvantCard web site plus some general systems management work. The joys of being the SysOp :)

Had a blast at the first Platinum Exclusive event on Saturday night. Didn’t DJ but ran around helping to keep the DJ’s happy, caught up with friends and had a wonderful time. Thanks to Marlowe and Warren for a great night :)