Hello, interblag!
I believe it’s week four or five of my seven-week rotation. The dates don’t really matter; working with networking is a steady gig rather than a project, so you do the same kinds of things every week. I’ve had both types before, and they both have their charm–with a steady gig, you can figure out when you’ll have to work and you get lots of practical work experience, whereas with a project, you can choose to do something you really enjoy, and it’s possible to get massive amounts of hours clocked. During my stint with the wonderful Web Rotation (hello, folks!), I spent the last three days before our presentation was due in the Advanced Media Lab, from six p.m. ’til midnight, just slamming down the animation goodness.
Has that happened here? Not at all. I’m sure my body is thankful for it.
Mostly what has happened with networking is, for you webernetters who are unfamiliar with the job, something called Inventory. All the wires which connect the campus’s stupendous amount of desktops are hooked up the right way, connected to patch panels and switches and routers so that everybody (theoretically) can do internet-type thins, like write blogs. However, sometimes a piece of it all will go wrong, and a friend of mine in Brandt Hall will say, “The internet is not working!” Indeed it is not, anonymous friend. Probably the issue lies in a misplaced cable, or perhaps a bit of hardware that has just worn out, but in order to figure out just which piece of the network is bad, we need to know how every bit relates. Right now we do not.
The server closet in the ARC looks like a jungle. No kidding. The red and blue ethernet cables are like vines that want to strangle you.
To figure out how all the wires and panels and Power Injectors (which ought to be something in a video game) specifically relate to each other, myself and the rest of our rotation must accompany one of our bosses–and perhaps an intern as well–over to all the campus’s server closets and record a lot of numbers from labels, and then trace each ethernet cable from the end connected to the Patch Panel to the end connected to the Switch, and match up the labels we find.
It is a job full of mendacity, if I use that word right, but oddly enough it has a therapeutic calming effect on me. You just get lost in the very slightly challenging task of following one wire among so many (though most closets are six thousand times better than the ARC’s) , and your mind goes numb. One might even call it Zen. Your neck muscles may start aching, however, in which case you should probably switch out with your partner.
That’s a tip, kiddies! Never go taking Inventory without a partner! I did it once, and it very nearly trapped me in a parallel universe of aching necks!
Other than that, we pull cables through tubes, chop apart old cables and pull them out of tubes, and use a wheely-thing to measure how much cable we will need for this new tube we’re thinking about installing. The internet, man! It’s a series of <cut>! We check the “HEAT” service request system every day, but on my shifts we never find anything. The very first day we thought that there was a problem which we could fix, but it turned out that the computer acted fine once we got there, and apparently hasn’t acted up ever since. Go figure.
Incidentally, Simon Kissler, one of my bosses, has a sneaky sense of humor. You’ll think he’s just this strange man walking around knowing things, and then he’ll say something that makes you chuckle. But if you start treating him as a man walking around making people chuckle sometimes, he’ll just start knowing at you, talking about Gigabit ethernet ports, and DARPANET, and how long an unassisted fiber optic cable can maintain a signal, until you have to forget about the laughter to make room for all the knowledge. Then he’ll make you chuckle again. Confusing!…and delightful? Maybe!!
Currently I am blogging in the middle of learning things on ElementK, because my boss is sick, and doing ElementK is about as necessary as and far warmer than everything else I could do.
In closing, during the writing of that last sentence I very nearly lost the entirety of this post. You see, Firefox and ElementK conspired to shut down Firefox.exe. They succeeded. However, Firefox had forgotten that it had, a while ago, hired a device that saved it’s status during a crash, and to Firefox’s frustration the device–I believe it is a relation of Browser Cache, that packrat–reloaded everything, including my blog. Thank that device if you enjoyed this, Dear Reader, for it is the reason I did not just write something like “Firefox deleted my post, and I shan’t write another. Good day.”
Good day!
- Will
