Following Edge

In addition to fighting a bout of thyroid-related fatigue (which I've mentioned before) and taking on an unexpected project, I've been feeling really under the gun the past few weeks about a computer network problem in my company that's taken a while to resolve. I have to remind myself that my work really is very good and that people's high expectations are due to my good performance and not due to any lack of appreciation on their part.

My plan had been to take an appropriate amount of time this month to install and configure new computer network routers and data circuits in our company. The goal was to double the capacity of our "internal" network with almost no increase in cost (about $25 per month per location) and I knew that the it was going to take some effort since any computer networking expert will tell you that a single room with 4 "routers" on it is complex and this project would require increasing the number of routers on our computer room from 4 to 6. Mania, but, hopefully, controlled mania.

Everything fell apart when the data circuits for our old network for 2 locations (Corvallis, OR and Eugene, OR) were disconnected a month earlier than I wanted them to be disconnected. The good engineering I've put into our network resulted in the problem being detected within a minute (at 3:17am on January 3rd) and invisibly "fixed" by sending data through a different (although slower) path. I knew it would take weeks to get the old circuits reinstalled, so I decided to try to instead move ahead more quickly with the new installation.

As human nature would have it, no one thought in the upcoming two weeks "Wow, I'm really glad that we still have access to everything even though we would normally be disconnected"! I am sure that if you work for a different company, you're familiar with days when access to the Internet or some local network or to some "server" is down for hours or for the entire day. Because I think the staff at my company rarely experience these outages (due to the redundancy and automation I've build in our networks), they don't appreciate how nice it is for things to work almost all the time. So, the main thought for these weeks was instead, "God, this is slow! Why is it taking Michael so long to install that hardware and software? It couldn't be that hard"!

Well, after fighting with bugs in the new routers and going through three different routing protocol softwares [1] [2] [3] to find one that would (mostly) work properly (and reporting a significant bug in the one that I am now using), these locations are now back up and running. I still have to get on to finishing the upgrade to the rest of the locations.

All this may sound like griping. But think about the "utility workers" of the world, which used to include the highway workers, power linemen and telephone technicians, but now includes all sorts of computer and computer network technicians. They aren't really noticed if their work goes perfectly and there is never an outage. Only when the power or phone or Internet goes off are these invisible workers noticed. Ironically, a randomly programmed hour of network outage each month might make my coworkers appreciate the stability of the network more.

Enough of my griping. Now back to my invisible work.