Iron Man - Theatrical Trailer 2

Well, I can’t sit back and ignore the efforts of my friends back in GBLX UK?! Natalie, Jackie and Sarah are currently raising money for St Lukes Hostice in Cheshire - and I think this is a very noble charity to be raising funds for, so I have donated some money and left a pledge to double my donation should they reach their target….now I could be really tight and hope they don’t! Or?! You guys and gals out there could help them by pledging a small donation yourselves, and force me to cough up some more money! All it takes is a few £2 donations here and there..?

Simply click the picture of these lovelly ladies and let your wallet do the rest!

In other news, I did a borg job on a couple of old Cisco 4000 series routers today and made myself two ATM nodes! Cos I can!

Started documenting my concept for customer focused MPLS today, i.e. we the customer have full autonomous control instead of the Service Provider - who ever that may be?

I am reasonably happy with the approach so far, but I’ll wait and see if I am breaking any best practice rules when I bounce this off our Cisco guru; so far I have elected to go with an iBGP core running LDP. using non-MPLS aware routers as route reflectors to fully mesh things and offer a little scalability.

How to offer multiple logical control at the CE end though?? In order to achieve this I have figured I’d go with eBGP peering to an elected private BGP AS getting around the obvious BGP problems this raises by using the ‘allowas-in’ and ‘as-override’ options and then mix in some vrf-lite with this on the CE devices and your vrf’s instantly stretch that little bit further without the need for an Enterprise image everywhere, oh and when it comes to internet access I’ll just peer with the public AS provided and look into ‘vrf-aware NAT’.

My next mission should I choose to accept it, is to get my head around QoS and figure out whether my approach is favourable for QoS or not.

The great thing about my job is I get to play with real kit! So it’s not all about theory at the end of the day. In that respect I consider myself extremly fortunate.

I have to say, I have gained a lot more appreciation this last week for the flexibility BGP provides when used in conjuntion with LDP it seems almost too simple at times, but then I haven’t factored in the QoS yet? So - this may all be moot. Can’t wait to plug my (our - sorry Jason!) muwahahahaa!!! lab into the voice test platform and run some voice calls across it….

In other news? Hmmm….let me see - I can’t wait for the new Indiana Jones movie!

A film crew have been lurking around the grounds at work these last couple of days and proved quite entertaining to watch during one of my ‘vdu breaks’ =p Although we’ve no idea at all what they are filming as they are being extremly tight lipped, using my incredible detective like power I was able to ascertain which crowd they were so just click the link and you’ll see they are the same outfit responsible for flicks like the Whale Rider for example!

I’ll keep my nose to the ground in case I learn any more!!

Wowser…I was just browsing through 4BarsRest(dot)com when I came across my very own mug shot amongst the crowd of victorious Wellingtonians! Guess I am getting a little more famous than I thought?! Hehe… check it out?!

In other news, it feels like winter today, down to a FREEZING 4 degrees!!! Brrrrrrr…. o.O

It looks like Dorothy’s Tinman finally got his heart, and grew up to be - IRONMAN

I’ve just got back from watching what is now officially my favourite super-hero movie of ALL time to date! IRONMAN! Starring Robert Downey Jnr. and Jeff Bridges. I even watched it in a luxury cinema with reclining leather seats, it was awesome! The film brakes all the rules of conventional super-hero films I’ve seen so far by being incredibly entertaining, whitty, funny and full of the damndest special effects I’ve seen since….well since um….forever!

If you ain’t seen it yet..shame on you, if you weren’t thinking of seeing it shame on you, if you’ve seen it and thought it was rubbish? Shame on you!!!

I finally got my head around a conundrum to do with a forthcoming project! How do you build a layer-3 MPLS Network onto a provided layer-2 MPLS core, AND maintain full autonomous control of all the vrf’s, common services and 3rd parties!! All I need to do now, is to get my head around making it a high availability scope, with mega-fast failover AND figure in some QoS (Quality of Service) capable of coping with Data, Voice and Video (and maybe some Wireless) then we are cooking on gas baby!!

We are fast approaching a time where the boundary between ‘enterprise customer’ and ’service provider’ becomes rather smudged. Though I guess that’s the way many enterprises are headed, from what I’m seeing in the forums and email newsletters I’ve been getting of late.

I wouldn’t say I’m ahead of the game yet, but I certainly got through a major landmark today, in terms of personal understanding of the technical nuts and bolts so-to-speak. My approach is to try and keep things as simple as possible - whilst at the same time acheiving what is actually quite a complex feat, but I won’t blow my trumpet any further, as it’s down to a level of teamwork too, and isn’t ALL about me!

*Kicks Ego out of the door and assumes the man of humility position*

Oh and in other news, and on a similarly geeky theme?!

MANY HAPPY RETURNS TO - THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB, YOU ARE 15 YEARS OLD! TODAY!!