First of all I apologise for getting a geeky - being a technical support engineer, it comes with the territory and whilst I cannot be specific in the following narrative suffice to say, this was one of the few moment’s of job satisfaction I have had in a while

I was given the mother of all faults on Monday to deal with and have had a couple of late nighters as a result of the sensitive nature of my client.  Anyhoo - I put in a temporary fix and set out on my quest for the root cause of the fault. 

I did this by building a mini approximation of the client’s network in a lab - No no no!! no mad flashy lights, or volatile chemicals here please! In my case a lab is simply a bunch of routers and a switch plugged into each other.

Anyways, by doing this I was able to play to my hearts content at replicating the fault without affecting the operational network.  It certainly paid dividends in my opinion in that it increased my understanding of a very robust routing protocol and it’s interaction with other routing protocols, in this current case I was dealing with BGP with routes learned from OSPF if you don’t know what these are then tough, I am too tired to explain

Since I played on the lab for the last day and a bit, I was able to identify a flaw in the routing; and tonight I got the opportunity from my client to prove the theory on the live network - Yay!!  It worked! My kudos get’s increased, though I say it all the time, this was still a team effort and I didn’t acheive my wonderful results all on my own, I got one or two crucial nudges from colleagues within my team that helped get to the end result.

though humbleness aside I did 90% of the work to prove this!! So there

In other news I have decided to get a Flickr account since so many people have one, and here’s what I have so far:-  Geese I will figure out integration with the blog at a later date, though I already have the latest plug in for it - I would partially blame Nikki for this but really it’s to do with a competition on BBC 1 for taking snaps of wildlife and whilst my first entry of a goose, isn’t technically Homegrown widllife - I “am” working on it ok!!