Escape from NJ

Well, last week was a blast. I'm only being partially sarcastic. I first want to thank my guest bloggers, Jim and Shaun. I hoped you found their articles interesting, and they might be blogging in again from time to time. I'm sorry I didn't get to write even an article, but I was so insanely busy that I ended up crashing at the hotel really late, only to end up getting up early to go back into the office.

On the subject of work, let me first recommend to you: If you decide to go with a colocation, and that colocation offers a service where they will do a one time rack install for you, do it. Don't even question it. Since I was the only one there from my company, I saved myself easily two, maybe three days worth of work, and several hernias. Our equipment was professionally racked and cabled, and everything was done according to my specifications. The most I had to do was show the workers my diagrams of where I wanted things to go. I really spent 3 hours moving empty boxes out of their way and queuing up the next round of equipment. It was great. I can't recommend it enough.

I also managed to get the T1 at the corporate office tested and turned on. I mentioned a while back that I had DSL at the corporate office, and that I was unhappy with it. Getting the T1 turned on is a big change for them.

Now, I'm using the Juniper Netscreens to route all the VPN traffic through the T1, and all the normal web-browsing traffic through the DSL (with the T1 as the fallback for normal traffic, and the DSL as the fallback to the VPN). This complex setup took me about 14 hours to get working correctly. I'm glad it's done.

The actual being-in-NJ part was nice. I like my office in Ohio, but since it's only me and my boss, it's quiet...almost TOO quiet. That's definitely not the case in the corporate office. There's also the fact that my coworkers there don't always tell me something is broken. They save up lists and have me fix things en masse. I'd much rather they submit the issues in bugzilla like I've asked them to. At least they tell me things before they catch on fire.

Anyway, thank you all, and I'll be back to my normal blogging schedule (if you can call it that) this week.