Thursday April 07, 2005

April showers blind driver

Driving home tonight was interesting. I have no idea what it was like for Chris cycling home. There were what we would call April showers , Squally, heavy then light. The car's windscreen wipers with their automatic sensors coped very well until...

The wipers were coming on very intermittently to match the rain. Suddenly just as a car approached me my windscreen was covered with muddy water. Of course there was a delay before the wipers considered cleaning the screen. These new technology ideas are great until of course you rely on them too much..

When did you last see one of these ?

During a walk I took this picture. It is springtime so this is a Peacock butterfly that has overwintered somewhere. During my childhood I remember seeing loads of these and tortoiseshell butterflies on bushes especially Buddleia in the summer months. Even though the Buddleia still flowers and is popular you hardly see butterflies nowadays except cabbage white ones. When I was a child I kept caterpillars. Not in jam jars but properly in large wooden boxes and fed them what they wanted to eat. Eventually they would pupate and emerge as butterflies. Next to our house was a patch of unused ground. It was covered in nettles. Often you would see the caterpillars of the small tortoiseshell butterfly on the nettles. Initially they all live in a group (gregarious) before moving off on their own. I would take a few put in my box and look after them. When the butterflies appeared from the pupa I would let them go. My little act of helping mother nature.

A change for the good

The lab team look after two labs in the UK . Now we have finished moving the larger one to the new building it is time to concentrate our efforts and give a little TLC to the smaller one. Incredibly the lab had hubs for its network. You can imagine the traffic a labfull of kit generates. Four separate subnets instead of one hassle free supernet. Time to change.

So the students have been working like crazy to plumb in new EDGE switches. Already the network is becoming quieter. The core switch will be changed soon and the supernet introduced. However during this goodness an existing core network switch blew up. Suddenly we had to replace it. Was it a switch or a hub? A load of unlabelled cables went into it. Eventually we got the network back then found a network loop. I fancy in the previous network setup this might not have had any impact. The students found it and started labelling things up, removing unused cables etc. This made me think. Our users who knew we were introducing these switches and must have been wondering what were doing - are these guys amateurs ?

It reminded me when I made additions to strowger telephone exchanges years ago. Despite testing new switches it was too easy to introduce crossed lines. A little drip of solder and bingo you had a three of four way conference call without wanting it. So I suppose the moral of the story is as you change things keep good records of what you are doing in case things go wrong. Make sure everyone knows what is happening so they can react to problems. In the students case above there is not much they could have done beforehand. Tracing the rats nest of cables before they did anything would have taken ages and of course most of those cables are now removed. Good intentions can sometimes lead to bad fortune