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Week Two
May 23rd - May 29th, 2011
 
Here's proof that the server room is freezing. Luckily for me, I only
have to be in there to configure a new machine. Once it's done, it's
remote access only for me. Imagine being in this room with a short-sleeved
shirt and shorts on! Should always bring a jacket.
Oh man how the second week just flew by! I have pretty big shoes to
fill this week. Last week was pretty much Mikhail's last week (the
current BGPmon expert). I know that Mikhail's expertise has a lot to do
with the amount of time he has been working on BGPmon and I shouldn't
expect myself to grasp all of BGPmon's intricacies. I certainly feel
pressure mount on me without his guidance, though. Luckily, Jason is
still around to help and I am really grateful for that.
The BGPmon learning curve is very very steep. Unlike last week that
consisted mostly of attempting to program and learning a new language.
This week was all about me finding answers to a bunch of new things I
have never been exposed to before. While right now, at the end of the
week, I feel like I learned a ton this past week, during the week I
felt horrible about my (seemingly slow) progress. I think this is going
to be a recurring theme this summer - lack of ability to gauge my own
progress and/or anticipate the "research" cycle mentioned in the "my
project" section of the site.
Also, this week, Dan was at Palo Alto Research Center at a
pretty important-sounding conference. There are actually a couple of
people there at PARC this summer. PARC is actually the best place that
you can get a research internship in the summer, so I am definitely
impressed that NetSec people ended up there.
Back to Dan's whereabouts this week, I had no idea he was leaving! When
we met on Friday, I don't recall any mention of this! But it's okay,
he's really good about getting back to everyone through email.
Everything worked itself out since most of the stuff I was doing must
be learned by messing up (sometimes royally). So there were two major
tasks this week.
The first task I completed was physically mount two servers on
a server rack in the (freezing cold) server room. By the way, I had
never even seen what a server looked like in person (or picture,
either). Can you believe that it is 65 degrees in there (server room)
all the time? I have to wear pants and a jacket in there to even feel
comfortable. After physically mounting the servers, I had to get an
Operating System on there. I did this for both "bgpmon1" and "hops" as
we call them. My coworker, Ben, mentioned he was a little sad that the
first machine was a bgpmon machine, otherwise he wanted to name them
"barley" and "hops".
I love those names! But, for now, hops is by himself without his
beer-brother. Poor hops, he's such a little guy (about half the size of
bgpmon1).
I just wonder now if hops gets cold at night...
The second task, I wasn't able to complete. This was to
install BGPmon on the new bgpmon1 machine. It actually isn't supposed
to be hard to do. I had already installed BGPmon version 7.1.1 on my
work-machine - kix. But the idea was to install the (almost) finished
BGPmon version 7.2 on bgpmon1. I wasn't able to get to this because
there were countless of unexpected hurdles I encountered when I was
installing and configuring both hops and bgpmon1. I'll save the trouble
and won't mention any of those troubles. The main points to take away
from them is:
1.) With great power comes responsibility (e.g. Spiderman, or hops, and bgpmon1).
2.) System and network administration is hard and very easy to mess up!
3.) Documentation, documentation, documentation. Never ever forget how important these are to EVERYONE (trust me).
So that sums up work this week. Basically I learned a lot and worked
very hard, but it might seem like I didn't (because of the very steep
learning curves). On to outside of work things: I decided to reward
myself on Friday and go out to a local pub and brewery called
Coopersmith's. It's a pretty cool place that actually brews their own
beer. The best part is they pretty much give you unlimited (to an
extent) amounts of beer samples. This is great for someone like me that
doesn't actually live here and has no idea what "Mountain Avenue Wheat"
or "Not Brown Ale" (a brown ale!) or "Punjabi Cask Ale" taste like at
all. I was very careful though and had very little to drink because I
have been warned numerous times by the roommates that, if you're new to
this elevation (almost a mile above sea level), that your tolerance for
drinks is considerably lower. So, of course, I took their advice and
mostly just sampled the various local brews that Coopersmith's offers.
By the way, the NetSec crew is set up for a free tour of the New
Belgium Brewery here in Fort Collins later in June. It's crazy that the
reservation had to be made that far in advance, but this understandable
given that the tours are free and they give you lots of free beer. You
can't beat that. It should be really fun and I'm excited to go since
Fat Tire, a favorite beer of mine, is made by them and is one of their
signature brews. This town has lots of venues for the beer connoisseur
(had to Google how to spell that). They even have a couple of "make your own beer"
shops here in Fort Collins. I'm also told by the roommates that
Colorado as a state has the highest number of breweries (mostly
micro-breweries, the best kind) per capita in the United States.
So after the pub visit, I went out and was about to start biking home,
but I heard some music playing. I turn the corner and find a live band
playing right in the middle of "Old Town", the downtown area of Fort
Collins - absolutely beautiful and well-kept place to see! Well, of
course I parked my bike right away and stayed to listen. It was a nice
little concert. I listened to them for about 2 hours before deciding to
head home because it was already dark and was too cold for me and my
Texas skin.
I swear, every day that goes by, I am blown away by how much
fun stuff there is to do around here. My next project should be to
start visiting these fun places! Well that's all for now, stay tuned
for more Colorado thoughts, adventures, rambling, research notes, and
whatever else I decide is on my mind next week!
See you soon...
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