April 30 2006 (10:20PM)

Nothing big happen this weekend (no calls which is good since I am not on call this month). I did play with ads for a few of my sites and I got to say it's more of a headache than its worth to try to make anything off website ads. I first tried Google ads but I had to many hits to a few sites and they dropped me ( basically I asked a few friends to click the ads when then visit the site and Google dropped me I guess I made to much for them to want to pay out). I then tried a few others and had no luck. I got adbrite now but it sux too half the time the network ads do not show up and when they do it's not targeted ads just a small pool of 15 ads. I also applied to yahoo ads but they have not replied to me. A few others I tried paid less than $0.005 per click.... I have notice that anytime any of the accounts get close to the point of pay out I get locked up and I have to explain the traffic to my site. It's almost like the ads company's don't pay out. I have not got paid a cent yet but have been running ads for almost an two months. My sites total over 7,000 unique hits per month and I know that visitors do click banners on my sites because the CMS I use on 3 of the sites tracks all visitor and clicks. For the longest time I just ran public service ads on my sites and links for friends site. I just thought I could make a few bucks and put it back into my charity work but as I said it has been a real pain. Well that's about all for this post.

So far today has be relaxed. I went to my Friday morning meeting to review projects and tasks for the coming week and all was normal. I discussed how the work this week went and also inform the rest of the team about my mass node move plan and setup the day and time for the maintenance. Then I  made the change ticket for our NOC to follow and got all the fun info added into that ticket. I also ask the Headend Techs if one of them could be present for the maintenance window so I have support for running new RF cables and anything else I might need with the node moves. After the meeting I noticed that I had some T-1's I had to test to be added to our IP Soft Switch so I got out the T-Bred 2209 tester and called Bell. The testing was basically just me having the Bell tech setup a loop and then I am running patterns on the loop to insure that the T-1 has no errors. After the T-1 test it was lunch time. Lunch was a quick stop to the local Chinese place to get a combo plate and many kinds of sweet chicken. After lunch I headed back to the office and had our Network Center for Voice send me a copy of all the current T-1's we have hanging off the DS3's so I could have a local reference just incase an issue comes up with a T-1. After I got the all info save on the network folder I made a copy to post by my desk and it was time to dive into personal e-mail. Good news in my email, an article I submitted to www.ezinearticles.com got approved so now I am up to 6 published articles. I am using the articles to get more traffic to the www.middlegeorgia.org. Since I have nothing else to post here for today I will SPAM a java script feed of my articles here:

Well I am back at work for today. I got in this afternoon at about 12:15PM and started up outlook to see all the fun I miss from 8-12. Well good news is that nothing happened that involved me and no one has asked me any stupid questions via email. Once I got my e-mail running and got a coke I decided to look at the CMTS to see how my node move went. Well all looked good and I knew it was time to get cracking on the rest of the work needed to be done. As always I replied to like 40 useless e-mails (people just love to send email to feel important I swear). About now it's already 1:30PM and I have gotten nothing done but e-mails.... Well time to stop procrastinating and get to the mass node move plan. Opps can't start that I have vendors in with a fellow engineer and he just informed me I missed the free lunch but I get to explain to the vendors how our plant works and why we so badly need there crappie product hanging off our network (this is sarcasm if you can 't tell). Once I got that over with it was about 2:15PM and I still needed to get the mass node move plan done. Oh great here come more email with people just wanting me to respond too. Now I decide to just close outlook till I get the node moves started. I get the web apps up and all the spread sheets to figure out how to best move the node. This process is painful but so important because one wrong combining and you could make more problems than your tiring to fix. It took about 3 hours to get it all down with me having to look at bandwidth utilization on every suspected heavily used node. But I got the first plan of action built for the node moves. It only took about 4 hours and 3 trips to the printer to get a good plan going. Next I noticed that it's after 5:00PM and I'm just about the only guy left in the office so I save the excel sheet and figure on finishing the tickets I need to send to the NOC in the morning. I hope Friday will be a lot less busy than today has been. Well that's about all for today Blog to ya later.

Damn I am good!! :P The test node migrated over and there was no issue! I guess all the worrying about wiring issue was for nothing the node came up with in seconds of moving the RF over to it. I just for got to take protection off the old cable interface so I had the RF switch flip to protect but after the move I killed the RF on the old up/downstream and all is well. I started this maintenance @ 1:00Am and was successful at 1:35AM. That is good for a node move considering this included calling the NOC and giving them the heads up that there could be alarms. Now I just have to get the plan of action to load balance the rest of the CMTS and I will be set. I also talked with a Cisco engineer about how many subscriber a Cisco 10012 can handle and he ask all kinds of info I can't post to the public but I think if sales keep going this CMTS may need to have a twin install beside him for more load balancing. Now this in no way means this current CMTS is over loaded I just like to be ahead of the power curve on upgrades. So as it stands now I got to do mass node moves next week and then after that do an IOS upgrade to get some newer features. The new IOS code has already been tested in labs and other systems so that should not be to much of a pain just the reboot sucks since it drops all customers. And if you have not guessed.... yes that has to be done in a maintenance window of 2:00-5:00AM. I guess I need to start sleeping from 6:00-11:00PM so I do not die.. Well I hope to post later today after some sleep.

It's still the 26th but I now have a little sleep in my system so I feel a lot better. I got kudos from management after sending out the e-mail at 3:00AM this morning about the maintenance window not having any customer impact. Not sure why they responded normally I send the e-mails off and it seems to go in to a black hole since I never hear back from any of then... I guess a few managers read e-mails from the engineering department. I am now sitting at my desk sending out the next maintenance warning e-mail but this time the work is all in a test node to burn in the new line cards. I am also listening on our company's weekly Cisco call (we have a call weekly with Cisco on open tickets and what is being done to fix open cases). Tonight's work should not be to bad but I just hope I wired the router correctly.... the worry is because a Cisco 10K router has tons of RF cables and there is no good clean way to wire 160 upstreams and 40 downstreams. All of this wiring is in two racks and it's a mess. We have all the cables zipped tied and as clean as possible but every time you have to move a upstream or downstream the cables turn into spaghetti quick. The cables also get heavy and can pull out of the combining so you have to make supports too. here is a picture from Google images of some Cisco 10K's and the wiring. Of course this is just from the 10K to the RF Switch and dose not show you the plant side of wiring where it can get real messy. The plant side is how you hook the CMTS into the MOS's cable plate so the end users can get services. All the Cisco cables is a mini RF cables set with heat shrink to keep it clean but the plant side is your standard run of the mill cable TV RG59 or RG6 so the plant cable is 3 times the size per cable to hook into the Cisco and on top of that you have to have the combining gear which is Headend grade cable splitters that are rack mountable. Just the combining gear alone takes up one rack and them the Cisco 10K by it's self is half a rack in size with out the RF switches. I installed 4 of these pretty much by myself and my back is still hurts from 10 months ago.

        Back side of a Cisco 10012uBR               Just the cabling to the RF Switch             One 5x20 Line Card

Well I am still up and working from the last post... I was able to get all the downstream combining to work out! I also found out that one of the Headend Techs had work this morning so I ended up staying around a little longer to make sure all the modems & eMTAs also came back online. My maintenance did not take any customers down (which is my goal) so I was glad that something went right. I also was called by the NOC on a different issue and ended up giving the NOC tech a little class on what the best commands to use when trouble shooting a Cisco uBR. I told him to always use "Show cable modem summary Total" command and look for any modems on cards 5/1/* to see if any of the Protect card where active (The Cisco 10012 uBR router has and RF Switch with a redundant card to perfect the other 7 working cards just incase a line card goes bad). After the little class I labeled all the combiners and closed my maintenance ticket with the NOC. I now am hoping to get home in time to get about 4-5 hours sleep before I get to come back to this fun house. My peer engineers are also up tonight working on direct fiber customers and the Metro SONET. It's kind of funny how many hours our employer gets out of us on salary. If this was not such a small area (Middle Georgia) we would get paid almost two time what we get here. We have al discussed the idea of moving an hour north to Atlanta for real pay but we all have houses (mortgages) and really do not like the idea of 3 hour commutes to works each day. Well I will try to up date this Blog again today after a little sleep.

First entry into this home made Blog. Do to the fact I do not want to deal with PHP or SQL I decided to just make my Blog in html. We will see how well this all works.....

As always a I have a ton of work I have to do tonight (for work :P got to make a living) so I am preparing to recombine the Downstreams off a Cisco 10K. I need to do this because with growth I have the issue of needing to add more line cards (Cisco uBR10-MC5x20U-D) so if all goes well I should have a fully loaded Cisco 10K. With all this fun tonight I can't forget that I am lucky enough to get to come in the next night too. Tomorrow night I will work on moving a test node over to make sure the newly installed line cards works. After all this fun I still have to be at work the next morning just incase the world catches fire. The worst thing is that maintenance windows with my company are from 2AM - 5AM so I am guaranteed to get no sleep this week. Oh I forgot to mention that this is all just my work life... I still have to find time for my Wife 3 kids and all the other fun things I comment to do for others. The only relief I get is my family and the internet to chat with friends. I also have a Computer Users Group (www.middlegeorgia.org) I run and that is my main way to geek out in person with friends. Last week I started Ethical Hacker Training and the guys seamed to like it. I was also able to meet the president of the Middle Georgia Linux Users Group (http://mgalug.org ) and I had him in our little meeting. I think all in all it went well and I would like to get involved with there guys more. I do not have a lot of Linux experience so it can only help to get to know more. I think I will even install a copy of Linux on my laptop with dual boot so I have something to play with.... the exact version I am unsure of yet but I have time to figure that out. Lets see what else do I have going on... Oh I got all the charity stuff I do.. www.savingfamilies.info, www.computers4kids.info, www.themethodisthome.org, www.pack566.com, and a few others too. Where do I find the time.. Well I will see about get more entries added later.