Well I thought I should let you know I am interviewing for jobs in Atlanta with-in the same company. I am looking to increase my pay and locally I just am hitting a glass ceiling. I am not sure if I will keep this Blog going if I take the job up there since I will be driving over 200 miles a day just to get to and from work. I will keep you posted and I think the jobs start in August so there is still time for more posts.

Well today was long and tonight will be longer. I have the joy of upgrading our newly acquired Cisco ONS gear from the university we singed up. Basically we signed up a lager university to provide them links to 3 local  campuses and one in Atlanta. Part of the deal we us buying there older Cisco ONS SONET gear and redeploying it on our backbone. I (and my fellow engineer) have the fun task of upgrading the software on the ONS units to be compatible with our version so when we add it to our network it will not have any issues. The biggest problem with this upgrade it that the version they are on now is so old we have to upgrade the units in steps. From version 3.X to version 4.X then to Version 5.X. Each step in this upgrade takes along time. It was close to midnight before we finished getting the three sites upgraded. Once that was done we headed home to sleep.

This morning I get to test DS3's! OK I am really not excited about being up at 3:00AM to work on a DS3 that we tested good a month ago. Basically our NOC (VoIP Group) called me about errors on one of our DS3's and it happen to be an Alltel Circuit. Well the bad news is the Alltel CO is very under staffed so I have to wait till the only CO Tech can work with me. The other issue was that he could only loop the whole DS3 to me so I have to pull out a  T-1 to run tests on. I powered up my T-berd 2209 and ran some pattern test on the DS1 and all looked good. I then called our NOC to get them to look at the DS3 out of loop and they started to see error's again. Now we know from testing that my Equipment is good but the errors could be in Alltel or my Softswitch. Since I am no allowed access to the Softswitch I will just have to assist the NOC till they fix the issue. I feel the issue is timing but I will let the other group get there chance to find the issue.

Time for some real upgrades! Tonight me and another engineer are going to do some major backbone upgrades. The plan is to replace an OC-12 with an OC-48 in one of our core routers (It's Juniper M20). First things first we will have to install the new OC-48 Line Cards. Once we got the card installed we them went in and backed up the old config. After we backed up the config we called our NOC and got the Backbone group from our Corporate offices online to get there side ready for the hot swap on the link. Good thing the guys up there are well knowledge in the juniper OS (junos) because it was tricky to get the interface up, OSPF up, And traffic back running on the link. We also had there group log into the DWDM Gear and make the changes from OC-12 to OC-48. All in all with there support the maintenance went well. We had the new OC-48 working and running traffic in under 40 minutes. The down time was not a big deal since this was just one of two diverse links we have to our corporate peering office. Our next upgrade is to the Cisco SONET Metro Rings. We are going to upgrade an OC-48 link to OC-192. Now one of the other engineer was warning us that to do this we would have to break all the circuits on the ring and then upgrade, and finely replace the circuits back. This sounds a little crazy to me and my fellow engineer so we did the unthinkable... we read the instructions and found out there was a upgrade wizard and the whole upgrade took only 25 minutes and there was no down time. After all that fun it was time to drive home and get sleep.

Well this entry is not from work for once. But there has been all kinds of interesting things happening. My little group is made of 3 engineers and we support over 33,000 CPE devices. Well that has changed as of last week... One of our engineers was pull off the normal job to be put on a special project. What this means is that all the work load is now on just the hands of 2 engineers. To add insult to injury we just got word of some new customer which will require me to upgrade from OC-12 to OC-48 on my peering links.  And I have to upgrade the Metro from OC-48 to OC-192 to support our co-location with customer.. The real bad news is that all this has to be done in under a month. Now if this was the only project I had it would be no problem but I have the normal work load and a few other possible projects for an OC-12 point to point and also a 10 Gig point to point. I hope I do not sound too bitter I love my job I just wish I had more time to get the projects done. It would also be nice to have time to research new technology and get to go to conferences. In other news I have been playing with video encoders and my little system migrating over to a video over IP. Once this project is done we will be multicasting all the video channels to our combining gear. The only issues I see with moving to Video over IP is that a lot of the older Technicians will be lost if they do not update there skill sets. This can cause a huge gap in trained personal and I have a feeling my job will not get easer any time soon. Well I guess you could call it job security. I real should not complain to much as there is a lot of people out there with out jobs.

I have not been too busy... what that means is that I have been working 50-60 hours a week instead of the normal 70+ hours. Salary is not a good idea if your an engineer in a smaller MSO. I have found that I hold the roles of Data Engineer, Voice Engineer, RF Engineer, Metro Engineer (SONET/Metro Ethernet), Security Engineer, and Per/Post sales Support. I just wish I got paid for all the extra duties I pull. I have also found that I make about 40% less the my peers an hour north of me. I have been looking around at other jobs north of here but the commute would be at least 1.5 hours one way :(. This morning (or tonight for me... It's still June 12th in my head sine I have not sleep yet) I have been load balancing nodes in one of the hub sites. The Cisco 10012 I am working on has well over 10,000 customer including voice so I am being careful to take my time in moving the node. My goal is to minimize the customer impact and get the nodes better balanced in the upstream. I can not wait till I go to 16QAM in the upstream. At this time I have everything at QPSK and I just can't last on 5Mbs per upstream. 16QAM will boost me close to 10Mbs per upstream which will help on all this night work to load balance. The down side is the field specifications for the modems tightens up a lot and I will have to make sure I switch over to 16QAM one node at a time to keep the Field guys from working to death. It's a two sided sword with upgrade because you can capacity but lose some of the head room you have with the lower modulations. My goal tonight is to move and split about 10 nodes with a little luck I can get the work done and keep 99% of the modems online. The issue with node moves or even splits is that the signal levels will change even if 1 Dbv. 1 Db can be the difference of online and offline with modems working on the edge of the signal range. Well I am about done with the node moves and it looks like it took about 4 hours to get the moves done. Now I got about another hour of reviewing the config and e-mailing out that the maintenance is done. I also have to call the NOC back and let them know I am done playing. They are not reporting issues off of this router till I am done with my maintenance. I also have to look to see if there is any outside plant maintenance because I noticed a node I was not working on take a 50% hit in it's modem count. I will have to see if anyone posted a Preventive Maintenance Advisory (PMA). Hopefully this work is done and I can drive home and get a little sleep. I have been awake now for about 20 hours and I have finished all my coffee so I need to get to my bed. It's now 5:15AM and I have finished the maintenance all in all I think it went well I ended up only having about 16 modems that did not come back online and that could just be the customer turning off the modem. After I get some sleep I might post more.

Another fun day at the office adding tickets to get IP's for the VoIP MTA's on the routers. I also decided to make a common command list to help our SOC support the system.  Here is a quick look at the commands I plan on adding a lot more commands as I think of other useful commands for support personnel. I have to be careful on the commands I show them as they have limited access to the router to avoid config issues. I also this month have the awesome duty to be primary on call so I should be able to not sleep much this month. Recently our manager decided to post an engineer in the SOC to help support them so I am also the lucky guy that gets to assist them with answers to questions and mini classes on how different networking gear works. It should not be too bad but I hate having to move my desk. Other annoying things are this work area in the SOC is so much louder than my desk so I have decided to listen to my MP3 player while I work to take the edge off. Anyway I hope to have more to post this week. I know I have some more node moves so I might get the chance to take more pictures.