Where’s Matt ?

Well, the last two weeks were very hectic on a number of fronts and I didn’t get a chance to post.

The Friday before last was the networking “all-hands” meeting. This was a meeting for *everyone* in UITS that is involved in supporting networks. My back-of-the-envelope head-count was up over 70, but with vacations, 24x7 shift schedules and whatnot, we ended up with about 40. I babbled on for a solid 90 minutes about the draft 10-year network plan, the discussion and work that went into developing it, and how that will translate into changes over the next year or so. After questions, we were supposed to have some great cookies and brownies, but much to my dismay, the caterers showed up an entire hour late - after most people had left.

After the snackless break, we asked everyone who had a laptop to come back for some wireless testing. We had 3 APs setup in the auditorium and during the presentation had done some testing to see how well clients balanced out across the APs (not very well as we expected) and what throughput/latency/loss looked like with certain numbers of users on an AP. The dedicated testing was all done with 1 AP for all users. Using speed tests and file downloads, we tried to take objective and subjective measurements of performance with different numbers of users associated with that AP (10, 20, & 40). The goal was to set a cap on the number of users per AP that, when reached by a production AP, would be used to trigger a notification so we proactively track which locations that are reaching capacity.

I spent last week out in Roseville California meeting with HP ProCurve. I don’t know about you, but trips to the west coast just KILL me ! Doesn’t matter what I do, I always wake up at 4am (7am Eastern) and, inevitably, my schedule is booked until 9-10pm Pacific. The meeting was excellent and useful - although you’re not going to get any details here because of our non-disclosure agreement.

Okay, now throw on top of this that I’ve had multiple contractors tearing up my house for the last 2 weeks, and it’s been NUTS !