Scott’s Blog

The replacement for our badly-flashed wireless access point arrived yesterday, and it came already upgraded to the new firmware version, so I don’t have to retry the exercise that buggered the old one up to begin with. Hooray. It works nicely too.

Yesterday when I was updating the firmware on one of our access points, it went wonky and wouldn’t allow me to connect to any of it’s administration interfaces anymore. I asked Stuart if he could figure out how to get it to boot it’s default failsave rom image. He tried a bit, called HP, and today they’ve said they’ll be sending a replacement.

Pretty good service, except they said the new one will still be at the old firmware revision level and I will have to go through the process of updating it again. Hopefully this time it will work properly.

In the nearly two weeks I’ve been back from Brainshare, I’ve worked only 6 days. In those days, a couple have been spent trying to stablize our failing and flaky storage system, that we use for backup. Its an HP DL380 G3 with an external MSA20 SATA storage array. It works fine for about two days, and then the HP 6400 storage controller card suddenly claims it is unconfigured and stops talking to the external storage array. We’ve patched firmware and drivers until the cows come home, so hopefully now, after two and a half days of uptime, it might be fixed.

I’ve also been dealing back and forth with Telus regarding a pair of Blackberry handhelds that RIM and Telus were supposed to provide me and James with at Brainshare. Telus didn’t manage to get the handhelds shipped in time so they didn’t arrive in Salt Lake City while we were there. I finally got mine yesterday, and got it configured after three tries on Telus’s automated phone programming system. James, on the other hand, has been screwed by Telus again. They have been telling him that his would arrive this week too, but yesterday afternoon they told him that he was on a waiting list, pending the availability of hardware. I bet he will be able to grow a full and luxurious beard before he gets his Blackberry.

Our programming team of Bart and Shawn have been working on the new project initiation tool that builds directory structures and records management structures for new projects. They are finding out what has been apparent to me all along: Even though the records management committee think they have all the issues sorted out for project filing, they really don’t. They have a lot more work to do to establish procedures, policies, access rights, and training. It’s always fun trying to program something for somebody who really doesn’t know what they want the program to do.

I went to a 3D Computers-hosted seminar about HP switches and wireless infrastructure products today. They have some very interesting stuff with gigabit switches that we may consider implementing at the top of some of our stacks. They also have some good products for securing your wireless access points, regardless of which vendor they come from. They have a black box which can dynamically provision VLANs for your wireless clients based on the user’s authentication profile. That would let authorized users have wireless access to more sensitive resources, and less privileged users only have access to limited resources. The HP guys are going to contact me about a Radius solution for our environment.