Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:22:51 -0400 From: "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com>
On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Paul Wall <pauldotwall@gmail.com> wrote:
Not to pick on the Democrats unduly - they just went first in terms of giving us crummy cabling as a metaphor for crummy government; http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/multimedia/2008/08/gallery_dnc_tech?slide=7&slideView=4
Paul,
One makes difference choices when it only has to last 7 days. Here's what it looks like at DNC headquarters in DC where it has to last from year to year:
When you build a network for a week, it's just not a good investment in time to be too neat. After all, in a week, it is all gone. Fun is networking a large show where the network is in a big, transparent room at the center of everything with lots of press taking pictures. Thee you have to build fast, debug fast, tear down really fast, and have everything look pretty. At Supercomputing every fall the net work has external connections of about 20 OC-192s and probably over 150 fiber links handled by a variety of different routers and switches all of which the NOC staff has to be able to work with. Last time I did SC was 2005 in Seattle. Pics at https://scinet.supercomp.org/gallery2/v/SC2005_Seattle/Mitch_Kutzko/ Look at the Tuesday November 15th page for pictures of the NOC. No single picture can really show the whole thing. A few are less than tidy...I guess Jim R. was not watching closely enough. I'll admit that most don't look quite as good as the DNC, but they were built rather more quickly and all by volunteers, albeit mostly seriously over-qualified ones. I retired from SCinet after 2005, but I miss if every November and I'd love to be in Austin this November to help build it again. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751