Status Report - September 29, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 29, 2008:


1. New staff: We welcome Diane Didier to the ARE-ON staff as Director of Administration and Planning.

2. DWDM equipment RFP: The acquisition of the ADVA Optical Networking equipment was completed on Saturday, September 27, with the signature of the agreement with ADVA and release of the purchase order by the UA purchasing department. The first delivery of equipment, a load of eight pallets, is planned for September 30. This represents about 30% of the total equipment. I have contracted with Facilities Management for use of a secured warehouse on Government Ave where we can store and deploy the equipment.

3. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: Now that the route survey for Monticello is done, I can now provide the information that we needed to place in the IRU document and will proceed with completion of the acquisition of this route this week.

4. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: TWTC has received and begun review of the latest draft. The City is at a particularly sensitive stage in the negotiation of the agreement with TWTC. The city attorney wrote on September 26 to say that he understands the desire for a rapid resolution, but he expressed concern that the involvement by others in our group might lead to complications and possible litigation, and thus incurring substantial delay. He suggests a course of action that continues to get TWTC’s response to the draft and a better understanding of their issues. In the meantime, UAMS and UALR have asked that we develop an alternative plan for connectivity to their campuses in lieu of a TWTC agreement. We have developed a preliminary route based on use of the Level3 fiber that passes through Little Rock, but it will be expensive.

5. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent us a brief status report on September 27. They have a meeting planned with WEHCO on October 3 to review their proposed agreement and engineering plan. Ritter is beginning aerial and underground construction at various points along the route this week. I have not completed my initial review of the draft of our agreement with Ritter, but will complete it this week.

6. Suddenlink: The SuddenLink representative called me on Friday. She will be supplying us with an alternative for fiber into the Arkansas Tech campus and for a route from Jonesboro to Biscoe. We will carefully review their proposals. They have expressed a keen interest in working with ARE-ON.

7. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

8. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I met with MBO and Cox in Alma and Van Buren to identify splice points in the area where we might be able to splice our MBO fiber into the McLeod fiber. We now have two locations where Cox says we can splice into the MBO fiber, one in Van Buren and one along US64 between Alma and Van Buren. Scott will be meeting with CT&T to review the two locations and to make a recommendation on the one that best meets our needs.

9. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp has developed a preliminary plan for placing the Fayetteville MX960 router into production. We will utilize one of the extra lambdas currently available to Tulsa and a temporary 10G port on the OneNet Tulsa router to do testing and migration of the current path to the Force10 router. Steven has a videoconference with OneNet planned for October 3 to do more detailed planning, with a final cutover planned for October 17. Steven is also working with OneNet on potential direct peering relationships with commodity Internet providers, Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Steven is in California for Juniper training this week and will be back in the office on Friday.

10. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly continues to work with CT&T on route development. CT&T has contacted McLeod to get permission to use some mid-span splice points along several of our routes to shorten the construction. McLeod has okayed one of these in Russellville and Monticello. These eliminate some problematic builds in both of these cities and will lower our costs substantially. We are also approaching WEHCO Cable in Pine Bluff on a possible use of their fiber to eliminate at least one of the builds to the UAPB campus. In Fort Smith, CT&T is developing a northern secondary route into the UA Fort Smith campus. He will be meeting with MBO later this week to get into the Fort Smith POP to get information on getting fiber into the building. Arkadelphia still presents a problem. We have a good route from the nearest Level3 splice point to the HSU campus, but the secondary route that I had initially identified is not feasible. CT&T’s engineers will develop an alternative for us. In Conway we will be building two fiber routes into the UCA campus. I had a meeting planned for Tuesday of this week with Conway Corp on use of their right-of-way, but we will have to postpone the meeting due to scheduling conflicts. The Magnolia route planning is still pending discovery of a fiber route into the city. We have developed contacts with several companies between Monticello and Magnolia that we believe may present our best option for fiber into Magnolia.

11. ADSB Network: Steven has completed the migration of our offices to the new Juniper EX4200 switches and ARE-ON IP space.

12. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us.

13. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.

14. Workshops: The BGP and routing workshop for the ARE-ON members has finally been scheduled. Cisco has approved our use of their test lab and training room at their offices in Little Rock on October 8, the day following the ARE-ON steering committee meeting. Steven and I will be team teaching the workshop. The objectives are to train the ARE-ON member networking staff on the BGP protocol and routing configurations they will need for interfacing their campus networks to ARE-ON.

15. ADVA RETAG: I am a volunteer member of the ADVA Research and Education Technical Advisory Group. We had a conference call this past Friday to plan for presentations that ADVA will be giving at the Internet2 member meeting in New Orleans.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network

Status Report - September 22, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 22, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee met by conference call on September 16 to do the scoring of the three finalists’ Best and Final Offer. The scores were averaged and added to the calculated score for Cost, producing final scores for all three vendors. The top ranked proposal was from ADVA Optical Networking. I wrote a letter of recommendation to the Purchasing Office on Friday with the results.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: Now that the route survey for Monticello is done, I can now provide the information that we needed to place in the IRU document and will proceed with completion of the acquisition of this route this week.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The TWTC lawyer wrote on September 19 to say that the review of the latest draft of the agreement had begun. Jeannie Winston from UALR has asked for a face-to-face meeting with TWTC following their review so that we can explain our position and rationale for this draft. TWTC is unavailable for travel this week, so it will be at least another week before this meeting can take place. It is still at this writing unscheduled.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a brief status report on September 19 along with the preliminary draft of our IRU agreement. Ritter has continued to work with WEHCO Video on the engineering of the fiber build in the Forrest City area.

5. Suddenlink: There are no new developments with Suddenlink.

6. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

7. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly has a meeting scheduled with MBO and Cox Communications on Tuesday in the Van Buren / Alma area to determine where the MBO fiber crosses I-40 and to look for a suitable splice location where we can splice the MBO fiber to the McLeod fiber. They will also visit the MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith to see the building entrances and take some measurements in preparation of building the fiber to UA Fort Smith.

8. Juniper Routers: The 10G linecards for the Juniper MX routers arrived on September 15. All of our linecards have been slotted into their respective routers and “smoke tested”. The serial numbers of all routers and cards have been forwarded to Juniper so that our maintenance contract can be completed. Juniper engineering and sales team spent most of September 18 with us talking about various issues and helping Steven configure the EX4200 switches in our building and the Harmon parking deck. As a result of their work, Steven came in late last Friday evening and completed the configuration of the switches, the new DHCP setup for our office machines, and the relocation of our Sun network management server to the new rack. Steven anticipates having the MX960 ready for production by September 30. During our discussions with Juniper we realized that it would be necessary for ARE-ON offices to have a border router. We decided to use the Force10 or the UA’s Juniper M10 when it becomes available, but it’s likely we will have to buy a small router. We asked Juniper to look into a router that had some security features such as a firewall or VPN blade.

Steven and I had a conversation with Von Royal of OneNet on September 19 about their assistance in migrating from the Force10 to the new Juniper MX960. We will temporarily use an existing, unused lambda between Fayetteville and Tulsa and a second 10G port on the OneNet Tulsa Cisco 6509 router to build and test the MX960 configuration.

9. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly met CT&T in Arkadelphia and Monticello to pick routes for Henderson State University and UA Monticello, respectively. They found one good route in Arkadelphia, but the second route presents a problem that will require additional investigation. They had better luck in Monticello where they identified two mid-span splice points much closer to the campus that will dramatically shorten our fiber builds. We are uncertain at this point whether McLeod will permit mid-span splices, but we will make our case in discussions that I will have with them this week.

10. ADSB Network: Steven has completed configuration of our Juniper EX4200 switches and is ready to migrate our offices to our new network. This will necessitate changing IP addresses for all our office computers, printers, and LifeSize units. We will make this changeover on Monday.

11. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us. We were contacted over the weekend about a problem with local Cox customers experiencing high packet loss rates in communications with the UAF campus. We need to clarify contact procedures for off-hours and weekends with the campus operations group, which I will do on Monday.

12. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.

13. Workshops: Unfortunately, Cisco has not responded yet about availability of their lab and conference room in Little Rock for our routing workshop that we had hoped to conduct October 8th. Without their assistance it will be harder for us to do hands-on training using Cisco routers. At this point I think we have little choice but to push the date back.

14. Diane Didier’s Office: Steven and I cleaned out ADSB 228 for Diane’s arrival this week. I have a Dell E-series Latitude laptop and docking station on order for her, but it will not arrive in time. We will set up a temporary computer for her to use until her computer comes in.

15. Trouble Tickets: UA Fayetteville operations center called me on Sunday, September 17, regarding poor performance that local Cox cable modem customers were having with on-campus connections. Steven and I worked on the problem with the assistance of James Deaton of OneNet until late that evening. We identified the problem within Cox’s network, and James filed a trouble ticket with National TransitRail through which the Cox traffic was flowing. The following morning the problem was still not resolved, so OneNet made a temporary BGP route map change that favored the Internet2 commercial peering service route rather than NTR. OneNet reported on September 19 that Cox had identified the bad router and had rerouted traffic around it.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network

Status Report - September 15, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 15, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The formal Best and Final Offers were opened September 9. We have an evaluation committee conference call scheduled for September 16 during which we will make our final selection and recommendation.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: Some of the fiber splice points in the McLeod network have changed with CT&T’s route surveys, which is affecting the documents that we are submitted to McLeod for this IRU. I am going to recommend to McLeod that we proceed with the IRU document with preliminary splice and co-location information, then follow with any updates as they become available later.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I met with a group that included UALR, UAMS, Melissa Rust, Bill Kincaid, and the City of Little Rock on September 9. We reviewed the latest draft of the agreement with TWTC and created a new draft that everyone pretty much agreed upon. One issue that the City was unwilling to press forward on was inclusion of the cross-river fiber span into the Sprint POP in North Little Rock, which would be extremely valuable to ARE-ON. Upon request by several people at the meeting, I wrote an email to Tom Butler (UAMS) and Bill Walker (UALR) to ask them to appeal that decision to the mayor and/or city manager. Later, the city manager agreed to include the route into the agreement. The draft was revised and sent on to TWTC for their review. Jeannie Winston requested a face-to-face meeting with TWTC’s legal counsel to review the draft and explain our position on each issue. The TWTC counsel replied that there could be some delay due to the impending Hurricane Ike. This meeting has not been scheduled yet.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a status report on Friday. They had a meeting with WEHCO Video earlier in the week in Forrest City. WEHCO expressed great interest in the project and a willingness to participate. WEHCO is engineering the construction plans to the POP locations in the Forrest City area. I owe them contact information for Level 3 so that they can work through access issues into the POP, termination of the fiber, and on-going maintenance needs. Ritter needs the same from McLeod. Ritter has a draft agreement prepared and will send it to us for review this week.

5. Suddenlink: I received a surprise call from Suddenlink this week and talked with them about their new interest in working with ARE-ON on dark fiber into the ASU campus. Previous conversations with Suddenlink had been quite the opposite, so this is a big change. We are too far along with our business relationship with Ritter to reconsider an alternative, but I told Suddenlink that we would be very interested in finding a second redundant route to ASU. The best route for us would be Jonesboro direct to Little Rock, and Suddenlink is very interested in this route, too. It may not be in our budget to pick up another route to Jonesboro, but I told the rep that we would give serious consideration to a proposal that didn’t make us bear full costs for building the route. I also talked with the rep about Arkansas Tech’s interest in getting connectivity to their Ozark campus. I provided information on the location of the nearest fiber POP in our network, and she is going to investigate what it would take to get from Ozark into that POP.

6. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

7. Van Buren/MBO: We are still waiting on final confirmation about the location of MBO fiber in the Van Buren area. Preliminary information from MBO placed their fiber crossing I-40 in Van Buren. But they now believe the fiber crosses at the US71 intersection, which is 6.5 miles to the east. Scott Ramoly and CT&T have done a preliminary scouting trip to the area, but they will have to follow-up when MBO and Cox and give us more conclusive information about where their fiber is.

8. Juniper Routers: The 1G linecards for the Juniper MX routers arrived last week. Steven Karp installed them and powered up the Fayetteville MX960 and the three MX480s. The 10G linecards have still not arrived, but they should be here Monday. Steven will slot them up as soon as they arrive and begin the final configuration and testing. We anticipating being in full production on the Fayetteville and replacing the Force10 by the end of September.

9. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly started touring cities with CT&T to do preliminary fiber route analysis. Scott has submitted a separate status report with details, but to date they have looked at UAFS (Fort Smith), ATU (Russellville), North Little Rock Level3, UAPB (Pine Bluff), and a preliminary visit to Van Buren. They have identified several improvements to the routes that I found during preliminary planning earlier this year. In fact, we are finding more opportunities for buried fiber than originally thought possible, which may cost a little more, but will give us improved protection against fiber cuts due to storm or accident. Scott will be in Arkadelphia and Monticello this week.

10. ADSB Network: The EX4200 switches are installed, but Steven is working on a problem with a 10G port that might lead to getting a replacement chassis. All of the fiber between the Harmon deck and our building is patched, but we will need to follow up with cleaning one end of the link when we get the new adapter for our fiber scopes. We plan to start transitioning our offices over to the new network (and thus new IP addresses for our machines) beginning Monday.

11. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us. We were contacted over the weekend about a problem with local Cox customers experiencing high packet loss rates in communications with the UAF campus. We need to clarify contact procedures for off-hours and weekends with the campus operations group, which I will do on Monday.

12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed. I wrote to Rick Martin, DIS lead engineer, on Friday and give him the detailed IP peering information that he will need to set his end up.

13. Workshops: We are still awaiting approval from Cisco on the use of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for our BGP and routing workshop. I told Cisco that October 8th would be our preferred date since it immediately follows the steering committee.

14. Quilt NOC Tools Workshop: We participated in this workshop on September 10 via videoconference, along with about 20 other sites. We got a number of ideas about new tools that we should consider as we build our own NOC. There were several presentations on portals that others have developed to give their users access to various tools and network information. We are considering WikiMedia, but Atlassian has a nice product named Confluence that I saw demonstrated at the Joint Techs workshop this past summer that I really like.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network

Status Report - September 8, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 8, 2008:

This blog is now being published at http://nocblog.areon.net

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The formal Best and Final Offer request was submitted to the top three vendors using a format approved by the UAF purchasing office on September 3. We asked each vendor to alter their designs somewhat to conform to changes that have taken place in our network design since last March. The vendors’ proposals are due Tuesday, September 9, at 2:30 pm. A conference call during which the evaluation committee will make its final recommendation is to take place either on Thursday or Friday.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: I had a conference call with McLeod last Thursday, September 4, to answer questions leading up to the completion of the exhibits required for the new IRU. I will submit the final revision of the splice point and collocation request form on Monday, September 8. McLeod should have the agreement ready for signature by mid-week.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 9, in Little Rock with the City of Little Rock, UALR, UAMS, and ARE-ON staff and legal counsels to go over the latest draft of the agreement with TWTC. I will be attending the meeting. Bill Kincaid, UA legal counsel in Fayetteville, will participate by telephone. Melissa Rust from the UA System Office will also attend the meeting.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a status report last Thursday on their progress. Ritter has a meeting planned with WEHCO Video on Friday, September 12, to review the overall requirements for our project, as well as additional needs that Ritter has. Ritter hopes to have a proposal back from WEHCO within a week. Ritter will work with us on the details on their agreement with WEHCO to ensure that it meets our needs as well as theirs. We should receive the first draft of our agreement with Ritter once the WEHCO agreement is settled.

Part of this project is some new fiber between Harrisburg and Wynne, plus the fiber that is to be built to our McLeod and Level3 fiber POPs near Forrest City. The fiber for the project is expected to arrive on October 6. Ritter is also working with the Highway Department and Entergy on easements and pole attachments, as well as ASU on the connection on the Jonesboro campus.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: We are still waiting on final confirmation about the location of MBO fiber in the Van Buren area. Scott Ramoly has contacted Charlie Pickle from MBO several times, and he is awaiting feedback from Cox who manages the fiber. Scott will be visiting the location on Monday, September 8, with CT&T to do the preliminary engineering for the fiber build that will splice the MBO fiber to our McLeod fiber.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper MX routers were delivered on Thursday, September 4. We hauled the routers over to the Harmon parking deck on Friday and racked all but one of the MX960 routers (it will go into the same place as the Force10 E600i when we complete the migration to the new Fayetteville MX960, which is anticipated by the end of September). We will power up the routers either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and begin the process of configuring and testing them. Steven Karp captured time-lapse photos of the installation process and is assembling them into movies that we will post on Youtube. Here is Part 1 of the video showing the installation of the racks and the MX routers:



The line cards for the MX routers are the only components that we have not received. Juniper says that they were shipped from China and should be here by the end of this week.

Following our issue with Qwest’s internal order processing delays for our Juniper equipment, Qwest representatives will be in Fayetteville to meet with us on Tuesday, September 16. We also plan to use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss ARE-ON futures, especially as regards our members’ acquisition of additional Juniper routers and our eligibility for Quilt discounting.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly will start touring cities with CT&T beginning Monday, September 8, as CT&T prepares the preliminary estimate for the cost of our fiber laterals to the university campuses. First up will be Russellville and Van Buren. CT&T advised us of a bridge renovation that will take place west of Russellville that will impact our build to one of the two Russellville splice points. We are also seeking advice from CT&T on filament counts and fiber type to use for our lateral builds. We will be purchasing our own stock to use for the actual construction.

9. ADSB Network: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly worked with Sean Bruce in UAF network services to install the patch cables in the various buildings in the fiber path between the Administrative Services Building and the Harmon Parking Deck. Some of the connections are temporary pending arrival of a new adapter for our new fiber scopes. Steven has one Juniper EX4200 racked up in our building, which he will configure and test this coming week. Once we have the link to the Harmon Parking Deck running, we will patch each of the Ethernet jacks in our offices into the EX4200, effectively removing our offices from the UAF campus network. This will enable us to do network management independently of the campus network. It will require all of our IP addresses to change, but that should not present a problem. The Wi-Fi connections will remain connected through the campus network, though.

10. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us.

11. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The changes in IP addresses for the LifeSize units will take place as soon as we can get the fiber link between our building and the Harmon parking deck completed. The units will then get their new, permanent IP addresses. We will ask the UAF folks to leave the systems in the DHCP tables so that we can move the units to another office or conference room in the building (thus necessitating connections through the campus network).

12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.

13. Workshops: We are still awaiting approval from Cisco on the use of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for our BGP and routing workshop. We have requested use of their facilities on either October 8th or 22nd. Since the ARE-ON steering committee meeting is tentatively planned for October 7th, I think it makes sense to push for the 8th. Cisco was in national sales meetings this past week, so we should hear from them this week on our request. Steven and I will team teach this workshop.

14. Document Reviews: I have reviewed the new ARE-ON member MOU and Management Council documents with Steven and Scott. We have a number of changes suggested for the MOU that will help clarify several IP address issues.

15. Quilt NOC Tools Videoconference Workshop: We have registered to participate in the Quilt NOC Tools Workshop on Wednesday, September 10. This is the first Quilt workshop conducted by videoconference, which will save a lot of money on travel, plus permit more people to participate. The installation of our LifeSize units is most timely! We have talked off and on about what software tools we want to deploy in the NOC to do various tasks from network monitoring, configuration management, trouble ticketing, etc. This workshop will help us better understand what tools are in use at other regional optical networks.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network

Status Report - September 1, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 1, 2008:

Labor Day Holiday Edition

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee met August 27 at the UA System Office in Little Rock. After presentations by the top three vendors, the committee met for over two hours to discuss the presentations. I had hoped that we would be able to do the final scoring and come home with a recommendation, but the committee wanted to get additional clarification from several of the vendors on a couple of items, plus tweak configurations that would enable us to better compare the proposals. I will release letters to each vendor, along with a form that our purchasing office will need to get an official best and final offer from each vendor. I had hoped to get these out on Friday, but will do so Tuesday. We will need to give the vendors one week to complete the forms and questions. The committee will meet by conference call next week once we have assimilated the information from the vendors.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: McLeod wrote on Friday to say that each of the splice points and collocation sites we were requesting has been accepted. I have to fill out order forms for each of these, which will be incorporated into the IRU appendix.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: There has been substantial activity on this issue in the past week. Our partners at UAMS and UALR have gotten involved to accelerate the negotiation of the contract between TWTC and the City of Little Rock. I suggested that Mike Abbiatti get involved to help protect ARE-ON interests, and he has. TWTC has agreed to bring their lawyers to Little Rock to meet face-to-face with the City’s attorney and legal counsels for the UA and ARE-ON. Jeannie Winston at UALR has been trying to coordinate the meeting for the latter part of this week (September 4 or 5).

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter informed me that they had an internal meeting scheduled this past Friday to prepare their request to WEHCO, a communications company based in Little Rock with cable TV services in the Wynne and Forrest City area that Ritter wants to buy an IRU for fiber between those two cities. David said that he would provide me with an update early this coming week. David also sent me the contact information for the person in Entergy that they have been working with for fiber into Little Rock. Entergy will be very busy over the next few weeks repairing damage from Hurricane Gustav, but I will still follow up on the contact.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly has contacted Charlie Pickle from MBO to confirm our findings in Van Buren during our visit a week ago. We have also provided this information to McClelland Engineering (see below) for them to do a more detailed analysis of our options in splicing our McLeod and MBO fiber. As reported above, McLeod approved our use of the Van Buren splice point, and as long as MBO’s information has been accurate, we are very positive that this fiber build will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper MX switches should have shipped this past Friday, but we have not received tracking information from the shipment yet. Steven, Scott, and I worked at the Harmon parking deck to finish up the installation of the new racks and cable ladders in preparation for the new routers. Steven took time-lapse photographs of the work, which he will assemble into a Youtube video that we will publish as a part of this blog. The UAF HPC team generated a lot of interest when they did similar videos when the Star of Arkansas was installed.

(As a side issue, we have talked with Qwest about the internal order processing delay that added a couple of weeks to the order fulfillment before Juniper received our order. Qwest also shipped our EX switches with UAF contact information rather than ARE-ON's. Qwest is looking into the problems.)

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly, Steven Karp, Dan Street (UAF Facilities Management) and I had a meeting with McClelland this past Thursday. We handed over the updated laterals document that Scott had completed and described each of the fiber builds that we need. McClelland and CT&T will be driving to all of our cities to do preliminary analysis of each route for the purpose of producing estimated costs for each. I believe they will have this done within two weeks. This information will then be used to build a contract, a statement of work, and a preliminary budget sheet.

9. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize systems arrived last week. Steven, Scott, and I set the systems up, which we used in our first videoconference staff meeting on Friday morning. Mike Abbiatti took the third system home and has it working. When we have our Juniper EX switch setup for our building and patched into the Force10 router, we will move the systems to our own IP space. We will leave the systems setup with UAF IP addresses, too, so that they can be moved to other conference rooms in the building for campus use.

11. iPhones: I received my iPhone this past Thursday. I am happy about it except for one major thing, battery life. It’s abysmal, even after turning off the Wi-fi radio. The graphic keyboard takes some getting used to. Composing messages can be slower than with other phones due to the constant need to go back and correct typos. Otherwise, performance seems good. Having downloadable apps is definitely a plus. The Safari browser is definitely the best of any mobile phone on the market today and addresses the biggest problem we have had in viewing PNG graphic files. Steven has been reviewing ssh clients.

12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.

13. Workshops: We decided to postpone the BGP and routing workshop until October 8th or 22nd after seeing that we will have so much work going on with the delivery and setup of the Juniper MX routers to make a September 15 date unworkable. I have asked Cisco to check availability of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for these new dates. Steven and I will team teach this workshop.

14. Document Reviews: I have reviewed the new ARE-ON member MOU and Management Council documents and am awaiting further input from Steven and Scott. I have a number of changes suggested for the MOU that will help clarify several IP address issues. I will forward these to Mike Abbiatti this week.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network