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
About Me
- David Merrifield
- Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States
David Merrifield is the chief technology officer for the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON), which is a consortium of the eleven four-year public universities in the state of Arkansas formed to build a fiber optic network to connect the member universities to the national research and education backbone networks of Internet2 and National LambdaRail.