Now we're getting somewhere

It has been a hectic few weeks for me. Major projects for the period include the preparations for Steve Irwin Day, the roll out of the new Telstra Next IP managed WAN and the slowly but surely deployment of a campus wireless network.

I'm also feeding in various nifty services into the Zoo network - such as a OpenFire Jabber server, Twiki wiki, One or Zero Helpdesk and a few other things. Although I'm going to hold off on their deployment to users until I have a LDAP directory of some sort in place for all these things to authenticate against.

I updated the firmware on my Sony Ericsson P1i too - the difference in performance and stability is night and day - and it was pretty good to begin with! The Opera browser and unified messaging apps have been improved quite a bit. I'm actually encoding TopGear episodes to 3gp format on my MythTV box and watching them during my lunch breaks on it - I didn't think I'd be using it like that. nb: I could just watch the xvid/dvix encoded eps but they're a tad large...

Steve Irwin Day
Steve Irwin Day went well as far as the web servers went - they handled a doubling of traffic without a hitch. I will be sad to see the replication servers go, they've done their job well and I'm kinda proud of them. I'm starting an upgrade of massive proportions of the two main web servers this week - hopefully once I'm done they'll be more than capable of handling the load without the need for replicas. More on that later.

Telstra NextIP
I've cut everything over to the zoo's shiny new Telstra Next IP WAN (to use their marketing spin). Speeds are good, response times are awesome. I'm also using Telstra's Proxy Caches too as they're very snappy and are used by many - plus there's a discount on data used through them apparently.

As part of the WAN, each SHDSL connected site has a managed Cisco 1801 router and SHDSL TA, some yumcha device. The NextG connection is as per usual, but when it is connected it has a L2TP into the WAN and thus has access to all the same routes as the other sites. I've set up Mikrotik routers at each site including the NextG connection - the Zoo has 2 x Yawarra WRAP1-2s in a rack enclosure still, Mooloolaba has a Yawarra WRAP1-1 with wireless and WhaleOne has a Mikrotik RB133 in an indoor enclosure.

Campus Wireless
Not too much progress - the Admissions indoors area now as its own AP and the Taj (crocosium buidling) offices have coverage too. I'm waiting for a sparky to run new cabling to key points so I can locate a few more APs in good coverage areas. Also waiting on a $1k order for various bits and pieces from the RFShop so I can start making up tails and prepare the splitters for installation. Also getting some antennas from them that are cheap and appear to have excellent performance - looking forward to trying them out.