First SMC TigerAccess Equipment Installation

Almost completed the installation the SMC VDSL equipment at the Peninsular Resort at Mooloolaba (Queensland, Australia). As mentioned before we mounted the equipment and had everything ready to go for the phone guys. Well they should finish the line terminations to the Splitters today and everything will be all go for the core equipment.

Now I have to go through a few installations of the CPE (Client premises Equipment) with Peninsular's maintenance guy to make sure he knows what to do.

All the equipment including cabinet, Access Controller and DSL Router came to around $12,000. Labour is at about $2000 not including room installations. Compared to the cost of the PBX system which was over $50,000, our system is pretty cheap, particularly when looking at the revenue generated from it compared to the phone system.

Janice of Wyoming

Had to go down to South Port and conduct a site inspection at a 87 appartment building (Ocean Sands). Thought I'd take advantage of one of the views and got this pic of the $25m yacht 'Janice of Wyoming':



It's the one just to the left of center, with the huge mast behind some trees. Gives you a good idea on just how big that 130m long lump of aluminium is. More information can be found in this Sea-Spray article (PDF).

A day spent in Redcliffe

Woke up around 2am this morning to work out why the Colubris device wasn't letting me NAT to the internal devices. Mainly because I wanted quick responses from the US based support folk. Turns out that something is suss about the link I had the equipment running on, even tho it was a definite unrestricted outside network. All worked fine at the client site...

Day started with me getting a couple of coffee's from macca's and arriving at work at around 7:45am. Willow turned up at 8 as arranged and after a bit of me catching up with the usual 'first thing' tasks we loaded up her nifty Astra and were on our way at 8:30. Traffic wasn't bad, trip took around 45min.

Unloaded the gear and got straight into hacking up their cabinet to squeeze in 30 odd 3m leads to patch all the units to the two Linkys SRW224 switches, don't know what I would have done without help from Willow (she's doing work experience with me on her RDO's from the TAFE). Once that was complete I then proceeded to destroy their phone system and render their phones useless for a period of a couple of hours. Turned out that their main extension is somehow hooked into the DSL line, beats me how DSL and a PBX system can be combined. I then worked out how their intraoffice cabling worked and got the Cisco DSL router hooked up.

Sorted out some configuration errors with the SAB Server and everything was go.

We had lunch at the Coffee Club on Redcliffe Pde.

Willow and I then ran around like idiots testing for a connection from each unit and marking which point has the data on it. Manage to locate 5/6 units that didn't have any connection - left that for the cable monkey to deal with.

There's still a few little things that need to be tidied up but its all there and working for anyone who wants to walk in on Friday and use it. So if anyone is seeking a place to stay in Redcliffe, call into the La Vida on Anzac - 41 Anzac Ave, Redcliffe. QLD.

Electricity is a good thing

A site went down today because Energex was doing PLANNED work on the buildings. Pity the client didn't forewarn us of this pre-arranged power outage. So a mad rush later and the site is back up using the handy generator we keep handy for such occasions.

On a funnier note, Don had to borrow the GPA to quickly go see a prospective buyer of some bits on his old Range Rover. Can't wait to hear his comments. It takes people some time to get used to the right understear and left overstear, sticky rear brakes and dodgy electrics -- odometer doesn't work, fuel gauge works sometimes and the indicators can short out sometimes.

Now to start playing with the VDSL equipment...

Day of productivity

Optus woes cured (as expected - a MTU issue), La Vida equipment and configuration is all set to go for Tuesday (bar a PoE adaptor for the Linksys AP) and we successfully hooked up a new client to our Metroplex wifi network. Now I can concentrate on vehicle shopping and catching up on documentation.

Some pictures of the La Vida equipment on the bench:



The SMC Tiger VDSL switch and splitter for the Peninsular installation:

Optus upgrade woes

Yesterday morning Optus completed a scheduled upgrade of a core router in Brisbane. This is where our Sunshine Coast Frame Relay link terminates. Essentially a MPLS service. The upgrade entailed replacing the router with a larger chassis for scalability and hence the layer 1 and 2 configs would have changed as a result -- the probable cause of our issues.

After this upgrade we discovered that any sort of traffic that utilised larger packet sizes stopped working. This included traffic too and fro our database services and the Brisbane based webservices and any kind of secure connection such as online banking and eBay (noo!).

We circumvented the database woes by rerouting outgoing packets from the database server via our Telstra Frame link, creating a circular route. This is because the connection between the two would be established but the reply traffic was too large and the connection would time out. So now replies go out via Telstra and it all works fine -- this saves us having to change source addressing etc.

We're now waiting on the Optus network monkies to do their thing. As much as we love Optus, it just proves that you can't sit with any single provider and having a backup link with another is very worth while.

Now I have to start planning for the new installation at Brisbane today and try and resolve configuration issues with Colubris CN3200 that's going into La Vida on Tuesday.

The Dockside Marinanet upgrade went fine yesterday. We now have our own DSL with static IPs and the MT Router is happily running with its new config and software.

Looked at a few cars last night. There's a Nissan Navara Dualcab 2.4l ute for $14,000, only has 76,000 on the clock too. Real men drive utes.

Home once again

Probably the most eventful of my trips down the coast. Before leaving Mackay I went to the Mackay Marina as scheduled to meet the antenna guy to adjust the antenna. Since the meeting time was at 10am I had a half hour to kill as I had arrived at 9:30am, so I ordered myself breakfast and a coffee from the restaurant next door to the Marina office. It took a bit longer than I had expected to cook so I had to leave to assist the antenna guy. I told a nearby waitress that I would be back in about 10min. 10min later I arrive to see the owner eating my breakfast with a confused look on his face as he looked at me. Apparently the waitress didn't tell him that I would be back soon and so he ate my breakfast... 15min later I had my breakfast and another coffee for a discounted rate :)

Having had such a great start I managed to get to Rockhampton by around 2:30pm where a Magpie took it upon itself to fly into my front bumper. Poor little bugger, wasn't a whole lot I could do about that one - it was near the correctional center just north of the city. Must have been eating the stuff they give the crims.

After passing through Rocky I was starting to get jack of this driving stuff. There's only so much driving one can do in a week and I was up to my four thousandth kilometer. I then relised that I needed to swing past Gladstone to do the upgrade there *grumble*.

Arrived at Gympie at approximately 8:30pm and boosted my reserves at my arnty's place before heading off on the final stint to Nambour. So from 11am to 11pm on the road with a few breaks in between, screw that for a trip.

Hopefully I won't need to go back up for a while although it looks like I'll be doing it again in two months time anyway...