First day at a new job

Ok, so today I join the real world for my first full-time job. Up until now all I'd has was a large number of part-time jobs, often simultaneously (sometimes making up more than 40 hour work-week).

My new job is basically a network administrator position, for a business-oriented ISP, using high-end wireless technologies between buildings (avoiding high fiber costs from telco and other incumbants). The ISP division is being split off from the original company, which has a desire to focus on the technology only.

Since I knew I was hired a week ago, I've been chatting to the head tech guy on IRC a fair bit, finding out everything that I'll need to know to run the ISP division. The Toronto-based company that bought the ISP division, has their grounding in installing telco/PBX gear for office buildings, and they are also interested in using VOIP over this wireless network.

I came in this morning, got two AMD64 laptops for temporary use, one available to me for a week or so, needing a reinstall (and it should be done installing a complete Gentoo environment by tommorow morning), and the second as a one-day only machine, running Windows. I've spoken to one client, who had some servers located in the same office as me, and wanted external firewalling, so we figured out what to charge them and implemented the firewall rules in the networking system.

The networking system that the original company has developed is phenenomal. It contains everything from automated monitoring systems (with automatically generated trouble tickets for any detected outages), to CRM and billing controls, and networking controls for everything under the sun. There are a few ways that it can be improved, but it's mainly documentation of the system, and a few minor user interface revisions (I'm not certain on them, as there are several ways to reach a given page).

I had a look at the wireless gear on the roof of our office building, and saw the network unit attached to the wireless gear. Went downtown and picked up one of the servers that's currently giving trouble. Unfortunetly we didn't have any spare working cdrom drives on hand, so debugging and fixing it gets to wait until tommorow.

Later in the week there's an wireless unit replacement to do, and that will extend my wireless skillset.

For a good deal of this wireless stuff, I've been reading up on it for nearly a week now, and it's nothing really beyond some common sense in physics, engineering and mathematics behind it.

The VOIP stuff when it comes up will be a lot more interesting, as I realize that I bought a pair of VOIP FXO cards cheaply on eBay some time ago, and I've never used them.

Day 2 of new job

Ok, so day 2 of my new job.
I finished the AMD64 install on the Laptop, figured how to boot the Ubuntu LiveCD into a non-framebuffer command prompt (add "vga=0 debug -b 3" to the kernel parameters in grub). Spent some time configuring the laptop to my liking.

Had a dolphin-friend tuna salad sandwich for lunch, and got one of the end pieces of a freshly baked banana-bread loaf for desert. Bought a whole banana-bread loaf. Helped Ryan get a netboot rig going, enabling him to doing the flashing for his embedded systems much quicker.

Spent most of the afternoon preparing a pair of wireless units (Airaya GRIDs). The two pieces of documentation that were with them turned out to be almost totally unrelated, so it stymed me why they weren't working at first. Also, take care not to walk in front of the antenna, as 5580Mhz @ 21dBm, as you will get a headache very quickly.