Technically Speaking

I head to Austin Tx for Tech Field Day 7 on Wednesday morning. Should be a good couple days of sessions and overall discussion. I am not sure at the moment who I am most looking forward to. I think all of the presenters have things that interest me.

The Presenters are:

Dell (Dell | @Dell_Storage)

SolarWinds (SolarWinds | @SolarWinds_Inc)

Symantec (Symantec | @Symantec)

Veeam (Veeam | @Veeam)

Some of them I have seen before, but there are new product releases since then and probably some new faces as well. I think the networking opportunity is what I like the best about Tech Field Day. In my neck of the weeds… er woods there aren’t many user groups so these events and the online stuff that tends to go with them are high on my list. Although the local tech stuff may be changing soon, but I cannot divulge that just yet.

I am looking forward to seeing some old friends again and definitely making some new ones. These events are busy, but in my past experiences they are enjoyable.

A bit of a thank you in advance to Stephen, Matt, and the rest of the TechFieldDay crew, without them, we wouldn’t be doing this. Oh and for the links above, I apologize as the editor I can access right now doesn’t seem to HTML friendly – will fix those soon. Update: Links Fixed… much better.

Last fall I was tasked with overseeing a phone system installation at my organization, which was a rather large undertaking given the short time frame for getting it accomplished, but we got it done.

The months since the new phones went in have been a vast improvement over the previous phone setup we had, depending on who you ask of course.  However adding this many IP based devices to our network has introduced some challenges in keeping things running smoothly and keeping devices online where they belong.

Quite simply we are running out of space in the kiddie pool that is DHCP.  My new project is to rescope our environment and split things up into VLANS.  The beginning of this endeavor was this week and it is starting to make sense.  I understand the reason for creating VLANS, to essentially keep the voice devices and traffic somewhat segregated from the PCs and other data devices.  This way the DHCP pool available for each device type gets to grow a bit.

Working with all these hosts

I guess adding things to the network as they become necessary is catching up with me.  Sure we need the device and it serves a business purpose, be it a printer, PC, or phone, but this doesn’t mean there is room by default.  The fact that we haven’t done a lot of big adds to the environment and usually aren’t growing at a huge clip put me in sort of a docile mode about the whole thing.

Big picture getting clearer, but still not a Monet

The move to a VLAN environment will also allow me to essentially rebuild our whole infrastructure.  No not with brand new gear all over the place, but with cables of a more desirable length and a better cable management arrangement (and some labeling too).  This should clean things up and make it easier to manage.  I am not sure I will be putting in a glass door to show it off, but it will be more pleasurable to work with for sure.

Another positive is the learning aspect for me.  Sure I am learning, but I am glad I didn’t try to get to a scalable network without some help.  It seems this is quite a big undertaking and should be closer to complete by the end of the summer… I hope.