End of Day: 10th September

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Phew! I feel a bit like a proton whizzing around a 27km pipe myself. What a day!  I'm looking forward to putting my feet up and veg'ing out in front of the goggle box.  Before I wend my way homeward though, it's time for a quick update from the crew here.   We'll start with Networks first for a change.  Here's Ben: Hello there! Welcome to my first EOD post as a member of the Network Development team! I've been in the team just over a month now after crossing the floor from the Operations team, and I'm busy on my first project, consolidating some of our internal services. Today I've been preparing the server I've built for this and been putting some finishing touches to the xen guests which live on it. I'm hoping to get it racked in one of our Sheffield datacentres tomorrow, so I can get closer to finishing the project off. Matt and Dan have been dealing with the tickets that come through to our department, and Dan's also been looking at the abuse reports we get from other ISPs and concerned individuals. Kev's been providing his usual excellent support to customers of our 'Just The Name' and 'Pay As You Host' vISPs. Over in DBA land, Al's been reviewing SQL queries from our codebase to make sure they are all up to scratch, Mark's been looking at improving the data on our staging platform (where our developers test stuff) and John's been doing the usual DBA type analysis. Dunk, Rick and Riz have spent the day working on various problems, and Sarah's been preparing for an upgrade of our Juniper ERX aggregators in between doing various things to our phone system. In the 'pure network' corner, Ade's been planning for an upgrade to a router in one of our Sheffield datacentres, between a few peer reviews and ad hoc tasks. Denis has been preparing for some changes to our internal network as well as working on the SLA for one of our links to our colleagues in South Africa. My new friends in Systems have been working on project documentation (Josh) and creating and testing the LDAP schema for a new anti-spam/anti-virus solution (Geoff). That's about it for today, other than the fact that we've not all been turned to nothing by the LHC.   Next up James, with the Comms update: Chris has been spending his whole day looking at some of the problems that various people within the company have been raising. It's not normally a big job, but with Matt being away, there's been a bit of a backlog, which Chris has been battling through. He's also been a "Tweet"ing fool. I've had another manic meeting day. Aside from that, I've been doing a bunch of taskwork and posting in forums. Bob's not actually been doing anything apart from checking if the world has ended yet. He did say he was going to run to the pub as soon as it did and see how many pints he could drink before being sucked into a black hole.   It's a quick EOD today with our final update for the day coming from Catherine in QA: My colleagues in Development all gave me a round of applause today! Sadly, this was not for my awesome QA skillz but because I have sweets on my desk which Nigel decided he was going to lunge for at the precise moment I turned round, meaning all I saw was a blur of movement coming straight for me. Even sadder, instead of swinging into some ninja moves, I screamed like a big girl and disturbed everyone...hence the applause. Ahem. Everyone else has had a much more macho day 🙂 - Gary has been working with Rowan on some improvement to his big project. - Gavin has been helping Team Awesome with some improvements for our corporate customers. - Paul has been working on the products tool with the developers in India. - Matt 1 has mainly been doing some development on a mock service, a testing tool to help us use services which have to talk to other web sites (like faults) on our testing environment. - Matt 2 is, sadly, not well, so has been working from home all day, and Nigel is on holiday. Finally, I've been on problems in the spare moments when developers aren't launching kamikaze attacks on my desk 🙂    So that's it for today.  I know it's short and hopefully you found it sweet.  Let's hope Colin's not having a pasta disaster and that, black holes permitting, we all meet up again safely in tomorrow's EOD. Take care.. P-j