IODA Conference begins...

9:00am Monday morning Ron and I met all the participating students at Okanagan College to help load up the cube van we rented with all the laptops, switches, servers etc. Clinton went and picked it up that morning but will be driving back mid week to hold down the fort at OC.

Trevor & Matt had completed the configurations as part of their 299 project and had spent most of Saturday familiarizing themselves with the configuration again. They are now both working at Telus and so they had to clear out the cobwebs and dig deep to remember how all this stuff works. Anyway they had tested a client and everything seemed to be working. Then Matt was to have the assistance of a couple of students to help configure the rest of the laptops generously donated by OC in the same way. We had planned on leaving at 11am, but for whatever reason Matt only had 1 1/2 of them done. We left anyway, stopping to pick up some food and supplies and made it to the Delta Sun Peaks by about 3:30pm. We then spent the following 7 hours configuring and installing all the equipment, breaking for pizza around 6:30pm. The install actually went fairly smoothly, although there were a couple of unexpected hiccups. Turned out the wireless authentication was still required from Sun Peaks, so we decided to remove our authentication. In addition we had a DNS problem and a routing problem connecting our network to the Delta Sun peaks network. Of course that was routing 101 and after a few minutes thought we turned on NAT on our router. After that everything seemed to work beautifully. So we headed back to the hostel around 11pm and had a nightcap.

Today we made it back to the hotel for 10am. Ron had been up since 6am to say goodbye to his kids who had come up with yesterday to help out. He then managed to fit in a bike ride since he has to maintain that buff body he has been working on for the past year. However all the students left Ron and I stranded at the hotel and we had to have Elker, the guy looking after the hostel, drive us up to the hotel. Anyway, the only thing left was ensure that the Logon VBScript Matt and I were working on added the printer to all clients. It took a couple of tries, but after some help from 'the scripting guys' we managed to get it to take.

Ron and I then put up a schedule for the students and now here I am, sitting in the computer lab doing my turn at the support. The IODA members have made us extremely welcome and are absolutely thrilled with what we have accomplished and providing for them. As a result they named us the official sponsor of the French Canadian night tomorrow night. Should be a lot of fun. There were times where Ron and I were wondering if having a project outside of classes was such a good idea, but the enthusiasm and professionalism shown by our students have demonstrated the value we can bring to an event and certainly something our department and Okanagan college can be proud of.

We've run into a couple of people from Thompson Rivers University who have wondered why we are doing this event and not TRU. The main reason is of course that we are the only department in the region that specialize in networking and telecommunications. However it was also a testament to the benefit of the conferences and trade shows we attend, since Ron made this connection while at a Science education conference in whistler.

IODA Conference Coming up

Next week our department is going to be looking after the IT Services for the IODA conference; a conference about organizational development and the global ecology. Some of the breakout sessions really look quite interesting, but we'll be spending the better part of the first day ensuring all the systems are stable. We have a couple of students coming in tomorrow and sunday to make sure the client server side is ready to go. The did it as a project in their NTEN299 class and have had honoured their commitment to stick with it and see it through to the end, even though they both have full time jobs with Telus. I'm very impressed and proud of them for making doing this. We obviously chose the right guys to take on this project. Although they may have just chosen it on their own.

Our department and 5 other students are all heading up on monday and most of us are staying until saturday. Food and lodging is provided so it should be a blast. Although I should really be heads down prepping for my 218 class which starts for the first time this fall. We are going to be doing the MCSE course on securing Win2K3 server networks. Definitely a good thing for the students to take.

Networkers 2007

Spent the week of July 21st in Anaheim for Networkers 2007.  I didn't get to all the breakout sessions I would have liked, but of course the beautiful thing about networkers is that they record all the sessions and allow you to download the slides and presentations afterward.

I spent some time in the World Expo area talking to a few vendors, picking up some freebies and trying to win some prizes. I also spend some time talking to a lady who is working with the second life group within cisco. We had a great chat. SL is definitely an example of the interfaces to come. The Cisco academy had a lounge I was able to hang out in and chat with some other instructors. Made some good contacts and got some great information. In between I still  managed to get to sessions on Wireless Mesh technologies, 802.1x, Data Center design and CCIE security.

 The CCIE security was a techtutorial I did for 8hrs on the Monday. The instructor was none other than the guy that decides what does and doesn't go into the CCIE exam. Needless to say it was a very valuable session. The cool thing about it was that I realized I'm really not that far off from writing the exam and having a chance, but it would still require a massive studyfest to get myself to the point where I live and breathe cisco's security solutions. Anyway the instructor provided some interesting hints on what to focus on for the exam.

Another interesting session was on 802.1x and what it takes to get an enterprise into identity based networking. Lets just say that at the end of that session I realized you have to REALLY REALLY want this stuff to implement it. There are so many variables out of one vendors control that the last half of the presentations seemed like band-aid solutions on how to work around the issues. Anyway, it was enlightening as well.

My CCNP exams all expired a long time ago so took the CCNP Routing and switching composite certification exam. Man was that a long exam! Plus since this was my first time doing these testlets missed the four out of the first five questions by clicking on next instead of the 1,2,3,4,5 on the side. I asked one of the proctors if I could start again, but got shutdown. At this point I was thinking I'm done for since there are only 57 questions and you need 80% to pass. Anyway, I battled my through it and ran out of time as I was about to click on the last question so that was five questions I had lost. Well I was totally shocked to see the congratulations come up on the screen. I must have nailed all those question that I really had to think on, but  wasn't sure. What a relief! 2 down and 2 to go. Although I'm not too worried about the security exam.

Although there was free food and booze, I only really got into it on one night, the first night. Happened to hook up with a cisco rep and his clients as well as some ladies from global knowledge. Well, they must have had some preauthorization for spending because we they just handed over their credit cards and said let it rip! I was introduced to my first "soco".  I had no idea that's the shortened name for Southern Comfort, but hey it tasted good. However the night was still quite tame and everyone was well behaved.

The highlight of the week as always was the customer appreciation event. The brought in a bunch of female tribute bands, AC/DShe, Led Zepella and The Iron Maidens. All were excellent especially considering I'm big Maiden fan. Then, believe it or not, they brought in KISS all painted up and singing their greats. They had face painters on hand so I even had my face painted up as Gene Simmons. There were over 9000 people at this conference and they must have had about 60 busses to transport us from the hotel to where the even was located. Took about 40mins just to get there. The only down side to it all was that it was over by 11:00pm. However Kiss put on a great show.