Cisco recently made available an interesting simulation game called myPlanNet. If you’ve played SimCity, as I’m sure most people are familiar with, you’d find some of the concepts similar. In myPlanNet, you are the CEO of a service provider, and what you do is to manage your business as it evolves through the different eras from primitive dial-up, through broadband and mobile connectivity, into the futuristic (although certainly not farfetched) medianet age.

The target audience for this game is quite different from that of SimCity. The background knowledge required is different. Although SimCity also requires you to know something about city planning, economics, etc, much of it is really common sense (at least for the kind of audience who would play SimCity).

In myPlanNet, you really need to know broad fundamentals on various network technologies, everything from data networking, mobile phone networks, broadband, etc. If not, then you had better have a great passion to learn about these things. Apart from just having fun, education seems to be the goal of myPlanNet, because there is plenty of explanations, tutorials, and illustrations. But, of course, if you are not interested in these things at all, you’re not going to like the game.

There are plenty of thing to learn. You’d see how service providers organize their infrastructure into core, aggregation and access layers. There are also edge layers as well as the “service delivery centre”. It’s not very different from how enterprise data networks are built. You’ll see what devices fit in where, and what devices are required to provision what kind of services. You’ll learn what sort of technologies lead to what opportunities, or basically what depends on what other things.

There are three starting points you can choose in the game: 1) As a landline telco; 2) As a cable TV company; 3) As a mobile phone operator. Whichever company type you begin with, you’d soon have to acquire technologies and build out services of the other type of companies which you didn’t choose to begin with, and ultimately continue progressing toward the same goal of reaching the medianet age.

The real life is not different. Look at the SingTel and StarHub (I hesitate to add M1). They both provide landline phones (although limited deployment for StarHub), digital voice, mobile, fixed and mobile broadband, pay TV, etc. Networks are converging, and whether you start out as a landline phone company or a cable TV company, you’d all end up doing the same thing.

There’s no StarHub or SingTel to compete with in this game. But I think the game will give you an appreciation of what StarHub and SingTel do behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood.

The game is not too challenging. Actually you would find it more difficult to go bankrupt (if at all possible) than with SimCity. My guess is that Cisco wants this to be an education tool. You aren’t going to learn a lot if you get stuck with economics, even though there are some simple economics that you have to manage.

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The 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) standard was ratified in 2002, but we finally only got around to installing our first 10GE interface last year. This year, we have another big bunch of 10GE links interconnecting a big bunch of our switches. 10GE still costs a bomb. The Cisco 16-port 10GE line card lists for something like S$80K. Yes, that’s a big sum of money, particularly since the line card on its own is not very useful: You still need a chassis, power supply, fan tray, and supervisor module at the very least.

The nice thing about networking in the last decade is that everything has basically settled down around the Ethernet standard. Everything. Even Wireless LAN is basically Ethernet. Ethernet has also crept its way into Wide Area Network applications. It has simplified things for network professionals. (Actually it has made things simple enough that everyone could say they knew how to setup and run networks.)

But while everything is standardizing on Ethernet, the networking devices have become more and more complicated. There are so many things to learn and to know.

Our Catalyst 6509, for example, has been running the 8-port 10GE line card just fine. But the new 16-port 10GE line card wouldn’t come up, because it is apparently unsupported by our current firmware. Yeah, an oversight on our part not to check on the firmware requirements first. I suppose this is not too different from how some PC motherboards require a BIOS firmware update to support a new CPU. The firmware for a Catalyst 6509 is more complicated, of course. I’m always a bit apprehensive about upgrading, partly because we don’t have the luxury of a testbed to test the firmware, and the switches we’re upgrading are always “critical”.

The firmware upgrade this time around had a few surprises, but fortunately nothing as spectacular as many others we’ve been through. Someday, Cisco should think about how to make firmware upgrades for their products as idiot proof as, say, their Linksys products.

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Last weekend, a Linksys WRT610N became the latest addition to the networking gear I have at home. It replaces my trusty old WRT54G which was starting to go bonkus after serving for many years.

I have been thinking about upgrading my wireless broadband router for some time. In fact, I was considering StarHub’s free Apple Time Capsule promotion last year. It does 802.11N wireless, Gigabit Ethernet wired ports, includes 500GB or 1TB of storage and printer connection sharing.

But there was no urgency when my WRT54G was still working. Of course, now things are different. So I quickly refreshed my comparison survey of the various wireless broadband router products. The Apple Time Capsule is off the list, because it is too expensive and its disk storage capability has been filled in by a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus direct attached storage I bought last year.

The main new feature I want is draft 802.11n support and Gigabit Ethernet wired ports. The main contenders were the Linksys WRT310N, WRT350N, WRT610N, and D-Link DIR-655. The Apple AirPort Extreme was considered too.

In the end, I bought the Linksys WRT610N. I liked that it was Dual 802.11n Band, operating at both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands. Everyone nowadays has at least a 802.11b wireless device somewhere. The 2.4GHz frequency band is extremely congested. I see a dozen Wireless LANs in my home. But the 5HGz frequency band is lesser used. It is occupied by 802.11a, which is not common. Furthermore, Dual Band 802.11n wireless broadband routers are not so common either. The reduced congestion is distinct advantage of running a Wireless LAN on the 5GHz frequency band.

The WRT610N has the new Linksys outer casing design. The device has a UFO-like shape and features internal antennas. It definitely looks nicer than their older products, and many of their competitors’ products. But the router is does not need to be looked at, so in my opinion, it is not something terribly important. Not unless it is so beautiful that you want to show it off.

The WRT610N cost $245. I don’t think it was a terribly good bargain. Considering that one can get the Apple AirPort Extreme for just $13 more ($258 with educational discount from Apple Store), which would have come with just about everything the WRT610N has plus USB printer connectivity sharing.

The AirPort Extreme looks beautiful. Yes this is something you could display in your living room (except that its white colour tends not to gel with most living room gadgets). But I’ve not used or seen the the box in operation, so I don’t know exactly what kind of configuration options there are. I am concerned about configuration flexibility because I have rather specific things I want to do. I consider myself somewhat of an expert at networking, and there are some not-so-standard things I want to do with my home network. I have used a variety of Linksys broadband products for many years, so I know what it can and cannot do. It was thus a safe choice to go with the WRT610N.

One common complaint about many Linksys products is that they get very hot. So far my WRT610N has not gotten hotter than “warm to touch”. Setup and configuration is similar to any other Linksys broadband router product, so Linksys users should be quite familiar with the administration interface. The 5GHz and 2.4GHz wireless radios are configured independently, so you can have different settings between the two Wireless LANs.

Although 802.11n is still in draft status, the WRT610N works perfectly with my MacBook (supports 802.11n in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands as well). In the past, “draft” often means you have to buy everything from the same brand manufacturer. Fortunately 802.11n draft is sufficiently advanced for this to become a non-issue.

Just for record sake, I managed to clock about 80Mbps transfer rate from my MacBook approximately 2m aware from the WRT610N, performing scp file transfer from a PC connected to the Gigabit Ethernet port. Decent performance I guess.

Update (9 Jan 2009): I’m told that Apple’s AirPort Extreme may be dual band, but operates at only one band at a time. I.e. you can configure it to work at 2.4GHz, or at 5GHz, but not to provide wireless coverage on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands at the same time.

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We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help us with our network and data centre operations. This is like an internship, a program that we’ve run for one semester already. It is a really exciting opportunity for students as they will get hands-on learning experience working with production enterprise networks and data centres.

The students in this programme are called “Student Helpers”, although at some point we’d like to rename or promote this to a better sounding term like “Student Associates”. This isn’t the first programme that we’re running, but it is the first that seems to be working out. It’s a good thing, because sometimes what we find terribly exciting doesn’t quite match up to what students think or want.

What do our student network engineers do? Basically, they help us run our production networks and data centres. They will get to learn many things that are not taught in books, touch really cool high-end stuffs, and spice up their resumes.

These are real enterprise-scale operations, bigger than what you’d see in typical SMEs. We do many things that are “cutting-edge”. Such opportunities are usually not even available to fresh graduates, let alone undergraduate students. So this is really something quite exciting and valuable. Well, at least that’s how we hope our students will see it.

Of course the next question then is, what is there in it for us? Well, we have too many things on our hands, too little time, and not enough people. We could use with some help. Students are, admittedly, cheap labour. But we see this as a mutually beneficial relationship, and we hope to get some really good students onboard. It will cost us time and effort to run the programme of course, but hopefully we reap more benefits out of it than the overheads will cost us.

This is not the place for a total newbie to start learning the very basics of networking. So one thing we will tell potential students is that we expect them to come in with either some basic understanding of networking, or a willingness to put in the effort to quickly get up to speed. The right aptitude and great passion are important. After all, we are expecting them to do useful work for us, we aren’t really running a training school here.

I hope we will be just as successful (or more so) with our second batch.

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Software upgrades are usually not terribly complicated things. Of course, the newly upgraded software many introduce new problems, such as incompatibilities or interoperability issues with other software or systems. The same is not too different for firmware upgrades of network switches. They are not trivial (that’s why you need network engineers…), but they are documented procedures that can be and are routinely carried out by network operators and providers.

A couple of nights ago, we upgraded the firmware of our Catalyst 6509. It was not supposed to be so complicated. Making backups and copying images back and forth would take a little bit of time. Rebooting a Catalyst 6509 will also take several minutes. But we wouldn’t anticipate taking more than half hour ordinarily.

We know Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong, will. Murphy’s Law came more true than we expected.

The root cause of the problem we encountered was a corrupted firmware image. What we had on disk was not what we transfered to the Catalyst 6509’s flash memory. Can it get more wrong? Yes, eventually it turned out that what we had on disk to begin with was actually also corrupted. So, of course, the Catalyst 6509 switch could not boot up from corrupted firmware.

If that was not enough, our upgrade exercise got waylaid by a few other weird hardware glitches. First, the switch indicated a “minor fault” and a “temperature alarm”. The fan tray had a red light. We realized the fans were not spinning at all. One of the line cards had an orange status light also indicating a “minor fault”. While we were puzzling over these problems, just suddenly out of the blue, both power supply units showed a “DC output failure” light, and the switch was dead. Turn off, turn on, fortunately the switch started up fine, and the fans were spinning again. Hmm, but wait, the standby supervisor module failed to come online.

It was altogether a rather strange upgrade exercise.

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We’re still looking to hire more staff to support our Network, Data Centre and IT Security operations. It is the same super engineers kind of work I blogged previously, but this a technologist position targeted at polytechnic graduates. Our priority for this position is in Network, Data Centre and IT Security operations, in decreasing order. Let me know if you’re interested.

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Yes, the Internet celebrates its 25th birthday today! TCP/IP had a difficult start. It was first demonstrated between Stanford and UCL in 1975. It took quite a bit of persuasion before it was finally adopted and the ARPANET switched over to it on 1 Jan 1983. If you didn’t yet know… TCP/IP is the basic network protocol that drives the modern Internet as we know it today.

I had the fortune to attend a course in IT project management some years ago conducted by Dr Bennet Lientz. He was one of the project managers on the team that invented TCP/IP. He shared with us some of his experiences from back then. TCP/IP, like many great technology inventions, was a solution waiting for a problem to solve. They had trouble persuading the adoption of TCP/IP because of the lack of a killer application!

Guess what was the killer application they made for TCP/IP back then? Email! Yes, email was one of the first applications of the Internet. A decade later, the web became the killer application. Nowadays, we have peer to peer network, social networking, etc, etc.

The Internet has already brought us data, voice, video convergence. We’ll probably see more of mobile convergence coming up. Wonder what future the Internet holds for us?

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Are you looking around for a new job? Or perhaps your first job? Well, we’re hiring! We’re recruiting to fill the vacancy of Systems Engineer (Network). You will work with our Network Team which manages overall Network operations, Data Centre operations and IT Security operations. (Yes, if it sounds like three jobs rolled into one, it is.)

What are the perks of this job? Well, you’ll get lots and lots of learning opportunities in a relaxed and friendly working environment. We do run state-of-the-art network infrastructure and data centre facilities, so it is not like you’re stuck with some yester-year’s technologies.

Why Super Engineers? Well, the term Systems Engineers is often abbreviated as SE. But SE can also mean many things: Sales Engineer, Software Engineer, Security Engineer, Support Engineer, Service Engineer, etc. And I learned from an IBMer many years ago, who was tasked to shift office (and thus earned the title Shifting Engineer), SE might as well mean Super Engineer. SEs do everything!

And honestly, what we really need here are Super Engineers too. Our SEs crawl around to lay cables, carry heavy equipment, make UTP patch cords, get their hands dirty assembling and disassembling equipment, climb rooftops and investigate plumbing problems, climb over mountains (okay it’s just a hill…) to follow cable trenching works, etc. Yes, there are certainly some work hazards too. But remember the benefits? That’s where you get to learn! Where do you get to be involved in such varied work?

Our operating culture here is that we often build rather than buy. Hence, many systems and applications are built ourselves. We build on many open source technologies (e.g. LAMP) and program in Perl. We run lots of Cisco hardware, but we don’t really consider ourselves a Cisco shop… because we do continue to procure other brands of products. We run two data centres with state-of-the-art facilities monitoring and water cooling. And while traditionally many network teams cannot get along with security teams… well, we’re the same team, which means we get to run security efficiently and effectively too.

Alright, if all these sounds interesting to you, let me know. I’ll drop you a formal recruitment advert.

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Sometimes I just can’t help but think that some Americans don’t realize that the world is much larger than their country. The latest episode comes from a DNS report generated by DNSStuff.com which gave a score of “F” for my domain (at work). Why “F”? The scoring methodology and conclusions it tries to draw from the test results are simply and totally illogical. It seems to underscore their presumption that the US is the whole world. If you’re not in the US, then you’re an alien. (I know, I know, as far as their immigration rules are concerned… we are indeed aliens.)

First, the domain was awarded demerit points for being a “.sg” domain. As if the whole world is made up only of “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.edu”, etc domains? Com’on, there are so many other country-level TLDs in the world. How can you assign demerit points simply because we are not from the US?

Next, more demerit points because my authoritative domain name server took more than 200ms to respond. The test server is in the US. Hello, did you know it does take over 200ms on average for a round trip packet from US to Singapore? It’s about 300ms ping response, for example, from StarHub Maxonline to MIT.

Then, even more demerit points because one of my authoritative servers was thought to be an “Open DNS”, which means it will respond to recursive queries. This is bad only if your DNS for *.somewhere.com will answer queries from other people (outside your own network) for names outside your domain. But my authoritative name servers do support recursive queries because it wants to answer for sub-domains within my domain! It isn’t an Open DNS, it’s just being helpful to answer for my domain and all sub-domains!

After summing up all the demerit points, we score an “F”. The scale starts at “A”, I’m not sure where it ends. I imagine there isn’t anything worse than “F”.

How did I come to know about this ridiculous report from DNSStuff.Com? Well, a certain MNC sent an email to my helpdesk to complain that their mail server couldn’t send email to my domain. Their mail server indicated a “DNS error” when trying to send email to us. They then produced the DNSStuff.Com report that showed we scored an “F” and thus suggested our DNS was broken. After over a week and countless email bouncing between too many people, they are still reproducing the same report as if it were the Gospel truth. It says you scored an “F”, therefore it is your Fault. F is for Fault.

I was just thinking, if your mail server is experiencing a DNS error, shouldn’t you check your mail server’s DNS server? I.e. the DNS server that your mail server talks to? Anyone with basic troubleshooting skills should understand the need to probe systematically from known facts, such as where the error is occurring. How can you make a wild guess, conclude with some irrelevant evidence, and then throw the problem to someone else?

I shan’t name this large and well known MNC, but I don’t believe their technical staff were so incompetent. I suspect their network engineering staff simply didn’t care, and their server administrators were simply trying to assign blame to someone else. They’re probably thinking that we are Singaporeans, thus it must be our fault. No need for any sound technical reasoning. Just assign the blame.

They are probably thinking if there is a world larger than the United States… it doesn’t matter, because the world revolves around the United States.

Many years ago, when I visited the US on a technical study trip, we shared our broadband experiences in Singapore with some of their people, including next-generation network engineering people from companies like MCI. That was 1997. In 1997, we already had ADSL and cable broadband across most of Singapore. When we mentioned this to some of their next-generation network people, they stared at us with puzzled looks. Then they asked, “You’re talking about an upcoming project?”

No. We are talking about what’s happening “now”. They couldn’t believe us. In fact, they re-phrased their question a few times, as if suspecting that we couldn’t understand English. They couldn’t believe a tiny country like Singapore could roll out broadband on a national scale.

Of course, there must be many other Americans who are not so short-sighted. I’m just unfortunate to run into those who are seriously myopic.

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