Fiber carries light

Lighting the way for progress

Not when fiber breaks

– Paul Schuh

I wrote this haiku a few years ago as I was testing fiber trunk lines between two campus buildings to locate a suspected break.

Async Cables

Serial cables

Front of Rack

Rear view of rack

Setting up my CCNA Lab routers this evening. Have everything mounted in the rack and cabled together. At the core of the set up, I have a 3620 with an async card in it that gives me terminal/console access to everything in the rack without having to swap the console cables around. I just telnet to a specific port off the 3620 to access a particular device.

For example, when I want to connect to the router connected to Async line 6, I just connect with: “telnet c3620 6006″

Here are some shots of my current set up.

First shot is a close up of the octo-cables coming out of the Cisco 3620. Each line goes to a serial interface on other equipment in the rack. Right now, I’m using 10 serial lines. The interface here supports up to 32 serial lines — so I’ve got a bit of room for growth.

The next shot is the inter connecting serial DTE/DCE cables between each Cisco 2600 router. The router with four serial interfaces is connected to four separate 2600′s — one, two, three, and four. One and Two are further connected to each other, as are three and four in this particular set up.

Finally, here are two shots, one of the front of the rack and another of the rear of the rack.  Below the routers is a shelf where I have a couple of Linux boxes that I use as nodes on the networks for testing connectivity between different router setups/configurations.

I’m building a lab at the house to use to study for CCNA and CCNP certification. On the left are some old Cisco routers and switches scrounged from work. On the right are some routers and switches I bought on eBay. I have a Cisco 3620 with an Async cable connected to all of the console ports so I can access all of the systems console ports thought the 3620.

It’s just about ready to go — I’m just waiting for an order of DCE/DTE crossover cables to arrive and then I’m in business. I hope to be able to get things set up so that I can administratively reconfigure the systems without having to make a lot of patch cable changes to create different scenarios… we’ll see.

Finally, in the bottom left corner, is an Ubuntu Linux system I’m using for general management of the switches. It’s got tftpd set up, and can receive syslog messages from the systems if I need to do some heavyweight log troubleshooting. Eventually, I hope to get it set up as a TACACS server as well.

Update #1 — mounted the equipment into a rack that was donated to this cause.

You can listen to the show along with photos from the studio on the Snake Oil Salesmen website here.

I’ll expose the details about the gift later this month as long as its not too cold.

Daily Zen

My project, the “War Morgan Project“, is coming along. I’ve got bits and pieces coming together with either melodies or chord progressions defined for eight songs so far. I’ve got lyrics coming along for three songs so far.

No names other than Logic Pro filenames for the songs so far; it looks like its going to be a mix of rock, jazz, and electronic styles.

Everything here is subject to change, but this is what I’ve got so far:

WMP-1 – Catchy rhythm hook with variations on a lead

WMP-2 – Variations on a bass riff

WMP-3 – VIm IV V VIm ballad in D

WMP-4 – VIm I II IV VIm piece in Eb

WMP-5 – I IVm IIIb VIIb I in F

WMP-6 – I VIm IIm V I in A

WMP-7 – I IIm IIIm IV V I in Bb

WMP-8 – Ambient Electronic

WMP-9 -

WMP-10 -

One website I found very helpful was the Hot Frets Progressionator which is a Flash application that generates sample chord progressions. I find it a nice tool to help me get started.

I’m pretty happy with where I’m at with the project, between work and the upcoming gig with my band Snake Oil Salesmen at The Nines in Ithaca on Saturday, the 16th at 10pm, I’m not going to have much time to work on the songs until after that gig is finished.

– Paul Schuh

I set up a site for my project, the “War Morgan Project” — where I’ll post notes and media specific to the project. I’ve co-written a few songs with Snake Oil Salesmen, but never put out anything of my own, so this should be a fun experiment to get those music composition gears going.

About the name, “War Morgan Project,” it is a play on the name of an organ sample on my synth (Warm Organ) and my middle name (Morgan.)

– Paul Schuh

Daily Zen, Music