Estate Agents Queries re Conflict of Interest

Today we responded in full to a query via the estate agents about a conflict of interests in our line of business and the previous occupants of the building. They were an IT Services company (don't want to go into details at this point) but they are merely vacating this building and not leaving the industry.

We have modified our response for business interests to be correct, removing some of the generic service elements the estate agent had added to the contract and added the direct business streams as can be seen on the blog.

We now seem to have a happy estate agent again. But they still move at the pace of a snail!
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Estate Agents Queries re Conflict of Interest

Just received a depressing email from the estate agents. It reads as follows:

The Chairman of xxxxxxx is concerned there may be a potential conflict as you are in a similar interest.
Can you provide more details on what you guys are proposing to do?

Booger, guess I had better give the geezer a call and find out what the problem is... More flipping delays...


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Internal Plans

Hee hee. Quite funny really. Alex is currently working from "not to scale" scribbles from the estate agents to produce rack layout diagrams for the DC floor.

If we go by his drawings, you guys aren't ever going to be able to get your kit in our out of the racks without moving the wall out 1 foot!

Guess we will fix that before agreeing the floor plan...
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Meeting with our Leased Line Provider

After the estate agent meeting which went really well, and he is very positive, we had an hour with our leased line provider.

It was an off the cuff meeting in the local hostelry, in which I am sure we will be setting up an account over time!

Anyhow, we chewed over speed of delivery and some existing services they have in progress for us in London, resilience options and various other matters. I have to say I like the blokes attitude, and hopefully we can work together on a more personal level now we have finally met face to face. Its amazing how much time we have spent on the phone and pushing emails and paper around over the past few months (for other Nirenet business, but not related to this site) and have never met! Its just a shame we were flying back that night and both had to drive to the airport and them drive from our local airports home, otherwise he could have given his company expense card a bit of a bashing and bought the beer!
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Awaiting the Estate Agent for a site meet

I am currently sitting in our nasty little hire car (made of excess Tupperware it would seem) for the estate agent at the site.

Due to a complete **** up this morning, Alex was delayed by 5 hours. He is adamant it was an accident that caused him to miss the flight, but I think he had too much beer last night and missed the plane personally!

Anyhow the upshot is we didn't get here until after 1pm and the site was empty as the current occupants all had to leave to do some work, so some of the planning we wanted to do with regard technical services we won't be able to complete as we can't get in.

However, we have diagrammed up the utility services and outside space to put formal drawings together (as finally requested by the owner) for the generators and air con condensers. Once we have done this we are informed things will move along... About blooming time..
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Waiting....

Hmm, sat in Belfast Int airport waiting for Alex. He tells me there was an accident on the M25 this morning and he missed his flight. Well it was actually delayed but they had closed check in at the correct time and even though the flight hadn't left they wouldn't let him check in.

Hmm, I know he was in the pub last night as I spoke to him late on.... Makes you wonder ;-)

Anyhow, got four or so hours to wait now, so chance to catch up on the email and such. Just a blooming shame this flipping airport seems devoid of power points you can sit at as I know the laptop will be flat before he arrives... Blooming juice gobbling 3G card.
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Van Hire

Realising the error of our ways today, (having the air con delivered to our office and not telling them to hold it for direct delivery to Belfast) I have been looking at 3.5T tail lift Luton van hire, one way to Belfast and also ferry costs.

All I have to add is that I am glad I was sitting down. We might be getting Palletline to deliver / kick the kit around yet. Blimey / Bloody Hell / Chuff Me... So if anyone knows of a cheap hire company that will do one way, please drop me a line and let me know, please!
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Delivery of the Air Conditioning

Today we took delivery of our data centre air conditioning. We have gone N+1 on the air con, and have two complete Mitsubishi VRF systems We chose this kit as it allows us to go "Green" by re-using the waste heat from the data centre to heat the offices in the same building. We may even go as far as selling / giving surplus heat away to the adjacent buildings as it costs us nothing (in energy) to do so. The kit allows transfer of heat from extract units and supply to demand units via a BC controller.
Currently we have 12 ceiling cassettes, 3 wall units, 2 BC's and 2 condensors and are awaiting delivery of the building controller to interface all the kit together. Its like cable city looking at the wiring diagrams for it, as it runs from a data bus around all the units and each unit is addressable over a two wire none polarised connection.

Looks like a right deal of fun for the installers!
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National Grid Wireless

Today we received the documentation from NGW for locating transmitting equipment on their masts.

Not sure I believed the 23 stage flow chart they follow as part of their project management remit. It makes the Royal Families family tree look like a flipping seedling...

Looks like I am going to have a peaceful afternoon in the gents solstice with a couple of feet or spare loo roll ;-)
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Dedicated Servers

Today I have just placed an order for a pallet of Pentium 4 machines to provide dedicated servers to you chaps in NI.

They have come in at a stonking price as they are bankrupt reseller HP stock. We have alwasy said we won't supply beige box carp, but if you guys / gals want to put your own in that is fine. However beige box is generally too higher a support overhead. It is a different matter if the support is within your hands-on time, then effectively it is being paid for, but for our equipment leased as dedicated servers, this is not something I want.

They are quite impressive machines, a selection of P4 2.4 to 3.02Gig machines, all capable of twin hard disks and plenty of memory.

I have to pat myself on the back tbh as it was an excellent purchase. I would expect we can delivery a P4 2.4Ghz, 256meg memory and 20gig disk for around fifty quid setup and less than fifty quid a month.

Upgrades to standard spec will just be commercial list pricing from which ever supplier we buy the bits from with a very slightly increased monthly price if you have twin hard drives (due to maintenance costs and increased power consumption)

They are all capable of a selection of flavours of Linux, and CentOS, RH and Ubuntu drivers are HP default, as well as MS Windows.

Anyone want to pre-order a shelf full?
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Racks

Alex might have found a blinder today.

It is just possible we have located a decent rack re-furbishment company who seem to deal in decent quality kit (Compaq/HP/Kneurr/Prism) and if they do a decent job at a decent price, we might just be able to rag a rack setup price down to something really sensible.

All part of the service!
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BT 21CN Interconnect

Have just returned from a BT conference about the roll out of their 21CN network and how it affects existing broadband ISPs. Its a good job the coffee was strong as otherwise I could have had a free afternoons' sleep.

Anyhow, we are going to lodge an objection to their plans (many ISPs already have so we may as well join the list). The deal is that in the new 21CN network, BT will hand off "broadband" traffic to ISPs at a number of locations around the country. They are zoning regions and creating two (or more) aggregate nodes in each zone from which an ISP can gain access to local broadband customers' traffic. They have also proposed a charging model based on how far the ISP interconnects on BT's network from the customer.

While this all sounds fine in theory, they seem to have left Northern Ireland out fo this equation. NI has two "metro" nodes which are multi-linked back to the mainland via resilient and redundant routes which is all fine. However there is no Core node (where the ISP interconnects) which means all ISPs will have to take their NI customers' traffic in Manchester or similar, making the distance based charging model a bit of a farce for NI customers as they won't have the (potentially) cheaper "local user" based charging model available.

In reality I would imagine most ISP's will only interconnect with BT in say three locations and will take a balance of some local and some more distant customers and average the charge per customer, but we were looking at putting a local interconnect point in NI bringing the cost right down for local customers.

I will write and propose an objection to Ofcom and BT tomorrow to see if we can have any effect...
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Hot Property # 1

This morning I received an email stating that our requests for the #1 unit are in progress. Some have been agreed already (bolstering security, CCTV etc) and we are now awaiting approval for the Generators and Air-Con.

The agent doesn't think there will be a problem with either, and has granted access to work in the unit under license until occupation too. This is all excellent news and maybe, just maybe we will have the unit we want with agreement to allow us to use it to serve you folks in the very near future!
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Property Viewings

Ok, finally home.

Well we've seen all four units, and after spending the weekend driving around to choose them we did it well. All the units are usable and we can deliver services to you folks from them all.

However we do have some favourites. One unit is a dual floor one with plenty of space for the generators and the air-conditioning and outline approval from the agent on the spot. This is currently number one.

Second we have the brand new unit which we met the landlord at, and again seeing it was the landlord we could have answers to all the questions on the spot. The only downside to this unit is that there is no false ceiling in and it will be impossible to climate control the space without, so we have 2000 sqr foot of fire retardant suspended ceiling to install before we go any further. Bugger.

Unit three was the ex call centre and this is pretty good and will be quick to move into, but the power supply is completely inadequate and I am not really sure how they ran that many PCs from the incoming supply.

Finally the first floor office, well it has all the right space for generators and air-con but its not particularly secure and also its first floor and there is no lift, and I don't fancy lugging all the racks up the stairs, so that is number four.

We have sent confirmation emails to all the agents and await their written consent for all the requirements, but have not turned any of the properties down yet, having been burnt on this previously.

As soon as we have a response from at least number one and two, we will get them to produce outline contracts and get our WAN circuit orders in. Hopefully this will be during this week with a bit of luck.
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http://www.nirenet.net/

Property Viewings

I am currently sitting in the hotel reception waiting for lazy assed Alex to get out of bed so we can view four properties today. He overslept and we are supposed to be 30 miles away through rush hour traffic in 55 minutes!

We have four viewings today and are no doubt going to have all the same issues about bolstering building security, adding substantial air conditioning and standby generators, and re-wiring the whole building etc.

The properties are: one brand new retail / industrial unit, one pair of combined retail / industrial unit which is currently occupied by one company who are going to revert to one unit, one ground floor in a large office complex (an ex call centre) and finally a first floor very presentable office with no lift!

As usual in our good planning, we have the appointments booked an hour apart but two are almost next to each other and the other two are the other side of town. Of course we didn't book the adjacent ones in adjacent hours so there will be much high speed driving around the area.

I will post more when we've seen them.
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http://www.nirenet.net/

Back from a vaguely enjoyable holiday in Crete

Ok, after a fortnight in the sun and relatively un bothered by the phone for a change, I am back in the last of the floods... Alex has been busy while I've been away spending our money on UPSs and arguing with estate agents to no avail, and therefore as our last two #1 choices have officially fallen thru we are planning a long trip over to survey the area again.

More when I've looked at flight prices and the diary...
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UPS s for Nirenet

Courtesy of an offer earlier in the week, we have just purchased two fully redundant 40kva UPSs. They are Digital Energy™ SitePro® UPS's and came at a brilliant price.

While they are not as large as we would have liked, they are fully interlinked and run master-master for complete resilience.

Unfortunately we've had to delay the shipping as the previous premises fell through as I guess you've already read but at least they are ready to ship and as soon as we've moved them to NI, we will order up a complete set of batteries
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Premises Fell Thru

F***** B**** B*******

The estate agents just called to tell us that although our landlord agreed the generators' locations at the rear of his unit, the ground is owned by a communal landlord, who also agreed to the location.
However some of the other tenants have objected as we will be obstructing a fire escape route. This is flipping rich as the generators are large brightly coloured with a compound around them and other units in the same building have fire escape steps, oil tanks, refrigeration equipment, pallets and all sorts of other c**p in the walk way too.

For lord sake, the alley is 4 meters wide and we want to put a 1.5meter deep compound into to.

F******* B****** and B****** more....
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Estate Agents work at the pace of a snail..

Hmm, late on a Wednesday, finding myself sitting here pondering on why estate agents seem to rate timescales in weeks rather than days or hours. I can produce a leased line quote for two sites 200 miles apart in about 15 mins, yet an estate agent takes a week to fax some docs across. Maybe thats why I have so many grey hairs, and she is beautifully preened and manicured etc..
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BT Wireless Service for Belfast

Hmm, I read this morning BT have been flexing the corporate bank balance again and providing over-priced hotspots in Belfast.

While my initial reation was "sausages" (or similar) I've come to the conclusion that is fine. BT will spend a fortune on advertising and raise the public awareness. Then we will bowl in with a solution at half the price, keeping all you lovely folks very happy indeed!

Story below, credit BBC.


Belfast to become a wireless city

Wi-fi connections are becoming more commonBelfast is about to become a wireless city, promising surfing at the touch of a button in the park, bus or street.
BT engineers have completed the installation of wi-fi equipment in the city, following similar schemes in other UK cities.
When the technology is fully live, it will enable people to access high speed wireless broadband from a wide range of locations, the company said.
The move has been welcomed by Belfast City Council.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6286844.stm
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Day 2 property hunting

Ok, after another productive day, we've seen both of our top two properties.

As expected, one is a really nice business park, extremely well maintained and such, and externally looks excellent. However the unit we viewed is very dated inside, and we suspect we would have to spend probably in the order of 10k on the inside to bring it up to scratch. It’s also technically less than ideal having a smaller incoming power supply than the other unit.

The second one is in a major office / industrial area, with a modern mezzanine / office space, with windows overlooking the lower floor where our equipment will be located. It’s quite new, relatively clean (nothing a lick of paint will not fix) and had good facilities for generation and air conditioning. It also has plenty of surrounding business which could well be you! We have to get agreement to place our generator at the rear of the unit yet, but as soon as that is done, we will be signing on it!

Its a refreshing change to view sites with the landlords, rather than the estate agents to be honest as you can find out what they are like and more to the point whether they actually care about their property or are just money grabbing.

As soon as we have a decision regarding the generator and air conditioning we can make a move. Oh and finally this unit also has the added advantage that there are two major carriers already there, and they are ducted down separate sides of the building so we can get a fully resilient wan service with no pinch points and complete diversity. This is excellent news for both ourselves and yourself too!


http://www.nirenet.net/

More Estate Agents and properties

Currently sitting in our hotel after being around some of tomorrows potential viewings at night just to check over the areas, and we think we might have found our goal.

We have short listed two, one is a really pleasant business park and the other is slightly more industrial, but newer. Going to have a beer or two now and ponder on our options.
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Trip to Belfast

Hmm, currently sitting in an airport awaiting a plane to Belfast. Its cold, wet and I'm tired due to getting up at 4.30. Still at least (unlike Alex) I didn't have to get up at 3.30 to make it to the airport.

Will post more later when we are there, but at the moment, we have six sites up for viewing today

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BT OpenReach Contracts Returned for Countersignature too.

This morning we returned the Openreach contracts for their leased line products. We await the countersigned copies back hopefully soon!

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http://www.nirenet.net/

National Leased Line Providers

Part Two:

Think we might have found a cost effective leased line provider for you chaps. With some negotiation we think we should be able to deliver national 10Mb/s full transit circuits for circa 10K pa. This will completely destroy other providers current offerings at 15.3K pa and 17.2K pa...

Bring it on, we look forward to providing the service!
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http://www.nirenet.net/

BT Contract Returned for Countersigning

Today we returned our operator Openreach contract to BT for countersignature. Once this is done we are then in a position to be able to place orders for your customer circuits.

Having said that, there is still some back end work to be completed yet before we can go ahead..
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National Leased Line Providers

Earlier today I had a meeting with a potential National Leased Line provider. While they had a product set including national 2Mb/s all the way up to gigabit, they weren't really any more cost effective that our current national pricing with ATM hand off from BT and NTL.

Furthermore the guy spent far too much time telling me how their new owner had written any number of blank cheques post their acquisition and how much infrastructure upgrade they had done and how much better they were now than a year ago... That is his quote... Would you want a circuit from this outfit?! He left quite promptly....
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Banking - HSBC

Blimey, its like pulling teeth trying to get an appointment with the business manager at HSBC

It seemed a simple request to have a meeting in the next couple of days, but no, the diary is full until the middle of next week... Heck they must be making some money!
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Residential Routers and CPEs

Today we have been testing a range of CPE's offered by TP-LINK

We especially like the TD-8840 which is an ADSL2+, 4 ethernet port CPE with good management and oddly for a more budget CPE actually has a processor and OS that manage a good thrashing with p2p and similar apps with thousands of entries in the nat table.

We also like the TD-W8910G which is an ADSL2+, 4 ethernet port plus extended range wireless product, again at an excellent price point and seems pretty darn resilient as a consumer CPE.

They are currently being kicked very hard with p2p and sustained flows to ensure they are stable, but so far so good.
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Web Developer, Welcome

This morning we welcome on board one of our web developers to NireNet.

All please meet Claire. We will tell you more about her as soon as shes found her way to the coffee machine and whet our very dry Monday morning palettes!

She has a number of years of web development and brand marketing experience and I expect her to be taking over this talking to you real soon so I can get on with some proper work!
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BT Wholesale Login

Bugger. At the worst possible time BT Wholesale decided I had typed the wrong password too many times and it is a painful process to get it reset. Doh, will teach me to use post-it notes under the keyboard in future!

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Meeting with BT Openreach

Today we had a meeting with BT Openreach regarding contractuals over the circuits and such.

It is interesting that there is such a division between BT Wholesale and BT Retail these days where there really is a de-markation between them meaning they do actually buy products from one another and push wooden-dollars around the plc. Seems there is a touch of malice too when Wholesale has to call up Openreach and order a circuit just like any other comms provider does.

Still means we get the prices to pass on to you!
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Verizon Leased Lines

Ok, now I've stopped laughing, and can type again, I can tell this tale.

We had requested and been chasing a quote for a secondary leased line from Verizon

They finally came back today with an "offer" for an STM1 circuit (not what we asked for) at 155Mb/s (not what we asked for) at around 10k per month on a two year term.

I am not joking and that is not a typo, ten thousand pounds (give or take the pennies) PER MONTH..... OMG we are still laughing our socks off here... That is three times BT's pricing!
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Belfast Property Search

Currently sitting in a coffee shop in the Malone area using their free wi-fi! It's quite scary how much work you can get done when you start at 8am at your place of work and don't sleep until 9 then have a shower etc.

We've already toured a number of areas and some a terribly business unsuitable to be honest. We've put 55 miles on the hire car which isn't bad going for driving around sites, industrial and office parks since 9am.

Unfortunately our chosen estate agent for the day has managed to prevent us actually getting into any of the sites we are supposed to be seeing. The landlord failed to delivery the keys for the first one, the second he brought a massive bunch of keys with him, but none fitted and the third was just hopeless when you got there. Technically it was great, right next to our carriers' pop, but was disgusting, rubbish everywhere and smelt disgusting.

We are heading to look at more now, and will post more later.
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Eltek -48V DC Rectifier / Supply

As I am sure many of you are aware, much of our equipment is powered from -48V DC, often referred to as telco supply. Some is AC powered but almost all is available with -48V DC supplies and some (Cisco 7206 for example) is available with both.

Because we have small pop sites and larger data centres the power requirement and sustainability is varied. For example we will be running pop sites on purely -48V DC with a 72 hour sustainability and the data centre will be generator, ups and utility mains fed. However we still need to get utility power to -48V for battery charging and actually running the kit.

We were looking at various suppliers, but today Eltek came up trumps with their new Flatpack range of rectifiers and system monitors. The chassis are all N+1 on the rectifiers, fully hot swappable and expandable too and at a quite excellent price. Also their turn around on quotations was speedy, which is refreshing at the moment. Looks like we have a deal!

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http://www.nirenet.net/

Leased Line / Transit Supplier (Pt2)

After chasing Cable and Wireless again, I finally got this one line email from them (a week after meeting them to request a quote and chasing them by telephone)

"Pete,

As per our conversation I will start working on this today and will update you on my progress tomorrow afternoon.
Regards"

Arrrggghhhh....
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Leased Line / Transit Supplier

Hmm had a none productive meeting with Cable and Wireless today about resilent tail circuts to Northern Ireland. We are pretty set on our primary supplier, but are looking for a completely independent one for the seconday circuit.

Sometimes it feels like trying to extact blood from a stone getting a simple quote from these guys. It can't be that difficult to provide pricing for Layer-2 to London and possibly Layer-3 full transit at a commited rate on a Gig tail now can it.... I shall pull some more hair out..
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Server Backup Nas's

Finally we've made a decision and taken delivery of our NAS boxes for the local infrastructure backups from Infrant Technologies.

We decided on the ReadyNas 1100 which is an excellent price point for 3Tb of storage and utilising EMC Retrospect multi server edition we can run hourly point in time snapshots of the SQL databases and logs and also the other "infrastructure" data that we need backed up on a very regular basis.

The device performance is excellent, running Raid 5, giving us 2.25Tb of usable disk space, we estimate to be able to hold nearly six months of point in time backups and it is writing via a single backup server managing job schedules and such at 350Mb/s to disk. Excellent.
Backups will be held either in London or Leeds, we haven't decided on the final location yet and we may actually buy a second set and run mirrors of the backup set for complete resiliency..
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Chiller Rental Services

Phew. A long morning bashing out the details for the rental agreements for our chillers.

We are still considering two different companies but today I was meeting Chiller Rental Services

They seem a good bunch of guys and have an excellent understanding of the concept of high availability with nothing less than N+1 being spoken of.

We are also trying to do our bit for the environment and reduce our carbon footprint by using "Freecool" units which basically use the natural temperature of the surrounding air to cool the water if the temperature outside is lower than inside. Looking at the average temperature graphs, this does not look to be too hard in Belfast! No offence folks, but if we can cool your servers for minimal electric and save the environment too, then it all can't be bad.

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MySql and Radius install.

Just thought I would pop a quick post in. We are currently bored bored and more bored installing CentOS umpteen times complete with MySql, Radius and DNS etc for the core infrastructure servers and testing etc.

Its like a production line, box opening, flashing, CentOS blah blah... Pass the coffee
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Syslogging and Configuration Backup

After quite a bit of hunting for a tool that would syslog equipment and also capture config changes securely, we decided on Kiwi Enterprises Syslog Daemon and CatTools

Having tested the trial versions some time ago, I was impressed with the pricing and the level of functionality available and even after a bug in the syslogger was identified which was making a bit of a mess of formatting Cisco Pix logs this was fixed by Kiwi while we were still evaluating the trial versions. Very impressive service.
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http://www.nirenet.net/

Datacentre UPS

I now have quotes for one possible UPS for the data centre, a modular product from UPS Power

We have specified 200kVA starting point, N+1, obviously with a battery autonomy of 20 minutes, more than adequate time for the generators to get up to operating temperature and ready to be on load.

The solution consists of three 100kVA inverters plus independent chargers for the battery strings and such. It also allows us to hot add inverters, chargers and battery strings as the demand increases which is excellent as many UPSs don't allow hot dock of inverters running in parallel mode.

While the quotation included transfer/bypass control gear and battery cabinets, it was exclusive of the batteries and I am glad I was sitting down. However we have decided it is within ballpark of what we had budgeted and have placed an order.

As I am sure you can appreciate power sustainability and availability is key to service delivery and that is what we are aiming for, 100pc delivery.

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http://www.nirenet.net/

Generators and Aggreko

Having decided March is the month of facilities, as I'm sure you've already seen, we have been on the trail of UPS and air-conditioning suppliers.

One of the options on the table was Aggreko where we are currently having discussions about two times 200kVA generators and three Freecool chillers plus control gear and air handlers etc.

Once we got past the telesales folks the chaps in Belfast have been Stirling, quickly producing quotes and advising on product set. We have also allocated space for 72 hours of on-site diesel storage and a managed re-fuelling service to ensure we have the fuel in the event of a local or more national disaster. We have had to pay a little more for the service to up our priority to just below "life support services" (Hospitals, emergency services etc) putting us on par with BT etc in terms of delivery. This will provide excellent service availability in the event of grid issues and continued fuel supply in all but the most severe of disasters!
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http://www.nirenet.net/

Actelis / MetaLight EFM Kit

We had some interesting discussions with Microtel today regarding Ethernet in the First Mile products. Basically these allow us to delivery Ethernet products to you the customer over one or more copper pairs from our pop sites or co-mingled exchanges.

We are particularly interested in the ML1300 Series which would allow up to 40Mb/s over 8 pairs at a reasonable line length. It will allow us to provide high bandwidth synchronous services from our pop sites at excellent prices benefiting both yourselves and us.
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Back in Belfast!

Quick post this one. On my pda sat in the "glorious" coffee shop in Belfast Int Airport awaiting Alex before we get busy surveying property for the next locations... Will catch up with you all in a day or two, hopefully with good news!
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Power metering and monitoring

One of our goals at NireNet is to be as transparent to you, the customer, as is possible. One of the things we wanted to do was offer co-location and dedicated servers where the actual consumption was metered and you were billed for the actual power consumption (plus the required percentage consumed in cooling) of your equipment rather than the stock price per "U" most providers offer.

To do this we needed a sub-metering solution either with pulse meters or current transformers on your server power feeds.

Today, we had a meeting with Procuro who offer these tools. We particularly like their monitoring software > Here which allows us to integrate the power consumption figures into the portal for your visibility and billing.
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http://www.nirenet.net/

Ofcom Communications Provider ID (CUPID)

Today we received notification that Nirenet Ltd has been allocated a Communications Provider ID (3 digit code) by Ofcom which allows us to proceed to deliver communications services to the public.

Our ID is 262, details of which can be seen in Excel format on the Ofcom site

: Updated - Our ID now appears in Ofcoms' downloadable document.
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Duns Number Application

Now things are really in progress, and our Duns Application is in too. We await a response.
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Cupid Application for Nirenet.net

We have just received confirmation from Ofcom that our Cupid application for Nirenet has been accepted and is in processing.

Its a no issue "problem" as we already hold Cupid ID's for other companies so this one should go through easily. Only "up to" three weeks to wait.....
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Nirenet Company Registration

Time to crack open a small bottle of bubbly!

Company registration has gone through for the up and coming Nirenet.

We are now on Companies House Here for anyone who cares!

Meetings with the accountants and bank are looming!
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Versatek DSLAMs and CPEs

Well sorry for the late post folks but we have been on a round the world tour in two days to see Versatek .

They have some very interesting offerings in terms of CPE and DSLAMs

They are very firmly on the possibilities list at this time and we have ordered some trial units to be shipped as the airline weren't very pleased about the idea of 12U chassis as hand baggage!
I will let you know more how we get on once we have some and have performed some testing and its time for sleep!
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Copper Overlay for Hampton Hargate, Peterborough

Re this article, TPON , we were presuming the poor folks of Hampton Hargate were getting remote DSlams. However, I read today they are getting copper overlay for the area.

When we were surveying the area, we discovered those who had copper overlay at the Hargate end of the estate were only achieving around 1Mb/s on 5km of cable from Peterborough Central exchange, and those in the Vale are getting around 2-3Mb/s from their adjacent exchange.

Now it turns out BT are not rolling out remote DSlams, but are continuing with the copper overlay which is absolute madness. Maybe there is business here after all....
Copper Overlay Program
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The list of thing to do this week:

1. New Company formation!

2. Another meeting with BT re commercials

3. Get estate agent's paperwork through our legals

4. Chase suppliers again due to their lack of response.

I am sure that some more will come to mind in due course!

Welcome to Monday...
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Entry Level ADSL Platform??

Last night the partners involved were offered some ex equipment Lucent AnyMedia Access System chassis with Adsl 1 cards (up to 8Mb/s + 1Mb/s) cards at an excellent price.

We are now considering taking up this offer as they offer upgrade potential for VOIP/PSTN services as they are a full multi-service platforms.

While they are not supplied with the VOIP/TDM cards, we are looking at pricing to allow us to bring a CPW/TalkTalk price busting package to you!
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Provision of Voice Services??

Voice Services are something we have been considering offering as part of our solution. One product we have been looking at, but haven't made a decision on, is below.


From: YakaSoftware [http://www.yakasoftware.com]


The solution starts at XXXXX,- EUR and that involves installation, configuration and minor customizations based on your requirements. This applies for all web, as well as for asterisk (VOIP Server) related installations.

The facility would be provided either via Softphone, SIP router/gateway or a channel bank to provide traditional POTS in your premises.

One option of Channel Banks for review are http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Channel+Bank

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BT and Distant Co-Mingling

Ok. BT have taken the questions whether we receive and return the customers' voice service to and from our co-lo building. As suspected BT don't actually have anyone in the UK doing distant co-mingling with Shared Metallic Path, i.e. where the LLU Op doesn't provide the voice too.

There is another LLU OP doing distant co-mingling with voice provision but they also provide the POTS service and BT need to investigate with planning and technical sources how we move this forward.

Again, another hold up from BT!
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Doh, chasing BT re SMP provision and distant co-minging

Hmm, well we are still awaiting a call back from the powers that b(e)t to get answers to questions raised about whether or not we have to accept and hand back the voice (pots) service within a distant co-mingling environment.

The location we have chosen for the first site allows no direct access to the exchange building as it is a Category-X exchange and requires major building works for access. So we've taken the building next door and are running tie-cables back to BT!

Jackpot, its just a shame they don't seem to have completed the process elsewhere yet and the docs are all 3 years out of date and contradictory. We fear we may have decisions being made that are defining policy at the moment!

More at http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/products/llu/llu.do
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BT and the Estate Agents

Phew. Back from holiday.

Good news, BT are busily helping us along when we thought we would have the most problems with these boys and the politics involved in an organisation of such a size.

Today we've also submitted plans for the required air conditioning to the Estate Agents for approval and all things are moving forward (slowly!)

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More from Zyxel

Following our previous discussions with Zyxel regarding CPE's we raised another raft of questions relating to "in use" scenarios, and steering of sessions from the DsLam chassis to our Bras's

We have had a number of responses back, but some are commercially sensitive so I have edited and the results are paraphrased below:


Q.
I still have a number of questions / clarifications regarding these points if I may.
Session Steering > Our intention is to have two Bras's behind the Dslam chassis. At this point they are are likely to be Cisco 7206's, but possibly something else. We want to attach each Dslam chassis to two Bras's for resilience and will provision either two switches or connect the chassis directly to two Bras's. Our question relates to how we steer the sessions to each Bras. Does it operate similar to multiple DHCP/BootP servers where the session is broadcast and the first to respond does, or so you map a port to an endpoint mac address etc. This is all related to resilience and if one Bras is down, we need to know how to steer the sessions, or if this is un-necessary as any Bras can respond.

Zyxel.
PPPoE session starts with broadcast just like DHCP. The first BRAS responds to a PPPoE request takes the control of this PPPoE session.
Two BRAS can backup each other just like DHCP servers without any configuration changes.

IES-5000 cannot support PPPoE relay, customer cannot define designate BRAS in the DSLAM.

Typically, customer can config max session number in a BRAS server. If the session of 1st BRAS reaches its threshold, it stops response to new request, and 2nd BRAS takes over.
For example, if the there are totally 2K subscribers, set max session number is 1K+ in each BRAS.

Another way is using PPPoE intermediate agent. DSLAM will insert DSLAM and port information in the PPPoE request packet. BRAS can using this information to decide to service this request or not.
It needs some configuration in the BRAS, but it is more secure.

Also if with the configuration if you have database with the MAC address of your client
You can configure your BRAS to respond for a specific MAC address.
For example, BRAS A responses to customer 1, 3, 5
BRAS B responses to customer 2, 4, 6


Q.
Zyxel indicated when we met them that sdsl.bis was approved for use in the UK under ANFP so long as appropriate .psd files were applied to the ports, limiting it to 3mb/s per port, rather than the 4 or so shown as potential. Do you know if this is correct, and are the .psd files available.

Zyxel.
Within the UK the ANFP is still dated as of August 2005 - I am pushing our contacts within the SP community, BT and the NICC to disclose information with regards to the changes. My current view is it that the new document will be produced in line with the launch of 21CN in July. I will forward all of the current documents that I have to you for your perusal and any updated ones that I get visibility of. I have a clearer picture from the other EU markets especially in Ireland where SHDSL.BIS and VDSL/2 will be defined by June 07 and I suspect that BT will follow suit. The issue remains on voice splitting on the mdf frame and the interference with the ADSL2+ circuits. I have a view as to which PSD and band plane will be used.


Q.
I note from the Zyxel website that the 48 port ADSL2+ card shows Annex M capability, but lists as "Maximum transmission rate up to 25Mbps/1.2Mbps for
ADSL2+ ". Surely if it is Annex M then it should be a 2.5Mbps upstream rate.
Can you confirm please.

Zyxel.
Yes, if you enable Annex M with a CPE that supports Annex M, you can get a upstream rate higher rate than 1.2M.
Typically, the rate is between 2M ~ 2.5M dependant on the CPE and quality of the local loop
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Zyxel Equipment

We have had a response fron Zyxel re CPE's. It is a bit limited and needs clarification, but is with regard bonding multiple tails into a larger capacity virtual pipe. Makes quite interesting reading.

The CPE (P 793-H) in question is here - http://www.zyxel.co.uk/web/product_family_detail.php?PC1indexflag=20040812093058&CategoryGroupNo=3F72026A-1316-4561-8DA7-FBCF4D5B8BAA

It is capable of bonding multiple 2.5meg synchronous channels under BT's ANFP currently and can be utilised up to 4.5Meg in the future.
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Estate Agent for www.nirenet.net

The agent for our preferred location has got back with good news. We had a number of points raised including the location and security of our generators, building CCTV, partitioning of the office and a number of other points.

We have verbal agreement to all of the above with the exception of modifications to the building fire alarm system to our requirements, but this is a minor issue related to the cosmetic appearance within the building which we will resolve easily.
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