End of Day: 27th January

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Well here it is, the End of Day that you've all been waiting for. Well some of you, OK maybe just Colin. Apologies for the lateness today it's been a very very busy day and I've still not gone home. Oh well at least I'm saving money on electricity by not having the TV or heating on. So what have we got today, two submissions and we start with Michael from Networks:

Today in networks we have been working mainly on resolving internal problems raised to us and answering customer tickets. We've also been working on building some new hardware as well as ongoing project work. Our broadband network is a bit out of balance at the moment, in part because of the new bandwidth we lit at the end of last week so we've also been working on getting this balanced better..

When a new segment is lit it takes time to get it fully balanced across the whole network, each pipe will have a mix of active users (those actively using their connections) and inactive users (mainly people who have left the router all the time on but the connection is idle) but when you light a new segment the mix gears more towards the active users, particularly those who just turn the router on when they want to connect or who use USB modems. Initially to balance the pipes we add extra RADIUS entries to the new segment to get more people connected but that can put too many active users on if you leave it too long or not enough if you don't leave it long enough. We can also do this if the number of customers on a segment is significantly lower than another. Another of the tools we have available is to temporarily stop new users connecting on a particular segment. So we can stop people connecting on the busiest segment for example so the number of customers on that naturally decreases as people disconnect and the mix of customers doesn't get too slanted towards active customers.

It's a delicate act to get the right mix of customers spread across the all the central pipes.

Our second submission today is from Adheel in the CSC:

Hey readers, here's the end of day from the CSC today.

The office has looked really colourful these last few days due to the abundance of luminous green water bottles lying around the office.

Staff coming in after the weekend off have been looking around wondering where these have come from (as part of a promo offer) and the spare one's are being fought over as I type this.

Our team has been looked after by Dave today (who has been sat singing Hot Chocolate songs under his breath most of the shift) as our normal team leader Annette has had a well earned rest in bed this morning. She walked in around 13.30 looking relaxed and refreshed whilst the rest of us who have been in since 08.00 A.M this morning turned our own shade of luminous green which worked well with the water bottles.

No matter, as tonight I can watch the best football team in Sheffield beat another Yorkshire team (United vs Doncaster) and then come in tomorrow and laugh at all my colleagues who are Wednesday fans as they face a tricky away match to the (once) mighty Nottingham Forest. (Ed: the advantage of posting at 11pm is I can say if you don't want to know the result look away now.... Forest 2 Wednesday 1, Blades 0 Doncaster 1)

The big Sheffield derby is on the 7th of February, so if my team loses then, I expect them to point to these comments and make me eat my words.

I'm also trying to get the managers to sign off 500 copies of this.

To post around the office and kitchen area so that when it's someone else's turn for the tea round, I get a half decent cuppa for a change (only joking, my colleagues make awesome cups of tea).

We have also been doing some real work in the office today but that's usual for us hard working folk at Plusnet. 🙂

That's it for today, think I'm finally going to go home, only been here since 9:45am... Catch you later.