The Zial Adventures: Phase I

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Well, I'm in...sort of. This is a continuation of the "wish me luck" thread but we've gone beyond "luck".

I met the the boss, Chris at the Zial office at 10 this morning. We had some time to kill before meeting with the client and so talked about my "homework" assignment of researching wireless. There's so much too it that it's hard to put in a nutshell. Most of what I found had to do with security and a lot of that comes from Cisco. I talked about the 802.1X standard, RADIUS server two-way authentication, designating APs to act as local authentication servers when the WAN link is lost so folks can access the wireless network in their local offices...stuff like that.

I spent more time learning about Chris and about Zial (a portugese slang word for "web", I found out). The big networking project on the 10th floor of the Key Bank building had to be done by last week so they got it done without me. The network printer will be hooked up by a specialist so I don't have to touch it (thanks).

What I did was fairly simple. The property managers for this building work in the third floor. They have a whole three computers...two PCs and one laptop. The PC acting as "server" runs Windows 2000 Pro, the laptop runs XP Pro and the receptionist comptuer runs XP Home. The server and laptop are linked via the wireless LAN and the server and receptionist PC are linked via the wired LAN (I don't know why). Although the server and laptop could ping each other and the server could access files on the laptop, the laptop couldn't access the server. The server and pc couldn't even ping each other but the server could "see" the pc in My Network Places. My job was to get the laptop and server in a two-way conversation and the server and the pc in a conversation. I ran a few tests, a few wizards, scratched my head when something wouldn't work, but in the end, got the job done. Thankfully, Chris took off to run some errands for awhile so he wasn't hovering over my shoulder.

I talked to the office person Monique. I guess she and Chris are in a relationship that's not strictly business. I really enjoyed actually getting to know a little bit about the both of them. She's Italian Catholic from back east. Chris is a native Idahoan but spent sometime in Orange County, CA where I used to live. Monique also used to live in San Francisco...but much was there after I'd left.

After the job was done, Chris took Monique and I out to lunch at a downtown Mexican place. I can't tell you the number of times I've spent driving my two-ton truck downtown collecting mail that I wished I could just be there to enjoy a bit of time walking around and grabbing a bite. It was nice to have a taste of that...even if only for a little bit.

Chris complemented me on my work even though I don't think I did all that much. Someone with more experience could have accomplished what I did in a fraction of the time. My final part of this job is to create the network documentation. I downloaded a demo of LANFlow and can crank out a diagram. I've got a link on a "how-to" for for the step-by-step procedure for making a document for use by the client.

I also discovered that the receptionist computer ran extremely slow. It's got a celeron 1.19 (I think) cpu and 256 megs of RAM. At first, I thought it was because she was running a lot of memory hogging apps, but when I closed them all and tried to open My Network Places, it took forever. She said it's been slow since the day they unpacked it. I checked the hard drive briefly and it's got plenty of room. I may have to talk Chris into letting me go back and see if I can find out what the problem is.

As an aside, my editor finally sent back the chapter to me...four small changes to be made. They need them ASAP and Chris wants the documentation by Thursday, so hopefully, I'll spend the rest of the day and a little time tomorrow finishing this stuff off. Then I can get paid.

Chris said a funny thing on the drive back to the office: "...now that we have you on board, we've got someone who can go into these businesses and ...". I'm on board? Basically, he'll develop a job and give me enough lead time to arrange a day off from my postal job to do it. Eventually, as they get busier, I'll have to make a decision about making the leap.

I told him that and he said that was ok with him and that he'd rather have me "in house" at that point. Not quite a job offer, but perhaps a shadow of things to come. We'll see.

 

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One word - EXCELLENT :P

 

This experience will help you immensely.

Lap it up.

 

As opposed to laptop it up?

 

Congratulations

just curious, wouldn't mind posting the link would u, could come in handy for something i've got in mind !

 

Glad to help. Here's the link:

http://www.more.net/technical/netserv/diagrams/documenting/

I'm not a search engine genius...but someone who is provided this to me. I'm happy to pass it along.

 

Thanks

that's just what i've been looking for !