Jonny and the Cell (pt. 2.5)

Much has happened since my fledgling foray into the world of wireless networking. After finding and confirming facts for over a month I set to work developing a method that could be used to assess the quality of existing networks yet still provide a firm basis for the design of new ones. I derived a set of equations that could be used to answer the most difficult questions I had about access point placement and then developed a tool to simplify the solutions. I began using a grid, optimized for multi-floor, multi-unit deployments, to predict where access points would need to be placed and provide documentation that field technicians could follow during deployment. And after all this I am still developing my method and still finding evidence of its predictive power.

Confirming BGP Advertisement

Needing a quick and easy way of confirming routing for a given prefix, I decided to write an Expect script that would check all of the major route-servers with telnet capability for BGP best path information and dampening/penalties. This is really useful for documenting evidence of a new route's completion.

Documenting Layer-3 Topologies

I recently decided to try making a set of scripts to generate a layer-3 diagram given a list of routers. My method was simple: obtain a list of connected routes and interfaces for each router in a list, find those networks that are shared by two or more routers, then spit this information out in a format that graphviz can use and generate a diagram. My goal was to make this work on a Metro Area Network of OSPF-speaking routers.

Svilnog aagrnams

Last Saturday I was sitting at Monical's Pizza, scarfing down a bowl of the red and white salad dressings with some lettuce, when I began pondering the anagrams on my placemat.