Minutes of Working Group Meeting

Joint Astronomy Center, Hilo

September 8, 2011

Present:

Absent:

Minutes

  1. Current Network Status

    2. As if to make up for the unusual number of problems we had during March, April and May, we haven't had any since early June, except for the confusion regarding the date of a scheduled downtime. I received an alert from the State's Information & Computer Services Department on Friday 8/26 of a scheduled INET outage for Monday 8/29, 12:01am to 6:00am which turned out to be for Sunday morning 8/28, and it took us by surprise. Fortunately, the SX southern path was up and the microwave more than handled the traffic to Oahu and the Internet at those early hours.

  2. Progress on UH 10Gb Upgrade

    3. At the IfA Hilo Building: On August 10th two new Cisco 4900m switches were installed to replace the primary router, a Juniper m78, and the secondary router, a Cisco 7206. The 7206 was completely replaced, but the m78 is still sitting there waiting for an opportunity to be swapped out with the least disturbance to the network. A schedule will be announced at a later time. Also in the plan is a LuxN WDM box to be installed within the next two months. The goal is to have two 10Gb connections from the building, one to UH Hilo and one to UHCC. However it will be some time before we will see 10Gb out of Hilo for the following reasons:

    a. UH-ITS still needs to install additional equipment at Lapahoehoe and Mauna Lani.

    b. INET fiber needs to be extended to the CFHT.

    c. The upgrade of the SX south to 10GE has yet to be scheduled.

    d. Upgrading at intermediate sites on Maui is not completed.

    To the Summit: Fiber work to HP and Haleakala is expected to start late next year and be ready for deployment in 2013. Fiber to HP along the Saddle Road will continue on to Mauna Lani after the access road. This new fiber along the Saddle Road together with the existing fiber along the eastern shore of the island will provide redundancy that we don't currently have.

    To the Mainland: The first of the two new 10GE to the Mainland is scheduled for deployment by the end of September. Although it was my understanding that the two new 10GE will carry commercial traffic, it will start with R&E only. In the meantime, the existing commodity circuit will be upgraded to 1.5Gbps from 1Gbps on 9/19 at 4:00am. There will be a 10 to 15 minute outage during the cutover.

    At Other Sites: LuXn WDM and Cisco 10G equipment will be installed at the IfA Manoa campus on 10/2. The new equipment will provide the IfA with one 10G and one 1G connections to the UH campus.

    On Maui, the IfA building is 10GE ready.

  3. Brief Updates of Various Projects

    4. VLBA: The VLBA GE circuit was handed off to us on 7/7, a day earlier than expected. However it was a bit of a challenge and took several tries to get traffic through because of two Hawaiian Telcom practices that weren't communicated to us:

    a. Hawaiian Telcom sets all new circuits to "automatic in service", which means service will be turned on automatically, but only after there are signals from both ends for 24 hours.

    b. Hawaiian Telcom sets all interfaces to "auto negotiate off", a feature that is not supported by the Cisco 2900 at the VLBA.

    Subduct Infrastructure: Fiber installation between the VLBA and the Summit Communication Room did not go as smoothly as expected. Hawaiian Telcom's plan to replace an empty subduct with a new one without having to walk along the puu did not work due to damages of the conduits at several locations, and two of the pullboxes were filled with cinder. It was fortunate that Hawaiian Tecom was able to pull through a single microduct with a new microfiber. However it will not be possible to place anything else along these conduits without major work.

    Again, we will need to pursue an as-built drawing of the current conduit system and to work on a plan to provision for subduct space for the future.

  4. Next meeting

    5. December 8, Thursday, 10:30am at the Keck Base Facility, Waimea.

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Last updated December 12, 2011 by Miranda Hawarden-Ogata