Nuclear Weasels

Several months ago I was involved in a project to upgrade the link which connects us to the University we get our internet connection through, the project involved decomissioning a Wireless connection and commissioning a new Fibre Link. Thankfully for me the Fibre Link portion of the project was handled by the Universities staff, this left the Wireless link for me and my collegue to deal with.

Following the advice given to us by a 3Com engineer who had been on site a few months earlier we decided to route the new Fibre Connection through our core switches a nice set of 5500G-EI 48 Port PoE Switches. Doing as I’d been taught I created a VLan on the switch as it didn’t have a IP Address it wasn’t routable accross the switch. This VLan was then plugged in to the Fibre Converter and our firewall, allowing us to place devices outside our firewall (Which we had wanted to do previously with a few of our servers which have issues working through our ISA Firewall).

That portion of the work went swimmingly, however the next morning as I sat down to document this change I was told by the boss – “We don’t have the time, there’s no money in the budget to write it up. Anyway it’s not somehting you’ll forget now is it?”

Fast forward 9 months and whilst on annual leave I get a phone call which went somethng like this.

“It’s all dead, we have no connectivity with the outside world.”

“Oh, well have you checked the connections?”

“Well I would, but I don’t know how its all plugged together.”

“Ah” I responded “I know I did the work but I can’t remember either.”

Cue me kicking myself as thoughts of being dragged in to the office emerged in my mind, after an hour of phone diagnostics we finally figured out A) how it all hangs together and B) what exactly the fault was. The very next day I was back in the office and a sitting at my desk, madly typing up a document describing how things are installed and setup as I really don’t want another phone call when I’m on leave.

The reason for typing this out is two fold, one to hopefully educate others on the importance of documenting your work and also to educate myself on the importance of documenting as I do things – even if there isn’t the budget for it. A job that would have taken me 2 hours the day after setting up the network took me a whole day 9 months down the line.

Saying we don’t have the time creates a false enconomy, the question you should be asking is can we afford the time it will cost if we don’t document?

~Dan