Key migration - done

Well it happened, our new core is fully functional. Lots of lessons learnt, most of them non technical.

This migration was mainly breaking up the old Huawei mpls core and making all their P/PE's into CE's to the new core comprising of CRS-1's and 7609's. It went very smooothly.

it seems the most annoying thing in this whole process is going to be mainly dealing with people.

- due to the size and components involved, even my manager was not sure we could pull it off. Which creates interesting scenarios, all of them annoying time wasters. Im happy for them to waste the time they pay for, unfortunately this has started eating into my personal time and I dont think I can/will allow that

- Other departments also need to be given the confidence that everything will work out and for us (my team) this (running/managing a network) is easier than a walk in the park - we have to watch out for thugs and other miscreants though. IP transformation needs to be understood as a process that takes time.

- I hate project managers especially if they dont have a technical background, even worse if they are not willing to listen and happen to sign your paycheck.

Next up of course there will be the usual setting up all the network monitoring systems, ensuring qos is well done, all this have been tested but we now have to confirm how it fares with live traffic.

If you work for a telco and have had to deal with the ip transofmation process, Id be very interested to know how you handled peoples confidence levels in the process without going nuts!

- the next four weeks are focused on my lab. and I feel like I've pretty much achieved what I wanted here. oh....from now on I am also scouting for contracts especially if they have anything to do with design/implementation and general IP transformation ....