bzarcher | ^

Our demo Ironport box showed up today - it was a crazy enough Monday that I got the server delivered to my desk at 10am, and didn't actually get to even open the package until after 5pm, but it was really nice to crack it and start going through the manuals and various "Hey, by the way" documentation.

Even better, assuming I can cut through the red tape to get it racked and run into the data center before Friday, I can have an Ironport engineer on site by Monday to work with me all day on getting it going and making sure everything works as smoothly as the first 800 page manual suggests.

(Which is actually pretty interesting, to my surprise. For every bit of "This is our CLI and thou shalt use these commands to motivate the machine spirit!", there's about 10 pages of "Oh, and this is how it works, and here's why we designed it this way, and let us take you through a couple different ways this may apply to your environment." It feels far more like a -good- textbook than a user guide/release note.)

800 page manual #2 is on my reading list for tomorrow, and then the 400 page CLI breakdown/appendix-y thing that it sounds like I really want to read to make sure I am cool with this even though they keep saying it's optional.

I'm pretty sure that by Sunday I will be really good at operating it, but I do know I will need help on getting the box into the network, since I'm going to be trying to figure out at lot of stuff that was done before I was even in college, let alone joined the company, and how I can safely replace it, or at least shift it without breaking things.

But, on the other hand, I'm being told to go at this thing Hell-For-Leather so we can get it done by year end, and Boss is giving me access to anyone I need, within reason, so I think I can make this thing work.

And y'know what? That feels pretty awesome.