11th Systems Administration Conference (LISA '97)
Creating a Network for Lucent Bell Labs Research South
Tom Limoncelli, Tom Reingold, Ravi Narayan, and Ralph
Loura
Lucent Bell Labs
Abstract
This paper describes the tools and techniques used to split the
AT&T Bell Labs Research networks in Holmdel and Crawford Hill into
separate networks for Lucent Bell Labs and AT&T Labs as part of the
``tri-vestiture'' of AT&T in 1996. The environment did not permit us
to keep the system down for an extended period of time. Legacy systems
and old configurations were supported while new systems were
introduced. We did not have direct control over many machines on our
network. This paper describes the old network and what we were trying
to build (or split), but focuses mostly on the specific techniques we
used or developed. What made our network unique is the amount of self-
administered machines and networks in our environment. We took
unmanaged chaos and created two clean networks. This paper is from the
perspective of the Lucent Bell Labs system administrators (SAs), not
the AT&T Labs SAs. The transition did not go smoothly, and if we could
have read this paper before we began we would have avoided many of the
problems.
The beauty of it all is that we did not take one mess
and create two separate ones, we split and cleansed the networks at
the same time.
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