Don’t you love it when someone has a good idea? I especially love it when someone has it, agrees it contractually then throws it to a bunch of unsuspecting techies to then do it. All without consultation of any sort. This is a real example of that.

In this instance, the agreement is that we will bill the client based upon the number of active ports across their whole estate, thereby they only pay for what they use and we have an incentive not to over deploy/over design capacity.

This came from a poorly orchestrated tour of a comms room. You can imagine it – come and see the quality of the work. Why are there so many spaces to connect things? That can’t be right, that’s costing me money. I only want to pay for what I use. Hmmm.

This lands on my desk to sort out. It can’t be hard can it? We have management systems after all. Hmm. Last count on this contract I had something like 50,000 LAN ports. Many of which go up and down. Sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes not often, sometimes not at all. Hmm.

Of course I have to start by asking a basic question – what is an active port? What does that mean contractually? The definition comes back as “a port that is up”. Hmm. “Up when?” is my retort. I’m not deliberately throwing hand grenades here but truly trying to make sure we do the right thing. As it turns out, and as I probably could have predicted, the whole thing blows up into an almighty nuclear war.

Whilst we wait for the fallout to settle, I decide it is easier to write out definitions of all of this based upon what could be technically achieved using the capabilities I have to hand.

For the less technical, or those that think this is simpler than it really is, let’s consider some scenarios that are in my mind.

The conference room – the room will have a varying number of ports that will be used sporadically throughout the day, some more than others and some not at all yet the expectation is that all ports presented to the conference desk will always work.

The hot desk – Similar to the conference desk in reality although likely to have a more frequent usage pattern

The office reshuffle – in estates like this, there is always some office or other that is having a reshuffle. That means desks moving about and an expectation of port availability. Similarly, ports that were heavily used now become unused.

The normal port – up in the day, often down at night. Could be up all the time, depending upon how well the turn off at night policy is operating.

The server port – up all the time

The bonded server port or secondary standby port – up all the time but depending upon traffic patterns could have heavy use on one port and virtually nothing on another

The port scenario I haven’t thought of – that’s definitely there, who knows what that is!

Hmm. After some experimentation I end up writing some code that actually achieves this. Actually pretty well and with some smarts too.

Of course by the time the nuclear war ends, the net result is that the answer I have now come up with is now deemed to be impossible to achieve. I decide not to argue.