Article link:  Psst! Whats the Password?

Earlier this year, ProStructure completed a major IV&V (Independent Verification & Validation) project for the Washington State Ferries, a department of WSDOT, and the Federal Transit Authority, a department of USDOT.  The project focused on a new high speed ship-to-shore wireless network implemented on the Ferries system by contractor Mobilisa.

The full report is available here:  http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/CAI-PSC-IVandV-Final-Report-20080910.pdf

From the FTA research site: http://www.fta.dot.gov/assistance/research/research_5638.html

I’m personally excited about the public release of this report for several reasons.   First and most importantly, we get to show the world the kind of truly first-rate work that we do.   Reports of this caliber are almost always locked away as “Highly Confidential” and never see the light of day.  Thanks to the FTA for ensuring that all of its research reports are made publicly available.

In addition to that, we get to show off some of the really innovate technology we put together for this project.  We built a monitoring platform for this project that was both weather hardened and security hardened.   Our locked, tamper evident, IP67 rated (waterproof) boxes were designed to be strapped to the side of the ferries like a flight recorder or “black box”,  continually running a suite of network tests against its twin unit located at the ferry terminal.

Our yellow Test & Measurement Device aboard a WSF vessel

Irving Popovetsky aboard the Steilacoom II performing a final once-over of the unit before the test

By utilizing the scientific method, we build and tested our hypotheses about the expected network performance.  We collected a great deal of addition information including radio statistics, GPS data and weather data.  Using this information we were able to understand how various external influences affected network performance.

For more details, check out the full report.

Here at ProStructure Consulting, we’re extremely enthusiastic about technology and the trials and tribulations of its implementation in the field.  We are fortunate enough to get to build, manage and secure some of the most sophisticated IT environments in the Pacific Northwest.  As a result of our position, we get to do things that nobody has ever done (or fully documented) before.

We believe that the web in general is and always will be the ultimate resource for IT professionals who are trying to understand, implement and troubleshoot pretty much anything.  The purpose of this blog is to chronicle some of our adventures, document challenges, lessons learned and best practices that nobody has yet written about, and in general give back to the IT community by providing our own resource.

We’re starting out with a team of three writers, each with very unique talents and specialties:

• Irving Popovetsky, Principal Consultant: Anything and everything about information security, systems engineering, storage, disaster recovery, IT policy and management.
• Brandon Psmythe, Principal Consultant: Large-scale networks and monitoring, network engineering, information security, IT policy and management
• Amber Pham, Systems Engineering Consultant: Microsoft Operating Systems and Servers, Project Management, Data Center design and engineering

Stay tuned as we begin to fill out some recent war stories.