We set up our office!

The good part - our office has access to a pool!

Paraphrasing what one of the interns said (actually euphemizing), "Take that M$"

We are the kind of people who just have to set up everything on our own. Thankfully building furniture on our own is still not in style here, ie. we don't have the tools nor the parts... so that part we bought - seven tables, seven chairs. That we thought is more than sufficient for the next 6 months.

Coming to our actual hardware - it was handpicked. Nothing fancy or out of this world but still handpicked. The guys actually went down to the store, picked out the hardware and got it assembled.

Four Desktop machines, one server, a switch, a wireless hub. I will let the techie guys describe that in detail. Well, let me just brief you about what we achieved at the end of the day:

We crimpled our own network cables to hook up the desktops and the server with our internet connection. Even I learnt to do it. I can now create my very own inernet cable within a few minutes! 

Our internet service provider (archaic and monopolistic that he/she is!) provides a service which isn't compatible with our wireless hub! I believe they overcame this hurdle by routing the messages through another network card. They managed so many work arounds, I lost track. 

They did something called a software RAID on the server. I guess that makes it super-robust with inbuilt redundancy. They have also networked the computers to such an extent that one can actually run the same command on all machines simultaneously. Synchronization is now a piece of cake!

They also managed to configure the network to have access to the combined pool of resources. To test this out, they compiled our software - what took around 50-60 minutes usually got compiled in 10 minutes! We are well on our way to an optimized wonderful company.

The techfolk would be very curious to know what all they did. They should be following up with a detailed account of everything that we did so far.