We have been working on moving Network Computing's Green Bay lab for more than a year, and last week finally had the opportunity to tour the new lab space as they were building it out.

The reasons for our move were many, most revolving around being in the basement of a building with a sump-pump in it. I have feared a backup of that sump pump since I first came on staff.

Little did I know, that the sump-pump was the least of our worries.

A picture is worth a thousand words - if you can get Flash downloaded and installed so you can see the pictures...

While testing SOA Management products I discovered that it isn't always that easy to get Flash downloaded, let alone installed.

You've likely heard the rumors that the Green Bay lab is moving across town. While you'd think most of the hard work would be in tearing down our infrastructure and bodily moving it across town, turns out that setting up data services is a lot more painful...

We've all done it, fat fingered a config and not caught it until packets started disappearing or traversing a route they shouldn't have. But generally you find them within the first few days, if not hours, of that last "wr mem" on the router.

That's just what we did in the Green Bay lab, only our somewhat unique configuration - designed specifically to enable multi-speed testing without massive reconfigurations - caused us to not notice for nearly two years.

On the surface everything is simple. Every technology is straight forward. Every solution can be implemented given the right amount of effort and resources. Everything is cut and dried… until you actually try to implement a solution. That’s when the surprises start.

At Network Computing we recognized that discovering the surprises that various technologies throw our way and writing about them was the important part of providing quality product reviews to the IT community. We knew that the only way to do reviews the right way was to test products head-to-head, hands-on and in-depth—hence our labs.