Welcome to 2011
Welcome to 2011.
I hope that you have had time to enjoy the holidays and all the festivities that come with it.
Personally i have been doing alot of work stuff. Moving data centers is no small task when the customers want constant uptime. Of course for some customers this couldnt be done as they dont have fully redundant systems to switch over to. However a large part could be done very fast, but they all needed to be done at night and preferably during the weekends.
My main task was to make sure that all the routing and switching was done properly. We have alot of new fiber connections coming in, each one carrying a mix of internet and MPLS connections.
We managed to get all the routing done with a maximum outtage of 34 seconds (for one of the MPLS connections). I am very pleased with this as it shows that we have a pretty good network running for being flexible.
Security wise, i learned alot as well. My coworker did a great job of configuring the new ASAs that stands in front of our systems. By sitting there next to him and get to ask questions really helps alot in terms of understanding the details of the ASA configuration.
We did pretty much everything together in order to share the knowledge and know-how. For me, this makes alot of sense as im not the only one who is capable of understanding the topology and how it is setup.
Having a plan to do these things before-hand and especially having some time to review things as you come up with new ideas and thoughts on how to do it, is invaluable to the implementation. Being rushed to something will only yield a similar result.
The most time consuming task, was physically moving the equipment and doing all the cabling they way we wanted it to be. We used the opportunity to do everything from scratch and doing it right. So each rack was 100% defined and drawn out in Visio before we even touched any equipment at all.
By the end of all of this i started to think about it all. I have only been in the company for 14 months, and im already doing core stuff. This makes me proud as it shows that the company has faith in my abilities to do something thats critical for the company.
Im glad that i have the opportunity to work for a company like that.
As for the future, we have alot of tasks ahead of us. We have just been assigned a few more /24 subnets and our own AS number as well. I will be planning to switch over to using this AS number for peering with a couple of service providers. I want a bit more control on how we do load-balancing across our links. Right now we only have a redundant system, whereas i want to utilize all links.
Now to the study part.
I have been doing 20+ volume 1 labs again. Still learning some stuff, but i think i have a good grasp on things. What i REALLY need to learn is to read and understand the task fully! I find myself not getting it down 100% because i misread something or did a configuration that would accomplish the goal, but wasnt specific enough.
This can all be avoided by reading it thoroughly.
Im also looking at how to motivate myself to doing more. I need to re-spark my passion for everything. I need to be able to focus like i used to. All i can think of is that the failed attempt really knocked me off more than i initially thought.
I also want to come up with more labs on my own. Ive especially been doing some labs to test of things like Soo (site of origin) in BGP along with the “down bit” in OSPF so it wont redistribute into BGP what has already been redistributed from BGP into OSPF.
I want to write some posts about this, but they are pretty big labs in order to get the whole SP thing into the picture, so maybe i should do them in multiple posts?
I really want to do some stuff regarding switch QoS as well. The 3560 is very powerful in what it can do QoS wise. Especially setting up the buffers, setting up the thresholds and mapping it to the different queues. Lots of stuff you can do.
Anyways, its 7:30 AM at the moment, and ive been up since 4:30 doing labs. Great way to spend the last day of the weekend 🙂 Girfriend will be up soon and we need to goto some family thing. She promised i could read on the way there, so thats what im going to do.
Again, i wish everyone a great new year and please take care of yourself and your loved ones!
Kim