I give up. I'm going to take the F5 certification

flt0nujr

I work has a Managed Hosting Tier II Network Engineer. I've touched the F5 to create VIP's, Pools, SSL Certificates, caching and also configuring Cisco ASA firewalls to control access inbound and outbound traffic into the network. I thought I wanted to be a security professional and I got a little taste of it when a DdoS was occurring within the Noc and when a customer's database wasnt secure and I had to sit on the phone with the Cisco TAC, and the Database administrator trying to prove that the Cisco ASA was not at fault here, but the fault was with the customer never updating their MySql database server and not adhering to our recommendations to lock down the network. After that 4 hour conference call I was done, no more, zip....zero...no mas. I'm married with (2) kids, and I don't have the time to read on every freaking malware, virus, non-ethical hack that's out there. I'll just be a network engineer specializing in the following:

Cisco ASA:
VPN S2S
Firewall
Access-List's
Radius and TACAS

Cisco Switch:
VLAN
HSRP

Cisco Router:
BGP
OSPF

F5 load balancer

ande0255

Are you new to supporting customer environments? If you are at all involved in large scale deployments, you will be sitting on the phone for hours with TAC, many times throughout your life. What's wrong with calling TAC for assistance?

When your supporting customer environments, there is always going to be bugs and compatibility issues, you have to take the good with the bad, resolve what you can and let support hammer the really weird issues out.

Zartanasaurus

You're going to be in that situation no matter what specialization you take. It has more to do with the company you're with and what they do. If something is down, people are going to whine.