Network Engineer interview!

MAC_Addy

I just recently scored myself two interviews as a network engineer. It's been a while since I've been in the network engineer position, so some pointers would be great!

Basically both jobs are looking for demonstrated troubleshooting skills. In my opinion, or my experience, I typically work from L1 and up and then use show commands on the current running routing protocol. However, I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question without getting an immediate "no" on the checkbox.

They also both require experience with routing protocols. I know that one of the companies use EIGRP and MPLS on their networks, so in order to get myself up-to-date, I have been refreshing my memory with some CCNA material and some research on MPLS.

On one of the jobs, the requirement is to analyze the network for improved efficiencies. To me that means checking on running-configurations and network monitoring tools to see if the best route has been selected, and/or to see if there is high traffic on a particular router.

Any input on some of these would be great!

hurricane1091

If you let a routing protocol do its thing, it is going to select the best route basically for you. Cases of sub-optimal routing that I have found are in our DMVPN environment, simply because it's not really dynamic at all and does not work as it could/should. Using a monitoring tool like Solarwinds, we are able to analyze bandwidth and determine if an office has enough.

Real life example - VoIP team was implementing some new stuff, and now all VoIP traffic had to come to the data center first. We needed to analyze the additional traffic; which we did, and determined bandwidth would increase to over 50% utilization. With 2 separate MPLS connections from the DC, that meant if 1 went down, the other would be maxed out potentially and packet loss would occur. VoIP traffic is prioritized, and call quality would remain fine, but data traffic would suffer. End result was an increase of bandwidth on both circuits.