Life as a SysAdmin

Got to troubleshoot my first routing (EIGRP) issue yesterday!!! A few branches out in Utah only had connectivity through the MPLS cloud back to our corp location here in VA. They could not reach the internet. Well, I checked their routing tables and they were all missing their gateways of last resort (default routes). The core switch was replaced out there and I believe the default route was redistributed from static into EIGRP. So for now, I added static routes until the contractor who set the switch up comes back out (I was told that since he set that switch up that he needs to come back out and fix the missing routes in EIGRP which were advertised from the old core). Very exciting! I was able to troubleshoot that with just CCNA knowledge too - Very valuable! What were some of the first network issues that you guys troubleshot?

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

log32

Something like this except for the Halo gaming part
The Website Is Down - Sales Guy vs. Web Dude - YouTube

gorebrush

Learning how to use Cisco CallManager all by myself was fun.

Upgrading a HP Server to Windows Server 2003 without SmartStart. Oh, I'll not forget that in a hurry.

Designing, Implementing and managing new sites, and entire office moves within 6 months of my first Sys admin post (I achieved 0% downtime too)

While I do sorta miss all that, I DO NOT miss users

rsutton

CodeBlox wrote: »

What were some of the first network issues that you guys troubleshot?

The first thing I can remember troubleshooting as a systems admin was two domain controllers not replicating. Someone had "demoted" a DC by powering it off and putting it in a closet. The DC they turned off held all FSMO roles. That was my first all night call with Microsoft.

it_consultant

gorebrush wrote: »

Learning how to use Cisco CallManager all by myself was fun.

Upgrading a HP Server to Windows Server 2003 without SmartStart. Oh, I'll not forget that in a hurry.

Designing, Implementing and managing new sites, and entire office moves within 6 months of my first Sys admin post (I achieved 0% downtime too)

While I do sorta miss all that, I DO NOT miss users

I spent hours finding the right RAID driver the first time I installed Server 2003 on a Dell server, finally got it loaded on an external floppy drive and got the install going and my boss walks in and says "why don't you just use the dell start disk?".

CodeBlox

haha! I don't know about the olden days but that is an easy task now. Just use the disk as you stated or go to dells website.

higherho

- Pure Windows SA position - I could not log on to our file server with my Domain Admin rights. Error "saying that the Domain was not available" I checked everything (network connectivity issue, seeing when the computer communicated to the domain (which was like 2 weeks), etc). I figured I will just log in locally and join it to the domain again. Well the previous SA left the week before and gave me all the emergency passwords and none of them worked. I had to break into the system because this file server was also our DHCP box. Needless to say it took me roughly 4 hours to get it back up and running properly again.

- Linux SA / some Windows stuff - Our Hadoop Cluster was acting funky. None of the HBASE region servers were contacting its master server. I was able to ping it and do a trace. After some checking around I took notice that on the Hbase master server in the region servers file where you list IP's of what servers are your regions. The second and third octet of the IP's where wrong. Once I changed that the hbase-regionserver service started up again fine. However, I'm still not sure how it started initially prior to the error.

One thing that has been getting me upset in the SA world as of late is the fact that developers are not finishing their web applications and expect me to do it for them. It's not my role and it should be complete before I receive it to implement into our environment (I'm part of a Q&A lab).

EDIT

On a Side note, a Linux SA is a lot of fun but my brian is so filled with command line stuff lol.

CodeBlox

Funny you mention the thing about developers. A ticket from our helpdesk was sent to us and I have been working on it. We have an intranet website that has a page that performs an LDAP query on users. I discovered through troubleshooting that it works for 3 of the 4 OUs. I have brought it to the developers attention and they looked at some code for the page but didnt do anything about it. Come wednesday I plan to just assign the ticket to them haha!

it_consultant

CodeBlox wrote: »

haha! I don't know about the olden days but that is an easy task now. Just use the disk as you stated or go to dells website.

I don't use any manufacturer disk now - the RAID drivers have been in every Windows distro since the original 08. Just goes to show you how things change for the better and simpler.

meadIT

it_consultant wrote: »

I don't use any manufacturer disk now - the RAID drivers have been in every Windows distro since the original 08. Just goes to show you how things change for the better and simpler.

Be careful if you use Dell servers. The new gen servers (T/R620, T/R720, etc) have RAID, NIC, and chipset drivers that aren't recognized by a vanilla 2008 R2 install.