Day to Day networking?

Good afternoon everyone,

This has been on my mind for some time as I have been looking through the paper at the scarce I.T jobs in particular at those in the junior/graduate networking arena.

I was interested to find out from those who work in the networking field, what is involved in a typical day. Springing immediately to mind i am thinking of:

Planning Upgrades through research/testing/Communication

Dealing with day to day problems and issues with the current design

Nearly all of the positions that I see advertised require CCNA/CCNP + MCSE 2003.

This is leading me to believe that the other primary role in this position would be workstation/server issues and assistance.

I am sure every organisation is different but I am curious to find out!

Cheers,

Michael

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Comments

Miikey87

I am a bit silly, this thread should be moved.

PC509

When I was a sys admin, I would also check the bandwidth and see what was hogging it and find a solution. I would pro-actively find problems and find solutions for them. I would research and plan and talk to the boss man to see if it could be implemented. I had a couple servers moved to a different location (an ISP with several locations) and it freed up a LOT of bandwidth at one site. It was running a T1 at the time, and the servers were moved to a location with a 100Mb fiber connection. It helped out a lot.

But, there should be no time to just sit and relax. I was always looking for something to do. When I wasn't fixing things or solving known issues, I would be learning more about the infristructure so I can be more productive in my position. I tried learning as much as I could about what we were running so I could do more.

Also, cleaning up cables, backups, checking server logs and MRTG for bandwidth spikes, firewall logs, etc...

All that on top of the general support and stuff.

I miss that job a lot.

Forsaken_GA

The part they don't tell you about is all the damn cable you have to deal with.

Some days I run lots and lots of cable. Those are not happy days.

Miikey87

Thanks for the info guys,

I'm not trying to make the assumption that there is nothing else that needed to be done aside from what I mentioned. I am just curious to find out what other activities are performed

tenrou

I've found that unless your a really high level tech you're going to be involved with both sys admin and network admin work during the day. Hence why they want you to have some microsoft experience as well.

I suppose at an ISP or a really large organisation there would be enough work for you to be specialised. Larger places tend to do graduate enrolments though so they're not likely to come up in the paper.

Forsaken_GA

Miikey87 wrote: »

Thanks for the info guys,

I'm not trying to make the assumption that there is nothing else that needed to be done aside from what I mentioned. I am just curious to find out what other activities are performed .

It honestly depends on how the company has their division of labor setup, and the job description is a big hint to that. For example, in our company, the network department doesn't do admin work for the servers. There's a couple that we maintain, but those are departmental servers, the rest of the company never sees them. We handle the network, and that's pretty much it. In general, we run new cable, replace old, deal with our peers and the folks we buy transit from, troubleshoot any network related problems, setup new network gear, deprovision old, move them around, allocate IP space, monitor the network's health and bandwidth usage, scale the network as needed, experiment to see what effect a given change would have on our network, and in the rare times when we don't have any planning or maintenance to do, we study to either advance our skillsets, or keep them current.

The days are filled working with physical gear and software like nagios, cacti (or some other rrdtool based graphing program), rancid, mtr, wireshark, and a host of other network related tools (and if you don't recognize most of those names, do some studying... they're usually one of those things you don't find out you need to know about until *after* you're hired)

I'd also recommend picking up the book Network Warrior by Gary Donahue. It's a well written brain **** of the practical side of the network game and covers alot of things you should know, but probably don't because you haven't encountered them yet.

Miikey87

Thanks guys for your input and the recommendations, I will have a hunt for the book. Sounds like an interesting read!

chmod

Any job you get as sys admin/network admin, you better make the company save some money or help them make it.

If a company is looking for a net../sys... admin is because they need things to be done, you are suppost to provide the best(cheap,exc performance, easy to admin...)solutions.
In larger companies(ISP, Datacenters, Ecommerce etc) this might take you years and will always have something to check, deploy, secure, document, etc etc.

oo_snoopy

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

The part they don't tell you about is all the damn cable you have to deal with.

Some days I run lots and lots of cable. Those are not happy days.

Depends on where you work. Most places contact it out to professionals.

Forsaken_GA

oo_snoopy wrote: »

Depends on where you work. Most places contact it out to professionals.

Depends on the company, and the degree of cable that needs to be run. In the case of my current job, the original cable job was very poorly done, and I essentially had to recable the entire data center. For anyone who may be planning to run cable in a data center, running wires straight from your edges devices back into your core? really not a good idea.

But every network admin needs to know a thing or two about dealing with cable. Because one day, you will get the call to run a few hundred feet of cable, like, *now* for some emergency, unless you were intelligent enough (and your bosses gave you the budget for) to have plenty of extra ports on your patch panel runs so you can cross connect a whole lot of machines at the drop of a hat.

oo_snoopy

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Depends on the company, and the degree of cable that needs to be run. In the case of my current job, the original cable job was very poorly done, and I essentially had to recable the entire data center. For anyone who may be planning to run cable in a data center, running wires straight from your edges devices back into your core? really not a good idea.

But every network admin needs to know a thing or two about dealing with cable. Because one day, you will get the call to run a few hundred feet of cable, like, *now* for some emergency, unless you were intelligent enough (and your bosses gave you the budget for) to have plenty of extra ports on your patch panel runs so you can cross connect a whole lot of machines at the drop of a hat.

I agree, you're always going to have to deal with some cable, I recently re-dressed an entire closet. That kind of stuff doesn't bother me.

I wouldn't work anywhere where I would be the primary cabling point of contact (long runs, in the ceilings, etc.) You may get this in some smaller companies however.

Forsaken_GA

oo_snoopy wrote: »

I agree, you're always going to have to deal with some cable, I recently re-dressed an entire closet. That kind of stuff doesn't bother me.

I wouldn't work anywhere where I would be the primary cabling point of contact (long runs, in the ceilings, etc.) You may get this in some smaller companies however.

Unfortunately, as the junior in the department, I get stuck being the cable <bleep>.

Thankfully, I don't have to worry about patch cables. The senior had the foresight to order lots and lots of pre-molded patch cables in a variety of colors, so I only really have to worry about transport cabling, and I learned very very quickly to take the number of cables I needed to run and add 50% so I wouldn't have to do the same thing at a later date.