MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World
Different kind of networking people
Posted on 2013-08-09 18:00:00
Tags: Rant, Networking, Riverbed
In the first thirteen years of my working life I have encountered
a lot of different people in the field of networking. And for some
reason they were all skilled, experienced and willing to learn.
They understood their stuff, in case of issues a pointer to the
right direction was enough to help them out.
In my experience at the Riverbed TAC I have encountered several
new kind of networking people, although I wouldn't call them all
"networking" people.
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You have the ones described above: Call in with an issue and just
need a clue on where to start looking. They know their network and
they know how the WAN optimization works. When looking at packets
together and explaining what can be seen, they already know where
to look before I can ask them "Is there anything in the network
which would strip these TCP options?".
-
Outsourced network manager and network architects: Oh how do I pity
you. Your company got this multi-million dollar contract for the
network, but WAN optimization is more than the network. It is the
servers and the clients too, but because you only got the network
you are not allowed to talk to the company which is managing the
servers and the company which is managing the end-user support. The
company which is managing the servers will not tell you that they
upgraded to a newer version of whatever application and blame the
fact that half of the company can't retrieve their email anymore
on you! You will never be able to optimize encrypted MAPI traffic
because the team of the other company which manages Active Directory
doesn't want your Steelhead appliance to be able to perform delegation,
let alone be configured as a read-only Domain Controller...
-
You have people who have inherited a network and just found out
that besides routers, switches and firewalls you have another kind
of network equipment and they have no idea what... These are people
who can be saved, if introduced properly. Explain what WAN optimization
is, give them documentation, explain what the issue is and follow
up a week later. If it works out, they will end up as the first
group. If not, they will end up as the next group...
-
Outsourced NOCs. They seem to look at a screen and when there is a
different colour than green they will identify the brand of the
device and call the TAC. They refuse to do basic troubleshooting
themselves nor learn from previous cases opened and need to be asked
for the system dump every time they open a case. You will get emails
from them every eight hours with the request for an update because
that is when they handover their cases but don't bother to forward
the next steps to the original customers because they are not online
yet... Getting information from the device in question goes most
of the time without a problem. However getting more information
about the issue will have to go through the NOC, who rephrases it
and forwards it to the user, who answers the wrong question and
sends it to the NOC and who forwards it back to you...
Did I miss a category? Most likely because I have repressed them,
very deep...
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