Why yet another Network Engineering blog?
To document lessons learned. And because I don’t have the best memory.
I like to think I’ve landed the perfect Network Engineering job. I work for an organization with a large network, but it’s only a company of about 1,500 employees. That means the NetEng team of three people wear all kinds of hats. We also have a leadership team that understands that I.T. is expensive, so they don’t skimp on tools. Combine all that, and we get to play with a lot of toys – but we’re expected to have strong knowledge of everything we’ve paid for.
Most days we run into new and interesting problems, fix them, and tend to forget. Some of these issues can be cleaned up and made public. In that, maybe they’ll be useful to others – but it’s certainly good for me to get these lessons learned typed out for when I run into the same problem in 6 months and forget I’ve done something before.
Part of wearing different hats means I’m constantly jumping from topic to topic. Yesterday morning started with troubleshooting Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD). An hour later it was getting pxGrid working so Identity Services Engine and Stealthwatch could talk to each other. The rest of the day was writing PowerShell scripts to make API calls to Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
By the time the day was over, I had forgotten most the the morning’s BFD troubleshooting.
I hope to use this space write the occasional article about these diverse topics. Maybe it’ll help nuggets of knowledge to not fall out of my head quite to fast.
