- Developed an understanding of networking in order to migrate from a hubbed networked environment to a switched network environment
- Configured the network switches, tested the environment, and then organized the migration of all the network connections
From Xerox to Xerox? Yeah…it happens. Funny part, I was still supporting developers. Life’s interesting sometimes.
The last group of developers were the ones who wrote the software and drivers that talked to the printers.
The new groups were the developers who wrote the printer OS and network software.
This position opened up because the previous systems administrator (a direct hire) had gone to the Dominican Republic to work or something. Yeah, I know…”Why does this matter?”…obviously it does.
Anyway…so I started working and my management here was the finance guy of the division. That was a new one and it turned out to be an OK thing. By now, starting somewhere and doing an evaluation of the site was becoming a good move, and this environment was pretty good. There was one problem.
Network contention was over 85%. So network traffic was VERY slow. Unbearably slow. When I looked into it, I discovered that they were on an entirely hub network. Asking around, there was no reason that anyone saw to stay on it so we priced out an upgrade to a switched network.
So, another proposal, talking to the sales reps, etc. and we had a plan to get the new equipment in. At the same time, we were going to clean up the network closet which is always a bonus.
After the equipment shows up, we have the support techs help us get it all configured before moving anyone over. The test cases are the IT team and it all works great. So we start moving the developers over during a weekend migration.
Monday morning it all looked good…except people couldn’t do something that no one had mentioned.
It turns out that the developers would run their systems in promiscuous mode so that they could perform packet captures continuously when running tests. So they needed to be able to see the network traffic, and you cannot do that on a switched network.
So for the developers that needed it, we put them on hubs with their printers so that they could do their work and everyone else had a much cleaner network to work in.
About a month after all that settled out, my manager came in and told me that the contract was going to be terminated in a few weeks. The former admin was coming back to the states and getting his job back.
Ahh well…it keeps life interesting.