I thought I might share a brief story that exemplifies some of the excitement of working here.
For 3 weeks now we've been having a very odd internet connection problem, our outbound traffic has crawled to a near halt. I was convinced it was a problem with our new ISP as I didn't change anything. Our ISP representative is a man in Australia whom I communicate with over IM (skype). I mentioned the problem, he didn't see one and suggested I look at our router.
My style of network management is all about data collection. When I came here there was very little network monitoring being done. For nearly 3 years now, we've had several (5) network monitoring tools in place. They are:
Solarwinds Orion - snmp monitoring and uptime
PRTG (Paessler) - network sniffing and graphing
Firewall Analyzer (openmanage) - firewall analysis and traffic information
MRTG - firewall/router ingress and egress graphing and tracking
Big Brother - server uptime and monitoring.
Those are all outside of the other one off troubleshooting tools like netperf, iperf, perfmon, netcat, etc. that I use to identify issues.
Needless to say, WE HAVE VISIBILITY. So when an ISP tells me the problem is on my side, I tend to push back a little and say 'would you like to see my evidence I've compiled?'
Anyway, last friday we find out that our ISP guy is in the country, so we call aviation, and the guest house and we hustle him over here by chartering a plane.
YES, a new FIRST for me. I have now.. chartered a plane! Doesn't it sound so... luxurious? In execution, not very glamorous but he got here nothing short of a minor miracle.. but we did it, and he had a bed to sleep in and meals!
After sitting down with me for 3 hours, he finally said 'yes there is a problem, I can see it now.' I'm always glad when people spend time with me and walk away with the impression that I know what I'm doing. I'm usually VERY glad when they say 'hey nice tool, what is the name of that?' Both happened.
It is odd to run into professionalism and face to face time here, so I was glad we had it.
Two days later, after he's in Australia, he IM's me. 'You were right about the ISP, turns out there is satellite interference.'
Somewhere, someone is broadcasting at a frequency and strong enough, to interfere with Asiasat. So they're tracking that down now... hopefully we'll come to a resolution.
And all it started with a friday where I came to work and said 'wow this might be a quiet day! I might finish my 'to-do' list!' Then we decided to try and charter a plane very last minute and get the guy over here.
Everyone here knows, you NEVER EVER EVER EVER say 'wow looks like it might be a quiet day!'.
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I have to say, this job is definitely exciting.
