Ask YC: Any network gurus want a paid holiday?
One of my many hats is maintaining our network and data across our 18-acre campus. This is something I do because I can, not because I'm an expert. We recently had a fiber link go bad that took several days to locate (because it propagated as many different things), and the result was a real wake up call.
So, here's the pitch: You're a network guru that needs a break from the looming winter. We're in a beautiful remote spot in The Bahamas with gorgeous beaches, great diving, snorkeling, fishing, you name it. We'll fly you down (and a guest?), put you up and feed you (we'll even pick you up in a van running biodiesel we made from waste cooking oil). All we ask in return is some sound advice on how to move forward and what tools we should add to our belts. If this sounds too good to pass up, email me: gsiener at ceibahamas.org
Thanks!
Pros - Warm tropical weather, great location right on a beach, great food cooked by locals everyday, friendly staff and students, interesting sustainability projects, pretty good library, great sailing, diving, and kayaking
Cons - No hot water (we did morning exercise that made this more manageable), lots of mosquitoes (I did get used to them after a week or so), the island (Eleuthera) is fairly small so not too many places to go and explore
EDIT: For those more visually inclined, here are my pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steven_maher/tags/thebahamas
A metropolis this is not, but it's worth it when you have your pick of several deserted beaches :)
PS Where'd you get that aerial shot? Was that a Twin Air flight?
Networking classes alone would not give you any value in this case. In fact, they'd give you negative value because the real world never works like the text book, and offering advice that you yourself have not applied in practice is bad form.
I never finished Cisco networking classes either. I never really started them in the first place. I did however help develop the training and certification program for the Ascend/Lucent Certified Technical Expert course. That was after I already had about 8 years of daily hands-on LAN and WAN design and administration (late 90's timeframe). I was able to do that because I had been in the bowels of everything from a local travel agent office network to some of the worlds largest datacenters and NAPs (at the time).
Don't wish for network classes, instead spend some time with actual equipment, a copy of Wireshark, and some time on network admin forums/groups. Go work for a local ISP for even 6 months. You'll learn more about LAN/WAN networking in that time than in most formal network courses.
// finished 4 semesters of CCNA instruction only to be too poor to afford the testing. :)
Unless things have changed since I last looked, it's all labware. Sure, that's better than pure textbook, but still a far cry from reality.
so, you ready for the vacation?. :)
Part of the reason for my response is a bit of a personal nit, I guess. I come across a lot of talented and capable people who seem to feel that they need someone else to verify their skills. Schools and training programs and certs are all well and good for some people, but those things take time and money. Time and money that might be better invested on self-learning, or taking a mid-level job at a salary less than you are worth but such that your net income is still ahead of where you would be if you were going to school, and using that job as a learning/advancement opportunity. I'll take a guy with a GED and 4 years on an ISP tech support position before a guy with a Bachelors, 3 Cisco certs and no work experience in many cases. (YMMV).
The higher-ed/certification thing is so ingrained in so many people that I believe people do not often stop to consider the alternatives frequently enough. OR, they are led to believe that these degrees and certs are universally respected and the gate keepers to better career opportunities. This is of course not true.
My main point is that it's never too late to learn something new, and depending on how you personally develop new skills, the best approach may be non-traditional.
(Not that I got any in the end, someone who didn't care employed me first. But they make sense for a reasonably large group of people)
Funny story: so, my junior tech, who at some point had taken some Cisco course or another, had been tasked with finishing up some gigabit connections between two buildings.
In the main building, the network cabinet has two unmanaged Netgear Prosafe switches; one 10/100, and one gigabit.
Without thinking about it, he plugged some of the cables for the other building into one switch, and some into the other.
Both sets of cables ran to the other building, and then into another Netgear unmanaged switch. (There were multiple cables primarily for redundancy.)
So naturally the next day the network just starts going wild. He's tied a gigabit-size loop into the network, and the unmanaged switches are helpfully forwarding traffic back and forth to eachother, even though they're really not supposed to do that.
He's totally stumped. I get called in, sit down for a few minutes with tcpdump, and watch the traffic for a few devices on the network. Didn't take very long before I had a rough idea of what had happened, opened up the network cabinet, and found the misplaced connections.
So much for Cisco courses!
but any serious work related to network can probably last more than a few months. perhaps a sabbatical leave will do. :)
If that matters to you anyway (and it probably should), then flying in people just to troubleshoot your network seems a bit excessive.
Other than physical cabling and things like that this seems to be one job where you could do most if not all of the work remotely anyway (hard to tell without a lot more background info).
These are some pics from a hotel LAN at a place in Tortola I was at about this time last year: http://www.karas.net/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=2505 Not dissimilar to the OP case here, they were having "network issues" (this was not the reason for my business there, it became a side project), and their LAN was the result of someone who knew some fundamentals but was not a network guy by any means. I could tell more from 30 seconds of looking at this stuff than what they could ever describe to me (even if they had sent pictures).
A network that spans an 18 acre campus could vary from simple to mildly complex. The terrain and budget could suggest that alternative technologies might be more appropriate (PtP Wifi, Mesh, etc.) for some of the links being served by the fiber. Perhaps there are aspects of the fiber install that would indicate future potential failures and/or inabilities to recover from those failures.
A savvy network guy could assess and communicate this, but if they HAD a savvy network guy, this whole thread would have never existed.
So, IMO, an in-person trip is probably the most resourceful way to handle this. My guess would be a 3-4 day initial session, from which some recommendations could be made. After that it could be determined if they have the time/skills to implement the recommendations, or if the implementation should also be outsourced as well.
I've had to do some remote debugging of trouble and I found that it is quite taxing to 'talk someone through' the steps but eventually it did work.
It probably depends on how 'hands on' the issues are, if they're configuration issues or so then remote is probably ok, if they're related to physical stuff then onsite is probably much better.
The impact of the plane ride may take a very long time of renewable living to offset. Some things in life are unavoidable, but the net impact of plane+renewable is still going to be less than plane+standard/disposable lifestyle.