[AusNOG] Work experience in networking/telecoms/DCs? Getting my foot in the door?

[Beeson, Ayden]

+1

We had to reconfigure all our wireless ap ports from access to trunks with a vlan allowed statement, using our config management tools (Solarwinds NPM/NCM) we were able to push out whole campus configurations at once, turning a week long process of many people making changes into 2 buttons and 10 minutes wait.

Reconfigured over 1200 access ports across hundreds of switch stacks without incident, as well as the trunks between switches that now needed these out to the access rather than just at the controller, plus the vlan config itself.

Scary the first time but amazing in terms of man hours and human error savings.

That's not even to mention the saving in terms of rolling disruptions to staff and students and the inconvenience that could create...

Cheers,
Ayden
(This email was sent from a mobile device, please forgive any typos etc)


---- Chris Bennett wrote ----


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> In all fairness, you could also alleviate the problem with a much simpler
> "alias" configuration line. No need for an orchestration system to change
> VLAN configs.

Well the value in an orchestration system is that that one vlan change
might need to be made on more than one interface, on more than one
device, so now a netop has the choice of doing the same thing twice or
more (at risk of error or using an alias like you suggest), needing to
remember the set of devices & interfaces they must change for the vlan
change to be complete, or automating it.

And the change may be more than just 'add vlan' - it could be a
10-step process as part of a provisioning workflow, so getting this
stuff reliably applied without human error means programming it in
someway.

And in the context of gaining work experience & learning in SP/DC,
automating very simple adds/moves/changes is a very good way of
learning how to 'program your network'.

Regards,

Chris
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