04 Jan 2013
Heads up for a new beginning
After long time of consideration, I decided to start up a blog. Main reason for such decision is my lack of remembering things that I already discovered/solved, so I need a place to put my mind. I thought best idea is to share my thoughts with other sysadmins around the world, maybe someone else finds something useful on my pages, so we will all benefit from it. I’m not going to post regularly on this blog, since not every day/week something worth mentioning happens and would be useful to the others too. I’ll see how things turn and post more accordingly.
Similar posts:
I started my own list of such things. Google doc go figure. Forgot I disabled something, made a change, never enabled it again.
My question to you: When I have a problem that I’ve bashed my head trying to solve within our network, suggestions from online forums have not helped, nor from the manufacture, what do I do next? Hire a professional network engineer? How do I do that for a contract job, just to solve this one problem of mine.
Best,
Phil
From long time experience I can tell you few things about “hacking things yourself”… I’m basically self-taught sysadmin and I’ve never had some proper education / certifications to learn stuff. I kinda figured it out on my own. What I learned the hard way is… you can’t ignore best practices and how things should be setup. When you are designing a network or systems, always read best practices. Talk with other network engineers / sysadmins and ask them how would they design it. It can save you a lot of grey hair in the long run. Misconfigured networks, servers etc… all lead to uncertain results that can be really hard to debug even for a network / sysadmin specialist. If you setup network as it should be, you can find solutions easier and you can ask for help even from vendor. At least people will be able to help you, otherwise you are stuck and on your own (you chose it that way by hacking it on your own…). Once you hit such a problem, that is beyond your knowledge, you can try hiring a specialist to help you out, but be prepared that he might have to redesign some of the architecture too. It really depends on how big problem you are facing.
Some good wisdom there. Unfortunately, I inherited the system (which by the way was installed by two different companies). Maybe it’s time I redesign it. The problem is intermittent which to me is the worst kind. So it goes…
Those are the worst yes… But if you want stressless job, you’ll have to invest some time into it. Maybe it’s time for you to get some reinforcements and hire another sysadmin to help you… No matter the size of a project, you can break it down to smaller pieces. As I once read this quote on another sysadmin’s blog: “How do you eat an elephant? Slowly. Piece by piece.”