Passed CCIE Written

Once again I have forgotten about the blog and went on with normal life.  Why do all of our favorite bloggers disappear on us?  Well onto the good news I passed my CCIE V written.  I have been in contact with Mark Snow at INE and I will be attending a boot camp in the 4th quarter of this year if the timing is right.  I have a few large projects that will be going into implementation phase at that point, so 2 weeks gone can be kinda taxing to my co workers.  As for the exam is all over the place and I wish Cisco would find a way to slim down the topics,  as some of them won't even be covered(FXO, FXS).  Anyway I look to start writing here about my new experiences as I prep for the lab. 

CCIE Written scheduled

We have a date Dec 7th.  I have been studying over quite a bit of topics over the last few months.  The last 2+ months I will have directed study in my weak areas (QOS,Gatekeeper) and will work on getting stronger in areas's I'm already confident in.  I've reached a pretty good level of voice experience and I'm pretty confident with my work.  Time to push onto that next level.

Video

So I've been gone again.  Great things going on and not so great.  I thought it would be important for me to make a video, but writing and editing take a while, so a quick video would be good enough with everyone's fav lab videos.

New Job

I've been going for a while.  I've seriously been trying to secure a new job.  I had a lot of post I made, but didn't want to really talk about them until the deal was signed and I showed up the 1st day.  I've worked with a few companies who promised offers only to have things change up on me.  Well Monday I started for a global manufacturing firm.  I'm the Senior Unified Communications Engineer.  I really don't have any underlings, but still the main stop in taking care of VOIP problems.  So far I've already been making impact, Fixing a few issues that they had lingering on my 1st day.  Some of them were insanely easy I'm not sure what the last guy was doing.  None the less it feels good to be in a decent size enterprise vs working for a partner.  More than likely in a few years I'll end back up at a partner due to the challenge of the work, but its good to get some rest inbetween.

Cisco does care

Recently I had a customer who went down hard on there Db replication.  It has been off prob for some time, but since they had multiple servers and no changes needed to be made the phone system just kept chugging away as usual.  Then when it had enough it just stopped working.  This customer also ended there support contract with us and called in a Sev 1 request willing to pay top dollar for a engineer to assist them.

In the 1st stages of troubleshooting I noticed that the DB replication was off.  I tried to resynch  through the CLI and no luck.  We rebooted a few boxes no luck.  Next I was thinking we may have some deeper rooted problems we should call TAC.  This feels like one of the times they may have to root into the system to get it fixed, or we can get cisco to possibly send you a new box or 2 if you have good backups. There last backup was last year in april, but thats another story.  So there only option was to get the boxes back up.


I called Tac with the serial numbers and they were no longer on support, but cisco does allow you to pay by credit card.  I spoke with the entitlement guy and he said since they were 100 percent down cisco would give you a 1 time free TAC call but urged support.  We got a tac engineer and just like I expected he had to root in and we got the boxes back up, but thats not the story.  I though cisco was going to hold their system for ransom for those credit card digits.   Just another odd day in the life of a engineer.


We will be talking about backups next!!!!!!!!!!!!

Network Plats PT3

After thinking about this, I didn't come up with a good solution.   In other words people are going to be people and its best as us who provide support should just take the higher road, and let things go.   As we have learned customers are going to be upset which they should, but maybe with some coaching we can get them to deliver us what we need and keep the focus on problem resolution and let management deal with the attitudes.  While they are going to continue to say the silly things, I don't feel they can go away.  The part that I didn't mention earlier on is that I usually focus on the Tier2/3 level of troubleshooting, so I actually don't deal with non technical people.  I'm usually dealing with IT staff which is a reason for me beef as they know how things work.  Good luck out there.

Network platitudes part 2

Today I was chatting with a friend and I was discussing yesterdays post, and I was told that my post makes since from the eyes of a engineer, but what about the customer?  As a customer when I call support I feel there is no urgency to fix my problem, or that you want to keep me tied to paying for service.  When we loose our means to communicate with our customers or do our work, customers loose confidence, and will look to spend there hard earned dollars elsewhere.

I agree with this 100 percent, but how do we get to a situation when we can collaborate to solve the problem.  I had a post a while about about the 5W's some time ago.  Those should be the main thing that a support representatives ask, and the answers that a customer should provide.  That way we can get the ball rolling and get your problem solved so we can move on to the next.  We have several more we have to get to, so our day never ends.  One another note is it possible that all of us that work in support are just being a baby about this and we should just let it rub off?  Or when we speak to support personal we feel they are below us?  These are other thoughts that crossed my mind as I worked through talking about working support, dealing with customer service, and still feeling good at the end of the day for all your hard work.  I'm going to keep digging further and this may take a life of its own into something else...