National Smack a Cisco Guy Day

[Stonent]

That's right. I've declared today to be that day. 

When you give your Cisco guy the MAC address, IP address of something and say "I need you to tell me which interface this cable that's attached to a device with this IP adddress and MAC runs to" and he says "If you don't know how to use a tone generator and a wire probe, I can show you"

He deserves a smack.

[c4757p]

I'm all for this. Now I just have to find a Cisco guy...

[Fsck]

haha 

[Stonent]

I also know there is only one switch rack in that office and the exact command he needs to run.

[Len]

Sounds like your company could save the cost of a Cisco guy's salary...

[Stonent]

Our department has 3 other CCNAs and I'll have mine in a year or two. But we have only one Cisco guy position.

[madires]

Our department has 3 other CCNAs and I'll have mine in a year or two. But we have only one Cisco guy position.

Those certifications are just wallpaper :-) They only show that someone was able to remember some IOS commands and perform some basic tasks. Sorry to say that, but that's the reality.

[smashedProton]

Here is how you hide the body.

http://peterskastner.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/it-guy-0013.png

[warp_foo]

I thought every day was 'Smack a Cisco Guy' day? If not, it should be...

m

[ve7xen]

Those certifications are just wallpaper :-) They only show that someone was able to remember some IOS commands and perform some basic tasks. Sorry to say that, but that's the reality.

It's even worse than that. The exam questions are so vague, poorly written, and often incorrect that you basically need to memorize the answer they're looking for. If you know too much, you'll get it wrong. We are a Cisco partner, so of course I'm required to keep mine up to date because we get discounts on gear the more employees have the certs. Just had to renew it and it's just rage-inducing.

I wish I could smack my boss, as the only Cisco guy in our increasingly Juniper shop, since he keeps pushing us to buy more Cisco gear we don't need. But for now I would like to keep my job, so I will silently rage some more about having to work with Cisco IOS.

[Stonent]

So here it is 4:11AM local time for me an I went out there around 11:40PM with the information that he finally gave me.

Exactly what I asked for, nothing more. That nothing part included the OTHER wiring cabinet that this wiring went into before it got to the switch.  Apparently they moved the switch about 5 feet over but kept the old patch panels so the wiring goes in the old cabinet to patch panels which have cables that go out that are punched into new patch panels and then plugged into the switch.

So there's 4 or 5 possible failure points now where stuff goes from cable to wire pairs to a jack, to an rj45, to another cable, to more wire pairs, to another jack to a 3 inch patch cable to the switch.

That and about halfway into this the battery died on the tone generator or at least went so low that it stopped making noise. But not so low that it didn't occasionally cause the lights to flicker randomly on the probe. So that hour was very fun.

That and our new Australian helpdesk reps sent me on a ticket for a printer that they flagged as preventing the production line from working. That generates e-mails all over the place in the company alerting all sites that we've stopped. Now I've got people trying to get ahold of me wanting to know if our servers are down etc.   When I get to the printer, the whole department was at their dinner break and the printer seemed fine.  When I finally found someone they said "Oh we just turned it off and on again after we got off the phone and that fixed it"

So I asked my boss if I should have to put up with the crap and he said he was going to get me a read-only account for the switches and to let him know if I get any more trouble.