A Day in the Life of a CCNA.

My name is Daniel and I work for an ISP based near to London.

I left school with a few qualifications but wasn't sure what

I wanted to do. I have always been interested in IT and

was always repairing friends computers or helping them if

they couldn't get their printers working. I also worked

out how to help install their broadband routers.

I started on a degree in IT but I found that it was mostly

theory based and would be of little use if I wanted to be

a network engineer. A friend on the course told me about

the Cisco CCNA so I did some research and found Paul

Brownings Networks Inc. Cisco training site.

I had no budget for a course but then I found the online

CCNA training site www.howtonetowork.net so I joined that.

I studied for about 2 hours per day for 6 weeks and passed

the CCNA first time. For hands on practise I used some

second hand routers and switches I bought from ebay.

Once I passed my CCNA I started job hunting. I applied for

five jobs per day mostly via www.monster.co.uk or via

www.jobserve.com. Most companies ignored me and I had a few

interviews which came to nothing.

Eventually I was called for an interview with my current

company who are a medium sized ISP based outside of London.

They were impressed that I had studied for the CCNA in my

own time. The interview was about TCP/IP and subnetting

which I knew well from the www.howtonetwork.net website.

I was also asked about basic routing and troubleshooting

and I got most of the answers right because they are all

CCNA topics.

I was given the job and work as part of the network support

team. Here is my typical day:

0830 - start work. I have my cup of tea on my desk and I

check the queue for tickets logged by customers. My job

is to try to resolve problems before they are passed to

team 2.

0845 - first ticket. A customer is trying to put an IP

address on a router. I e-mail them over a walkthrough

guide I wrote while I had some free time. There are some

pictures and clear instructions so they should be fine

using that.

0900 - another ticket. A customers server backups are

failing. I call them and speak to the server team. I ask

them where they are sending the backups and they tell

me it is IP address 10.10.10.7. I ask them if the server

has a route to that address and they confirm it does. I

then ask which device uses the address 10.10.10.7 and am

told that it is reached via a network switch. We check

the switch and the interface on it is down. Somehow

the duplex settings on the switch have been set to 10mpbs

half duplex when it should be 100mpbs full.

0930 - no tickets at the moment so I use the time to

clear my e-mail inbox and then read up on wireless

security because we are taking on support contracts

for that soon.

1000 - another ticket comes in. A customer is trying to

apply IP address 192.168.1.63 255.255.255.224 to a

router but it isn't working. I work it out on paper

and that is the broadcast address so it will never work.

I tell them to use 192.168.1.62 if that is free. I'm

glad I learned the easy way to subnet.

1130 - team meeting about changes to support systems

and new procedures. There is a space on team 2 so I

think I am going to apply for it. I have a good chance

because I am the only CCNA qualified engineer on

team 1.

1230 - Lunchtime. I have a sandwich in the canteen and

then study for 45 mins. I want to take my CCNP next so

I read up on OSPF.

1330 - it has been busy. I have to call a customer who

is installing a new router but their serial interface

will not come up. They know a bit about routers but

still can't resolve the issue.

We start at layer 1 so I ask him to check that a cable

is plugged in with the 'show controllers' command on

the router. It shows there is a DTE cable connected. I

then ask them to check layer 2 which is the encapsulation

on the interface. He has HDLC but when he checks the

paperwork from us it does say he needs to set it to

PPP. Once he does that the interface comes up and it

works fine.

1400 - more tea and another ticket. A customer has

lost the password to get into enable mode on their

router. They have a 1760 model so I check on Google

and find the password reset procedure. They have to

reload the router and use the break keys to get into

Rommon mode.

It takes a while but we get back into it and change

the password for him. I suppose he could have found

the answer himself if he had looked but there you go.

1450 - team 2 are all in a meeting when an urgent

case comes in. A customers router has gone down and

it is business affecting. I take the ticket and try

to fix it before calling the team out of their

meeting.

When I speak to the customer I found that the router

isn't actually down but it reloaded and now they

cannot access e-mail or the internet. I ask them to

read out the running config to me since they can't

e-mail it. It all sounds fairly standard until they

get to the access list. It reads

permit tcp any any eq domain

permit tcp any host 172.1.2.77 eq ftp

permit tcp any any eq https

I can see that for some reason they are not allowing

www or smtp. I think that the access list must

have been working but they never saved it to

the startup config so when it reloaded those

commands went missing. I talk them through adding

the missing lines and after we test it everything

seems to be working fine.

1610 - wrap up on a few old tickets to make sure

the customers are okay for me to close the ticket

off. One final cup of tea and then I leave for home.

The good thing is that you can always ask for

help if you get stuck. Most of the answers are on

google or on the howtonetwork web site or in

one of my Cisco books. We stock a lot here at work

and they are there to be used.