Ask YC: Any network gurus want a paid holiday?

I volunteered at the Island School 4 years ago. I can attest that it is a beautiful remote spot. I was there helping out with their summer camp for middle schoolers and also working on some construction projects around the campus. I'd go back if I had the networking experience. Depending on my mood I found it peaceful or lonely as it is very isolated and I saw only 50 people total in the 1 month I was there. Other thoughts on my experience:

Pros - Warm tropical weather, great location right on a beach, great food cooked by locals everyday, friendly staff and students, interesting sustainability projects, pretty good library, great sailing, diving, and kayaking

Cons - No hot water (we did morning exercise that made this more manageable), lots of mosquitoes (I did get used to them after a week or so), the island (Eleuthera) is fairly small so not too many places to go and explore

EDIT: For those more visually inclined, here are my pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steven_maher/tags/thebahamas

Glad you enjoyed your time, thanks for those insights. We actually have hot water via solar water heaters. To be honest, most days you wish your shower was a little colder!

A metropolis this is not, but it's worth it when you have your pick of several deserted beaches :)

PS Where'd you get that aerial shot? Was that a Twin Air flight?

Yes, I took it on a Twin Air flight back to Fort Lauderdale. You guys have made a lot of progress, since I was there. Congrats!

Makes me wish for once I'd actually finished those Cisco networking classes.

ditto, so very ditto

I grok your point, but will make a mild counter argument.

Networking classes alone would not give you any value in this case. In fact, they'd give you negative value because the real world never works like the text book, and offering advice that you yourself have not applied in practice is bad form.

I never finished Cisco networking classes either. I never really started them in the first place. I did however help develop the training and certification program for the Ascend/Lucent Certified Technical Expert course. That was after I already had about 8 years of daily hands-on LAN and WAN design and administration (late 90's timeframe). I was able to do that because I had been in the bowels of everything from a local travel agent office network to some of the worlds largest datacenters and NAPs (at the time).

Don't wish for network classes, instead spend some time with actual equipment, a copy of Wireshark, and some time on network admin forums/groups. Go work for a local ISP for even 6 months. You'll learn more about LAN/WAN networking in that time than in most formal network courses.

Appreciate your reply. But wasn't that too heavy for just a jovial comment?.

so, you ready for the vacation?. :)

I didn't mean for it to be so heavy ;)

Part of the reason for my response is a bit of a personal nit, I guess. I come across a lot of talented and capable people who seem to feel that they need someone else to verify their skills. Schools and training programs and certs are all well and good for some people, but those things take time and money. Time and money that might be better invested on self-learning, or taking a mid-level job at a salary less than you are worth but such that your net income is still ahead of where you would be if you were going to school, and using that job as a learning/advancement opportunity. I'll take a guy with a GED and 4 years on an ISP tech support position before a guy with a Bachelors, 3 Cisco certs and no work experience in many cases. (YMMV).

The higher-ed/certification thing is so ingrained in so many people that I believe people do not often stop to consider the alternatives frequently enough. OR, they are led to believe that these degrees and certs are universally respected and the gate keepers to better career opportunities. This is of course not true.

My main point is that it's never too late to learn something new, and depending on how you personally develop new skills, the best approach may be non-traditional.

When you're the guy with a B.A. and work experience in ISP call centres, Cisco certs are a handy way of not getting your C.V. thrown out by H.R. drones :-)

(Not that I got any in the end, someone who didn't care employed me first. But they make sense for a reasonably large group of people)

If you take the official network classes from Cisco then you do spend a lot more time on real equipment than buried in a book.

// finished 4 semesters of CCNA instruction only to be too poor to afford the testing. :)

And where does that equipment live?

Unless things have changed since I last looked, it's all labware. Sure, that's better than pure textbook, but still a far cry from reality.

We had a full network setup where I took them, with a fair amount of real hardware (of varying manufacturers even [a few AdTran boxes]). Perhaps that is a rarity, I'm not sure. :)

I've taken a bunch of Cisco classes but never actually finished them and took the tests. My network of ~16,000 devices is at a pretty steady 99.99 uptime rate for the last 2 years. A big upward curve since taking over from my predecessor who was certified in half a dozen different ways.

yeah. and besides switches/PBX I don't see where would one need Cisco anyway.

"One neck to choke" is a powerful reason to deal with more than their switches.

Heh!

Funny story: so, my junior tech, who at some point had taken some Cisco course or another, had been tasked with finishing up some gigabit connections between two buildings.

In the main building, the network cabinet has two unmanaged Netgear Prosafe switches; one 10/100, and one gigabit.

Without thinking about it, he plugged some of the cables for the other building into one switch, and some into the other.

Both sets of cables ran to the other building, and then into another Netgear unmanaged switch. (There were multiple cables primarily for redundancy.)

So naturally the next day the network just starts going wild. He's tied a gigabit-size loop into the network, and the unmanaged switches are helpfully forwarding traffic back and forth to eachother, even though they're really not supposed to do that.

He's totally stumped. I get called in, sit down for a few minutes with tcpdump, and watch the traffic for a few devices on the network. Didn't take very long before I had a rough idea of what had happened, opened up the network cabinet, and found the misplaced connections.

So much for Cisco courses!

CCIE is the only cert that is a sure thing. If someone has it you know they're good.

Anyone care to let me know why I got down-voted? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Career_Certifications#Cis...

would be nice specially if internet access there is also super fast, so any network guru can just go there and still be able to administer remotely whatever he/she is administering before. :)

but any serious work related to network can probably last more than a few months. perhaps a sabbatical leave will do. :)

An overwhelming response, thanks for reaching out. I'll get back to your emails in the next 24 hrs but to answer the most common questions: - I'm expecting this to be ~1 week long trip. Spend some time checking out what we have, make some recommendations and have some fun.

you might want to post this on NANOG/SANOG mailing lists.

I'm guessing the signal to noise ratio of posting there would be overwhelming and defeat the purpose...

The power of HN is that you have many resources to call on at once. Might it be a better idea to troubleshoot using the knowledge and tools available to you through the people on HN?

And 'greener' to boot.

If that matters to you anyway (and it probably should), then flying in people just to troubleshoot your network seems a bit excessive.

Other than physical cabling and things like that this seems to be one job where you could do most if not all of the work remotely anyway (hard to tell without a lot more background info).

I would have guessed the opposite. It depends on what you are walking in to.

These are some pics from a hotel LAN at a place in Tortola I was at about this time last year: http://www.karas.net/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=2505 Not dissimilar to the OP case here, they were having "network issues" (this was not the reason for my business there, it became a side project), and their LAN was the result of someone who knew some fundamentals but was not a network guy by any means. I could tell more from 30 seconds of looking at this stuff than what they could ever describe to me (even if they had sent pictures).

A network that spans an 18 acre campus could vary from simple to mildly complex. The terrain and budget could suggest that alternative technologies might be more appropriate (PtP Wifi, Mesh, etc.) for some of the links being served by the fiber. Perhaps there are aspects of the fiber install that would indicate future potential failures and/or inabilities to recover from those failures.

A savvy network guy could assess and communicate this, but if they HAD a savvy network guy, this whole thread would have never existed.

So, IMO, an in-person trip is probably the most resourceful way to handle this. My guess would be a 3-4 day initial session, from which some recommendations could be made. After that it could be determined if they have the time/skills to implement the recommendations, or if the implementation should also be outsourced as well.

Good points, a 'guru' on the spot can save (a lot) of time.

I've had to do some remote debugging of trouble and I found that it is quite taxing to 'talk someone through' the steps but eventually it did work.

It probably depends on how 'hands on' the issues are, if they're configuration issues or so then remote is probably ok, if they're related to physical stuff then onsite is probably much better.

The question is - can a network guru leave whatever company he is working at for a few months, and then come back with no problems?

Sometimes; generally not, though. I'd love to come down, but I'll be somewhat busy.

I doubt they need a couple months of work? It sounds more like a week or so to get them pointed in the right direction.

My thoughts exactly.

Why would the requested project take a couple of months? It sounded like a week or two at most, which makes it a "free" vacation.

Doesn't the fossil fuel energy cost of the flight overwhelm any energy savings from living on renewables?

They won't probably fly you alone and not in an executive jet.

This is probably getting off topic, but I think that many times the concept of "green" energy is more about reduced footprint vs. zero or negative footprint.

The impact of the plane ride may take a very long time of renewable living to offset. Some things in life are unavoidable, but the net impact of plane+renewable is still going to be less than plane+standard/disposable lifestyle.