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Ask Slashdot: Designing a Telecom Configuration Center?
First time accepted submitter Big Jim Taters (1490261) writes "I have been tasked with helping move our config center from one location to our Headquarters. I have a small budget and no choice in location. I do, however, have an opportunity to design the space fresh (well, kinda.) What we will be configuring is routers, switches, firewalls, and other telecom related devices. What I cannot find is any "Best Practices" or "Lessons Learned" out there. So I ask you fine folks: What are some of the best and worst designs, practices, procedures, and work flows that you have encountered in sitting down to stage anywhere from 2 to 200 devices at once to get configured?"
Either you padded your resume or your boss is dumb. Either way, you're taking a job away from one of the many qualified engineers who could succeed in this task.
You're seriously starting from scratch? Oh man... wish I could do that.
Lets see... #1 thing... when I started way-back-when, we had this giant display board that would show alarms on equipment. It looked neat, and made us look fancy. Don't do that... It was useless to those of us fixing stuff. The only people that looked at it were executives. Every hour or two some VP would come running over "Why is NewYork blinking red?!?!?!" "Because the gateways is down." "Is that bad?!?!" yada yada
Setup a wiki... make sure everyone has permissions to edit it. Make sure you have procedures in place for how and when to edit it.
I don't know what equipment you're using, but if you have a choice, try and go to a monoculture of one manufacturer if you can. We had a huge mess of every type of device you could imagine from every company on earth. Over in California we had 3 Juniper routers. Every time something "strange" happened with those we had to call the "Juniper guy" You should all be experts in everything you have and the easiest way to do that is to go with one vendor. It makes it easier to hire for. "We're a Cisco shop" or "We're a Juniper shop" whatever... That's up to you and how talented the people your managements willing to pay for. If they only will hire people green out of techschool like my old boss was, then this is likely a good idea.
Setup a centralized on-call list that charts whos responsible for what. One of the worst things that can happen during an outage is that you're screwing around calling Bob to get Toms number, because he has to change the firewall to let Tim into the device he needs to fix. This goes all the way down to your facilities people. I had an outage once that we couldn't address because the basement of the building was flooded and no-one knew who to call to get the pipes fixed.
Is everything you do software? Or will you be handing the equipment as well? Everything I did was via-remote. I rarely actually touched equipment, we had field techs for that. But my buddy that does the same job I did, now has a job where he actually unboxes the equipment and installs it personally. If you're going to do that I'd recomend a good printer, cable labeling templates... practice using both. TOOLS! Specifically "Easyouts" for stripped screws. A Small hammer. Hand-screw-drivers. Wire snips, etc...
Along those same lines, a benchtop with every type of OS that will pass through your stuff. We had Every version of Windows, MACs, Linux, etc... usually these were just to prove the vendor wrong... We'd submit a ticket for a bug and they'd say "Oh, that only happens with a MAC!!!" so we'd test it out "No it doesn't" etc...
I'm not sure if I got overly basic with you there, but that's how we did it.
For actually configuring devices, we'd have one of the leads write a script and then foist it off on "the new guy" to put it on every device. It's been about 5yrs since I've done a config though so things might not be as simple with all the modern GUI stuff.
and I like to get paid for my work. I expect most of my peers feel similar. So as unhelpful as you may find this, hire someone who's done it before, and ask them nicely to let you tag along and learn. Then you can become one of the professionals.
The above statement may sound condescending, but it's not meant that way. It takes years to learn the stuff you're asking, and differentiates the juniors from the seniors. Asking the seniors to train you for free isn't likely to be that well received by most of us.