First day at Cisco! .|.|.|.

Okay, so today was totally my first day at Cisco and it was rocking awesome =)

I started out waking up around 7:45 and got ready and showered, shaved and did the usual stuff. Dave then came by around 8:20 to give me a ride to my first stop, building 9. I was ready and we left the house around 8:30.

I arrived pretty early, around 8:40 to building 9 (the building I have to go to, to get my security badge and everything) and had to wait in the lobby until around 9:00. By 9, two other people showed up to get badges as well. At 9, we were all invited back to the security office, and at this time I began talking to the one woman who showed up as well. She was a nice woman of Asian decent and we were talking about Cisco and our experiences. By the time we were done getting our badges she had offered to give me a ride to the building I would be working in, building K (Thank god she did, because it was at least 1/4 mile walk to the light rail that would take me there). Any way, she drove me to building K. As I entered the building I talked to the front desk ambassador who phoned my manager to come down and get me.

A few moments later, Scott House, my direct boss showed up and began giving me the tour. He showed me the fellow interns I would be working with (all a great group of students =]) and then gave me a tour of the CALO (Customer Advocacy Lab Operations) Lab. This lab is HUGE. Words cannot describe it, nor can the pictures above describe it, but basically it is 12 or 13 rows deep of computer equipment and each row has 27 racks that can fit up to 40 some devices (that is a lot of equipment!)

After the tour of all the technical stuff, Scott showed me the Cafeteria in building J (adjacent to K [obviously]). The caf is very nice and is pretty cheap too!

After all the tours and what not, Scott took me back to building K to the CALO area to get acquainted with my work and the other interns. I was given an IBM Lenovo Thinkpad T61, and a Cisco IP Phone 7970 (Google them!). I also was given my passwords to log into all of my accounts and what not (there are like millions of accounts!) and they did not all come through as nicely as they should have... I am still waiting for my access to subscribe to my free light rail passes...

As the day went on, I wheeled a cart of cisco switches and 2800 series routers (pictured above) to my desk to re-familiarize myself with Cisco IOS (Cisco's operating system [Internetwork Operating System]) and various commands and what not. This went well, and I was able to interconnect three 2800 series routers over a serial T1 link, a switch over a FastEthernet link, and finally a workstation attached to the switch!

I also got some experience going into the lab and looking around at equipment and assisting my friend Jesse out with some of his cases, which brings me to my next point... cases. Basically in the CALO program, we interns exist to assist and help out the Cisco TAC engineers (the people responsible for troubleshooting the large corporations that have contracts with Cisco [Wachovia, American Express, Microsoft, various smaller companies, etc]). The engineers request us, via an online case system, to configure and piece together devices that would replicate the scenario a corporate customer would be using. So in other words, if Wachovia Bank was having an issue with their network, they would call their dedicated TAC engineer at Cisco and tell them the problem. The TAC engineer would then request a CALO intern to setup the scenario in the lab to replicate the scheme in place at Wachovia. The TAC engineer would then use this to assist in solving Wachovias problem!

It was a long day, that's all that needs to be said. I returned home via light rail around 6:30 or so, ate dinner and here I am writing this blog! If you have any questions, please feel free to comment and let me know! I will be adding pictures above!

Thanks for following and stay tuned!

-Nick