So you're wondering... What does he do at Cisco...? Well, I will tell you!

Ok...

So everyone has been asking me... "What do you do at Cisco??" Well, I will tell you! 

Ok, so basically Cisco has contrats (be it large or small) with literally thousands of companies across the world... you name a country and Cisco has a contract with at least a few companies within that country. 

Anyway, as we all know, computers and other sophisticated electronics don't work forever. In fact some just never work. Well, my job is to help fix them when they break (from across the world!). 

In other words, let's say we have a fictitious company in Sri Lanka, and all of a sudden this company can no longer get out to the internet... It just stops working. Well this company will call its Cisco TAC Engineer and tell him or her of the problem. The engineer will then create a case and ask the CALO Engineers (me =]) to rebuild a replica of the customer's network, in our local LAB (pictured in the posts below). It is then my duty to find the equipment necessary, and connect all the pieces together and configure them so they can talk with one another. Believe me, It can get quite complex. 

Here is an example case that I received yesterday. It is not entirely too complicated, but you will get the point. (WARNING - This section is for techies only! others will probably get confused and just roll their eyes!)

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a 7600 with two sup720s or rsp720s  running c7600rsp72043-advipservicesk9-mz.122-33.SRC

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So that's an example case that a client would need a Cisco 7600 series chassis with two supervisor 720 cards installed running c7600rsp72043-advipservicesk9-mz.122-33.SRC << that version of the Cisco IOS operating system. 

Here is another one:

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I need an me3400 with Version 12.2(46)SE of code.  Can I get an IXIA port connected to the gi0/1 as well.  Thanks,  Jeff  ********************

So this guys is basically asking for a Cisco MetroEthernet switch (just like a normal switch really) and he needs it connected to an IXIA, which is a traffic generator (it simulates hundres of computers or devices on a network)

So, I would basically recive this case in my case manager and inbox and then go about solving this for the TAC Engineer. Sometimes its really hard to find the parts and they must be borrowed from other departments or what not, but most of the time its just a matter of getting the equipment hooked up and talking to the world. 

Sometimes, it doesn't go so easily though. Yesterday, I was assigned a case, the first one I posted above and the requester asked for two supervisor cards to be intalled (supervisor cards are basically the motherboard of the device). I did this, however, one of the internal components of one of the cards was different than the other, and when you are using two supervisor cards together (for redundancy in this case) they MUST both be EXACTLY the same or the chassis will crash. Well they were different and the chassis kept crashing. Eventually I was able to get it online and operational but it was still a headache!

Anyway, I also help clean the lab and perform maintenance on the devices and racks in the lab, and I also install new equipment and remove old equipment from the lab. It's a great job though, I love it. 

So thats it for this post, hope you learned some, and had some of your questions answered... probably not though =). but I am off to San Francisco tonight with my roommate and Nick. I will hopefully have some pictures and will upload then either tonight or tomorrow...... or later.

Thanks for following,

-Nick