With another Christmas right around the corner many network shops are getting ready for the Christmas break. This can mean one of two things for you as a network engineer. Either lots of work with everyone off, or little work and lots of on-call. Either way, as a network engineer our job doesn’t really take a vacation.
New Toys for Christmas
Many shops over the upcoming Christmas break take this opportunity to do upgrades, maintenance or testing on the network that would otherwise impact production systems. This can mean:
- Hardware Upgrades
- Architecture Changes
- VoIP Installs
- Failover Testing
- Performance Testing
- Cable Cleanup
- ..and more
It sucks to have to work over the Christmas break, but these are the times you get play with the new toys and make improvements to the network you have been putting off for a long time. Also may mean you get to play with some cool new technologies and learn some new stuff!
A Long Winters Nap
Depending on your company Christmas time may be a time when things are shutdown to a minimum leaving only automated systems running. Most likely the accounting department is still working closing out the year end books so some lights have to be left on.
If this is your situation than you need to be thinking about your NMS systems and making sure the network is being monitored effectively so if anything does happen you will be aware of it and can fix it quick. Double checking your remote access, VPN access, paging, bandwidth usage, etc will ensure you get a good nights rest (with you pager by your night stand of course)
What are you doing to prepare for the Christmas holiday? Leave a comment below and let us know what you are up to over the next couple of weeks!
One Response
hi bro…
thanks for your post