Daily Activities on Routing and Switching

[ajay kondapalli]

Hi Experts,

Iam curious to know about :  What are the routine activities Network administrators do on switches and routers.

We donot carry designing or  configuration part daily, so what kind of operations we do being a network engineer or admin?

What kind of problems we face daily ?

Need info,

Thanks in advance .

Ajay

[Ganesh Hariharan]

Hi Experts,
Iam curious to know about :  What are the routine activities Network administrators do on switches and routers.
We donot carry designing or  configuration part daily, so what kind of operations we do being a network engineer or admin?
What kind of problems we face daily ?

Need info,
Thanks in advance .
Ajay

Hi Ajay,

It depends on the network which you are supporting,Once a switch or router is configured is under support structure so not a major activities used to be done in routers and switches as daily checks.

Physical verification of pwer and other led are working and logs are been monitoried which are usally goes to syslog for further analysis and as well as by login into switch administrator used to check the show logging of the latest logs been genrated on switch or routers and if any WAN links are been coonfigured on routers link montoring of the also been done.

So if you as daily check proper back should have been done and any system or critical logs are been genrated needs to be check .

Hope to help !!

Ganesh.H

Remember to rate the helpful post

[ajay kondapalli]

Thanks for reply,

So we need to monitor our WAN links if any and check syslogs and others if there is something wrong. Thats it ?

[Jon Marshall]

Ajay

What are the routine activities Network administrators do on switches and routers.

Leave them alone and let them just get on with what they were designed to do

Seriously, if you have configured logging and or SNMP then you generally do not need to do anything on a day to day basis. Switches and routers fairly reliable so if it isn't broke then just leabe well alone.

Jon

[hobbe]

Well this is my view of the question at hand.

First: it all depends on the type of network and the type of organisation the network resides in, however there are some things you can consider quite universal.

Daily:

Monitoring equipment for hardware/software faliure.

Monitoring syslogs and SNMP for anomailies.

Monitor that you have no unexpected problems such as failovers and such that might not be a problem now, but can turn into a problem.

Creating a baseline and checking for breaches of that baseline.

Monitoring for plan ahead ie check that you are not growing out of your network environment

All of the above is done in a networking monitor station.

One that I personally like is solarwinds orion.

Others are OP5 or Nagios or Tivoli or HP Openview.

"Regularly"

Change passwords

Test/Upgrade software for the devices in the network.

Test firewalls/routers/Switches access-list (nmap/netcat)

Sniff network for knowledge of traffic patterns and anomalies.

This is what I consider good things to keep in mind on any network.

HTH

[rtjensen4]

The big things I do:

• Daily Syslog check, but not from the devices themselves. I use CiscoWorks to collect all my logs and i just pull a daily report and look for anything odd.
• Monitor WAN links and switch uplinks via management plaftorm, Orion, What's UP, Tivoli etc- Daily
  
• General Administration, 1 or 2 times a week on a busy week.
  
  • Activating / deactivating ports
  • Changing VLAN assignments
• Troubleshooting
  • configuring monitor sessions for packet sniffing
• Testing
  • Idealy done in a Lab environment, but that's not always available.

Other than those things, the stuff just works.

[Elisha]

Hi Ajay,

Routine activities include

1. Check for throttling links or links that are maxing in a network

2. Check for optical power levels between links, between ports 

3. Check for CRC errors on ports 

4.You may need to know the latest patch or softwares from the vendor so you organize for upgrades

5. Check uptime for all nodes , this should be automated and the tool should send you a list everyday

6.Run security cron jobs quarterly to check if all nodes comply to the latest security threats or measures

6.Look out for junk configurations and clean them all

7.Do daily checks on temperature, fan speed, etc, a big network you should add a tool to automate this process.