Advice - New Network Admin

Hi All,

First let me say, I love this site! I have never found such a wealth of information in one place!

on to business..lol. I have been in the IT world for about 10 years and in networking for at least half of that. I have been a network analyst as well as a network administrator but never managed my own WAN. I recently was offered a position in a company where the network is in need of a complete overhaul. its slow and inefficient. I will be in charge of redoing it all. I am a little overwhelmed with being given this task. I guess I am just looking for some pointers as to how to approach being given a clean slate. I have never really desinged my own WAN. I have done a LAN and managed internal routers, but have never been tasked with doing a frame or any sort of WAN.

I am up for any advice that you guys can come up with!

TIA,
M

hey.
I think you should give more details, like - what equipment you have, what tech u use (frame,cell,packet...), how vast is the network etc. :roll:

thanks for your reply. I think more or less i am looking for a broad answer. how long time network admins would approach a situation like this in regards to examining a network to try to overhaul. i am not really looking for specifics on devices or configs, yet..lol.

i am looking at basically a hub office with several remote offices, some more than several states away. trying to figure out how to really dive into this at the beginning.

thanks

Heya,

You may want to look at what you want to achieve out of a new WAN network. Also what kinda bw each site is doing, inter site connectivity, location/ centralization of servers etc... Would an MPLS network prove benefical for you??? HUB and spoke or any - any site connectivity.. These are some starting pointers.

Some more info would bne useful.

IP-bod

Congratulations on your promotion. The following refernces may come in handy if you have Cisco devices. They cover Cisco WAN technology-options, configs and troubleshooting. There may be some used copies on Amazon.com.

CCNP 2: Remote Access Companion Guide (Cisco Networking Academy Program), 2nd Edition
www.ciscopress.com/title/1587131455#

CCNP 2: Remote Access Lab Companion (Cisco Networking Academy Program), 2nd Edition
www.ciscopress.com/title/1587131463

1.) Document everything possible. You are being given a clean slate, but you still have to transition from the mess to your design.

2.) Server consolidation. As IP-bod wrote earlier, and I agree, this will save you problems down the road. There should be servers just at the hub office, and some back-ups at an alternate location or two for survivability.

3.) Sometimes the slowness might not be from the WAN, but from how the sites are configured. Look for bad things like too many cascading hubs/switches, or router configurations like secondary IP address on interfaces, etc etc.

4.) Future growth. The design needs to last for several years, so maybe it would be a good idea to ask what happened with the company the last several years as far as growth.

5.) Ask for more than you would expect to get. Then maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised to see what they'll actually purchase.