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Why I am Here Before You Tonight
I am self-taught; had little mentoring.
My history in system administration.
- Started administering 3 machines.
- Soon was responsible for a very small network of roughly 6 test machines. (Only 1 important.)
- Worked on project where I administered 3 critical servers and assisted in the administration of 4 small networks with several very important machines.
- Now partly responsible for a medium-sized network, roughly 24 servers are important, half of which are critical.
Notes:
I. Why I Am Here Before You Tonight
A. I am self-taught; I had little mentoring
i. Thus, I had not even heard of SNMP until late in my career.
B. My history in system administration.
i. Started my career administering a mere three Sun Solaris workstations.
a) Not even servers – just workstations.
b) There were no networking concerns.
ii. Then I moved up to administering a very small network of roughly six test machines.
a) Only one was of any importance: the DNS (Domain Name Service) and remote access server.
b) Still very manageable through manual labor.
iii. In 2000, I was put on a project where I administered three critical servers and assisted in the administration of four small networks with several very important servers.
a) I managed those servers with simple scripts, but it was still a pretty manual process of checking on them to see how they were doing.
b) If I had to have administered the four networks, it could not have been done manually. The four networks used SNMP, but I never got the chance to learn it since I was not responsible for that part.
That's not to say that I ignored everything that was not my responsibility. Indeed, I gained more responsibility to the point where I was primarily responsible for the Cisco networking equipment. This is where I really learned the bulk of my (meager) networking knowledge.
Surprisingly, even as I was learning on the Cisco equipment, I still didn't get my feet wet in SNMP, even though it was installed on them. I was just never shown it.
iv. Now, I'm responsible for a medium-sized network.
a) Roughly one-third of the machines are important, and one-tenth are critical enough to need some kind of monitoring on a 24 hour/day, 7 days a week basis.
b) Now that I knew SNMP existed, and how it could help me manage a number of important devices, I decided to start learning about it.
c) That's why I volunteered to do this talk – to share what I've learned in the past month since starting to study SNMP.
d) Obviously, this is an introductory talk, as I am no where near being an expert in it.