NOC Personel Question (Possibly OT)

Thu Mar 15 21:49:20 UTC 2007

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Stephen Satchell wrote:
> Gadi Evron wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, I have a friend who used managed to get "Not A Janitor" on his
> > business card.
> 
> My all-time favorite business card was one from Autodesk from the chief 
> financial officer, who appeared to be a real Niven fan:
> 
>    Speaker to Bankers
> 

Unless he was an Orson Scott Card fan and then this means something else
entirely. :)

I must admit, the is the most "family" thread I have seen on NANOG in a
long time.

Back on topic though, what do you find to be the three top time consuming
issues with a NOC, and how does a NOC help you solve these issues?

As an example on my burrowed joke from earlier on 'reboot moneky', the
ability to call the NOC and ask someone to reboot a machine saves a ton of
time and the NOC engineers learn a lot by helping along, as part of a
process to becoming fully fledged "snobs" like the rest of us.

It may be a joke to me, but as I mentioned, I got my behind kicked by a
nice girl. Where would we be without our NOCs?

Some things the NOC used to help us with quite lot, that were not directly
related to their obvious job description:

1. Reboots (as specified earlier).
2. Getting files on and off machines (via email to the NOC?)
3. Installing machines.

Meaning, tasks which either take a lot of time or make us go down three
floors to do ourselves.

Some innovations such as remote KVM (whether over IP or not) and later on
USB controls over remote KVM really helped along when they showed up, and
made that "broken phone" work much better as we could do things on our own
again (this is of course assuming folks don't just "telnet" to machines
which may be on completely different networks).

So, aside to monitoring, assisting and high-end tech support (not
necessarily to customers) what are the top things your NOC does for you,
and what did these things used t be 3 years ago?

Do you see any of these things as possible to automate or solve in a
technological fashion?

I figure if we all have different titles, we may use our NOCs for
different purposes and see different needs, and I wonder where that middle
ground between all of us is.

	Gadi.

--
"beepbeep it, i leave work, stop reading sec lists and im still hearing
gadi"
- HD Moore to Gadi Evron on IM, on Gadi's interview on npr, March 2007.