(“In Case You Missed It Monday” is my chance to showcase something that I wrote and published in another venue, but is still relevant. This week’s post originally appeared on THWACK)
Just as Kevin (KMSigma) and I did for SysAdmins in the last IT Life Coach video, so we do now for the network side of the house. The whole video is posted here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5_X9h2uqs and this post is really just a summary to pique your interest. Once again, we’re skipping the common-but-not-so-useful pieces of advice and trying to focus in on specific commands, techniques, and habits that will serve you throughout your career as a network tech.
We start off with what I like to call “basic network butt-saves:” commands or techniques that could save your bacon in an emergency. Things like the “reload in” command, backing up your configurations, and making sure you always have a USB-to-console cable in your network go-bag.
We wax philosophic about the features we look for in terminal programs. And we get a little ranty about mistakes we’ve seen people make when setting up switch stacks.
Finally, we offer a piece of advice I think is relevant no matter what area of tech you choose to focus on: don’t work so hard to memorize things. Yes, I said it. “Google IT” is a thing, meaning you can always rely on the search engine of your choice to find information you know exists, even if you’re not sure where it is.