Hello everyone,
It’s been a while now and nice getting back to you guys.
Something never seizes to amaze me when it comes to IT, especially networking.
One of our clients, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has relocated
from its UN Drive, Mamba Point office to the Pan African Plaza building, formal
United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) Headquarters in Sinkor, Tubman
Boulevard. Our task was to create a new Local Area Network (LAN) and terminate all
ends in a mounted rack in the server room, transfer and setup all IT equipment
including security cameras to function.
The client already had an initial internet service provider therefore,
connecting all devices back to same network would have a plug and play setup.
Instead, they decided to get connected to another UN agency. Out of 15 LAN
ports the new provider offered to connect 6 users which include a network
printer and a file sharing server. I entered the server room of their provider
and saw a lots of huge Cisco devices; I mean latest Core routers, switches HP
& DELL blade servers all mounted in a freezing environment. This was so
amazing, getting a glance at them. I have always wished to work in an environment
and on live devices as well and that’s going to be soon. The customer provided us with a 24 - port Net-Gear switch which was being used at their old office to
connect to their provider, the UN agency, but they condemned the equipment that it
was far way below the UN standards. They preferred a Cisco Meraki MS 225-24P HW
(PoE Managed Switch) which cannot be found locally and would take up to a week
to be delivered if ordered. We left with the option of connecting to the 6
available ports given.
All four users were connected to a real-time high speed
internet connection via a Cisco Meraki MS 225-24P HW switch except for the
network printer and the file sharing server. To connect the printer and
server, I had to get a static IP from the IT officers. All the printers are on a
different Virtual Local Area Network
(VLAN) therefore an IP must be given
from the VLAN range. It took us nearly a week from one floor to another in
getting the information from these guys until finally that morning they were
able to generate two static IPs addresses for our client, JICA. I started by
configuring the addresses into the printer. After several re boots, the printer
could not be accessible on the network. Than I compared the subnet mask given to me by the IT officer with that of the one I gathered via windows command interface, I
noticed the guy had made a mistake by giving me a slash /24 small network eg
(255.255.255.0) network instead of slash /27 eg 255.255.254.0 medium and large
networks. Rectifying this issue had the printer hooked up to the network as
well as the mini server. As of now, our client has upgraded to a more big and
high-speed internet. I am glad to have a hand on these equipment as I am also
preparing for my Official CISCO Certifications Exams (CCNA) coming up soon!
Daniel Collins
