My first step into networking was right around 2000 and being on-call for my company with about 120 locations connected with fractional 56k frame relay circuits. I would follow our flow chart to navigate through the Ascend Pipeline routers to perform the pings and other troubleshooting steps. Then, because the real networking guys were too busy, I was allowed to configure Cisco 1900 switches that were replacing our Hubstacks. Tabbing through the config and making changes to things I didn't know anything about like DNS, SNMP community, subnet masks, gateways, and changing the port duplex. Fast forward about a year and I was given my first real networking experience....driving around to our now 150+ locations to upgrade our circuits from fractional 56k frame relay to T1 or fractional T1 lines. I had the highly technical job of swapping out the WIC in our routers and changing the configs. Again, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had the config changes on a USB drive! What's a DLCI? What the heck are time slots? I especially remember being about 100 miles from our headquarters and discovering that the router required a v.35 cable and I wasn't given one. My co-worker at the main location asked if I could just run to the local Radio Shack and pick one up! Fast forward about 6 months and my co-worker throws 2 Aironet 340s on my desk and says "the boss wants to see if these work. I'm too busy for this. It's supposed to be some sort of wireless connection, but they only connect at 11 megs...I'm not wasting my time on that!" I would spend the next few years manually configuring and managing the wireless for my company - We started with WEP keys that the boss wanted to be different for each office, so we used a 40/64-bit key that was actually the phone number for each location! Unbeknownst to the boss, I anticipated a need for users to connect in different offices and built-in a 2nd 128-bit key that was the same for each office. And of course we were totally safe because we turned off broadcasting! Back then we required all users to purchase a Cisco 350 card, so I also had to create an install disc for each office - each tech had a copy for their offices so they could just run the disc to install the drivers and settings for that office. Should a user need to connect at a different office we could walk them through changing to WEP key 2. Each WAP was configured with a static IP and eventually, we had to set the channels manually. I remember many times troubleshooting wireless problems where users ended up just bouncing back and forth between WAPs....so I had to manually change the channels and occasionally adjust the transmit power on the WAPs. WAPs were installed in the cubicle areas of our branch locations and coverage was "best effort." There was no heat map software back then, and all firmware was upgraded manually. I don't even want to remember the amount of time that was spent converting from VXworks to IOS. I spent many, many hours maintaining this network. Somewhere along the line we eventually got Cisco WLSE - as bad as it was, it saved me many hours of upgrading firmware on the close to 400 350/1200/1100 access points we had deployed. Eventually, we transitioned to LEAP.....and then to PEAP....along with ditching the Cisco card requirement and using Active Directory to push out wireless settings to our clients. Of course, wireless took off and went from a luxury to a requirement. While trying to get everything right-sized and fully covered, we ditched Cisco products for another vendor that offered wireless controllers and made it much easier to manage and deploy. We eventually made it up to over 1000 access points in over 230 locations. All of that wireless was daunting enough, but we were also manually managing Cisco switches in each location - probably close to 500 in total. All of that ran its course and after almost 10 years we made the switch to Meraki. We now have a nice dashboard to manage our 980 access points and 475 switches....life is a lot easier now! It's amazing to think we've been using wireless for just about 20 years! ** sorry for the trip down memory lane...was digging through some old backup files and found my wireless folder!
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