Why do we have customers?

This is not going to be some long winded well researched post of how to provide exceptional customer service or in any way shape or form be confused with something like that.   I do high level technical support for my companies customer base.  I am the firewall, WAN, LAN, Network, Server, well know one else has a clue on what to do guy.  I like it, it keeps me busy and always needing to learn something new.  As such, I am reading, researching, or just plain interested in what is coming next, in other words I am sometimes paid to be the psychic.

I must not be that good, if I was, I would have known that one of our customers decided that it would be OK for them to attempt replacing a Cisco Pix Firewall that was at the other end of their VPN connections.  Of course, at 4AM, when the VPN would not come back up……I found out. 

<Aside>….I seem to use this forum for a lot of venting…..

I fully subscribe to the project management theory of the 6 P’s.  Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.  As well as the corollary… Failure to Plan on your Part, does not constitute an emergency on my part.

This is not to say that I fully plan and document every little step of what has to happen.  But I do plan the big steps, and try to identify those details that will have to be addressed to prevent problems.  For this project,  my plan would be.

1.  Get the current config off the old device
2. Review the config as a text file
3. Put this config on the new device, and see what needs to be “fixed”
4. Lock the configuration on the production device
5. Plan the downtime, and who needs to be notified.
6. Lock the config on the new device
7. Put the new device in place.
8. Test connections.

Pretty basic, I know the details of the IOS and how VPN’s work and who/how they are initiated.  VPN’s to this device are initiated by the other end, all this device does is listen for them, and accept.

As it turns out, the person putting the config on the new device kind of skipped steps 1 and 2.  He started on step 3, with what turned out to be an out of date configuration.  1 hour later, the VPN is up and working, and I am heading to the office on 3 hours of sleep. 

Please, learn to plan, or just tell me what you want done, and let me get you the plan.

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