Current Events > It's kinda interesting being a company's first on-staff network engineer

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like... Clearly, they had a consultant come in before me to handle complex stuff and they relied heavily on vendors for support. They used to use 100% Meraki equipment because it's super simple to manage and deploy.

When they interviewed me, my boss and I agreed that we should get "the good shit" for the new corporate office. The good shit being traditional Cisco routers and switches managed primarily via command line as opposed to a GUI.

They're working on bringing me on as a full time employee now, but they don't really have much of a choice. They need someone on hand to manage this network whether it's me or someone else. Might as well be me since I built it.
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Might I ask, what is it about command line that makes it so much better to use, in your opinion?
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legolas0008 posted...

Might I ask, what is it about command line that makes it so much better to use, in your opinion?

They never program the GUI to do everything.

For instance, I just finished adding a new port type into a server's firewall through command line. The server's GUI doesn't give you the option to do that. Only to modify the existing port types.

Also @CableZL make sure you google average salary ranges in your area for your job title to make sure they are paying you enough. It's a "new" position for them so they might not be up to date on what is considered average for that position.
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legolas0008 posted...

Might I ask, what is it about command line that makes it so much better to use, in your opinion?

1) You have a lot more control over how the device functions
2) You have a lot more visibility into the device itself
3) Changes take effect immediately

Meraki is 99% cloud managed GUI with a limited local management GUI for initial configuration. Most things are just done "the Meraki way." Meraki was bought by Cisco some years ago, but there are a number of things that Meraki hasn't caught up on.

Some examples:

Making changes.
- With Meraki, if you want to make a change, you have to log onto the GUI, make the change, then wait for the cloud to push the change down to the device. This can take about 30 seconds depending on connection speeds and what you're changing.
- With traditional Cisco gear, if you make a change, the change is implemented as soon as you press the enter key.

Like if I want to shut down a port:
Meraki: 1) Log onto web site 2) Select port I want to shut down 3) Click the button to shut it down 4) wait for the port to actually shut down.
- Works fine, but you gotta wait for the change to take effect, and there are some occasions where the cloud GUI doesn't accurately represent the fact that the port is shut down or turned back on for over an hour.

Traditional Cisco: Log into the device 2) Type the command to go into global config mode 3) Type the command to go into interface config mode 4) type the command to shut down the port
- As soon as you press enter on step 4, the port is shut down immediately.

The immediate response makes troubleshooting go much more smoothly because the device is doing what you tell it to do 100% of the time immediately. The more you have waiting periods in the troubleshooting process, the bigger a pain it is.

With Meraki, I can only run rapid spanning tree protocol. With traditional Cisco, I can choose to run traditional spanning-tree, rapid per-vlan spanning tree, or multiple spanning-tree.

With Meraki, I can't do most routing protocols. The only option is OSPF. With traditional Cisco, I can do BGP, EIGRP, OSPF, RIP, or IS-IS, OSPFv3, etc.

With Meraki, I can't see a lot of system stats like CPU usage, what process is using up CPU, CPU usage history, etc. With traditional Cisco, I can see a graphical representation of historical CPU usage represented in 3 different ways, CPU usage per process, and even sort CPU usage per process from high to low, and I have the ability to exclude processes that are taking up 0.00% of the CPU, or exclude any line of output based on whatever filtering I want.
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BlazinBlue88 posted...

Also @CableZL make sure you google average salary ranges in your area for your job title to make sure they are paying you enough. It's a "new" position for them so they might not be up to date on what is considered average for that position.

Yeah, I'm definitely planning to do that. I've gone well over my base hourly pay because of all the overtime I worked last year, so that's extra leverage, too.
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