Who, me? Techie with three months’ experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up
An IT worker with only three months' experience recounted, in The Register's "Who, Me?" column, being sent as the designated "Cisco expert" to install a switch for a customer running Nortel equipment, despite having no real expertise in either system. Confident after completing the rack installation, basic configuration and requested VLANs, he left the client's team to discover shortly afterwards that his new switch had caused over 4,000 AS/400 sessions to drop, forcing the client's IT staff to manually kill and restart each one.
A post-mortem traced the fault to the new switch's spanning-tree settings, which disrupted the SNA-over-TCP/IP emulation linking hosts to the mainframe, a setup with zero tolerance for dropped packets. The author, writing under the pseudonym "Martin," said he was mortified at repaying the client's hospitality with an hour of chaos, but reflected that the real fault lay with his employer for labelling a junior engineer "the expert" and sending him unsupervised to a major client. He kept his job, but said the experience taught him valuable lessons.
- Novice engineer wrongly billed as "Cisco expert" broke a client's network
- New switch's spanning-tree settings dropped over 4,000 AS/400 sessions
- Author blames his employer for sending an unsupervised junior engineer
New here? Start with this
Cisco and Nortel are companies that make networking equipment, including switches, which direct data around computer networks. AS/400 is an IBM computer system used by some organisations for important business tasks; SNA is a way for computer systems to communicate, and it can be carried over an internet-style network connection.
In this account, a new switch disrupted the connection between the customer’s network and its AS/400 system. Thousands of active sessions were lost, and staff had to restart them manually. The story also raises a broader question about how employers train and supervise junior staff when assigning them work for major clients.