Summer Internship

This past Monday I started a summer internship at a local Internet Service Provider. So far the experience has been great and I have learned pretty much, it is no Google but I love the oppurtunity it has given me so far. I have to send an email to my advisor weekly about what I have been up to so those will most likely be posted up here every chance I get. I also plan on uploading any notes I take while working in the notes section so if you would like some random networking resources or basic Cisco ISP grade info that might be something to keep an I on. Instead of making two posts I am just going to include week ones post here.

Monday – Went on site with a field tech, Chris, to South Mountain, one of PTDs nodes located in Bethlehem. I helped install a Google Cache server. Entire procedure took around 1 hour to complete. The most impressive part of all this was that 0 network loss occurred. I finished up the day by starting some paperwork for my internship and finalizing my schedule and other miscellaneous items.

Tuesday – Read some articles in Backbone Engineering’s Knowledge Base to try and catch up to speed on some of the things PTD does, especially Backbone Engineering, Network Control Center (NCC), and the Field Tech departments do. As well, as finished up a lot of the paperwork that needed to be completed since PTD saw my move from my old job at a store of theirs to the Backbone Engineering department as a transfer.

Wednesday – Went out on the road again with 2 field techs, Russ and Ed. Started the day off at WB3 another one of PTD’s nodes, this one, as the name hints at, is located in Wilkes Barre. I helped install a Cisco ASR 1802-X which to my knowledge was a node upgrade and helped increase the speed of the network. After this we went to Stroudsburg to replace a failing hard drive in a DNS server raid at one of their datacenters there. Again both of these procedures caused no network outages, which blows my mind. After arriving back from the trip I went back to the Backbone Engineering office. Here I was briefed on what a Cisco ONS 15454 is and what parts it consists of. In case you are wondering, it pretty much is a giant switch that connects two ISP nodes together. After learning about it I was sent to PTDs development lab with one of the senior techs, Terry, to show me where all the parts were located.

Thursday – To start the day I went back to the development lab with Terry. He and I built a Cisco ONS 15454 together but after that one he pretty much left me alone and I continued to build 4 more. The ONS 15454s I was building were bare bones and only included the parts every deployment needed. Each machine needed two power supplies, an LCD screen, a management card, and two port cards all of which needed to be installed. This took about 5 and a half hours. The rest of the day was spent inventorying wireless APs and switches that would later be used in deployments.

Friday – I was told Thursday before leaving the office that I would be spending the day with Russ the field tech from Wednesday. However, I was not told what we would be doing or where we were going. It turns out we were going on a 3-hour trip (one way) to Wellsboro PA, which if you are wondering is about 30 minutes north of Williamsport. After the incredibly long car ride we arrived at a commercial location that was not owned by PTD. Here we were tasked with installing a commercial grade router. This only took about an hour and a half and like the other install jobs went smoothly. After the install we hopped back in the car and headed back to Palmerton. By the end of the day I had spent 6 and a half hours in the car and only did about an hour and a half of work, not a bad