Just finished another week of Cisco classes and on this sunny saturday we've been practicing the design of a middle sized network that employed around 16.000 machines working all together.
For me, as a network administrator, it's a very dazzling experience to work with these numbers of machines and imagine them all connected.
These guys can handle thousands and even millions of client machines and to think about the scale of such thing being possible is one of the things that I like the most about network engineering and makes it so attractive.
I've been really enjoying these last few weeks because the more I learn about the networks, the more I understand how I actually knew very little about them even after spending the past five years actively working on the administration of a LAN.
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And if I stay dazzled with the current level of work that we are reaching, then what should I expect for the next months?
Because to be honest, each new design or troubleshoot exercise can sometimes take hours to complete and it's a very exhausting mental process to get everything working together as expected.
On the first level where only LAN's were mentioned I felt how CISCO was really serious about networking and quickly made the difficulty level quite demanding to succeed on their proposed tasks.
It's funny because looking back to those tought tasks of the first level - now they almost seem like kids play compared to what we've been doing for the last few days and leaves me with some concern regarding what to expect in upcoming levels 3 and 4 of the CCNA.
The interest is not in finishing this course as quick as possible but rather learn as much as possible, it's amazing to see how so many network concepts were so well designed that survived for over 40 years and treat the past and future tecnologies with the same pragmatism.
Learning more about networks at this precise moment means an investment for the next 40 years were many of the concepts we see available today will still be there in the future decades simply because their design was built to resist time - amazing achievement if we consider that computers evolved so much in the same time period.
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I was a bit tired after spending all day talking about networks but I guess that there's always a bit more of energy to dream on the possibilities.
:)
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