Where are my IT/Networking peeps?!?

[20X11]

145.36.4.0/22 is still a valid subnet, and any network a.b.c.0/22 is a valid CIDR address.

True,,,and 145.36.4.0 would be the next available address range above 145.36.0.0/22

[cfortune]

What type of equipment do you all work on? I was pretty heavy into Cisco. Then I started my current job and worked as a tier 2 person. We had all ProCurve gear and Palo Alto firewalls. After our network engineer quit, I was given the opportunity to move into his role. Now as soon as equipment ages off, I promptly replace it with Juniper EX series switches. We have 4 of their 40 port 10 gbps switches and probably 20 EX4200 48 port 1 gbps. If you guys haven't tried JunOS, I highly recommend it. Pretty different from Cisco or ProCurve but has some huge advantages.

In JunOS you have a candidate config you can edit and push to the running config. So you can make multiple changes and push them out. On Friday I swung our traffic to a remote site to a different circuit. Was done two minutes after my change window started, with validation. Had everything staged up. You can also rollback to any of your last 50 configs or have it rollback after x amount of time. It's a life saver when working on remote equipment. Tell it to rollback the changes after five minutes if you don't accept them. So if you drop a WAN interface or screw up a route, you wait 5 minutes and your equipment becomes reachable again. Pretty awesome stuff.

Their virtual chassis offering is awesome too. 128 gbps cables connect EX series switches to create a backplane. The switches then act as modules, or as one switch. Making interswitch redundancy a piece if cake.

Palo Alto is some pretty rad stuff too. So much you can do. Gotta love having a 16 port application layer firewall. Does NAT, SSL VPN, IPSec PTP VPN, real time AV, threat prevention, policy based routing, user identification, OSPF, BGP, RIP (lol), virtual routers, packet capturing, user activity reports, and a ton of other stuff. They're pricey though.


/geeking out

[asmo]

You have been assigned IP address 145.36.0.0/22
You need to assign the first available host address on the first available subnet to the router's E0 interface and next available host on that subnet to the HTTP server.

The question (and answer) are trivial - but the questions are also incorrect..

Which addresses should you assign?

The valid host range in that subnet is 145.36.0.1 - 145.36.3.254. So e0 is 145.36.0.1 and the server is 145.36.0.2... Easy enough

What's the subnet?

The subnet he already gave you - even though he mistakenly called it an IP address. 145.36.0.0/22

Which class is it?

Classfull routing hasn't been used in 20+ years. So the question is mu. See RFC 1519/BCP 122. When people ask that question/talk about classes I politely remind them of that and ask them when the last time they touched a network was.

As for his answer (145.36.4.1 and 145.36.4.2). That is actually the next subnet (/22) up. So by definition his answer is incorrect. I am guessing that he is under the long mistaken belief that you cant use the zero subnet (which is totally incorrect - its just a set of bits so the zero subnet is 100% valid and used throughout the internet and has been for 30+ years).

If you send me his contact info I would be happy to send him an email to explain why he is wrong. My company name, my title and the letters and numbers after my name usually get peoples attention I want it to.

[asmo]

You should have also asked him back if you could further subnet down the address space and assigned the interfaces out of a /31. When he said you can't use /31 you would know he is a moron and could call him out as such.

I don't tolerate people who believe themselves to be technically adept why spreading false information. I love crucifying those people - preferably in public or at least in a crowd of their peers.

[DeusExMachina]

True,,,and 145.36.4.0 would be the next available address range above 145.36.0.0/22

That's why I'm thinking its purposely confusing. "You have been assigned 145.36.0.0/22" "assign the next available host address on the next available subnet". That would lead to 145.36.4.1 and 2.

[Jer]

Thanks for the input everyone. It seems like at minimum I wasn't wrong with my answer based on the wording of the exercise and at most he may have even been wrong. So now the real question becomes... how to address this? As I've stated, I need to send a thank you email for the interview. I planned to CC all three of them in on it and also have individual notes for each person which they, of course, would all likely read. I thought that if I addressed this with him it would be the best way because it wouldn't come off as I'm a know-it-all and I'm just sharing a note with him which they happen to read as well. How to bring it up and how to word it?

Also, the pres asked me about Crystal Reports which I know nothing about. They were considering implementing it and waned my opinion. I wasn't going to BS them so I said that I had no personal experience with it to be able to take from. I quietly notated during the interview though and I want to be able to give him some more info as part of that email. Since being able to advise on new products moving forward is an attribute they stated they were looking for I think that a short but well thought out opinion in this same email would go a long ways. I think I've got the right audience in this thread for this portion as well so no sense starting a new thread for it. What do you know... good or bad.. that I may include to help make me look better as they make a decision?

So, who can help me with this bad boy?

[cfortune]

Don't know a thing about it.

Just looked it up on youtube and found a video of guy using it to pull data from a database. Looked like the advantage to it was being able to select predefined fields, making the end user not have to worry about column names, joins, etc. Not sure why a network engineer would need to be involved in this. Unless you were dumping syslog and or SNMP polls to DB and wanting to create reports on those.

We use Splunk for log consolidation which seems kind of similar. It indexes log files/SNMP/Syslog, almost anything that can be outputted. You can then quickly search through those logs, use regular expressions to create custom fields for your various log types, search for keywords or timestamps, create custom time ranges to dig through, etc. You can then create dashboards, alerts, and reports based off of the data that is returned from your searches.

[20X11]

Thanks for the input everyone. It seems like at minimum I wasn't wrong with my answer based on the wording of the exercise and at most he may have even been wrong. So now the real question becomes... how to address this? As I've stated, I need to send a thank you email for the interview. I planned to CC all three of them in on it and also have individual notes for each person which they, of course, would all likely read. I thought that if I addressed this with him it would be the best way because it wouldn't come off as I'm a know-it-all and I'm just sharing a note with him which they happen to read as well. How to bring it up and how to word it?

Also, the pres asked me about Crystal Reports which I know nothing about. They were considering implementing it and waned my opinion. I wasn't going to BS them so I said that I had no personal experience with it to be able to take from. I quietly notated during the interview though and I want to be able to give him some more info as part of that email. Since being able to advise on new products moving forward is an attribute they stated they were looking for I think that a short but well thought out opinion in this same email would go a long ways. I think I've got the right audience in this thread for this portion as well so no sense starting a new thread for it. What do you know... good or bad.. that I may include to help make me look better as they make a decision?

So, who can help me with this bad boy?

Crystal Reports in a popular Reporting/Business Intelligence tool. We use a more flexible, powerful suite of tools from Information Builders called WebFOCUS. WebFOCUS is used by MANY Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, etc., but also many mid-sized businesses as well. Go to www.ibi.com to learn more.

[asmo]

Thanks for the input everyone. It seems like at minimum I wasn't wrong with my answer based on the wording of the exercise and at most he may have even been wrong. So now the real question becomes... how to address this? As I've stated, I need to send a thank you email for the interview. I planned to CC all three of them in on it and also have individual notes for each person which they, of course, would all likely read. I thought that if I addressed this with him it would be the best way because it wouldn't come off as I'm a know-it-all and I'm just sharing a note with him which they happen to read as well. How to bring it up and how to word it?

We would need to hear his explanation before we could give advice on how to handle it - that way you can hone in on exactly where his flaw in logic/wording was/is. Easiest thing is to blow it off and once you get hired confront him about it.

Also, the pres asked me about Crystal Reports which I know nothing about. They were considering implementing it and waned my opinion. I wasn't going to BS them so I said that I had no personal experience with it to be able to take from. I quietly notated during the interview though and I want to be able to give him some more info as part of that email. Since being able to advise on new products moving forward is an attribute they stated they were looking for I think that a short but well thought out opinion in this same email would go a long ways. I think I've got the right audience in this thread for this portion as well so no sense starting a new thread for it. What do you know... good or bad.. that I may include to help make me look better as they make a decision?

Best thing you can ever do in a technical interview is admit when you don't know something. I will hire a guy/gal who says they don't know but will research the question over anyone who tries to BS an answer. Technology is incredibly complex and utterly vast. It is impossible to know everything about everything. Its a full time second job just to know a little about a broad array of things.

As for an opinion on Crystal Reports - it doesnt do anything that you cant do with modern HTML/CSS/AJAX/RoR/etc and O/JDBC connections. It just makes it a little faster (to build) and cleaner (if your not a graphic artist with a background in GUI design) - but it locks you into their product. I am not a reporting monkey but I have spent enough time in databases to know enough to be dangerous. I would still in an interview say I knew nothing about the product.

[th3w01f]

I am guessing that he is under the long mistaken belief that you cant use the zero subnet (which is totally incorrect - its just a set of bits so the zero subnet is 100% valid and used throughout the internet and has been for 30+ years).

I'm leaning the same way, thinking that he may be confused.

As you pointed out there is no issue with using the zero subnet. Many people used to believe there were issues back when you had to add the "ip subnet-zero" command because it wouldn't work without it. If he's referencing E0 he could easily be talking about pre IOS 12.0 without the command.

"It should be noted that even though it was discouraged, the entire address space including subnet zero and the all-ones subnet have always been usable."

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk64...tml#subnetzero