Third Party

I feel sorry for some of the third party IT people I have to deal with for my work.

Sometimes, they are thrown into the lions den, being contracted to arrive at a customer site to make major network changes, but without being given the information on or understanding what equipment is there already.

I have been there many times myself, arriving at a site without full knowledge of what changing 1 IP address might do to everything else. Not to mention the state of some “comms room” cabling and equipment, all piled on top of itself in digital spaghetti.

They go in blind, hoping to do updates but find that there are critical pieces of infrastructure where changes need to be planned well in advance.

I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, so will always jump through the hoops to get it all working for them, but sometimes it’s not possible. Luckily, the stars aligned today for one of these people who emailed me to say they were at site and wanted an IP address change done. I emailed them back advising that it might not be possible today and asked for the missing information they didn’t give me - but we got it all done in time.

I now just need to wait for them to complete the changes on their side and hopefully, fingers crossed, I will be able to connect back to my server to complete the configuration changes. However, I think last time the same person sprung this sort of immediate update on me, it took weeks for my access to be reestablished. We shall see.