All of us in IT have all been there. Sitting around talking about how something on the network is wrong and it was the old guys fault. They did something lazy or wrong or did not document well and because of something THEY did you are now running something sub-optimal and performance is suffering. We have all been there. Now in these times I like to think would I have done the same? Why not? Do I really know what what made them choose what they did 2 to 3 or more gears ago? No I don’t so in many cases we need to cut the old guy some slack. Sometimes however we don’t. This is when something was clearly configured wrong, no description listed for ports on the switch or maybe redundancy that was setup wrong and would never work.
Well take this opportunity to fix the problem! At least create a plan to fix the issue. Don’t just sit around complaining about it, take some initiative and document what is wrong and detail the steps to fix it. It may not happen for many reasons (political, budget, etc) but at least you got off your butt and tried fixed it. If it is just poor documentation you have no excuses to not fix that.
Now think about what your are doing today. When you type a command will someone 2 years down the road be able to know exactly why you did that? What about port descriptions? Do you like coming into a network with no labels? Or what about when you do a “sho int status” and every port is labeled with server names but half are not connected? Clearly the documentation is wrong so can you trust the labels that are connected? Take the time to do right every time, even when removing something. What about network diagrams? Are yours done right? If someone walked into your network today would it take them 10 minutes or 10 hours to get a basic understanding?
The bottom line is take pride in your work and do it right. You should be happy to show of your configs and diagrams. Don’t be the guy that is blamed for everything years from now, be the guy they are still talking about how you did things the right way.
