Around 5 months ago, I received my current job as a Tier 2 technical support agent for an ISP called Smartaira. My job is fairly straight-forward: Take inbound support calls, answer tickets, and help users with all their internet-related problems as efficiently as possible. Smartaira is an ISP that provides service primarily for apartments.
Despite having my A+ & N+ when I first started at Smartaira, I had no practical experience when it came to actual working in an enterprise-sized network. Luckily for me, I felt adequately prepared for the job thanks to the CompTIA certs I’ve studied for. Whenever I was learning something new, I had a great grasp of all the terminology and concepts that were being thrown at me. All my colleagues were very kind and patient, and that definitely expedited the learning process as a whole.
As a Tier 2 desk agent, I had the opportunity to work with a multitude of programs, and even had access to IDFs and switches via CLI in order to perform functions like configuring ports. All of Smartaira’s infrastructure runs on MikroTik and Junos OS devices, so I’ve had to learn the basic commands for those brands of equipment specifically.
Smartaira installs a large deployment of mesh routers for most properties, so I deal with issues such as wireless interference, device roaming, and MAC-based authentication on a daily basis. I need to know all about RSSI, SNR, signal attenuation, and much more. I also deal with VLANS on a daily basis, and Smartaria provisions special VLANs that provide select devices with an IP-Passthrough function for those that need it.
I setup accounts, look through event/alarm logs on APs, and use tools that let us see device connection history that mark the exact point at which connections fail for said device. DHCP failures, de-authentication, and client disassociation are the most common ones I encounter.
I follow the regular troubleshooting process that starts from one end of the OSI model and works towards the other end. I have to identify certain issues as being device-related or network-related constantly.
There’s much more that I could talk about, but being able to work at Smartaira is letting me learn new things everyday. I feel like I’m getting better at working with technology and talking with end-users. This post is already too long, so I’ll talk about the experience some more in future posts. Thanks for reading!