There was a time when I would stand up at a whiteboard and sketch an entire campus network from memory, including every network subnet, router, and switch.
Today, not only can I no longer hold all of that in my head, my whiteboards no longer exist.
In the first office I rented, I installed floor-to-ceiling whiteboards on all walls. I could write or draw on any surface.
I can remember walking into Max’s office with an idea, asking for permission to erase his whiteboard, and then drawing out or describing the idea or project. Maybe 30 minutes of drawing and discussing.
What surprised me was asking to erase my chicken scratches months later and being told, “No,” because they were still using it.
Regardless, today I need to draw serious network maps.
I have multiple routers between multiple subnets. Managed and unmanaged switches. Gateways and VPNs. I have an entire virtual network layered over the top of all of that to make different services appear to be on the same subnet.
Not to mention the virtual private cloud(s) that I run, the internal, non-routing networks.
It is just to much for me to do in my head.
Oh, here’s one that’s currently messing with me. I have a VPC. It has multiple gateways allowing access residing on different chassis in different subnets. I can’t figure out how to make it work today. Even though it was working yesterday.
I’ll be messing with networks for the next week to get things stabalized.