CompTIA Network+ N10-008 – Module: Examining Best Practices for Network Administration

1. 16.0 Examining Best Practices for Network Administration

In order to maximize our network’s uptime, in order to keep people safe and to scale our network, we need a collection of policies and procedures that everybody is following. And that’s what we’re going to be focusing on. In this module, we’re going to consider safety concerns, how to manage power, how to manage our equipment racks, how to manage wiring, in addition to examining what documentation that we need to maintain. But let’s begin with probably the most important of all those topics in our next video, as we discuss safety procedures.

2. 16.1 Safety Procedures

In this video. Let’s talk at a high level about some of the different safety issues we need to keep in mind in our networking careers. One of them is Power Safety, our network devices. They’re powered in some higher end switches and routers that we have. They might require more voltage or more current than some other devices that we have. Also be aware that voltage can vary country to country, but we need to be very cautious with power when we’re dealing with equipment.

But if you take a piece of equipment apart I know I’ve had to take the COVID off of a router several times to install extra flash memory in order to put in a daughterboard or maybe install DRAM. Well, when you do that type of thing, when you’re working inside of a piece of gear like that, let’s make sure that we remove power before we work on that device. And when you’re plugging the device in, let’s make sure that it is properly grounded. And in the United States, you may be working in some older buildings that have two prong outlets instead of a three prong outlet.

Maybe that building was wired before it was required that there be a ground. Well, you want to make sure that you’re properly grounded. I know of some people to actually cut off the ground plug from a power cable just so they can insert it in one of those two prong outlets. Please don’t do that. You’re removing a safety element when you do that. If there is some sort of a problem with the equipment and you’re touching a piece of metal on the equipment, electricity might run through you to get the ground instead of using that ground lead.

That ground lead is there for your safety. Please don’t bypass it. And even if you do have power removed from a device, please be aware that you might be working on a power supply or something else that has a large capacitor in it. A capacitor. It can hold a large charge with the equipment not even plugged in. You need to be very careful when working around large capacitors and to protect the equipment. It’s common practice to wear a wrist strap. And that wrist strap through a resistor connects you to ground.

That way you don’t touch one of the chips on the circuit board and damage that chip through electrostatic discharge. Because you’re grounded, you shouldn’t get that little static shock if you touch the circuit board. However, if you are grounded and touch a live electrical lead, what’s going to happen? Well, that electricity could run through you to get to ground. That’s why when you’re using a wrist strap, please make sure that the wrist strap has a resistor built into it. It’s still going to prevent you from damaging a circuit board through electrostatic discharge, but it makes it less likely that live electricity is going to be running through you to get to ground. Those are some things to keep in mind when you’re working with power. Also, please be very cautious when you’re lifting equipment. Some of our larger modular switches or larger routers, they can be very heavy. And you can injure yourself. You can drop the equipment and damage that equipment by trying to lift something that you should not be lifting by yourself.

I know this has happened to me. I remember when I was working at Walt Disney World, I was trying to mount a Cisco Catalyst 65 nine series switch, and it was packed full of power supplies and modules. It weighed, I would say, well over £100. And I was trying to pick it up and sit it in a rack, and I lifted it by myself, and it was not easy at all to maneuver. And I later was cautioned that I should not have done that. I should have asked for help before doing that.

And after I started doing that, I realized that I really did need some help to help maneuver this and get it into the rack and not hurt my back. And when you’re working in a data center where maybe you’re doing a lot of rack mounting, it’s interesting that you can actually get a forklift that is designed for those 19 inch racks. You mount equipment between rails that are 19 inches apart, and you can use a forklift to handle that really heavy equipment. And when you’re putting equipment in the equipment rack, I recommend that you put heavier equipment on the bottom. That way the rack doesn’t become top heavy.

And it’s a good practice to secure a rack firmly to the ground and to the wall. And I learned this lesson the hard way. I remember when I was working at a university, I was working on a server. We had a couple of very large Dell servers, much larger than the blade servers that we have today. But these were very large, very heavy servers, and they were on rails where you could pull them out and push them into a rack to do maintenance on them. That was really convenient.

But the racks were not secured to the wall. They were just sitting there. And I remember I had one of the servers at the bottom at least partially pulled out, and then I pulled out one of the big heavy servers towards the top of the rack, and that made the rack start to tip, and it was tipping toward me. I mean, it weighed a lot. There was no way I could have held it up by myself. And it was about to do some serious damage to me, and I just yelled, help. And fortunately, one of the network engineers that I was working with, he was nearby, and he saw the rack starting to fall towards me, and he reached up, and together we were able to push the rack back into place.

But that was nearly a catastrophic event for me because I had pulled multiple servers out of the rack at the same time and the rack was not secured. And it just about crushed me. And something else we need to think about when it comes to safety is fire safety. If there is a fire in an equipment room, how do you put out that fire? Well, typically for electrical fires, instead of using water, you’re going to use a fire suppression system that’s going to use a certain type of gas or chemicals designed to work with electrical fires.

But when these gases and chemicals are dispersed, you don’t want to be breathing those things. If you’re in the room when those gases and chemicals are dispersed, you probably need to exit the room. And something else, you want to make sure that your HVAC system is set up to stop running in the data center when that happens because you do not want those gasses and chemicals to be sent throughout the HVAC ducts when the HVAC system is running. So typically the way those systems are set up, as soon as the gases or chemicals are dispersed, the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system, it stops.

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