Network Administration Essay -- Computer Science

Network AdministrationI have worked as a computer profit executive for over 5 years. Ihave worked mostly with networks in a mixed Microsoft Windows NT andNovell Netware environment. I am a Novell Certified Novell Engineer(CNE) and I am a certified Novell GroupWise Administrator. I havetaken classes in compliance of Cisco routers. In this essay, I willdiscuss the definition of a network administrator, the tasks andresponsibilities of a network administrator and share a day in thelife of a network administrator. For documentation on my credentials,I am including my affidavit certificates.What is a Network Administrator?A network administrator is one who maintains and troubleshoots yourcomputer systems. Depending on the size of your organization and thecomplexity of your technology, a network administrators work lowlife rangefrom ten hours per week to full time. There are some obvious networkadministration tasks, such as installing or upgrading system softwareand managing user acco unts and disks space, so you probably have someidea of what an administrator does. The InternationalTelecommunications Union (ITU) is a consortium of telecommunicationscompanies worldwide who have, among other(a) things, defined a series ofrecommendations that describe how a telecommunications managementnetwork (TMN) should be operated. The ITU members have adopted a modelof management functions that I consider is of interest to us because itprovides a framework that we can use to understand the role of thenetwork administrator. This function model is often referred to as theFCAPS model aft(prenominal) the initials of each of the major functions itdescribes.TMN function Naive descriptionFault Management Fixing what is broken.Configuration Management Controlling the operational parameters ofsomething so it works the air you want.Accounting Management Knowing who is using how much of what, andmaybe billing them for it.Performance Management Making sure it all works acceptably quic kly. protective covering Management Controlling who can do what.The idea is that just about any network management task can be said to locomote to one of those management functions. For example, plugging apatch-lead back in after it has fallen out is fault management,introducing a firewall onto your network is a security managementt... ...workstation can be putback in service elsewhere, the administrator would possibly format thedrives (effectively erasing all the previous data) and reassign theworkstation in a position that is little demanding than the previousone. I have found that installation of rising workstations not only makesthe end user more productive, but generally the task of administeringthe workstation is easier because of the feeler in technologyi.e. newer operating system. Some administrators have found it usefulto sue a procedure called ghosting to speed up the process ofsetting up multiple new workstations. When this process, a workstationis configured with gen eral setting sufficient for most users. Specialsoftware is used to copy an image of that configuration. When a newworkstation or workstations is needed to be configured the imaged isthen copied to the hard drive. For this procedure to work, theworkstation must have the same or very similar hardware as theoriginal workstation the image was copies from. Otherwise there willbe multiple errors and the administrator will spend time morecorrecting errors than he/she would have doing the configurationmanually.