Charlie Garrett

The internship that I had at LogicSouth turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. I learned a lot from working with John Long, Scott Cann, Matt Merkel, and Taylor Jones. They not only taught me a lot about working for an ISP company, but a lot about life when working in this technology industry. I am extremely glad that I had the chance to work with something that was interesting to me, the maintenance of the servers. Through working with servers, I was able to gain a new perspective on just how intense it is to keep them running efficiently on the network. There are many reasons why I feel that I came away with a lot of valuable knowledge from working with servers.

First of all, I found out something that, although somewhat familiar, was pounded into my mind the entire time I was doing this internship, and that was the maintenance of the server being a mandatory component to a healthy functioning network. The overall monitoring of the network was simple, that is, once I figured out what I was looking at and paid attention to what activity was occurring on the network. I started to look at this maintenance issue differently; I began comparing it to a human being. For example, a human being is not always healthy because there are different entities that would bring a person’s health down, such as the weather, stress, accidents, etc. A person who is unhealthy would get better when supplied with the right treatment, whether it is medicine, juice, rehabilitation, or some other form of treatment. I looked at the maintenance of the network in that same context. A network is going to get sick every so often, but in order to keep it from being sick for a long period of time I had to make sure that any potential issues were already being treated. When I started to look at the maintenance and managing of a network in that type of light, I started to grasp the concept of what goes through the mind of a network administrator analyzing the network on a day-to-day basis.

Secondly, I was able to perform maintenance on servers and the network on a frequent basis, which was some great hands-on experience. I actually was able to take part in the installation of the updates that were needed on the network. One thing that I noticed was that Anti-Virus and Spam Blocking updates were a major necessity there. I was informed that the main reason for those particular updates all the time was because of LogicSouth being an Internet Support Provider company. In most ISP companies there has to be some intense monitoring and control of the in and out traffic over the network. Since there is a lot of traffic on the network, there is always the chance that the network could be infected by a file or some sort. Therefore, updates are desperately, and continuously, needed.

Finally, this involvement with network server maintenance made me look at things as a whole, not as single entities. The way I logically analyze something now is totally different from the way that I used to look at computer issues. Presently, whenever I look at a problem when monitoring a server issue, I start to break down what key factors are posing concerns on the network. By looking at the network in that manner, I am prompted to look at more possibilities and conclusions to the network issue. Throughout most of the internship I have been blown away with the amount of tedious work that goes with the job of being a network administrator. I finally see why network administrators get paid so much money. T hey appear to be on call twenty four hours a day, seven days a week! I really enjoyed working at LogicSouth this summer and would definitely suggest to others that that particular environment is a great one in which to do their internship. I am very sure that I will be able to apply all the skills I learned in the classroom t his fall. This is especially true since I had the chance to utilize and explore Microsoft Project. I was also able to do a little bit of performance monitoring. I will never forget my experience that I am taking with from there and I truly appreciate everyone there for giving me the chance to work within their work environment.