Day 2: I arrive in Belfast for my first install of the week.
Having lived in Belfast for a short time, I’d been looking forward to going back. As a keen photographer, I made the most of it and took some interesting photos on the way.
My first stop was to install two firewalls for one of our clients, a leading finance firm.
I met with our site contact and we had a brief catch up before setting to work. Working closely with our clients in-house teams always gets the best results. The client’s security policies require them to have their own IT contact onsite whilst we make changes to the network, they will also carry out extensive testing following the install which it’s good for us to be onsite for, so we can assist where required.
This install is part of a multi-site roll out. We are installing firewalls in pairs, to ensure resiliency of service. Myself and my counterpart needed to make space on the existing switches for an additional eight new connections. This is all mapped out in advance, one of our senior engineers prepared a runbook with a patching diagram for me to follow.
The firewall configuration is also carried out in advance, and tested in the Meraki portal before I arrive on site. Once I connect the firewalls to the network, the configuration is downloaded and ready to go.
We tidied up the existing patching and then made 3 connections to each Cisco Meraki firewall, plus two patch cable connections to the uplink port in the switch.
Once the install was underway, we completed the changeover in just under two hours. As part of the upgrade, two Cisco routers were taken out of service. We checked everything was working as it should be, following a pre-approved testing plan. Once we were confident everything had gone to plan, I contacted John for confirmation.
John carried out the final tests remotely to confirm the install was complete.
It was a rewarding day, both seeing Belfast again and working well as a team with our client.
