I thought I would give this little parody a go. I am not a poet by any stretch of the imagination (as you can probably tell) but it was still fun nonetheless.
Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the LAN,
Not an application was stirring, even over the WAN.
Packets were free-flowing, no bandwidth control,
Performance routing not needed, even QoS wasn’t on patrol.
This was because no users were about,
Trying to finish their work, before they chilled out.
Everything was running smooth, no contentions on the Ether,
Solarwinds was all green, even the NetFlow Receiver.
I was sat at my desk, checking the packets,
When what did I spot, a firewall making a racket.
I checked the firewall logs, it had half-open connections.
What could cause this I thought, malware with an infection?
I dug in more deeply, with Wireshark on my screen,
Nothing was obvious, this was all unforeseen.
I pinged, I traced, I routed around
Until I hit that point “Ah-ha” what had I found?
A rogue route on my network, how had it got there?
Had someone made a change without paying due-care?
Next-Hop I had a look at, this didn’t look correct.
You’re pointing to the wrong address, I needed to dissect.
As a result of the next-hop being changed
Asynchronous routing was clearly to blame.
I checked the router that was causing the problem,
Did a show ip int brief, damn I am awesome!
It was all there clearly in black and green,
an interface was down, causing the router to demean.
I ran some interface commands, which had no effect,
nothing seemed to make this interface connect.
I carried on troubleshooting from the top of the stack down
Until getting to Layer 1, faulty media converters are renowned
I went through the stores, until I saw what I required,
Allied Telesis written on the box, all neatly attired.
I grabbed the converter and headed to the rack,
where the faulty one lay, on top of the stack.
I watched the new one light up like a Christmas Tree
This will fix the problem, as I did foresee
I went back to my desk, logging on to the session,
SecureCRT I used, it left a good impression.
Checking the router with a show ip int brief,
the look on my face, it was such a relief.
The interface was back, OSPF converging
I could see all the routes, quite clearly all merging
The firewall settled down, 3-way handshakes completed
I checked for the rogue route, it was finally deleted.
“I’ve had enough for one night”, I said to myself,
Time to go home and watch films like Elf
I said to the NOC before I drove out of sight,
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”