I had this strange consulting gig where the lone network engineer (call him Darek) responsible for a country's ground network angrily and hastily quit. Guess he'd had enough. He worked for a company let's call it Acme SatCom. Calabania bought a bunch of satellites from Acme and was paying them large sums to also take care of their ground network which included several data centers connected via DMVPN. Cisco routers, switches, firewalls. VMWare running on unknown platform. Calabania comes to Acme periodically and requests changes.
So in I come. There is a drawing from five or six years earlier. Now normally I would login to each of their data centers and grab configs, interfaces, peer relationships - map it out to see what kind of drift had happened from the original spec. and understand precisely how things were configured. BUT Calabania would only allow access for specific defined purposes for specific changes. And Acme didn't want to tell Calabania "our sole network engineer quit, but we have a consultant here who need to crawl through your network to find out WTF is going on over there".
As it turned out I got an offer from an old boss a couple of months into things. And thank God. My stomach had been churning at the thought of possibly going in to make a change into this network based on old drawings in a tight window. I really could have made a mess. I tried to explain this to the boss and his superior how I felt like alligator bait in this situation.
Anyhow it was a weird one. What might you have done in this situation?
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