Interview Experience with S&P Global

 

This interview was for a Principal Network engineer role. The JD completely matched my profile but it had a little more into Network side of things. I still thought i can be a good match. I managed to get this referred via my friend Sai Pradeep who completed graduation in same college with me. His reference worked and I got a call from the HR. Interview was scheduled. 

I had around 3 days to prepare and i dont remember when was the last time that i prepared for an interview so well. I even managed to start learning AWS Networking as that was part of the JD. Surprisingly i was able to relate AWS networking so well that i am now preparing for AWS Certification CNS01 Advanced Networking. 

Coming to the case of actual interview, the person who took the interview Deepen Patel started the conversation as this is more of casual discussion and he was asking more about my work that i do. He then tried to ask some simple questions and interview was always comfortable. I have some below take aways that I though could have been done better

• I sounded little overconfident about certification when I said "probably i will do that after getting into S&P. 
• When the question was asked about how I troubleshoot I kept it very simple by saying look through the path and understand where the problem is. I could have elaborated it much better adding my experience in all sorts of technologies. For example, if something is not working I should have started from DNS to path tracing to handling firewall in path to troubleshooting on firewall and advanced troubleshooting on firewall and then including proxy load balancers etc.  Just so that i can prove my expertise. 
• I could have been little slow and explained things more detail so that it would have given a better chance to evaluate. This is because at the end of the day what we say is what they can judge upon. 

On a last note, I got an email from HR that I am not selected. Little disappointed but I want to take this positive as I think I have a better opportunity to work on migrations that I have in hand and customer is looking for me. 

Fixing Cannot complete your request after enabling two factor authentication

 

While performing a change on Netscaler to enable second factor authentication via RSA. I ran into an issue where in user would see an error that said "cannot complete your request STF:<storefront name>". The troubleshooting was difficult because the storefront server was not showing any error log that could indicate a possible issue.  

To clarify what is done here are high level steps of what is being done to enable 2nd factor

• Find the authenticaiton vserver that is mapped to authentication profile of the Gateway VIP.
• Check the Authentication policy and bind RSA as Next Factor authentication and dont forget the add END after RSA.
• Go to Login Schema and upload the new XML file that has the page that we see for 2 factor authentication. 
• Here this profile carries settings for SSO. If this is not enabled the credentials will not be passed on to Storefront.
• This last step is critical because previously SSO policy was configured to pass on the credentials to storefront now this is done as an option in login schema.