Submission + - Need help convincing boss to invest in new systems
jsepeta writes: 2 weeks ago I accepted a new job as a network admin 350 miles from home, and the offer was less than I had expected: no moving expenses, low end of the salary range, and no vacation time for a year. My first day I discovered that our primary domain controller had been freezing, we have no backups, and no antivirus protection, as well as a surprising lack of security on our cloud effort in a data center. Of course, first weekend the PDC breaks, and the boss dismissed my request for additional hard drives so there's no place for me to save backups to. After dedicating my Sunday-thru-Wednesday building a new DC and CRM server in VMWare Free (we're hosting no fewer than 4 functions on every server), the boss decided not to repair the 2 dead servers, and then went back on his plan to buy a replacement server after I'd already explained to him the deficiencies in our network. After spending far too many 10+ hour days in the office, I'm ready to GTFO.
With 20 years' experience maintaining computers and servers on networks, I realize that I have no desire to be in the hot seat when his cheapassed house of cards built on used 5 year old Ultra320 hard drives purchased from Ebay fails again. But in the interim, what strategies can I engage in to impress upon him that while he may have spent/wasted a great deal of money on the old network admin, the company is now at great risk for crashing and data loss unless he commits some money for equipment and software for backups. We're running a mixed Win2k8/2k8R2/CentOS environment and the $8500 pricetag for Backup Exec was nixed, as well as the $3500 from Roxio Retrospect. BTW, I tried running Windows backup on the DC that died BEFORE it died, but it froze twice while trying to make the backup — and now he thinks I'm responsible for killing the damned server. Keep in mind that the company is a startup in the medical software field, and there are NO older pc's sitting around to do squat with. Also, Microsoft's built-in backup software had pretty crappy logging from the W2k8 server I ran it from. One of the problems is he's a seemingly smart guy who's run other companies with far less IT resources than this company, which is a software development house. He's against my suggestion for offsite backups, even though I warned him that if a server in the data center goes down, he's going to lose not just data but customers.
With 20 years' experience maintaining computers and servers on networks, I realize that I have no desire to be in the hot seat when his cheapassed house of cards built on used 5 year old Ultra320 hard drives purchased from Ebay fails again. But in the interim, what strategies can I engage in to impress upon him that while he may have spent/wasted a great deal of money on the old network admin, the company is now at great risk for crashing and data loss unless he commits some money for equipment and software for backups. We're running a mixed Win2k8/2k8R2/CentOS environment and the $8500 pricetag for Backup Exec was nixed, as well as the $3500 from Roxio Retrospect. BTW, I tried running Windows backup on the DC that died BEFORE it died, but it froze twice while trying to make the backup — and now he thinks I'm responsible for killing the damned server. Keep in mind that the company is a startup in the medical software field, and there are NO older pc's sitting around to do squat with. Also, Microsoft's built-in backup software had pretty crappy logging from the W2k8 server I ran it from. One of the problems is he's a seemingly smart guy who's run other companies with far less IT resources than this company, which is a software development house. He's against my suggestion for offsite backups, even though I warned him that if a server in the data center goes down, he's going to lose not just data but customers.
