Iamthefallen's Journal: I R sysadmin?

Our current BOFH is going out in a few weeks for shoulder surgery after tearing a tendon fencing a few months ago. He's expecting to be out one or two weeks at least, and is trying the PFY, aka, me, to hold the fort while he's not here to rule his domain.

I'm looking forward to it, it should be fun. And there's so much that I can improve while he's gone, he's been here for like 18 years, so of course there are things that a fresh set of eyes can find to improve. Like simplify the backup procedures by eliminating a few sets of tapes, change the IP ranges to be 192.168/16 rather than 192.168.1/24 (More elbow room). Not to mention, all those cables hooking into the switch could be routed in a more tidy fashion, I'm sure I can improve the cable routing by just cleaning it up a bit. While I'm at it. the servers on the rack could probably be organized alphabetically ascending rather than just have them sit in the order they were installed. Not to mention, we have a bunch of different service accounts doing various things, how much simpler wouldn't it be to just run it all as Administrator instead. Likewise we have a whole bunch of groups and policies in our Domain, I think we can merge all these together into just a Users group and save some administrative effort. Then of course update the documentation to use a cross linked Wiki instead of just text files on a network share.

Yes, I can see lots of room for improvement. I'll make him proud.

I won't tell him beforehand though, it'll be a surprise.

wow

[nizo]

Its been nice knowin' ya :-)

excellent!

[stoolpigeon]

you obviously have the makings of upper management. the surprise idea is a nice finishing touch. i think that even if it gets a little boring or tedious while you are working on these projects that you can motivate yourself just by imagining the joy on his face when he returns. i see employee of the month in your immediate future!

Re:

[Iamthefallen]

My favorite project I think is to change the old SCSI drive array in the servers to a 500GB SATA drive instead. It'll save the company thousands to move to a modern technology like SATA rather than stay with the old legacy SCSI. Did you know that it was invented in 1979(!) It's like almost 30 years old! SATA is only a few years old and all new computers have it.

Re:

[Cyberdyne]

My favorite project I think is to change the old SCSI drive array in the servers to a 500GB SATA drive instead. It'll save the company thousands to move to a modern technology like SATA rather than stay with the old legacy SCSI. Did you know that it was invented in 1979(!) It's like almost 30 years old! SATA is only a few years old and all new computers have it.

On a related - but serious - note, my former colleagues in the central IT department here had a bright idea: SANs and shared RAID arrays are reall

Re:

[Degrees]

I saw your comment in my previous JE re this, and want to apologize for not replying to it. Some times, my life gets busier than I can handle, and this was one of those times.

It does explain why you've seen such bad behavior by GroupWise. Boy, what a bad plan. I mean, sure, I can see how it might happen, but sheesh. One thing we learned in my *smaller* environment is that you don't implement new complex technology without sending people to training. The SAN was a case in point; Xiotech trained me to watch

Atta boy!

[ellem]

Streamline!

Be sure to remove all scripts and replace them with Autorun.inf.

One wire per switch ought to be plenty.

Make sure everything runs in Win95 Compatibility Mode - event the *nix stuff.

Two words for reliability: Mo Dem!

Re:

[Iamthefallen]

One wire per switch ought to be plenty.

Actually I just had an idea, we could do away with the switches!

There's like a million Ethernet cables coming into this switch, so instead of these switches that create clutter, we could have a few wireless routers instead! BestBuy has them on sale for under 50 bucks this week. With say 5 wireless routers, we only need like a $20 hub to connect everything!

Re:

[ellem]

Ahh a new Sys Admin I see.

Wireless is great but you have to be careful not to lose the Tolkien Ring in the Ethernet. That's what the plastic does on CAT5. Keeps all the Tolkien Rings in there.

Re:

[Degrees]

Now, to do this right, you need to maximize the coverage, see? So you need the wireless antennas in sync, see? So you need to manually set the MAC address on the antenna side on all five WAPs to be the exact same MAC, see? 'Cause then they will be like one big antenna, see?

I'm thinking this is too much work, and you should instead maximize the storage per dollar spent in your environment by converting every server drive array to RAID 0. You needed to test your tape restores anyway, right?

Encrypt This Instantly!!!

[TechnoLust]

A BOFH with a lot of free time will no doubt be reading slashdot and, if he doesn't already know it, will figure out your UID and read your journal, thus spoiling the surprise! You need to encrypt this with something he'll never be able to figure out, something secure and state of the art, like... ROT-13.

Mindless conformist

[TheConfusedOne]

Obviously the servers should be arranged by MAC address to speed up identifying problems while interrogating the switch.

One piece of well learned advice, always make sure that the PBX is down for repairs before instituting any major server upgrades.

Re:

[Degrees]

This is the beauty of implementing a Voice over IP system - network down-time is network fun-time! Especially if you can get the Data Center door keycard locked for HIPPA compliance. Just be inside first.

good luck

[pnutjam]

I hope the area under your raised floor is cleaned regularly. Otherwise they'll never find your body.