intermodal's Journal: New job

Coming up on a month into a new job. One of the worst things about it? My predecessor's documentation consisted of a few outdated spreadsheets hidden in a directory on one of the servers, a list of passwords, a couple folders with license keys, and a file cabinet filled with printouts of howto documents from the Internet with no clue what he used them for (including countless ones for functions and features I have discovered we do not use, as well as software we do not use.)

One recent fun discovery? He assigned an unknown number of undocumented and unreserved IPs within our DHCP block to desktops, with no clues as to specifically why. I discovered this when I installed a virtual machine to test with and clobbered my boss's (the owner's) static IP. He was gone for almost a month before I came on. So far, the static IPs seem related to our copier's scan function, but I can't guarantee that is the only reason, and I see no reason to meddle with the systems that are working. DHCP reservations, here we come!

Now to see if I can get the desktop hubs replaced with switches...

most excellent!

[yagu]

congratulations! you have moved into one of the better settings of taking over predecessor's work! (unfortunately, I'm not making that up.)

Re:

[intermodal]

It's got its ups and downs. About half my job falls into non-IT "other duties as assigned". which isn't bad when it means taking the cars down to get the oil changed, but it is bad when I have to keep track of cellphones that haven't been properly documented in the month since the other guy left.

Re:

[intermodal]

Also, thanks! It's not a horrible gig by any stretch.

Good luck

[jawtheshark]

I hope you get the resources to streamline the mess left behind. It gets doubly hard if there is never money for IT. I know how that is. *sigh*

Re:

[intermodal]

I'm making a couple pushes here and there. We've got two sites, and the other site is about 50% stocked with machines built in 2006, and overall, we have a serious problem with machines not having enough RAM. Some users are still on machines with 512MB.

I think the staff here where I'm located thought the other office was full of lazy whiners who just weren't getting their work done because they weren't trying...

We're going to replace those machines, and now I'm just figuring out with what hardware. I thi

Re:

[jawtheshark]

I think the worst part about being in a small and previously questionably-run IT environment is that the expectation is that things will be bought once and work forever. It's not a matter of whether I could have upgraded these seven-year-old machines, but whether I would have to explain myself if something fails on an old machine we just spent money upgrading.

I wouldn't blame it on IT. You see, I have tried here too to make the best of things. I try (but apparently fail) to pass the message that you need

Re:

[intermodal]

I'm not blaming him specifically for everything, I know we all have our strengths and our weaknesses, and that our ability to order new hardware and commercial software is certainly limited. It's just that I spent much of yesterday digging up which dynamically-allocated unreserved DHCP IPs (network printers and desktops) had services statically linked to them. Over half the dynamically assigned devices had such configurations attached to their IPs. Hopefully I got them all. It's things like that which I

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Yes, I have to admit that the DHCP situation you described is indeed quite weird.