travis' brain dump

You know… it flat out amazes me the inability of some people to do their jobs or perhaps even more so their lack of effort to take initiative in their careers… Then they get upset when they get passed up for promotions and pay raises… *rolls eyes*

First off I hope this doesn’t come across a complete anger blog and honestly I’ve revised it a few times before publishing in order to try to take that anger aspect away. It’s really not my intent. I guess it’s more of an astonishing view of a recent observation of people who for one reason or another seem incapable of doing the very thing they are employed to do. Whether they are just completely stupid or otherwise ignorant, these people are always the ones who seem to take the whole ‘ well my phone isn’t ringing, so I don’t need to fix it ‘ attitude. These people work in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode and spend their days looking for ways to slack off as opposed to looking for ways to make their job easier or be more productive. I’m sure we’ve all (sarcasm) enjoyed (/sarcasm) working with someone like this or perhaps worked for someone like this. I feel sorry for you if you’ve exeprienced either case. 

The reasons why network administrators have a job is to manage the network and make sure things run smoothly and work well for the company employees, end users and themselves… NOT SURFING THE INTERNET ALL DAY! For the record, I’m not saying that everyone who surfs the net during the day is a slacker, but some people just haven’t earned the privledge. They need to be fixing their broken networks before looking up their latest stock quotes or sports scores.

As if you can’t tell, there is a degree of personal irritation here, but again, it’s not an anger post. LOL I just simply don’t understand how some individuals stay employed when they cannot do their jobs and yet it’s so hard for people who can actually do these jobs to secure a new one when they are unemployed. It really upsets me that people like this are able to keep jobs for years and talented people get shafted. (yes, I am complaining)

Some background…

As most of you know, I was unemployed for a couple months after unfortunate events at the company I was working for left them with no funds in which to maintain a payroll. Sad story, but hey… it happens. After spending literally two months searching for work and interviewing here and there I picked up some temp work at a company locally. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent gig and paid a bit less than what I need/like, but hey, it’s better than unemployment any day. (don’t get me started on *THAT* rant…)

At the interview for this company, I was given a little warning about the condition of the network. A little warning is perhaps an understatement, hehe. Items such as replication and group policy came up during the technical questions. I figured they had some configuration issues with it, no biggie… I didn’t think that the AD structure was in complete shambles and wasn’t even being utilized properly.  Seriously… someone stated it best when they said, “It’s not even functioning as an AD, more like a glorified NT4 domain.” Shoulda said that one in the interview, lol. 🙂

Well, I landed the position and started the following week. That was August 6.  I got a chance to blog the day after I started and a few personal blogs here and there but for the most part it’s been non-stop here. (not the complete reason the world hasn’t heard from me, hehe but all the same this has been a big part of it)

Just for starters because I don’t want to write a novel, when I first sat down with the network documentation here the first thing that floored me was the listing of error event ID’s in the event logs that you could ignore. WHAT?!? I kid you not, there was a list of event ID’s that were labeled ‘ It’s okay to ignore these ‘… LOL Ok, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ll ignore a Terminal Services error on a server when it’s not an actual Terminal Server and it’s complaining about a printer attachment but blatently ignoring your corrupted/delinked sysvols and your Exchange system attendant crashing every five minutes? Give me a break!  Are those smoke breaks including the use of a bong? I won’t even go into the myriad of other errors out there but they do include such things as complaints of duplicate entries for computer names across domains, network load balancing services installed on servers that don’t need it nor use it, WINS errors from a database that has obviously been neglected since it was first turned on, partial upgrades on systems which leave certain installed features downlevel and thus cause errors, etc.. etc.. the list goes on folks.

This leaves me to the entire frustration of ‘ what the heck did this person do all day? ‘ — In the documentation it states a list of ‘ daily tasks ‘ that are the ‘ bulk ‘ of this persons routine workload (i assume) which only took about 2 hours to complete each day. Since we’ve fixed 99% of the issues since I’ve gotten here, I think it’s honestly something that can be done in *UNDER* an hour now.

So what’s been my solution to all of this? Fix it naturally. Call it my OCD streak but I tell ya, I was seriously losing some sleep over this. It had me worried that at some point this network was going to collapse in on itself and they eyes would be turned towards me, not a pleasant thought. With that said and with the help of one of my associates here to who I have to toss a ton of credit to, we have successfully brought this Active Directory and it’s member systems up to a level by which I can proudly say is on the road to actually having a shot at becoming a real network. It’s been a privledge man as it’s nice to see someone else was feeling the way I was about the whole thing and was ready to help me get it all up and running. I honestly don’t know if I could have gone as gungho as I did without the help you provided.

The proud achievement? ZERO errors in the Directory Services, DNS, System, Application and File Replication logs. No more complaints about missing plugins in Exchange, failed replications, lost GPO items, confused computers and wouldn’t you know it? You can understand the OU structure in the Directory and the backups are working correctly too!

I still don’t get it however. I really don’t. It’s taken this associate and myself approximately 3 weeks to fix damage that has been out there for MONTHS if not YEARS! Why wasn’t it fixed before and why don’t people take pride in their work, I will never know. Perhaps it’s just lack of knowledge but that’s no excuse. If you don’t know how to do something and it’s part of your job, tap resources. Books, colleagues, the Microsoft TechNet and FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND!!!!

My next series of tasks will be consolidating asset management, software licensing, change mangement and internal support issues into one nice system for use instead of 50 thousand freakin excel sheets. Who does that!? DATABASES ARE YOUR FRIEND TOO! Hopefully I will get to see the birth of this system and the destruction of the use of 100 documents spread out over who knows what network shares to provide information for what should be included in maybe 25 documents, a few visio diagrams and a login to a centralized system. *shakes head* For that sake of saying it, if I can’t be here to continue to manage this network I hope the other individual doesn’t screw it all up in the matter of months once I’m gone.

*rant over*