wow, or maybe WOW!!! Yes another long pause between posts. Sadly neglected this site, although some would say thank god. However, I have been busy in my new role and so far, loving every minute. Apart from those odd moments when I don’t. Yes, me an IT support Officer, who would have thunk it? Not me that’s for sure. So what have I been doing these past few months. Where do I begin? I had to project manage the server relocation from Melbourne to here in Sydney. Started off with building a new server room, then adding the air conditioning, then having dedicated mains supply, arranging a dedicated van and person to pack, load, drive non stop and deliver said servers to Sydney the next day, ooh a nice 11 hour drive or so, over 1100K’s distance. Unload, unpack and slot into nice shiny new rack, complete with Cat6 cabling, new Fibre link from Unit A to Unit F (very expensive 2 Mb link – 250 mtr’s).
The plan was good and the servers were back online by Lunchtime, DNS and IP changes made and mail server up and running. Next step was to setup all the 90 PCs with the new IP addresses for remote access (laptops only) and the new server ip addresses for Citrix servers. Thanks to the help from Jeremy (The Grid Corporation). The only hiccup we encountered was the SQL server didn’t want to fire up. Hmmm, that was fun. Any ways 30 restarts and 400 swear words later, the POS started up – thanks to the Golden touch from the MD, who was also involved. Yes an MD with a very Hands on approach, quite refreshing really.
The next stage was to move over from AAPT to Telstra – I could write a hole war and peace on that, so here is the quick and nasty version. AAPT Bad – Telstra even worse. Could not project manage a root in a brothel with a fist-full of hundreds. Finally got that completed at the same time we moved over onto Exchange Server 2007. Same weekend! Madness, but it worked.
All this done in my first 3 months and dare I say probationary period. So a good test of my character and mad skillz yo to see if I had what it takes. Thankfully with help i managed to pull it off without any further loss of hair on my head. Just my sanity remains in question.
All of the above, with the additional day to day churn of people not being able to use a mouse and keyboard properly, Accpac issues, servers shitting themselves for no apparent reason and printers messing with my mojo. Network printers are the spawn of Satan I swear.
I have further convinced myself that I hate computers, this HP laptop is my crowning glory for pissing me off no end only to find that after a few updates from MS then the ability to not swipe my finger on the reader and log in, then lose Wireless access, then yet more updates and then the ability to get back which that I had lost, only confirms, PCs are pond scum.
I am blessed with a new system, Exchange 2007 integrates nicely into the Active Directory and reduces my work load with having to create a new user and configure Accpac writes and privileges, no more 3 or 4 systems now. Now we are looking at BES for Blackberry’s, one more item on the ever growing list. My First quest is to seriously reduce the amount of printers we have on the system – Bloody Kyocera printers cannot make the same Toner unit fit more than one machine – Bastardo’s!!!! New printer – new toner to add to the increasing stationary order.
I am sure I have missed something off here, but once I have read through this post, no doubt I will probably end up making 3 more post’s – or not.
Tis good to be back!!!!
