Month Three Review

Taking ownership of this network through the migration (post) has helped, in my mind, solidify my position in the organization. The urge to leave has lessened and though relations with my boss are still rough, the friction ebbs. I've come further than I expected. The last three months have felt like an eternity and it surprises me that I'm only getting off the new employee probationary period now.

Much of this last month went into preparation: login scripts, folder topology, hardware and settings details, staff and vendor relations, and overall project management. A lot of time was spent communicating with staff (post) to make sure the transition was as easy as possible, as well as hashing out details so staff were minimally impacted. All that work fit nicely into a staff email (post) and a post-op summary (post).

Three days in the thick of migration activity led to an overall successful end result, even though I was bumming the whole way through the process (post). It is my way. In the end two new servers replaced two aging ones. File, print, Exchange, and anti-virus services were moved over. Backup services were consolidated on to one server instead of separate server installs on each server, and a new tape drive was connected. Some cabling was replaced and employees were provided new, uniform, drive mappings and logical printer names, all distributed through group policy and login script.

Debugging followed. One of the lingering issues was broken POP3 access for branch offices (post). Oddly, despite all that I had checked and rechecked, it turned out that the POP3 virtual server had at some point shutdown. Easy fix that took me forever to figure out, but it's all done now.

The legacy of my predecessor made a few days hell as manually set DNS settings (post) and a randomly assigned login script changing DNS settings to manual kept causing workstation connectivity to flake. Also an easy fix but time consuming.

XP/2003 home directory synchronization breaks from time to time and there is an odd message that appears on startup saying that network drives couldn't be connected, even though they are, but other than that there are far fewer gremlins.

While I do think a company grows as its systems stabilize, I wonder if this much change in three months will propel the company or maintain status quo as people get used to things. Certainly the company has been waiting for upgrades, so maybe they will start running out the gate now that there is so much more network stability. I like watching companies grow and hopefully I've facilitated that (post). Onward to Kintera (ugh) (post), fundraising events, and workstation rebuilds.