Silicon Shecky

So I have a couple things that tie together into the title today. The fun thing is that the two examples are separate ends of the spectrum, but both show stupidity and are a great source of frustration.

Example 1 is all about how people think lowly of IT. Recently I have had to deal with a situation where a security certificate for e-mail was nearing expiration. We tell the people about it, ask for them to renew or purchase a new one so that RPC over HTTPS continues working, and so that they don’t get certificate warnings every time they locally open outlook. Do they listen? Nope. Who gets blamed? We do. Then the kicker is getting someone to agree to pay for a brand new certificate takes forever. I just love how we get listened to sometimes.

Example 2 is even more interesting. SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 both came out late last year. SBS 2008 you can get preloaded on a Dell server. EBS will not be available from Dell until the end of the month. Heck you can not even get a quote from Dell on an EBS server. The only way to get a Dell EBS server is to get a Dell Server with no OS and separately purchase EBS from another vendor and install it. As if this wasn’t annoying enough, when talking with my Dell rep, I get asked, “Whats wrong with going with standard server 2008?” Well considering that the client wants an all in one solution, but already has 75 users and is still growing, SBS is out, but EBS is in. Its what EBS is made for. So why all these months have passed and Dell does not offer it? HP does. Makes no sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and working in the IT field, there are just some days that I have to go … WTF!

So, in the midst of not writing too much this week, I’ve had a lot of headaches. Headaches that you can avoid.

Headache number one. Always do a daily check of backups. Make sure that everything including SQL databases are being backed up properly. If they aren’t, find a way to remedy that.

Headache number two, SQL 2005. Yes SQL works nicely, but when you have people who insist on using the Eval version past its 120 period, upgrading them to the full version is a pain. One that Microsoft can fix by not forcing an uninstall of the eval and install of the full version. Oh and double check all backups before you do the uninstall.

Headache number three, Windows updates and Symantec Endpoint. I have hit this one a few times this week, where Windows Update goes into a weird connection and install loop for a patch and can’t install it so keeps retrying to the point that Symantec Endpoint 11 things the server is under a DoS attack. Course this eventually led to other issues that required a reboot of the servers in question, so they worked properly again. Well two of them did, the third one led to…

Headache number 4, ease of finding information from Microsoft. Yes, Technet, and Google are nice items, but when one puts in a search about corrupted exchange log E00, you would think that you would get all the info or at least KB articles that offer solutions for it. This is not the case. It took about 100 different search strings along the exact same parameter, with a small change here, small change there to words or order, to finally find the missing step to bring back up a clients exchange information stores.

Yeah, its been a busy week, but at least there are lessons to be learned. The biggest one is that Microsoft is painful.

You know, I love my job. I love being able to work on things and learn new thoughts and ideas as I work. It is so fulfilling to see a project finished and working right. The only problem is they never are really finished.

So after the big file migration, and the corrections to the AD Users/OUs/Groups was down to a tweak here or there, I decided to see if I could figure out why some things with Exchange and DNS seemed to be so damn slow. They say that curiosity killed the cat and satisfaction brought him back, well we shall see how this ends.

Between finding that AD/DNS integration was set to a legacy standard, even though we use Server 2003, to find that we had only 1 Global Catalog, even though we have 5 DCs 4 of them at other sites, only one DC as a Global Catalog. Replication for AD was set to 4 hours, and all other sorts of small errors in the DNS server have been found. Its the sort of stuff that should have been thought through when the original migration from 2000 to 2003 happened.

Well, at least its keeping me busy, and who knows when any of this stuff will come in handy, but I know it will at some point.