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Admin
So the point of the story is that only Active Directory and servers provide a "true" IT environment? Hopeless.
People who can only work with Windows artifacts like this around deserve to be miserable. There are many, many other methods that would have worked to provide a more integrated experience for the workers in that company, probably at less cost and with greater functionality than M$ and Sharepoint. If this is your idea of IT, then you are sadly back in the 1980's.
In 10 minutes on their existing hardware, Jon could have installed one of many services that would actually be tailored to the needs of the company, rather than a generic solution that only he recognized as being "needed." Your humorous story did not even indicate the main work flow or needs of the company, or hint at any effort by hapless hopeless Jon to find out these needs and adapt his solutions to them, rather than vice versa.
For a useful next step as a conclusion to this comment, get your head out of the *** of Active Directory, Dell servers, and other things that pass as generic Window$ costly "solutions" to non-existent business problems, and check out (for example) one of the many Bitnami packaged downloadable solutions that work to solve real business problems (CRM, subversion, project management and tracking, etc.) at NO COST and can run in an open source environment or on our favorite manufacturer's commercial operating system.
Admin
I plan to have that very smile on my face very, very soon.
Admin
On the subject of leaving jobs... I left one about 7 years ago where I was a computer maintenance tech. It was an okay job for a while, and working on a naval base allowed me to see and learn about some pretty cool tech. I even got to play on the bridge simulator.
The work began to wear on me, though. It just got too repetitive. Replace this video card. Check that network connection. Make this network cable (cables were expensive back then, we had whole reels of the stuff for hand-making). It was cool in that kind of naval workshop type environment for a while, but the low pay and monotony eventually got to me.
The straw that broke the camels back was when they asked me to go around to each of the bases 450 computers and:
a) Clean the screens and keyboards b) Verify appropriate barcodes and security clearance stickers were affixed to ALL PCs c) Log and note the location of all PCs with their barcodes
I saw that as a huge waste of time. Why did someone of my ability need to do something you could train a freaking monkey to do? (I had a high opinion of myself. Then again, I did write linux kernel modules in my spare time there.)
So a couple of months later I handed in my 4 weeks notice. It was a huge relief to me, I did feel very good, even though I didn't especially hate the place. It was like I was taking control of things.
Well, the next day, the boss decides to start giving me all the shitty jobs. Instead of making an effort to be civil and nice, he became very short, abrupt, and rude. He basically became a huge prick.
What the fuck? I worked there for a year, and this guy thinks after taking a year of my time that he can treat me like that. Stuff that. The next day was my last, leaving them short 17 days of my alleged 4 weeks notice and without a tech.
Of course, I didn't get paid for those weeks, but I decided not to raise a complaint.
Admin
Admin
First point, Open source solutions are only no cost if your time is free.
Additionally, an anti-Microsoft bigot (usually identified by their use of the dollar sign when spelling Microsoft) is just as much of a bigot as a pro-Microsoft bigot. IT solutions are horses for courses.
Pull your own head out of wherever you have it and come join us in the real business world where solutions are chosen for reasons other than semi-religious bigotry.
B
Admin
so true
Admin
So this "Jon" guy, with 14 years experience, thinks he can come in and roll out a completely new network architecture that's way too big for the company size without doing any coordination with management? Sounds like Jon isn't very professional, he should have known better. He should also have known that a company that size doesn't need all the silver lining he was trying to introduce to stroke his own vanity.
Last but not least he failed to appreciate that providing things like uninterruptable power supplies, backup and fallback systems, etc. to ensure people can keep working after a power failure IS part of his job as a network admin. He also failed to see the need to sell the (potential) need for a domain based system to ensure such continuity to management, and to use that need as an argument to get people to use his domain.
So the real WTF is one guy thinking he's god and attempting to push his ideas onto management after only a few weeks in the company without any arguments as to why those are good ideas, then refusing to accept the blame that is rightly his when things in his department go to pot.
Admin
Fortunately, you pointed that out. We, we wouldn't have noticed. Stinking Nazi Bierkeller CAN do some good, somehow, and not only they'd from at you.
Admin
Please explain where you get that backup systems were not provided? There sure are a lot of people that are able to glean information that was not exactly provided and run with their own ideas.
We had battery backups on EVERY system from workstation to servers. What part of "the company is growing" was missed? One of the major points was that I was NOT ALLOWED to buy anything BUT Dell equipment by 'Hartman'. No oddball software other than what was sold off the shelf. I wasnt even able to buy the freakin UPS systems from a different vendor.
Even better was that we were unable to explain VOIP to the CEO as he stopped all discussion about it and bought a proprietary phone system from his vendor.
You want another free WTF? He wanted me to buy a sat system for internet backup! Why not cable as uhm we ran Adelphia into the CEO's office for TV. (I won that one and they got broadband added in for failover)
When you are locked by managers into something thats it you do what you have to do to get the job done. My wife was supportive because unlike all of you lucky people we had student loans, house payments and other bills to pay to keep the family going. Im not able to walk out of a job just because my boss is an a$$hat.
I stuck it out and to this day they say what an awesome job I did for them. It was just insane getting them to do the right thing.
Admin
If handling it that way makes you an ass, then hand me a carrot and call me Eeyore. I would have done the exact same thing if I were pestered by people from a former job.
Admin
I had a huge smile the day I got fired from a very lousy company. That was a weird experience. My advice: take every "fun, forward-thinking startup" with many grains of salt :)
Admin
Oh my, this sounds like one of my older jobs, except no military guy was there. But the entire "local accounts" stuff does sound very, very familiar.
I set up the damned win2003 server, and I ended up being one of 3 users that actually used the AD logins, and that was because the win2003 server was actually my desktop PC as well.
Oh, and despite our company having more than enough licenses for windows XP, about half of our PC's were running some kind of pirated XP Pro... or even XP Home (which of course, were deprived of being joined to the domain.)
6 months after I quit, the server died a silent death and nobody noticed. Kind of like a year's worth of work died because of neglect.
Admin
Hey! I saw that at a college campus in South Carolina! The School Director got himself a whippin good deal on some computers and didnt notice that all of them were XP Home Edition PCs and they had all kinds of headaches getting them to talk to the domain and work correctly for student use machines...
I can say Deep Freeze worked well for them.
V
Admin
Oh my god! I work with one of these "Hartman" idiots. The only saving grace in my case is that my "Hartman" is more interested in running is side business than he is in paying attention to the work that's going on in the company. Mind you, this man has seriously farked a firewall project that started 8 years ago and is the only person I have ever met that would try to image/clone completely incompatible machines to each other.... and without ever even trying to use sysprep!
One day I'd had enough. I changed the password on the firewall and the servers, got management approval to disable the local admin accounts on the workstations because they were insecure, and it's only by a fine bit of forgiveness that I didn't completely revoke his domain admin rights. There are some people you can train ... and then there are some that you can't.
Admin
Sorry, but there are many millions of businesses that run on MS infrastructure offerings every day successfully. I wouldn't sit here and say that your OpenLDAP or Novell solution is crap, but as a sysadmin of Windows infrastructure for over 10 years, I can honestly say you need to get your head out of your a$$.
There's simply more than one way to solve the problem and accusations that it's crap just because it's microsoft is just immature.
Admin
I didn't see any thing in the posting that identified 8 clients. I would have assumed that they had 8 servers since at the minimum, you would have had a file server, an email server, possibly a print server, a development server, etc. It's unusual to put all of your server services on one machine since failure of that machine means no one can do any work.
Admin
Ok, I can't resist adding one last entry. I worked in an IT department in a large university for about 5 years. When I started, things were great. I could easily use my previous experience to improve the current systems and get management approval to get resources whenever they made good business sense. After about 3.5 years, my boss came to the conclusion that we needed to be a cost center to the rest of the university. Ok. I can deal with that - especially since the transition means I would get a 10% pay raise.
What I didn't realize was that the new job description, which was nearly the same as my old job description, meant that I would be doing mostly project management type work. Prior to this, I was mostly doing hands-on IT work - not trying to herd cats and getting the blame when they didn't want to follow directions.
This went on for about 6 months. My boss was getting somewhat irritated that I somehow just didn't instantly know how to handle a job that he was constantly changing the requirements on (without telling me). I suddenly got a call from a friend in another department and he wants me to come over and possibly interview for a position. Since things weren't going so well, I said ok and would meet him on lunch later in the week.
The interview went very well and it seemed like a sure thing. Little did I know that it would take a full year for HR to approve the new position and that I would take a minor pay cut with the transition. Since I didn't really like the job I was doing, the pay cut wasn't a big deal to me.
Finally, the day came when HR had approved and created the position. At this time, I had spent 1.5 years in a job I truly hated with blame being thrown at me month after month for my boss's incompetence. I had a meeting with my boss that morning and he flatly told me that I "had to improve or I would be terminated". When he made that ultimatum, it was the hardest thing in the world for me to sit there and avoid telling him the joke was on him - I was going to be out of there in 2 weeks plus one day.
The only regret I have is that my new boss told him I was leaving the department before I could - I really wanted to have the experience of telling him myself. To this day that was the best 2 weeks of my life and I've never been happier.
2 weeks after I left, 2 other people left and that's saying quite a lot when you work in an office with only 5 employees.
Admin
By explicit reading of the story, it is clear that the solutions proposed by Jon were not "real business solutions," but instead chose as the only (limited) things he knew how to do.
"Free" can mean not only free of cost -- and my point here is that lower TOTAL cost solutions were available that could be chosen and implemented based on the real needs of the organization -- but it can also mean "free of slavish devotion to the only-Microsoft-can-be-real-IT" thinking that trapped this employee into flushing his work life down the drain. There is freedom in choosing the most appropriate solution and not wasting your time and effort trying to adapt yourself and your company to solutions that do not fit the problem. Jon should have chosen that path, which IS "real IT," and not the one that produced unhappiness for himself and the unworkable solutions he offered to his company.
Admin
Where do you get these inane ideas? The Microsoft thing has nothing to do with the story. The server OS has NOTHING To do with the story.
Reading skills do. Management was resistant to change period. Why did they pay outside companies for email that WE hosted on site? What was the problem with logging into the domain? Why was the network admin screamed at for 2 hours because internet was down over a holiday weekend when everyone was out of town? Why was the Netadmin led to believe the company was tech-centric?
The truth was that the company was nothing more than a glorified government contractor staffing company. They DO NOT PROGRAM OR CODE ANYTHING they outsource all IT work and have a minimally talented person (I think intern) to do minor help desk tasks.
Bear in mind that what was upsetting was that when you leave your old job you hope things will be a certain way at the new one. When you realize that there was NO REASON AT ALL FOR A COMPANY TO HIRE AN IT PROFESSIONAL OF ANY KIND!! No one wants to wait for someone to realize they made a stupid mistake. Much worse is to see ignorant decisions regarding infrastructure.
Who the hell stores their HR and Financial data on a Dell laptop?
Admin
amen
Admin
Sometimes I truely envy women for their optimism, especially when caused by compassion...