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"I got a job. I’ve never gone from incredibly mad/upset to happy so quickly before. I swear my new boss heard grinding from my mental gears changing without a clutch. The facility I had been employed by for the past 18 months had just cut the entire IT department, including my job, and outsourced its functions to an outside company. On my way out the door, the head of the outside company caught me and offered me a job with them, making me their on-site support representative.

This was good: I was gainfully employed after being unemployed for all of five minutes. This was bad: I was never given full access to the network or firewalls in my previous job.

A quick phone call to the previous network admin confirmed my suspicions; he wasn’t in a particularly helpful mood. The previous server admin wouldn’t even return my calls. I couldn’t blame them — the company I now worked for had pushed them out of a job. Still, there was a network that was almost entirely undocumented, and I had no access to the firewalls.

To add to the difficulties, the network was in flux. At one point in the not too distant past, all layer 3 routing was done at a third-party facility. And over the past few years, the previous network admin had replaced all the switches and started putting all our equipment on our own VLANs — slowly pulling our network away from the other facility, finally, installing an ASA5505 specifically to perform NAT between our equipment and theirs. It wasn’t done though. The ASA, while wired in, was essentially doing nothing, and the switchports were a Jackson Pollock painting of different networks and VLANs. Finally, I was receiving reports that the new wireless network was dropping people off the network randomly. Let the fun begin.

I started off by tearing apart the previous network admin’s hard drive looking for anything that looked like a password file. It was in vain though. I looked for a tool that could recover it from the AD. No dice. Finally, in desperation, I looked through the previous server admin’s hard drive. Bingo! I found a three-year-old file with no extension called P@$$. Inside were the level 15 passwords to the switches and firewalls. I was in.

I used Visio to map out where all the main switchports went, with a little help from “sh cdp nei,” essentially mapping how the network breathed. I installed Spiceworks and was able to inventory most of the PCs on the network. Finally, a quick call to Qwest, and I had all of our external IP information.

The main switches were a stack of six Cisco 3750s, with three 2960s on the two upper floors, plus one more with POE for the wireless. The wireless consisted of a Cisco 4402 controller with 16 1142n APs. When I took my Cisco classes, it was all wired, so I attacked that first. All of the AD, RADIUS, WSUS, Symantec A/V, etc., were still on the old network. I started a document, and planned out the entire shift.

Sounds simple in hindsight, but this took more time than I care to admit. Meanwhile, I was attempting to keep 250 users happy, essentially, by myself. To add one more thing on my plate, the business decided to move from onsite GroupWise to a hosted Exchange system.

The network shift went on hold for a few weeks while we plotted the move to Exchange. It wasn’t the smoothest changeover in the world. The plan was to use Quest software to pull the managers and other higher ups directly into Exchange. This accounted for about 50 users. For the other 200, I would use a desktop with Outlook GroupWise connector installed and dump their mail into a .pst file. Not fun, but cheap. The host would then pull them in. Except, the .pst files weren’t in unicode format, so they couldn’t automatically pull them in. I ended up pulling in all those by hand using another desktop with Outlook installed. It was not the most fun on a weekend I’ve ever had.

Meanwhile, the stress of keeping 250 people up and going was getting to me. My normal five-mile morning runs were becoming slogs that I stopped enjoying. My wife and kids would keep clear of me when I got home, and I was putting on weight.

I cracked. A secretary made a joke about the Exchange migration, and I took it the wrong way. I yelled at her for no reason. I walked out, went to a store nearby and bought my first pack of cigarettes since I had quit three years before. Five smokes later, I came back in, apologized profusely to the secretary I yelled at and got back to work.

I put off the network shift again while I coasted and let the pressure ease off.

A month or two (or six) later, I was ready to give it another go. Adding another switch, deleting old VLANs, pointing things to the new IP addresses — about 10 hours on a weekend, and everything worked. My plan was 99 percent perfect. My only mistake was not enabling IP routing on the new switch. I was happy with the new setup, and most importantly, the users didn’t see a thing.

I put the wireless on the docket next, but decided to coast at least another month.

The company then decided to onsite the Exchange system, for various reasons. Two servers, a small SAN, a bunch more reading, installation, VMWare ESX 4.1, Exchange 2010, boom, done. Again, it wasn’t seamless, but the problems only lasted a day or two. Now, to get to the wireless.

But then the Monty Python-esque foot dropped again. Another job change, and I was back to my original company, without the outsourcing company. If I ever have to fill out a resume again, this is going to take some explaining. They hired an additional IT person and I finally had enough mental bandwidth to tackle the wireless head on.

A call to Cisco on the wireless drops basically told me that the previous network admin was out of his depth when setting up the wireless, and the money the company spent on bringing a supposed wireless expert on site to help was 100 percent wasted. I added another controller, a couple more APs, set things up the way Cisco recommended and the wireless has never been more stable.

Looking back, I tried to do too much at once, and paid the price. After growing up a bit, learning the importance of planning everything out, and communicating what was going on with the people affected, things are going pretty well.

There’s an episode of “Futurama” where Bender meets a god-like entity who tells him, “When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.” I think that’s a good motto for IT to live by."

source: Spiceworks

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