Week 6 day 2

I hear this all the time folks. “It worked yesterday, why is it not working now?” As I hear this I want to whip out my magic 8 ball or some other type of magic crystal ball and shake it vigorously looking for an answer. The problem is there are no magical answers and while it may appear that I have a magic wand with magical fairy dust I really do not. Sometimes things happen in binary land that I really do not have any control over. For instance, if your e-mail is hosted at a remote site and your password becomes inoperative for whatever reasons I really do not have the ability to fix that at your local desktop. We really do have to call the remote site (ISP, helpdesk etc) and get them to reset your password. Resetting your computer continuously for the next hour is not going to magically reset the password. Also, when you ask for help please do not feel the need to use a high pitched whine when you do it. My purpose in life (at work at least) is to provide you with technical support and I promise that if you just tell me what the problem is I will do my best to fix it. Heck, saying good morning and calling me by my first name would start the conversation off very nicely and would make me want to do whatever I can to assist you. After all, I get satisfaction from knowing that I have solved your problem and that you can go back to doing your job efficiently.

Over the last five weeks I have gone from running around with my hair on fire wondering if I made the right decision to take on this new job to having things finally slow down a little bit. As I look around me I am able to see things more clearly and I do not feel as overwhelmed as I once did. When you are the only I.T. person at a company you are responsible for everything and there is nowhere to turn other than to your ability to get things done and external resources. Now that I have most of the user community at a point where they can work without calling me several times per day I can now start turning a portion of my attention towards the actual network infrastructure which includes the five servers that run our applications and provides us services. I have several clean up type projects that need to be addressed sooner than later. I need to get my ducks in a row, create a plan and then go to the boss and get his blessings for any external resources that I might need or the necessary funding to make this happen.

My on call responsibilities have not been too overwhelming thus far which I am glad of. I get two or three calls on the cell phone per week and most of the questions I can answer without having to remotely connect to the users workstation to fix something which is nice. The intense discovery zone routine that I have been going through in the last five weeks has helped out tremendously as well. I have a three ring binder that has different types of information that I might need and I carry that with me in my laptop bag. Being extremely organized and task oriented is very helpful when it comes to being in an I.T. role at a company.

The disconnect between humans and technology

My job helps me to remain humble. I say this because I know that while I might appear to be a genius with computers and technology in general I am surrounded with folks who are geniuses in their own respective fields. The humility comes in when I get silly questions or complaints that are seemingly easy for me to figure out. I have to remember that I have been doing this sort of thing for 20 years and that my experience makes those easy things easy. I am sure that 20 years ago when I started working in the I.T. industry that a lot of things were not easy and that I owe my knowledge and experience to many mentors along the way.

Now , with all of that said, I have to say something else. Computers today are not that difficult to operate. The key thing is that you can not be afraid of it. Fear of the unknown is normal but if you belly up to the beast so to speak and dive in you will find that running your pc is not all that difficult. Think of it this way if you will. How do you approach problems in your every day life or job? You probably have a logical thought process that you follow to deduce what you need in order to get through the day. Your computer is no different. You have to approach your computer with the attitude of " I can do it!!" As an I.T. professional I have no problem with someone coming to me and saying "I do not know how to do this" or "I do not understand what this means". That is my job, to help you through those moments and to explain to you what this or that means and then to fix it to where you can continue on with your day. The thing that I do not want to hear and makes my job difficult is "I do not understand why this thing is broken and futher more I do not care, just fix it".

Some folks have the attitude that technology should just work and they get angry when someone can not just wave a magical wand and make their lives stress free when it comes to their personal computer. That attitude in and of itself is the disconnect between humans and computers. In my mind my job is to fix those things (hardware) that you (the end user) should not have to be worried about and to train you on how to use the software that you use to get your job done. My encouragement to you is that if your attitude is positive and you want to learn how to use your computer then my job as the I.T. professional is so much easier. When you are happy then I am happy. I like solving problems and I love seeing folks like you who are happily sitting at your desk banging away at the keyboard and being productive. I like being able to come by your desk or office and say howdy and not have to always be talking about a computer problem.

Just the other day I went to one of our satellite offices with a list of pc issues to resolve which I did while I was doing Windows Updates. I got to one of the lists and this person had said that the pc speakers on the desk have not worked since the pc was installed. I think the pc was installed two or three years ago. I started to get under the desk to trace the speaker wire to make sure it was plugged into the green audio out plug when I noticed that the power light for the speakers was not on. I reached over and turned on the speakers and guess what? My magic wand was out and I sprinkled power dust on those speakers and they magically began to produce music. LOL

Currently I am the I.T. manager for a company that does resort rentals on the East Coast. I have one main office to support and two satellite offices. That averages out to about 45 people and 50 pc's and five servers. I stay very busy but I like my job. I am thankful that I have a full time job that provides me with a salary and benefits for me and my family. I can remember the days not too long ago where I was working two and three jobs just to put food on the table thanks to the I.T. industry taking a nose after the September 11th incident. There are plenty of folks out there who are not as fortunate as myself and I remember that on a daily basis.

Supporting the boardwalk

After spending two years doing server support at a local college campus I managed to locate a job which provided a raise in income and benefits. Both of those things were needed by my family in a big way.

Money and benefits are very important but they are only a portion of the big picture. Why do we do what we do for 8 or more hours per day? Is the ability to pay bills the only thing that keeps us going day in and day out? It has been said and even researched that we spend more time with our co workers than we do our immediate family. Maybe that is why we drag little nick knacks from the house such as pictures, stuffed animals or whatever to the work place so that it can remind us of our loved ones.

I have been in the I.T. industry since 1990 and I have worked in six different industries supporting computer users and the underlying computer networks that they use. I enjoy a certain satisfaction from learning how to use computer technology and helping others to use it.

Fast forward from 1990 to September 2008 where I am supporting approximately 85 users and a computer network with five servers and one network with three different subnets. This is my third week as the resident propellerhead and for the most part all of my coworkers are excited that I am there. That is because there are more problems to solve than I have time to fix. I am sure that in about 3 months from now I will be more acclimated to the environment and have the backlog of work orders under control. The biggest problem that I have is knowing how to prioritize my responsibilities between providing end user computer support and being an I.T. Manager/ network administrator. Doing all three of these is going to be a big challenge for me and I hope that I am up for it.

Providing end user computer support is the easiest of the three for me. I have been doing this for years in many different capacities. While I am learning the new environment and living through discovery zone being able to clear out some trouble tickets gives me the feeling of accomplishment which is nice. It also helps those that I support to be able to use their computers with more efficiency and get their jobs done.

Today I got a phone call that reminded me of a phone call that I received years ago. I was working at a law firm and one of the legal secretaries called me and said that her computer was making a horrible clicking noise. She held the phone handset close to her computer so I could hear it. For the life of me I could not figure out what this was so I told her that I would be right over. When I arrived at her desk I observed a large bundle of papers sitting on the corner of her keyboard which was depressing one of the keys. Today I got a phone call from one of my computer users and she told me that her computer screen was flipped sideways. Once again the user flopped a notebook on to the keyboard to write in it and somehow the right key combination was pressed and presto, the screen flipped onto its side.

I know that with tablet pc's you can flip the screen from portrait to landscape because it is an functionality of the software. How did I solve it you ask? Google search engine to the rescue. I searched for "flipped screen XP" and I found multiple hits about this problem. Apparently my users were not the first folks to cook this up. I learned that with a simple key stroke combination I was able to flip the screen back to where it had come from. I had several folks get up from their chairs to walk over to see how I was going to solve that problem. Hopefully what I did was allow them a good laugh and showed them that while I do not know everything I do have the ability to research the problem and figure it out.

For some folks their idea of having a computer support person to call is that this person will just fix all of their problems. Oh, I have a strange screen on my monitor I have never seen. Lets just call the IT guy or gal and just have them come fix it. In this picture the IT guy or gal comes and fixes whatever the problem is and leaves. The only problem with this picture is that the computer user remains clueless about the problem and when it happens again they will just pick up the phone again. It is a vicious cycle that does not need to continue. Support should not enable someone to be helpless. Support should facilitate fixing of the problem but also educating the computer user so that they can understand what has happened and how to respond in the future.

Yes, I like fixing problems and I love playing around with computers. I love hardware, software and networking. I love surfing the web and watching videos online. I love blogging, reading, playing Texas Holdem online. The only problem is that there is only one of me and I can only be stretched so far. My goal is to help you, the computer user, to take responsibility for the tool that the computer is so that you can do your job. I want you to take ownership of your computer just like you do your automobile. You do not drive your car on flat tires or with no water in the radiator or gas in the fuel tank. You know that you have to do certain things in order to drive your vehicle down the street and survive.

The same principle applies to your computer. You have to pull out the manual and figure out how to use this computer. The fuel in this case is knowledge for your mind. You have to train yourself how to use the tool and make it advantageous to use it.

Out with Vista back to XP Pro

I still use Vista Ultimate at work and at home however if anything goes wrong with either OS on either computer it will not be reinstalled at this time. I really do not see any compelling reason for people to stop using XP and go to this new OS from Microsoft. The major problem that I see with Vista is that the OS is just not supported with regards to hardware drivers and other ancillary software. I just received a new Dell laptop with Vista on it from work and when I found out that the Aventail VPN client was still in BETA and has not had all the bugs worked out I was a bit skeptical. Sure enough I could not connect to the work network via vpn client which created a problem for me. One option would have been to dual boot Vista with Linux Suse 10.3 and use a VPN client that I know works or I could have installed Vmware workstation and loaded an XP guest OS on vmware and configured that OS for my remote access needs. I figured that my best bet would be to stop struggling with Vista and all of its problems and just go back to the tried and true XP Professional and be done with it.

Just the other day when I took posession of the laptop I was working with one of the helpdesk techs at work and I told them that if someone who is an IT Professinal struggles with configuring and making the technology work then what do we think end users are going to put up with. The bottom line is that we use technology in order to get our every day tasks completed. We use technology to gather and manage data. When it becomes a huge hassle to use the technology it is easy for anyone to get frustrated and look for other answers.

Update on chkdsk wiping out permissions on folders

After spending considerable time with Microsoft on the phone and an ezassist session on the server in question this is what I found out. There are two hotfixes available. One for W23k servers with SP1 and one for W23k servers with SP2. You must apply these hot fixes and reboot the server BEFORE you run chkdsk on any volumes. There are no easy ways to replace the permissions on the user folders once the damage is done. Option A is the GUI routine where you right click on the user folder and readd the users or global groups and then select to push to all files and folders. Option 2 is to use a xcacls.vbs script to run lcacls.exe and associated commands to push the permissions out to each file and folder. If you need to apply global changes only to a group of folders you can go to the top root folder and make your changes and then select inheritance for all sub folders and files under the root. That will not work for individual folder security permission needs which is much more granular.

I dodged a bullet with regards to replacing the security permissions on my file server today. Since the office is closed and no one is accessing the server or making changes to data I was able to revert the E volume back to 12/26/07 at 5 am via the Volume Shadow Copy. It took some time for this to happen but once it was complete and I rebooted the server I spot checked several folders and everything was back to where it was before I ran chkdsk and accidentally stripped out the permissions. If this had been a normal work day and all the users had been making changes to their data or adding data to their user directories then I would have been forced to go the lcacls.vbs route or the manual point and click GUI routine to replace the permissions. I can not begin to tell you how much fun that is.

chkdsk disaster on W2k3 NTFS partition

In October of this year I ran Chkdsk on a volume on one of my W2k3 servers. I ran this utility because we had evidence of file or folder corruption on that particular user share. I was rewarded for my actions by chkdsk removing ALL the security permissions on every single folder. Needless to say I was a huge hit with the rest of the server support team who wound up helping me to replace all the security permissions on these folders so that folks could access their data. In four days we got this accomplished. We did our research and according to Microsoft knowledgebase articles this was something that happens to Windows 2000 servers. No where did we see where Windows 2003 servers with SP1 were supposed to be susceptible to this type of problem. We did find an obscure article that hinted that there was an NTFS related file that SP2 would update that would keep this from happening. Fast forward to December and this same server is now updated with SP2 and all of the Microsoft Updates that are available for Windows 2003 Standard Edition. We are in the midst of Christmas holidays and everyone other than us unlucky contractors are out doing other things than work. I figured this was a wonderful opportunity to let chkdsk do its magic and fix whatever data corruption that might be on the user share of this server. I run chkdsk with the /f switch so it dismounts the volume and off to the races it goes. The volume is close to 1.5 TB in size so it takes several hours to do. Phase 1 and 2 go along just fine with nothing being reported back to the screen as an error. Phase 3 checks the indexes and that is when I got the dreaded “replacing invalid security id with default security id for file (numbers). Needless to say I was not really excited about the prospect of having to manually replace the permissions on all these folders. I called my boss, told her the problem and she authorized me to call Microsoft and get paid support. I am hoping that they can identify the problem for us so that I can document it and make sure it never happens again on our hundreds of other servers and that they can provide me with a script from AD that will allow me to replace the permissions with the correct permissions from the command line. I will let you know what I find out when the dust settles and things are fixed.

Vista Problems

Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft.

I subscribe to the ItsVista newsletter/blog and when I saw this I could relate to the PAIN that some of these problems have caused all of us. I have been using Vista every since the first beta release and I must say that the OS is different and takes some getting used to. I am currently using Vista Ultimate in a networking environment at work. There are two things I dont like specificially about Vista in a LAN environment.

A. you cant launch a program with the RUN AS option

B. Copying data to and from a network share takes forever

In XP Pro you can launch an application by right clicking on the icon and selecting Run As which allows you to select a domain admin account or system account with administrative rights higher than the current credentials that you are logged on to the domain with. The only way I can do network administration from my Vista box is to use a program called Hyena which allows me to sign on to a server individually with whatever credentials that I want.

As for copying data this is just rediculous. I have a friend who has experienced a laptop crash which is partly hardware and partly software related. I plan on disecting the laptop so that I can visually inspect the motherboard and other things attached to it to see if I can find out why it is overheating. In the interim I decided that I would bring the hard drive to work with me and get the data off of it.

I utilized a nifty little USB hard drive adapter that I used to plug the laptop hard drive into and copied all the data from the hard drive to my XP workstation. My Vista workstation did not know what to do with the new device. Welcome to the wonderful world of driver hell. I moved the device over to the XP machine and XP recongized that I have a external usb hard drive attached to the system. I copied the 7.3 gb of data over to my XP machine hard drive and then I copied it over to my user share on the network.

This is where the fun begins folks. I started this mess around 10 am this morning and figured I would just work on this inbetween my other work tasks today. I figured I would have it done pretty quickly. Never assume that a computer related task will happen quickly and without any problems. I always find myself assuming that and then wind up spending way more time than expected. I tried to copy the data from my network share to a folder on my Vista machine and after Vista estimated the time it would take it came up with 5 days and 2 hours to move 7 gb of data. I looked at the bit rate the data was moving and it was fluctuating around 25 to 30 kb per second. My Vista box is a Dell with dual core processor at 3.2 ghz and 2 gb of ram. I have a 160 gb hard drive plus network storage. I have a race horse under the hood folks and that does not matter. My nic is a gb ethernet and I have a GB ethernet connection to the switch. There is no way this connection should grind to a hault like this.

The downside to this nightmare is that the DVD writer is on the Vista machine and the XP machine is my dual boot windoze/linux box that does not even have a cdr writer on it. That means that I have to burn the DVD on the Vista machine. I finally got smart and totally bypassed the gui interface and went to the command line interface. I used xcopy to copy from the network share to my backup directory on the hard drive. I started the process , locked down the workstation and went to lunch. Once I came back from lunc the data had been transferred. I have tried several times to burn the data from the windoze explorer to a dvd ram disk with little to no luck. My next and final attempt at this is to use a DVD burning program called BurnFree which is ad driven freeware for copying dvd movies on Vista OS. If that does not work I will be forced to cart the data on an external USB hard disk to my friend.

During my research on the Net I did find some TCP settings to muck with as well as some system services that could supposedly be turned off and give me some more network speed. I tried all of the suggestions but none of them did the trick thus far. Due to time constraints in writing this I dont have time to give you all the gory details but if you do a Google search you will see lots of conversation going on about this problem.

BAD VISTA. You dont play well on the LAN... LOL