Work Work Work Busy

Wow, it has been a busy few days at work. I was off on Monday, Tuesday I come in and there are all sorts of problems, most notably one of the higher ups accounts got messed up because someone used that account to make a template for her old job title in the old system. They used that template to create a new account Monday and there was some key information that caused the template account to overwrite the user’s account in the new Active Directory. The system DIRXML really sucks, I say that, but I don’t really have a good understanding of it. It was setup and not documented at all. From my end, it just doesn’t work very well. Its deleted accounts, not updated accounts that it should have, and made in general weird changes to accounts in my system. Of course, it may just be set up wrong, all I know, it doesn’t work right.

I have this problem with one of the units where I work that uses a lot of Macintosh computers with the Entourage 2004 mail client. Lets just say they have a lot of issues, not one has to do with the Exchange servers I manage, but for some reason, they choose a mail client that just doesn’t work, and then complain to me about their problems. I think the problem has to do with network communications if you ask me, but they just don’t want to hear it.

Today was interesting. I lost connection to my e-mail, as did everyone else in my office. I couldn’t reach my mail server on the network at all. Being a good systems engineer, I run up to the computer room (they call it a datacenter, but I’m sorry, any room that you can’t keep a reasonable constant temperature or humidity, where you blow breakers, and have boxes and storage, can’t be called a datacenter) to check it out. It turns out all my servers lost their network connections for about 3 minutes. I called the NOC, and they told me flat out that there was no problem and it must have been my PC, funny, when I called them I explained that I had several reports. I informed my supervisor, who wasn’t too happy about the situation, who called the NOC himself, they explained to him that a switch crashed. I have a funny suspicion that someone in the NOC did something to cause the switch to reboot. Of course, its not my problem, but it sure does make me look bad when nobody can connect to their e-mail.

To top it off, I get off the train in an ice storm, the van had 1/4 inch of ice on that I had to get off the windows before I could finish the drive home. The good news is, I worked on my general amateur radio license exam studying.