Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Laying it out on the table, I've been looking for another job. I really like my current job but like any other job, it has pros and cons, things I love about it and things I hate about it. Just a recap for anyone who doesn't know, I work in the Network Operations center (aka, NOC) for a large Housing Department of a major university. We support the full IT needs of the staff (mostly administrative, custodial and maintenance staff) and limited scopes of support for the student-side of things (online check-in for housing, website hosting for various student Student Affairs groups, Internet services for the students in residence halls, etc). We're the first round of support. There's one phone number and one email address that 3 of us work out of. In many cases, we can help. Someone locked out their account, email "isn't working", "How do I do this?" sort of stuff. For things we can't fix, we create a ticket and assign it to the proper group. We...

Full disclosure, this is more a note for my future-self but I'll share it with you too. I got a new laptop for work (still a heavy-as-hell Dell Inspiron E65xx series so nothing to write home about) but it's completely fresh. It's nice to setup a new computer. However, I've learned that Active Directory (AD) isn't just something that's on every Windows machine, rather, it's something you enable. Not only that, there 2 ways to do it. Here's how to do it.

We have 4 Admins on my department's Network & Systems Administration team. The Security Admin and Network Engineer also manage Linux/Unix stuff while the other 2 admins are our Windows Admins, which is where most of our services run. One Windows Admin oversees the NOC (where I currently work) while the other manages our VMWare infrastructure as well as Mailmeter, our Cisco UCS blade systems, backups, etc. One Windows Admin has the NOC as well as a small team of student assistants that handle support duties to our residents under him. Security Admin, Network Engineer, and Other Windows Admin all have their own Jr Admins as well. Chris is a Jr Admin under our Security Admin and Steven is Jr Admin under our Network Engineer. Chris and Steven were both working in the NOC when I started and were 1 by 1 promoted to Jr Admin positions. Our other Windows Admin had Patrick, an older IT guy who worked here for almost a year. Patrick recently took a job elsewhere so I asked Other Wind...