Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Part of my file server project is to also train our NOC staff on the new ways to use the file server. The NOC or Network Operations Center is responsible for network monitoring and being the first round of support for our nearly 1600 users. They answer the phones, put in tickets for other parts of the IT department (Network Admin (my dept), our desktop team, our development team, our security team, etc.). They also manage accounts in AD and part of the new account creation process is making network shares and making sure new employees have access to the correct folders (which are specified by their respective managers in the new user requests). They also review permissions when necessary, restore files via Shadow Copy.... relatively basic stuff with a Windows GUI. However, since we're moving to Server Core, when they remote in to do whatever it is they need to do on the file server, it's going to leave them at a command prompt with no taskbar. Initially, my plan was just to t...

File Auditing is another one of those things that isn't very fun but it's still very important. With File Auditing, you can track who created/opened/moved/modified/deleted which file, when and from what computer they did it from. Not only is it great for knowing what's going on with your data, but it's also a key part of making sure your infrastructure is HIPAA, SOX or PCI compliant if your company calls for it. It's important when you're thinking about auditing to cast a wide net. You're not setting this up to "catch" someone doing something wrong. You're doing this to increase visibility into the goings-on of your data; The data you've been tasked with managing. You want to audit things, not people or groups. When you audit people, you might find that they are still doing something wrong but they're not doing the wrong thing you thought they were doing. Also, if you're auditing specific people or specific groups of people, that ...

Now that we're getting into setting up our features and such, things are starting to get a little bit interesting (of course, this depends on your definition of the word "interesting").  With Deduplication, we've saved a notable amount of space on our file server. Now, let's make configure a File Screening Policy to make sure our users can't save files that have no business need being on the server.