1-Man IT Department

Back with a Vengeance!

Well, not really a vengeance because I am not really mad at anything. I have decided to try to kick start my blogging career on both my tech blog (what you are reading) as well as my productivity blog. I am starting here, with 1-ManIT, because there have been a lot more changes in my life in this area then any other. I will hit some of the highlights now with more meaningful posts in the following days.

SANS Security Essentials Bootcamp Day 1

I am spending this week traveling to Birmingham, Alabama to attend the SANS Community Event that is teaching SEC401 - Security Essentials Bootcamp. The class is me and 23 others from all over the country. Most are from Alabama, but there are some from my home state of Louisiana (Louisiana Lottery Corp.) a couple from Georgia (including one gent who had to wear his University of Georgia Coachs shirt today, argh!), and then individuals from Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. The class is being taught by Matt Pierce who is the Security Administrator at AdTran in Huntsville, AL.

When we each arrive at the hotel, we are greeted with a black zippered bag with the SANS logo on it. When I lifted mine up, I thought that I had thrown my back out again. I looked down and saw 6 books that are each at least 2″ thick in them. Upon closer inspection, there was one book for each day, and they are each at least 500 pages. WOW! That is over 3000 pages of documentation for this training course.

A Long and Winding Road

It has been awhile since I have posted here, and since I have been pinged a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, I figured that i needed to start posting here again. So a quick recap of things that have been happening to me since I posted last.

1. I have FINALLY released the bid for the server that will become our new Exchange 2007 Server at work. Working in local government, if I hit a specific amount ($7,500), I have to bid out the machine to at least 3 vendors. I released the bid on June 2, and I will open them on June 18, 2007. I am pretty excited aboout this moving on. This is the one project that needed to get going. We are using Novell Groupwise currently on a Novell 5.1 server that was not configured correctly (e.g. my SYS:Public dir is not at /sys/public it is in sys/mail/public…why, you ask…I have NO IDEA, but it has been this way for over 5 years). I had never spec’ed out an Exchange Server before so I severely underbudgeted for the project for this year. It may be that I get the hardware this year and the software next year first thing. I am getting the OS and Exchange Server software off of state bid, so there should not be any delay in getting it in October or November. (We start our FY in October.)

My State of the Network

I have decided to lay out some of the basics of my network at my job. Read forth with caution because it is not pretty. Please leave and and all suggestions that you have for me to make my network better and especially more secure. I have a Grand Vision in my head of what I want the network to be like. Now it is just getting the money, time and knowledge to get it all in place.

I have been at my job since Jan 2006. It is the first network administration job that I have had. I have come from the desktop support arena that dabbled in the network area. When I got here, our entire City Hall network was running on an old Compaq Proliant ML350 with 40GB hard drive. It had Novell 5.1 as the NOS, Groupwise 6.5 for email for 85+ users, Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate 8, ARCserve 6 for our single tape backup and the file server for 30+ users. The backup had not for the 2+ months prior to my arrival, which was revealed when our Sales Tax database got corrupted before my arrival [who would have thought a 300+MB Access database would corrupt!].