Re: [SAGE] Strategies for taking ownership of existing infrastructure?

[Steve Barnet <barnet@chem.wisc.edu>]

Jesús Couto wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> The subject line sound awful (and its my first post :-/). Basically
> I'm just asking for advice for the following situation:

Welcome to the jungle. :-)

[...]

> I guess people here have found themselves in the same situation... I'm
> trying to organize my ideas at all levels (technical, practices &
> procedures, organization, "office politics") about how to get to own
> the place. So any tip or advice you can come up with is welcome.

In the past I've found it helpful to do a couple things:

1) Start work on a simple network map. It should cover physical
    and logical components. You might need a couple of documents
    to cleanly represent the information.

2) Make a plan. Make your "this is messed up" list, and then
    make a "how it should be" list. The plan is the how you get
    yourself from "messed up" to "how it should be." It doesn't
    have to be fancy, but it should be a list of projects broken
    down into steps you can cross off as you go along. Doing this
    helps keep you on course, and gives you a way to keep track
    of what you've accomplished.

You can organize the plan in whatever way makes sense to you.
I've found the following to work well for me (in rough order of
system impact):

Physical
   Find and label everything - if you can't find it, you can't fix it.
   Environment issues (power, cooling, noise, physical access, etc)
   Cabling - bad cables make life miserable

Network
   Switches/hubs/routers etc
   DNS
   IP address management

Application/Service
   Email, web, etc (organization dependent)

Procedural (How you and the organization work)
   Problem tracking/reporting
   Change management
   Administrative access
   Internal busimess processes, etc

I've found that problems tend to percolate from physical ->
network -> application/service in some rather subtle and nasty ways.

A few other thoughts in no particular order:

* Identify critical services (things that stop business, things
   that get you fired). Protect them as though your job depends upon
   it. :-)

* Tread lightly at first. Take time to verify that what you're about
   to do won't kill something else.

* Celebrate small improvements. In many cases, improvement happens
   as a result of small steps. When you're overwhelmed it's easy to
   overlook the cumulative effects of small fixes.

* Talk to your users and managers. It's quick to conduct business via
   email, but many times you can find out more in a five minute
   conversation than in a 20 message email exchange.

* There comes a point in any migration process after which you need
   to actively hunt down the stragglers and migrate them forcibly.

Of course, the list goes on. Hopefully this can get you started.

Good luck!

Best,

---Steve