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

["Dave Hilton" <hilton@entelos.com>]

Jesus,

Your discription of your predicament brought back some vivid memories.  Hang in there, it's a noble fight.

I always start by reminding myself that there is a huge gap between "it works" and "how I'd do it" - it's the only way I can avoid ulcers.

Find out what users are complaining about and try to "fix" something that is obvious and noticable amongst your users.  This gets people on your side and buys you some time to think and organize.

Get your own personal workstation tuned, then begin by tuning everyting between you and the Internet and between you and the important internal services (NTP, SMTP, DNS, VPN, file shares, etc.)  I have found that by the time I get MY things running the way I want - many others have reaped the reward.

Try to condense services into fewer boxes (computer and network) then, using the liberated boxes, rebuild in parallel with what is already in place. This is more easily done in the network, not so easily done in the servers.

Example: When I joined my current employer, the network consisted of five daisy-chained hubs, the users complained of sluggishness and erratic behavior.  By installing a single 24 port switch I made EVERYONE happy and it was at least a week before anyone came to me with additional "hey, can you take a look at this" problems.  By then, I had a rough electrical distribution map worked out; a network map with user names, room numbers, wall plate identification, and switch port numbers; lined up an outside Unix guru to lend me a hand; and contacted an ISP who could give us something better than a dial-up email drop account.  In retrospect I think I benefited by the fact that there were so many things wrong that dramatic changes occurred daily for the first month and I looked like a Real Hero.  It took another month to work out the SAMBA and NFS maps, synchronize usernames and passwords across all platforms (by manual intervention since NIS and I don't get along well), install four more central servers, reconfigur most of the laptops and workstations, run the printers through queues (instead of each workstation talikng directly to each printer), put the servers, network switch, and the telephone switch on UPSes (since we were good for one power interruption a week at the location). The third month I installed a firewall and new ISP connection (ganged ISDN.)  Believe it or not, the work got harder after that because I had run out of "obvious & dramatic" things to do.


Hope you can find some hope and guidance in what I've written.


Dave Hilton 
Network Administrator 
entelos® 
Foster City, CA 

Clarity in The Age of Plausible Reality