Some nice utilities

SoftPerfect has some very nice freeware, Network Scanner will give you solid information on a subnet including shares, SNMP and WMI queries. LAN Search Pro will look across your network for documents.

Both are free.

Make your users love you

Offer to color code their mail. Red for items where they are the only To:, Green if they are on CC: or part of a distribution and gray if it's to a distribution list only.

If any one knows how to do this in Outlook 2008 via a Group Policy Object let me know.

Fix -vs- Restart

It's common to "fix" a problem in IT by restarting the service or server that's acting odd.

A lot of the time restarting will let you send the customer on their merry way, and it's not a bad idea but don't confuse it with fixing the actual problem. In fact the restart can mask the problem by overwriting valuable error logs and other information.

Make sure you get the information to prevent the problem from re-occuring. Then restart the service. Finally, know the steps you need to take to implement the actual fix (making the service stable) and schedule a time to do it.

It's really freaking hard to fix a problem you have not identified.

Google knows the answers. The trick is finding the right question

How to troubleshoot a problem

This is something that's harder the more familiar with the technology you become - Oh look www.stuff.com is unreachable, I'll restart apache (or whatever).

Don't get me wrong, if you can fix something fast go for it (assuming no Change Control issues), but if you're looking to actually find out what the problem is that's a different game all together.

1. Identify the actual problem. SVN checkouts are slow
2. Specify expected results (SVN should check out in X seconds)
3. Identify all of the involved systems* (network, SVN server, client, storage, which repo etc)
4. Break down the entire thing to a testable granularity (ping time to server, speed copying repo with cp locally, the same but over NFS instead of SVN, storage utilization).

Now you have the basic tools to find out what's causing your issue, not just how to resolve it.

Learn a frigging language

Not just a scripting language, something you can at least write a UI out of. That's 90% of the work if you already know the job you want to do. And for LISA says you should program to be a senior dude.

Suggestion for someone who does not suck at programming

For something as easy to set up. I have yet to find a decent certificate server from a UI point of view. It's not that freaking complicated guys, OpenSSL does the work. I need to get off my butt and learn how to write code well enough to do a simple UI that raps around a command line tool.

I wonder if Python is the best bang for the buck.

So about servers versus services

As an good IT guy the very first thing you should know is to distinguish between the server and the service. Print is the service, nyc-print01 is the server.

For UNIX it's pretty easy to set this up - create an alias for the server, make sure any certificates it's using are signed for both names and you're usually groovy. I'm probably 70% Windows though, most UNIX admins I knew as I started out where college grads and that intimidated me.

Anyways, in Windows you can do most of the same thing. I don't guarantee it will work with any service but we've had good luck so far. First you do the same thing as with the *nix box, create an alias (the service is the alias, the server is the actual record. I'll make a post on the DNS specifics later.

Then you add two registry keys:

Key one, optional server names: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters make an OptionalNames entry, REG_MULTI_SZ is the type. Add one of each of the SERVICE names. I'm pretty sure you don't need to put the server name in.

The second key, Disable Strict Name Checking:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters
Dword value: DisableStrictNameChecking
Value data (Decimal): 00000001

Finally if you use certificates you'll need to issue certs to the alias, ususally this means a new cert for the server, still having the server listed as the hostname but with aliases defined. Windows Certserver is a pain in the butt.

Oh and you may need to add it's second name in AD, under adsiedit (don't screw around in here, this is kind of like the registry for AD). I'll post it later when I can look it up.

Even this point you may not get full functionality with your alias (printers) instead of your hostname. Try to find ways to resolve that if it's something can live with.