GroundZero3

I decided to make the jump to find a job in Nothern VA, my apartment lease ended on Feb 28th so I started to searching for a new job about mid Jan. I found a couple online and applied. I got a call back and did a phone interview and the following week did a face to face. Apparently they loved me and sent me an offer letter on Feb 15th, I asked to start on the 28th and they had no problems with it. I wish I asked for a later date because I wanted to take a week off to sleep and play video games. The last few weeks ive been slowly packing up my stuff and putting it into a storage unit.

Ive been here for 2.5 weeks now and boy oh boy I knew they had some issues but this is a bit more than I expected. Its a company with around 100 clients most based in Nova, several remote offices that span from TX to NJ. Supposedly the last network admins they had were horrible hence the desire to go out and look for a full time one.

So here are the list of projects from the start:

-RSA was deployed but only worked for two days and then users couldn't log in. Ive never played around with RSA so this should be interesting.

- Inventory of network. I was given some drawings that were supposedly updated on Feb 14th (the last day the admin worked) but im finding so many things wrong with them. So I need to find servers, switches, routers, firewalls, desktops, and laptops.

- Implement Dot1x, this was done and then turned off because it wasn't working right. I've done Dot1x in a wireless environment but never on a hardwire network. Im really excited to see how much of a pain in the ass this is going to be.

- Implement a backup solution. Right now two sonicwall boxes are setup and are supposed to sync but that hasnt been happening. On top of that I saw some usb external drives attached to the exchange servers. (lol?) There is also a netgear NAS on the network (lol? again) with user data on it.

- Server health monitoring. This is a pure dell shop so im gonna have to investigate what dell uses/has to monitor server health. Nothing is monitoring them so if a drive starts failing or a ram we wont have a clue unless we are physically looking at the boxes.

- RTG/MRTG on WAN ports. They have MPLS connection between our remote sites which I have a general knowledge of but never had hands on so im super excited about that. I want to start monitoring the internet port, the MPLS ports so we can see what kind of traffic is going across the networks.
- Once I get that in place and see what kind of traffic we are pushing QOS for VOIP will come next.

- Implement Shavlik. I have never heard of this software but a service is installed on each workstation and will upgrade third party software such as quicktime, flash, java, adobe and other wonderful applications. This seems like something really cool espically with the adobe updates and exploits. However just toying around with application its not very intelligent and will end up installing more software on your computer. I was testing it out on my box and ended up having safari, gchat and quicktime installed on my computer lol. So a list of approved software needs to be created and then tailor Shavlik to only update those applications

- Last but not least, implement Vmware. Come on you should have seen that one coming! There is no reason why any small business - enterprise shouldn't be deploying it. We have about 15 servers right now (4 of those are in the DMZ) so I think I can get down to around 7 servers (keeping the DMZ servers out of the vmware cluster). Of course that means buying new machines, licenses, and some kind of SAN/NAS solution. I have a dell poweredge r610 box just laying around so ill build a test box (hopefully I can get some extra drives and ram) to show them what it can do and why we need it.

So yeah busy few months coming up. My ultimate goal is to get to a point where I can work from home a few days a week with the drive time and gas going up. We will see! Ill be updating this blog section with the RSA implementation and other fun things I run across.