I should be long in bed, but I’ll post here because its been one full week now and people keep asking me, so I figure why not just say it out loud for everyone to hear all at once? :-)

The new job is going good. Its a hell of a learning curve. Its an extreme pace change compared to the security stuff. And the environment is so totally foreign to me that I’m still trying to find my feet there.

Compared to the old days at Datacom, this is a major shift in thinking. The new company is currently about the size that InterConnect was when I was there. However, because its no where near the size of Datacom, doesn’t have the resources that we had back in those days. There are no machines that can be set aside and used to build a lab environment to recreate problems that clients are having.

Also, when a client calls, there are so many problems always on the go that you rarely get the chance to just finish a single problem before the next one arrives. This has a major downside to my training. Because everything is happening live and in real time, you don’t often get a chance to go back over a problem to make it stick. Basically, if I don’t pick it up on the first time round, theres not really a chance to see something a second time.

Now, when I’m talking about problems, I don’t mean simple stuff that gets finished in a single call. Thats not so much of an issue. What I’m meaning about problems are those hairy issues that pop up (often it seems) that need some real time to be spent working on them to resolve the issues. Stuff you have to go away and research to find out how to resolve.

Another scary part of the job is that there is no central knowledge base with information on common problems and their solutions. I’m not talking about customer specific problems, but problems that are likely to happen to anyone.

Everyone knows I’m not a Microsoft guy. I know SFA about Microsoft products. It took me 20mins of research to figure out that to enable Out-Of-Office replies to be sent outside of the local Exchange domain, you had to actually change a setting on the Exchange server itself. Otherwise O-o-O replies were only sent to those people that were within the same Exchange domain as the person that is away from the office.

Thats not an uncommon issue. Its something that should definitely be in a knowledge base.

Then there are things like common Symantec Backup Exec problems that you’ll come across.

Then there are all the Windows SBS 2003 problems that are pretty common.

What about all the custom applications we have to support. For example the software that the different medical places use, or that the vet services use?

Theres so much information locked inside the guys heads, but its not accessible until you encounter the problem yourself. Its one thing to ask people for help, but its a completely different thing when that help should be easily located with a quick search on the internal intranet.

That is probably the biggest issue I’m having at the moment. The fact that instead of looking in house for answers, I’m finding myself going to Google instead. If the others are on a phone call or even out on site, I can’t just ask them to put their work on hold so I can get an answer for the person I’m dealing with. Thats not fair to their customer or mine.

Maybe that will change in time. I’m not sure. They talk about having a Knowledge Base inside the CRM. I haven’t found it yet, but that seems like a pretty silly place for a KB to me. Why tag a problem to a customer? Why even write up a resolution so that it is specific to a customer if the problem could occur again elsewhere?

I want to get a server in there and setup a KB of my own. Not likely to happen though. There are no spare machines I can just dump a web server and SQL server on and start putting a KB together on. It strikes me as something kind of fundamental in any IT shop, but I guess I come from a different generation.

I still don’t have internal email or even a personal domain account at work. ;-) So far I’m stuck using the helpdesk account. I don’t mind not having my own domain account. There isn’t really much use for it to be honest. I don’t have a specific place to call my own as such. I swap between two desks in the one office. Emails, job tracking and all that is done on the terminal server.

There are 2 monitors on the desks I use, connected to two separate machines. This allows me to have the problem notes and information going on one screen while I use the other to create a VPN to the client and work on their problems.

Being a Unix man, I have already installed Cygwin and Xming on the local computers I use the most. This isn’t really for any reason other than to allow me to feel just mildly comfortable. Okay, and maybe connecting to my machines at home and using X forwarding over SSH also helps keep me sane. ;-) Its slow but it works. Pity I only have 128kbps upstream at home. Do you know how long it takes for a Firefox window to update at 128kbps across an SSH tunnel to a local X server? ;-) Still, at least it can’t be sniffed by someone in the office. Minor inconvenience when I weigh that in. :-)

Yes, I do check my Gmail through the day. Why do you think I setup the X forwarding and SSH tunnels? :-P I don’t often reply immediately, but I do check it. If people email me, I’ll make an effort when I get the chance.

Its funny seeing how entrenched the thinking is when you enter a Microsoft shop from the outside. Or maybe its just that I’m too used to looking at problems from a completely different perspective. I don’t know. There are some that don’t really have too much knowledge about things outside the Microsoft range. For example, hardware issues, virtual machines, Unix issues, networking and security… The list goes on.

Configurations are done in a certain way because that is what has worked in the past. Not because they necessarily understand it or because its the best way to do it. This has become most evident to me when dealing with things like TCP/IP networking.

Its funny. Linux is seen as this thing they all want to try and discover. For me its an every day thing. The fact that I can type “ssh -X me@somewhere” and load up Firefox at home, but see it on my screen at work is almost magical to some of them. For me, its always been just another everyday thing. Nothing special or strange or even unusual about it. They were even more impressed when I logged in and then loaded Xnest across the SSH tunnel and used XDMCP to get a graphical login screen for my Linux server. They’re used to RDP Terminal Servers. Something like the X11 protocol still doesn’t make sense to them.

In a way, that saddens me. I mean, its not new technology. Its been around as long as “X Windows” has existed. In the old days of dumb terminals, it was the common way of doing things. Now? Its a novelty, almost magical.

By the end of the day, I’m exhausted. My mind is drained. Its hard work mentally, not physically. I’m tired, but sleep is an issue for me again. Its not the same kind of tired you get after spending 13 hours of the night walking around 100 different properties. In a way, I’m finding that one of the biggest struggles. I’m pretty sedentary at the best of times. Having a job that puts me on my butt all day is only going to make my butt grow bigger than it already is.

I need a gym and some personal trainer standing there flogging me to make me work out. Or something like that at least ;-)

Okay, enough yapping. Bed time is a must now. Its after 10:30pm. I’ll talk to you all next time.