The Last Tech's Mess....

[DVader]

Have you ever taken a new job, position or area and spent the next month or two cleaning up the mess the last tech did or didn't do?

Just found out that a peice of software wasn't installed on 50 computers by the tech before me when he set them up. Looks like a busy friday for me.

What have you had to fix and how long did it take?

[Stalemate]

I'm still dealing with the fact that no docs existed when I took my current position almost 3 years ago.

Networking, servers, passwords, policies, procedures, logs, etc. - nada!

We could never prove that he actually destroyed any of that, but...

[MacGyver]

My company recently took over a portion of another company's business in Ottawa. Bad news is, their network is a disaster and as of this moment, they have NO network admin whatsoever. The fastest workstation they have is a P200. They have 5 servers and only 8 employees, I am not sure why to this day. Their virus signatures have not been updated in at least a year, and their network is full of viruses!

I installed our own separate network instead for our people, with brand new workstations and high speed internet, and left the ailing junk alone. I was very clear to company management, much to their displeasure, that I wasn't going to have anything to do with the other people's mess. Fortunately I got the backup of my boss. <whew> So I don't have to worry about it.

[ephmynus]

[quote]Originally posted by MacGyver:
<strong>
I installed our own separate network instead for our people, with brand new workstations and high speed internet, and left the ailing junk alone. I was very clear to company management, much to their displeasure, that I wasn't going to have anything to do with the other people's mess. Fortunately I got the backup of my boss. <whew> So I don't have to worry about it.</strong><hr></blockquote>


Hmmmm, what happened to all the old workstations.

[ephmynus]

By the way, I worked for a little shop about two cities from me as a second job for a little while. My boss was nice but didn't know much about computers and I don't think, to this day, that he knew much about running a business. Anyhow, I worked there for $25/hour which I jumped at so I didn't mind. It wasn't the previous techs but the present techs that were my nemesis.

Me: I didn't have to partition so if you do a quick format it should be fine and the customer has been bugging us since he got here to hurry it up.
Other tech: {starts typing} ... ... "Bad Command or File Name. I don't think it knows how to do it."
I walked over to see the following command typed in at the command line (no kidding) Do A: Quick Format.

That was unnecessarily ball busting at the time but was rather amusing when I go back to that time in my head.

These "kids" were trying to set up a network in the shop to through telephone lines and modems. It wouldn't have seemed so bad if they were using RJ11. Instead, they were trying to figure out how to get an rj45 connector to fit into a modem. I don't know how they were hired (I think they were friends of the family) but I hopped out of there as soon as I started seeing this stuff going on.

[Cleetus]

Lots of stuff, brought in as contract, because the present "tech" was struggling.
We have 28 printers, but 68 printer objects in the tree. And so on, with servers, users, and anything else you can put into the network.
Just got done cleaning pc's because they still had year old virus's.
Old computers stacked up because nobody would trouble shoot them.
Of course now that everything is cleaned up, I won't tell the boss that one "good" tech could run this place and still be bored. Got to keep a pay check and the free time to study for cert's for the next job.

[MacGyver]

[quote]Originally posted by Aplustech:
<strong>Hmmmm, what happened to all the old workstations.</strong><hr></blockquote>

The other company is still using them. Office space is being shared, but not the network.

[APCSI]

My worst nightmare so far was a with a company that was running a small peer to peer network (until they got too big) and I had built all their workstations. They decided they needed a server and hired a "Certified Network Specialist" comapny that proceeded to screw up all my workstations, sell this company Microsoft's way overpriced small business server insted of plain Windows NT. The server was had one cpu, one hard drive, battery backup with no software nor cable attachment to the server so no true protection there, NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE, and an external (why I have no idea) DAT drive that they never could get working but kept coming back to try and CHARGING THE CUSTOMER the whole time.

As of now, the DAT works thanks to a simple driver update, the CPU has been upgraded, and the system is now battery protected and the anitvirus software i installed has cleaned off all the viruses people got from e-mail and disk from home.

[Papa Smurf]

I was asked to provide cover while the local tech was on holiday. I was hoping for a nice easy time, feet on the desk reading a paper drinking coffee that kind of thing.

I turned up on site and met the site manager who provided me with pin code and admin password for the server room. I opened up the server room and was nearly knocked back with the heat coming out of the door. Turns out they fitted a new server and ran out of power, So to get it up and running the disconnected the portable air con unit which was the only thing keeping the room from melting.

After sorting power out to the Air con unit and cooling to room down, I looked at the servers. They were moaning about slow access onto the server. 1 look at the server and I had spotted the probelm was due to a failed disk in the RAID 5 array. Turns out it had been like that for 5 weeks and no-one noticed.

Thinking that was the last of my problems I was about to leave the server when for some reason I decided to check the backup log. Turns out the backups were failing cause they were unable to mount the tapes correctly cause no-one had cleaned the drives head (ever I suspect, as the only cleaning tape was still in a wrapper). Speaking to the boss he had no idea this had to be done he thought the cleaning tape light was normal operation of the unit.

After this I asked a simple question about what sort of cable do you use to connect buildings on site....The answer "I dont know we didnt install it" I ask "what happens if you loose comms where does the cable run"......The answer "dont know I might have a map somewhere"

I spent a week tidying up the site IT documents as well as updating a few vital patches on the serves. Once I left the users thought the LAN was running a bit better (maybe replacing a frayed 40mtr cat3 cable with a new 40mtr cat5 between the server and hub had something to do with this as well).

Normally I wouldnt mind doing work like this but in the type of production area I was in on this site where there is ZERO room for mistakes really scared the s**t out of me.

Cheers
Papa"keeping the world a safer place"Smurf

[KINGofBLEH]

In my last job I took over for a guy whose only *****ion was to write code. He hated hardware, refused to understand networking, OS's, etc. He did not document squat. It took me a year to get things flowing the right direction. Then I got offered a job at a might higher level of support in the company and took it. The guys that replaced me has complemented me several times on my thoroughness and attention to detail.

I don't care what you *****ions might be, never ignore the needs of you existing clients. You are never more important than your business.

[G-Nome]

During the period that we were being pushed aside by another IT crew we were constantly having to fix up their screw Ups' A prime example of this was when they decided to repatch the entire network, by pulling out all of the cabling from the hubs. They thought this should be alright to do at 5:15pm since everyone should have left the office by then. Course we all know better than things never work like in the real world. These guys were supposedly Microsoft certified too. The following Monday we found that 2 of the 4 floors weren't connected, and even then some machine were being authenticated and the others weren't, took us a couple of hours to sort all that out. Same guys also reset printers via jet direct or some other means, cause printers were disappearing from the network as they no longer had a working IP address (Or at one stage this one printer had the same IP as another, and the guy was trying to figure out where his prints were going). This also meant having to re-enable IPX for the Novell network too. I must admit though, these guys were thrown in the deep end and had no knowledge on the network infrastructure either. We were never supplied any documentation when we started, so neither did these guys. Course we would have happily shown them the ropes had they not done the dodge and take over from under us. Rocking up to do a job and then discovering all the server passwords had been changed isn't the best way to make friends in this industry. Last I heard I think they were still trying to figure out what network cables came from which patch points

[PitaBred]

You ought to see the rats nests of some phone systems I've replaced... ugh... and there was so much crosstalk in the system that we'd try to trace the wires and get multiple signals, have to figure that out... ugh. Oh well. At least it worked out for the better.

It's actually kinda gratifying cleaning some of those messes. Lets you know that you actually did something for your pay, even if it's less than it's worth...

[Spork]

When I started my new job, none of the office computers had any sort of virus protection on them. It took me about a month to install, update, and clean all the systems. If I ever meet the guy who used to have my position, I'm gonna kick his *** .