One reader’s IT management nightmare

Working in the IT industry promises to be stressful, and many network professionals are expected to deal with more than the average amount of pressure. Still there are those situations that exceed even the accepted and expected level of frustration.

In response to a story posted by The Wall Street Journal online over the summer, I asked readers what their waking IT nightmares are. And readers wrote to share the personal nightmares they’re living at work right now.

One reader’s story:

“I’m currently in an IT nightmare. At the end of May 2007, I started work for a small manufacturing company. I was told that they were a ‘bit behind’ on upgrades, but I would have a budget of $30,000 to $50,000 to get everything up to speed. I’d be a one-man show doing both network administration and help desk. Since there were only 40 computers and two servers, I didn’t think that was too unreasonable. And I had moved from Maryland to Kentucky so that my wife and I could afford to buy the small farm we always wanted. I really needed the job.

Then the fun began.

– I had a few hours with the IT guy who was a part-timer leaving under a cloud. It turned out that he knew nothing about the servers and wasn’t that great on the desktops. He was more than ready to move on and had been for over a year.

– There were 65 PCs. Many of the PCs were 5 years old; some were closer to 8 years old and were running 98 SE.

– The current servers are a 10-12-year-old NT4 and an 8-year-old Windows 2000 running Exchange 5.5. Exchange is missing some directories and so badly misconfigured that I’m not sure how it actually works. Two other engineers have looked at it closely and the consensus is to replace it with 2003 and try to fix the issues then. We’re scared to touch it now.

– There are NO policies for software or hardware use — you want a program, buy it on your credit card (or download it) and install it. The users kept their own software (sometimes) and I have every version of Office from 97 up to 2003 installed.

– Many of the PCs had been upgraded to XP (some only have 128Mb of RAM), but none of the few remaining disks were labeled as to which copy went with which PC. I found one PC that was 3.0GHz with 256Mb of RAM BUS memory.

– There was no inventory of half a dozen laptops that floated in and out of the building for development and testing.

– The antivirus software was 5 years out of date and hadn’t received an updated dat file in 3.

– There was NO FIREWALL on the T-1 connection!!!

– I had almost 100 security groups, but only 60 users. File security was a nightmare with rights granted and denied all through the old file system.

– I have switches and patch panels scattered throughout the building in public areas and no wiring diagram.

I laid out the changes I thought needed to be made to bring the network up to speed. I laid out a timeline and then brought in three different companies to look everything over, eventually picking one to do whatever work I thought was beyond me, such as the Exchange migration. Every engineer shook their head and wondered why anything worked at all. $100,000 was closer to the mark for the first year’s improvements.

We’re getting there. It hasn’t been painless for me, but so far the users are all happy, even though I’ve taken away some of their toys. I generally leave on time and do extra time early in the morning so as not to impact them, though. I seem to have job security.”