* "The Ultimate Administrator's Repair Manual"
Chris Wolf writes books about Windows operating systems and other Microsoft technologies. In his latest tome, he starts the introduction by saying: “Imagine an Enterprise network that is without failure of any type, and users that never ask for help or have problems with their systems.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? But as Wolf goes on to say: “Now pinch yourself and wake up because you are surely dreaming.”
Failures, problems and questions from users will crop up from time to time. They can’t be prevented, they can only be responded to. We do, of course, take all the steps we can to mitigate these situations so that they occur as infrequently as possible, but they still do happen. And when they do, you are supposed to be the jack-of-all-trades, the know-it-all who can provide the answers and save the day. But you can’t know it all. There’s simply too much to know. Given the right approach, though, you can appear to know it all, which as far as your users and, perhaps more importantly, your boss is concerned, amounts to the same thing.
Wolf’s book is called “Troubleshooting Microsoft Technologies, The Ultimate Administrator’s Repair Manual.” At 700-pages it’s a relatively slim volume considering that it aims to cover “Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Office, Active Directory, and more!” (At least that’s what the cover blurb says). Surprisingly, I think, it fulfills that expectation.
Wolf doesn’t attempt to cover every aspect of every technology with every possible problem or question that might arise. Instead, he presents the basic information about a technology (IP networking, for example), provides monitoring or assessment tools on the CD accompanying the book and tries to instill in the reader a methodology for approaching problems that will work over a wide range of situations.
That is, in fact, the essence of troubleshooting. You could build an unwieldy manual of tens of thousands of pages that describe how to react to specific incidents occurring on a wide variety of Windows Server 2003 hardware and software platforms. You could build this book so that anyone with a high school education and the ability to follow step-by-step directions could handle any of the situations that are covered by the manual. Yet there will always be situations that arise that have not been anticipated (or haven’t been seen previously) and are not covered in the book. Without a troubleshooting methodology and without the ability to see the current situation as analogous to others that have been solved, the person facing the problem hasn’t the slightest clue about how to proceed.
Having the right tools and knowing a working methodology can be more useful to you in a crisis than dozens of thousand-page “how to do it” manuals. Wolf’s book fills that need for Windows network managers.
