Some of you may know that I’m in the middle of searching for a new job at the moment. I have been working with Fujitsu for five years now and I must say, without any reservation I will tell you that it has been the most enjoyable five years ever. Fujitsu are a great company and the technology that I have had exposure to here probably can’t be matched by any other company. Most people after working in a company for five years find it hard to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning. I genuinely look forward to getting to my desk to tackle the days challenges. I don’t under value this. Coming to Fujitsu from a very unfair and very inflexible employer I really understand how horrible life can get when you hate your job. It’s not a nice situation to be in and to be honest with you, because Fujitsu are so far on the other end of the scale it has taken me a long time to make the decision to begin looking for a new role. When I find something new, I will very carefully weigh up the pros and cons of moving because I would never like to be in that situation again.

I am looking for a very different challenge now. I would like to remain in a system administrator type role but I would like to work for a small to mid-size company. I’d love the task of building up an infrastructure on a tight budget while at the same time working toward implementing the standards that would be found in a large enterprise network.

In a contract that I finished about six months ago, I was asked to upgrade the computer systems in a mid-size company with170 users. They were running on out dated systems and the connectivity between various offices in the buildings was established using a mixture of hardware. Their budget was very small and the task was very ambitious. With only a few thousand Euro they wanted a new active directory environment, Exchange, File servers, IIS hosting, an application server and a firewall / proxy combination. All this and they could really only afford two servers. On top of all this, they wanted the systems to have resiliency.

Unfortunately, the IT staff in the company had no experience with command line environments so using Linux servers was out of the question. That was unfortunate as it would have saved on licencing and system requirements. I decided to use Windows 2008R2 Core, Hyper-V and a spare workstation with more RAM and hard disks and a RAID controller to give them 2 domain controllers, 2 exchange servers, 2 file servers, 1 IIS server, and 1 Application server and thanks to some refurbished hardware, they also have a machine running PFSense for their firewall and proxying needs.

The system that I implemented has its limitations because of the lack of physical hosts but it is a huge step up compared to their old single server infrastructure. They have a high level of resiliency and the work was completed under the budget.

What is unfortunate from my perspective is that I know how their environment can be vastly improved. By insisting on a purchasing policy for all technical equipment the environment would become standards based within a few years, by implementing service level agreements, expectations would be set for users and they would be happier with the systems that they depend on. By implementing a formal helpdesk system would help manage the time spent by the IT staff fixing problems reported by end users while also giving end users exposure to the progress of their problems and finally documenting systems would help new IT staff get up to speed freeing up time for senior admins to concentrate on important infrastructural enhancements.

Basically, what it boils down to is I have the experience now of administering a reasonably large environment. I have followed and implemented best practices and I have completed more change controls than I would like to remember. I would now like to help a company that wants to mature their IT environment by giving them the benefit of my experience and my enthusiasm to tackle new problems.

As I see it, there are a few really important parts to making a reliable, efficient and secure computer system.

• Use standard components… When possible buy hardware from one manufacturer.
• Plan in advance and keep stakeholders informed.
• When possible automate. When you can’t automate, make and follow a checklist.
• Set realistic expectations for end users.
• Document everything. You never know when you’re going to get hit by a bus.
• Set policies. They set expectations for users, protect equipment, and promote standards.
• Backup everything possible. Store backups in remote locations.

I could go on and on and on. But you get the idea. I have a passion for IT and I would really love to move to a company where I have more responsibility, more autonomy and more flexibility.

If you or someone you know are looking for a system administrator fitting my description please get in contact with me or download my CV.