Ever inherit a shop that's so F'd up you want to throw everything out and start over?

[jtusa]

Originally posted by: middlehead
I'm on my way out of such a situation. Walked in during early May without any support, the previous guys had quit in late March and early April, and have spent the last 5 months trying to drag this sinking ship above water. Came in with 30 servers and only 2 under active service contracts, convinced them to add one server in the late summer which is the only correctly built piece of hardware in that room, and spent the rest of the time trying to get them to approve new hardware for ridiculously over-tasked domain servers. One is a domain controller, DNS server, file server (for roaming profiles, no less), and the sole Exchange server. The other domain controller is also a partial file server, a print server, a DNS server, and hosts a 12 year old internally-created Delphi app for which there is 0 documentation. I'm quite sure I'm forgetting a few things on each of those boxes, and that's just two-of-thirty servers and doesn't begin to touch user level hardware.


My two week notice was effective today.

Haha, yikes. Well good on you for getting out while you can.

I rant about it, but like someone else said above, it's a challenge, and when I finally get everything like it should be, it'll be good experience, and will look good on the resume. When I took this job I had no idea things were as FUBAR as they are. But I went from driving 30-45 minutes each way at my old job, to driving 5-10 minutes each way for this one, and the pay is pretty good as well.

 

[Adul]

Sounds like a good challenge. Resume material. Save so and so company from complete and total meltdown.

 

[TXHokie]

That's IT - nobody knows what you do until you quit doing it.

 

[Apathetic]

A friend of mine was hired into a shop like the one you described, except there was no documentation and the previous admin had quit. On his second day, the PDC crashed and he found out that there wasn't a BDC. Ouch.

At least you have a BDC and you can start migrating all the extra application crud off of your DCs.

Good luck. It sounds like you're going to need it.

Dave

Originally posted by: jtusa

Originally posted by: Apathetic
Ummm... Please tell me your domain actually has a backup domain controller. If not, I think you know what your first step should be.

Dave

Well there's the primary domain controller, which also acts as an app server, and one of the actual app servers is the secondary. So technically we have two, but I don't like it like that at all.