So, I’ve been in Kansas City to turn up a nice new client for our Cloud Hosting, since their internet had not been kind to letting me on to check things out, we got onsite and had a not-so warm welcome to their IT infrastructure..
After arriving and checking out the machines and networking equipment, we found the following:
1. The domain, was 2003 based domain, that was something like: r512A3.com (I could only shake my head at this)
2. Workstations had no solid naming convention, after going to ~10 workstations, I did find a pattern.. they were all windows xp default naming convention -_- (the random letter and numbers, wtf!)
3. There were a total of about 35-40 PCs and Wyse terminals, but they had 3, 24 port racked switches, and 6 hubs.. yes.. hubs.. so the reason they kept loosing connectivity or had random dropping of connections, yup that daisy chained hub was the issue..
4. And the straw that broke the camel’s back per-say.. EVERY machine was a static IP config… yeah *everyone* oh, and who wants to guess why..? well.. it’s easy.. it’s because the old IT never setup the DHCP role on the DC.. awesome..
So now that your head has to hurt as much as mine has through the last day.. my rant is over.. I understand that some things are a preference of the IT that set it up (using a .com TLD instead of .local for a local domain [I prefer .local because of what it is..]), but gosh how the HELL can someone eff up a domain so badly..
After setting up DHCP on our new firewall, changing all of the local machines to DHCP and setting up all of the printers in the firewall’s DHCP reservation, we were on track for a good morning.
Fast forward to this morning, we got in and luckily the work we did last night helped immensely, there was some printing hiccups as we made sure to iron out all of the details for our cloud platform. Combine the printers with getting an emergency call to a local cable guy, we were able to do 8 new runs (btw, this place is 11k square feet!), to allow us to remove the Hubs, and hook up our three new wireless access points, score!
At the end of the day, we found ourselfs with a solid network, a wireless network that was ready for the docs to use and things looking good.
Now that I have my ranting out, i’m off for the night.. for those that read these, thanks, for those that don’t, you might be missing out.
Peace
-B