I’ve decided its time to sit my 70-299 exam, it will be booked for early September at the very latest.
At the present time I’m using Microsoft One Note 2007 to compile my notes, its working out quite well at the moment.
My aim is to pass this exam and then begin down two routes, the first will be to upgrade to MSCITP: System Administrator and the second is to pass the SharePoint 2007 related exams as we use SharePoint quite heavily within the company I work for.
With much trepidation I decided to try Window’s 7 on my 16 Gigabyte SSD Acer Aspire One, previous attempts at running XP and Vista on the machine left me feeling kind of numb. The issues with Windows and the SSD made the machine almost unusable for even the most basic tasks, these issues lead me to run Ubuntu on the machine for the last 5 months.
Now that Windows 7 has reached our MSDN account I decided it was time to test it properly, downloading the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Enterprise Edition I began the installation. Disheartened by two failed installs due to bad media (it appears my laptops DVD-RAM drive burns coasters!) I finally got the OS installed.
My initial impression’s of the install process and the system were good, the install took a grand total of 7 clicks to complete, the only slow point was the expansion of the files on disk and the initial configuration. Despite the slow speed it only took 2 hours to install, the first boot time was impressive. It takes about 30 seconds to boot to a usable desktop which doesn’t hang on me when I click and ask the machine to perform a task.
I did a quick scout around the internet for information on making Windows 7 more SSD friendly, I was pleasently surprised to find that the OS had carried out most of the tweaks suggested automatically as it knew it was installed on an SSD – thats a huge step forward from the RC we tried out in the office.
The only downsides so far are the terrible shutdown speed of the machine and the time taken to install Windows Updates – those though are things I can live with for now.
Several months ago I was involved in a project to upgrade the link which connects us to the University we get our internet connection through, the project involved decomissioning a Wireless connection and commissioning a new Fibre Link. Thankfully for me the Fibre Link portion of the project was handled by the Universities staff, this left the Wireless link for me and my collegue to deal with.
Following the advice given to us by a 3Com engineer who had been on site a few months earlier we decided to route the new Fibre Connection through our core switches a nice set of 5500G-EI 48 Port PoE Switches. Doing as I’d been taught I created a VLan on the switch as it didn’t have a IP Address it wasn’t routable accross the switch. This VLan was then plugged in to the Fibre Converter and our firewall, allowing us to place devices outside our firewall (Which we had wanted to do previously with a few of our servers which have issues working through our ISA Firewall).
That portion of the work went swimmingly, however the next morning as I sat down to document this change I was told by the boss – “We don’t have the time, there’s no money in the budget to write it up. Anyway it’s not somehting you’ll forget now is it?”
Fast forward 9 months and whilst on annual leave I get a phone call which went somethng like this.
“It’s all dead, we have no connectivity with the outside world.”
“Oh, well have you checked the connections?”
“Well I would, but I don’t know how its all plugged together.”
“Ah” I responded “I know I did the work but I can’t remember either.”
Cue me kicking myself as thoughts of being dragged in to the office emerged in my mind, after an hour of phone diagnostics we finally figured out A) how it all hangs together and B) what exactly the fault was. The very next day I was back in the office and a sitting at my desk, madly typing up a document describing how things are installed and setup as I really don’t want another phone call when I’m on leave.
The reason for typing this out is two fold, one to hopefully educate others on the importance of documenting your work and also to educate myself on the importance of documenting as I do things – even if there isn’t the budget for it. A job that would have taken me 2 hours the day after setting up the network took me a whole day 9 months down the line.
Saying we don’t have the time creates a false enconomy, the question you should be asking is can we afford the time it will cost if we don’t document?
~Dan
Just a heads up to my fellow SysAdmins, Sun has struck a deal with Carbonite to distribute a 30 Day Trial of Carbonites online backup software with the latest update to Java. It’s not something you really want in your corporate environment, so be aware if your users have the ability to update Java, you could be getting Carbonite too!
http://java.sys-con.com/node/1027624
~Dan
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