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Ask Slashdot: Getting a Grip On an Inherited IT Mess?
First time accepted submitter bushx writes "A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company. All the documentation I have is of my own creation, as I've spent most of my time reverse-engineering the systems in place just so I can understand how everything works together. Since I've started, I've done everything from network and phone upgrades to database maintenance with Perl, and thus far it's been immensely rewarding. But as I dig deeper, I notice the alarming number of band-aids applied by my predecessor, and it seems like the entire company's infrastructure is just a few problems away from a total meltdown. The big question now is, how do I, as a single person, effectively audit the network, servers, databases, backups, and formulate a long-term plan that can be implemented by one person? Is it possible? Where do I begin?"
You work at RIM?
start drinking
Dude, that is to easy. There are serious wiseacres on this board.
Did the last guy outsource everything to india?
Just buy a few cases of your energy drink of choice and put Eye of the Tiger on repeat until you've got it all fixed.
I believe in you.
They have a guy who finds upgrading phone systems immensely satisfying! If he's sick he'll come in and fix it and who needs vacation anyway, he'll take the cash instead.
I'm betting it's a psychotic break and he IS his predecessor.
Deleted
When I was hired to run the IT department of a major company my predecessor left three letters in the desk that was now mine. Each letter was clearly labeled; System Failure #1, System Failure #2, System Failure #3. A post-it note was attached to the bundle of letters.
In case of a substantial system failure open the letters in order, once per failure, and they will help you through the problem.
I put the letters back in the desk and forgot about them.
About one year later we had a cascading server failure that left our corporate intranet and several important production servers off-line. While repairing the problem I remembered the letters. Curious, I opened the first letter.
Blame me, your predecessor
The day after we got the servers back up I was called in to my boss;s office to explain what happened and why were down for so long. Taking my cue from the letter I blamed my predecessor. My boss was satisfied with my answer and let me go.
About six months down the road we had another big failure. This time our primary database server went down and the secondary was having trouble dealing with the load. I had to put a lot of extra hours into getting them back up and we lost a few transactions due to the backup server not being able to function under the load.
Once again, I reached into that desk drawer and opened letter #2.
Blame the equipment
This time I lamented to the boss about how it wasn't my fault. It was that backup server! If we had some good equipment to run on these things just would not happen. He was satisfied with my answer and I went back to work.
Things ran smoothly for the next 18 months. Then we got hit with a virus that somehow got past our firewall and wreaked havoc on our systems.
I opened the third letter.
Write three letters
(Sorry, this was the first thing I thought of when I read the summary)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Dude, for three years I was the sole server, network, and SAN guy for an S&P 500 company. If you can't handle a small e-commerce company with a handful of servers (we grew for 60 to 160 servers in those 3 years) then get out of IT. It took most of those 3 years to eradicate the poor work of my predecessor (hey, let's buy an $800 RAID card and then do Windows software RAID AND compression) but I eventually got there. It was a lot of work but I managed to keep it to 50 hours a week for most of that time
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yeah but "what you do" is probably World of Warcraft.
You wouldn't be in this situation if your employer gave a crap. It's plain and simple: you report to someone. They know the extent of the problem and that there is only one of you. If they cared, there would be more than one of you. But there isn't. So turnabout is fair play.
This is the true American solution to your problem: find other people to exploit and skim off the top ...
Step 1: tell them you're going to become a telecommuter so that you can work 100% of the time
Step 2: get on elance or some other such site: hire gobs of cheap (dubious) overseas help at $1/hour
Step 3: instruct them all to send emails from your address and answer the phone with your name.
Step 4: find a different job and just let your sub-contractors handle that one until the house of cards falls apart
If your current employer calls you out on the fact that you have 15 different accents and sometimes answer the phone in a female voice, ask them why they're so racist.
bonus if you used a pseudonym when hiring for your present job.