Ask Slashdot: Herding Cats, Aging Systems?

An anonymous reader writes: I've recently started a job at a medium-sized enterprise in the UK. They claimed to be an advocate of open-source. The job was advertised as a Linux sys-admin. I've been in the role a short while and the systems right across the business are end-of-life: lots of XP and 2003 servers, a handful of LAMP web servers, and a large IT department with almost no skills in the technologies on site. Most boxes have the default password still. As a senior techie, I've been tasked with helping bring the skillset of the rest of the staff up. Where would you start, given that most of the kit is EoL?

Comments

Go Virtual

[BDMcGrew]

Well, your question leaves out a lot of details but from what you've said so far, look at getting some new hardware in there and start virtualizing some of the the EoL systems. This will provide you an upgrade path for existing systems and a snapshot'd point of restore in the event of a failure.

Re:Go Virtual

[ShanghaiBill]

Well, your question leaves out a lot of details

The most important left out details are about politics, not technology. Do you have the support of top management? How powerful are the people that are opposed to your project? There are people that will actively work to sabotage your efforts, and use you as a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. How are you planning to deal with that?

Since you are the "new guy" trying to change things that you don't understand, you didn't even mention end-user applications, and you seem to be more interested in OSS-evangelism than supporting your users and helping them get their job done, my prediction is that you are going to be out of a job in less than six months.

Running?

[gstoddart]

As a senior techie, I've been tasked with helping bring the skillset of the rest of the staff up. Where would you start, given that most of the kit is EoL?

Well, you have 3 main choices:

1) Try to fix it and succeed
2) Try to fix it and fail
3) Run like hell

You won't be able to force the rest of the staff to bring up their skillset. Management has clearly left it to rot on the vine for a very long time. And, by the sounds of it, they don't know what they've even got.

A large IT department with no skills with the technologies on site? What exactly is that large IT department doing for this company? If you have a bunch of people with no skillsets with the technology they have ... then what skillsets do they have, and how is it helping you?

Without more detail, I'm hearing "Hi, I've just joined a company with a terrible IT department, how do I fix that?" Who let it get into such a bad state? Because if they're still around, no way in hell you'll ever fix it.

Re:Running?

[TWX]

Yep. If you're not in-charge and able to make the tough calls (ie, figuring out who's actually supporting important stuff, who's not, and making the decisions about who gets a chance to migrate to something new and who needs to take their skillset elsewhere) then you're probably not going to make the difference that you want to make or that your superiors somehow expect.

What I can say, from experience, is that you need to actually learn how things are working now before you start making changes. I've had bosses brought in from the outside that thought they were gods' gift to the IT world that decided to try to remake the organization in their own image, only be be fired less than a year later because they pissed off all of the existing IT staff such that the boss got no results, and pissed off the users by failing to maintain existing workflow such that the users' jobs became much harder or required lots of direct assistance.

Learn what's there, why it's there, and understand that most decisions were made as a reaction to something prompting it to be necessary. Change what can be changed in a sane way, but don't take personal offense to anything as it is now as there are probably good reasons why it is the way it is. If you come in with the attitude that you can rip out everything without a care, you'll find suddenly that no staff will bother to warn you of the pitfalls in front of you that they're all well aware of, and you, not them, will be the one with egg on your face when it breaks because it was your decision to change it.

Low Hanging Fruit

[AdelieMan]

I would audit everything, Make a matrix of things that need to be addressed easy to hard, least significant to most, and start chipping away at it. It will take time to turn that ship around, but it will be worth it, and you will keep your sanity.

Re:Olut with the old, in with the new

[bobbied]

Buy a new system. Power down every system in turn and try to power it up again. If it will not start, replace it.

NEVER power down old hardware on purpose unless you have backup plan for the system... Old hardware has a habit of not coming back when you power off and if it dies, you created an emergency for yourself...

There are going to be enough unforced errors in the process, you needn't go out and look to create them.