IT Guy to MSP: Why? Part 2
Haven’t read part one? IT Guy to MSP: Why? Part 1.
Let’s quickly take a look at how most businesses are structured.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll focus on an average small business. In my experience, these guys have a tendancy to run around like a head without a chicken. Not that they don’t know what they’re doing, but the feeling is somewhat panicced, and not at all like the calm, reserved, quiet sort of vibe you get in a well-organized medium or large corporation.
I beleive part of why a larger business tends to be more relaxed is because there’s a hurdle you have to get over in order to become big. It has to do with organization. Unless systems and processes are put into place, every situation, even if you’ve encountered it before, feels as though you may have to do this or do that, and you’re forced to come up with a solution.
This lends itself to panic as decisions are made on the fly. Let me be clear – I’m not really sure why this happens, I’m just inclined to think this is why. In small business, everyone wears many (or all!) hats. One day you’re the IT guy, the next you’re running out there to meet clients, another day you’re selling or fixing something.. in a large corporation you’re given a title, a job description and perhaps a desk to sit at. Hopefully you get good at your job because it’s well defined and you’ll do it day in and day out, and (in theory) you won’t do much else.
There’s nothing wrong with either model. I’m of the oppinion that small businesses typically don’t acheive the zen-like state until they want to get big, and in doing so are forced to organize like crazy. I think the zen-like state allows for more efficiency.
Let’s look at a really basic company org chart I threw up in about 2 minutes.
Basic company structure
It’s not based on any company in particular, but it represents what a young-ish company might look like. It has a leader, an engineering team and graphics artist to produce something, a sales and marketing team to advertise the product, a controller to keep an eye on finances, a secretary to answer the phones and keep meeting notes, and a business development specialist to find new avenues to explore in order to increase revenue. Pretty basic. Oh, I forgot the IT guy.
To simplify it further: president runs company. General manager tells him what he needs to know about production. Biz dev improves company’s bottom line. Controller watches expenditures and makes sure the bills can get paid.
I’m going to end the article here. Notice how I put the IT guy as reporting to the general manager? That’s because in most companies, when the IT infrastructure breaks, production can often grind to a halt.
It’s important to think of IT as being either central or at least supportive of the company’s function as a business.
Active Directory 2008 Notes 2
Posted by Harv in Server 2008 on December 30, 2009
Preparing Active Directory for Server 2008 DC’s
Note: These steps should be completed before promoting or upgrading an existing domain controller.
- Run adprep /forestprep on the schema master of the forest. This extends the schema to receive new 2008 features. The changes must replicate through the forest before proceeding.
You must be a member of the Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins, and Domain Admins in the forest root domain.
Any Windows 2000 DC’s must be upgraded to SP2 or later, or SP1 with hotfix QFE265089. - Run adprep /domainprep on the infrastructure master of each domain that will be accepting Server 2008 DC’s.
It adjusts ACL’s on AD objects, and the SYSVOL shared folder.
You must be a member of Domain Admins, and the domain’s functional level must be Windows 2000 server native or higher.
adprep /domainprep /prep can also be run to enable resultant set of policy planning mode functionality.
Originally posted 2009-06-29 00:32:06.
Quick forms using PHP’s PEAR::Quick_Form
Posted by Harv in Development on December 30, 2009
One of the golden rules when developing anything is not to re-invent the wheel. PHP’s PEAR [pear.php.net] is a great resource to find stable, tested, reusable code. From PEAR’s website: “PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.”
Here’s how to build a quick form using the quickform extension.
Originally posted 2009-04-20 21:30:38.
How do you stay focused?
Posted by Harv in Uncategorized on December 30, 2009
I play games!
I’m lucky enough to have an employer who believes that having a good life is more important than doing the work you’ve been given. It seems to me that there are specific trends in the way people with this attitude think. I am very similar to my employer. Thus; when I’m working, and I encounter a block, I play games. My employer encourages this. Lately I’ve been enjoying RoboKill.
How do you stay focused?
UPDATE: Sometimes I play Desktop Tower Defense!
Originally posted 2009-04-22 13:51:45.
You can still buy Windows XP!
Amazon is still offering Windows XP Home, Pro, and Upgrade.
The Upgrade edition upgrades your legacy (98/ME, possibly 95?) to XP Home + SP2. There’s no upgrade edition to make the jump up to Pro, you have to buy it outright.
Here are the relevant links..
Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Home Upgrade
Originally posted 2009-03-26 09:00:42.
ActiveSync Lost My Data!
Ugh… activesync lost my data. Sound familiar? Leave me a comment and let me know I’m not the only one.
I will be posting soon about migrating to Google Apps and syncing things such as email, contacts and calendar through google.
Originally posted 2009-04-15 22:20:59.
Downgrading to XP
Posted by Harv in Troubleshooting, Windows, XP on December 30, 2009
I’ve had a clients laptop for about a week now. I have to wonder – how is it that these companies, in this case Hewlett Packard, retain clients when they do stuff like this.
My client was tired of Vista. He asked me to take the laptop and downgrade it to XP. So I took it, popped in an XP Pro SP3 disk, and found out to my dismay that the SATA controller in use by the laptop (an HP DV2500-series, or the 2660se to be exact) is not naturally recognized by the XP installer.
The simplest solution is to get into the BIOS and make sure AHCI is disabled. That forces the SATA controller to “pretend” to be an IDE controller, which XP happens to know how to talk to right out of the box. HP has disabled the ability to change this setting. You don’t even see it in the BIOS, but I know from experience that it’s there. They want you instead to order their rescue disks.
The other solution is better, but not quite as simple. Find out which controller is in use, download the manufacturer AHCI/SATA drivers, pop them onto a floppy, re-do the setup, and make sure you hit F6 when it tells you to, in order to load in RAID or SCSI drivers. It searches the floppy for drivers, you select the right one, and away it goes.
So I went out and got a USB floppy drive. Somehow I’ve managed to get by without one up to now. And then I started digging around on HP’s website (among others), to figure out which controller this laptop is using. To my dismay, nothing on the HP website indicates this clearly. Absolutely nothing.
I scoured google. I half took the laptop apart, hoping to get a glimpse of the motherboard. I even downloaded and installed the ultimate boot cd. UBCD allows you to also add in a bunch of plugins. I loaded it up with tons of utilities in the hopes that one of them would tell me which controller it was using. Alas, no luck there. It did however see the hard-drive, which meant that its driver was working!
I copied its driver onto a floppy hoping that would be enough. Nope, when I ran the XP install, it gave me a message about requiring a TXTSETUP.OEM file. I searched through Microsoft documentation – clearly not worth the hassle of writing out this file.
Now I was getting desperate. I even tried a product that was supposed to be able to make tons of modifications to your BIOS from within an OS – so I stuck the installer onto a USB stick, booted the ultimate boot cd (ubcd4win), and tried it out. No luck.
I called HP. They were completely useless, and pushed me to order the XP rescue disks. Uhhh, no thanks. I already had an XP disk, and I wasn’t going to pay them for their crippled version which comes bundled with what I consider crapware.
I finally came up with the idea of downloading and installing Linux, as I was fairly certain that was a bulletproof way of finding out which controller is in use. I’ve tried many distros but in times like these, I like to pick ones I’ve never tried before, just for the heck of it. I headed over to distrowatch.com and downloaded CentOS.
I deployed it to a USB stick (quick tutorial coming soon) and booted the laptop with it. 5 minutes later I had the name of my controller – it’s an Intel ICH8M/ICH8M-E. I found the drivers on the intel site, put them on a floppy, and ran the XP install. Still no joy.
So I fired up nLite and created a new XP image, with the driver slip-streamed in. Voila.
I’m exhausted. But at least now XP is installing. I wonder why the same drivers on a floppy didn’t work.
I’m going to see if creating a USB stick to install a slipstreamed XP is a viable solution. If it works, I’ll write a quick tutorial on it.
Okay, rant over!
Originally posted 2009-08-16 11:07:32.
15-minute image gallery with Drupal
This is a placeholder to remind myself to write this damned article. Actually, I’m going to record my screen as I walk you through the entire process.
Originally posted 2009-05-06 01:03:04.
Active Directory: Groups
Posted by Harv in Server 2003, Server 2008, Windows on December 30, 2009
Distribution Groups
- These can not be used to perform any sort of ACL (access control) or permissions, and are therefore ill-suited for anything other than to create a list of users to whom you might want to, say, email. If in doubt, use a security group instead.
Security Groups
There are different types of security group. Note that the type simply defines the scope and replication.
- Universal: Objects in this group type are replicated to other domain trees within the forest. Note that global catalog servers have to replicate this information, so heavy use is not encouraged. Can be comprised of users or groups from any domain. See note (1).
- Global: Can only contain objects within the domain.
- Domain Local: Can contain objects from any domain, but are used to control access only to local resources. See note (2).
(1) – In Server 2008 we now have the UGMC (universal group membership caching) feature, which can counteract some of the overhead associated with using many universal groups. This doesn’t mean it’s okay to ignore common sense and best practises though!
(2) – Domain local is best used to control access to resources. Consider a file share: you create a domain local group called, for example, “Sales Share”. Now you allow the sales share read/write/whatever access. Note that this is domain local. Now instead of modifying the share permissions to add all the associated users/groups, you simply add the sales groups from each relevant domain as members of this group. Now when new sales people come in and go out of the company, your work is already done.
In short:
Domain local – can come from any domain but only access local resources.
Global – can only be from this domain but can access resources in any domain.
Universal – Replicated across the forest, can be from any domain and can have access to resources in any domain.
Originally posted 2009-09-20 01:42:14.
Do Follow
Posted by Harv in Misc, Utilities on December 30, 2009
I’ve installed wordpress CommentLuv [commentluv.com] and doFollow plugins. Hopefully that will encourage people to actively post comments!
Originally posted 2009-04-21 01:08:17.
commentluv, dofollow, plugin, wordpress
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