All the lights

This time of year people get all misty over all of the lights. Here where I am, the lights are on all the time, so its hard to get wound up about it. Working where the lights are always lit (including during the day) does something to you. It makes you wonder why their power bills aren't higher and why we find it so alluring. Of course we don't get the snow that makes the lights sparkle, and yes I really do know what it looks like, I used to have to shovel the white stuff. Anyway, considering the season I thought it was an interesting way to start the entry to the blog.

If you read my previous blogs you know that I rant about my work and the stupid things that go on there. I will continue with that, but I wanted to say that I do purposely leave out the names. Liablous writings are not what I am about. I do not make this stuff up. The events that I post here are true an as accurate as I can make them, and I will make notes where I add or embellish the facts. People and companies do stupid things and cause problems for others, hopefully they can entertain and inform others. Have I ever done something stupid? You bet!

Out IT guys are always doing something that doesn't seem just right. I should know, I spent 20 years in IT as a consultant and network engineer. Let me tell you that these guys make the three stooges look like a finely tuned instrument. Most companies back up their data in some form or another, and we are no different well sort of.
Lets go back a while to when I was first asked to look at our local network after a problem. Our previous DBA actually had some rights to administer the servers and the backups, and was having a problem. He had heard that I has some experience with servers and asked me to take a look at it. So after a few minutes of poking around I let him know that the backups were not being done correctly, and that we had no current anti-virus protection. He was surprised at this revelation (he was not a network or server administration guy), so he asked me what could be done about it. I had to tell him that there was nothing we could do without the proper rights to the server. We do not have any local support as I have posted before, they do everything remotely if possible, and administration of the servers is no different. One day the person that was administering the servers left themselves logged in. So, in an effort to help our situation, I was asked if I could give the proper rights to a few local users. I did what was needed, and from that point on we had no real need for outside help. We made changes to the backup schema, and started updating the virus protection.
Shortly there after we got the notice that we were going to be 'transformed'. We had heard from other sites that is never went well, and was a source of problems for every site that had been done already. Our site was to be done, but unlike the other sites we were different. How? The only computing equipment that belonged to the IT group was the servers, the rest of the equipment belonged to the client. This was not going to be good.

Come back and see how this goes wrong.