I'm in LA and was asked to interview at a beauty company that needs an individual to come in and handle tech support. I'll be repairing computers, printers and other devices...as well as managing the server and network equipment. There's about 60 users in the company so it's fairly small. The important thing is that I'll have access to the servers and network.
This is my chance at an administrator type job and $20/hr.
If I'm responsible for the servers and network, I don't know why they don't call it an admin job unless they wanted to avoid the cost of highering an experienced administrator.
I may be asked to troubleshoot with exchange and VOIP though. I'm not sure which version of exchange they are using, but I'll be watching all the videos on exchange at Itidiots.com.
Any tips or useful advice for troubleshooting or working with exchange and VOIP? I'm not too familiar with them.
I also have this list that DarbyWeaver wrote:
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Get familiar with a Sniffer and learn about delta times and round-trip time RTT.
Get a program like MRTG so you can see what is up and what is down, when and for how long - wait, have them buy you PRTG.
What are you using now? I know Solar Winds is nice... and rocks... but you did not say if you have cash.
First things first fix speed and duplex issues. If you are experiencing CRC's -find out why - whatever it takes and resolve them.
Get a Packeteer even if it is a demo.
Get some Fluke Hardware - even if it is only demo...
Draw diagrams if you do not have them.
Learn to characterize what is on your network.
Find every server and make each admin tell you what ports are in use.
Find the Firewall admin and find out what it going where and why.
Get the Network Admin / Engineer and get rules wrote to match what the SysAdmin and the FWAdmin told you.
Get with management to get some teeth.
Stress policy - if there is none make it a point.
Baseline everything - before and after.
Backup everything - before and after.
Always be willing and ABLE to roll back.
Read design books and articles.
For heaven's sake - BASELINE - know what it right and what is wrong.
Do not be afraid to set thresholds on ICMP, Multicast, Broadcast traffic.
Learn why Static ARP can be a good thing.
Learn what a jumbo and runt is and everything in between.
Oh yes, DHCP, DNS, WINS, LDAP, NTP etc...
Make sure they work 100% as advertised... they could be performance issues and everyone is too proud to admit their DNS/WINS is broken...
Did I tell you to get a Syslog server yet... Let your equipment complain to you - it will.
Did I forget about an NMS SNMP-based Alerting System?
Let me know when you plow through this, I'm sure I got book-loads more... that you ever wanted to know...
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Assuming I get the job, is there anything I should understand or ask from them aside from documentation? The guy that runs their place right now is a developer who got stuck with the job...so I'm fearing that the place will be very disorganized.
It's a learning experience...but I'm hoping it doesn't go over my head too quickly.
