Describe some of your best moments in IT

2ndchance

This is one comes to my mind:

It's not so much that what I did was brilliant, because it wasn't. To me, the following story was really a watershed moment in terms of making a paradigm change from being always reactive to becomming proactive:

So we had a school that was moved to a set of temporary buildings. They were connected to our LAN via a Cisco Aironet 1300 series wireless bridge. We had some issues in the first few months with the bridge going down due to environmental conditions. I decided I wanted to know when the bridge went down before I got a call. I downloaded [EMAIL="Look@LAN"]Look@LAN[/EMAIL], a pretty simple tool, and told it to periordically ping the IP address of an IP phone at the school. If the phone failed to reply, [EMAIL="Look@LAN"]Look@LAN[/EMAIL] was to email me with a notification.

The campus front office thought I was a wizard when I showed up to resolve the issue before they even called me.

I'm curious to hear everyone's story.

cablegod

Good one

Fresh off the top of my head:
I did a re-org of an 11g database, basically mirrored the first instance with the only changes made was tablespace-level compression turned on, and all indicies & tables were compressed. Selects were 8x faster, inserts/updates were 6x faster or bettter as well. Compression doesn't always hurt performance We saved ~10x disk space as well.

Very simple to do, but the benefits were huge.

I can't remember them all. I've been in IT for far too long.

historian1974

I have two recent ones:

About a year ago, I saved the place where I work $30,000 by initiating and running a project to harvest 200 Adobe Acrobat licenses from computers that did not need it. They were looking at having to buy 200 additional licenses to accommodate growth. Not exactly a technical item I know, but finding cost savings is a huge deal.

This year, I discovered that some people we able to get internet access (some people where I work are not allowed internet access) by accessing proxy bypass websites. I got to work with the sector infosec officer to help rememdy this. I do not work in infosec, but it's an area in which I have interest.

forkvoid

Mine was at my last job...

The university I worked for had central IT staff that were paid by the university 'System' as well as staff for the university 'campus'. Some colleges within the campus also had their own IT staff--I worked for the second largest college.

Central IT(OIT) ran the labs and had a guy who managed the images. Absolutely brilliant guy. I was in charge of the images and deployment in my college. Through painstakingly downloding every driver for a wide range of systems that we support, entering them into a spreadsheet and comparing the DEV numbers each driver support, I was able to determine that most systems had many devices in common. I then switched a lot of the drivers over to manufacturer drivers for more up-to-date stuff. I then built a system using a couple third party utilities to automatically pick the proper HAL(thus enabling multiprocessor on the ones that had it, uniprocessor on the ones that didn't, and standard ACPI on the really old ones that didn't understand uniprocessor) and automatically load *only* the drivers that particular model needed. All of this was automatic and was just a drop-in folder on an image.

It decreased the driver database from 30GB to 1.5GB, increased image performance and increased deployment speed. I gave a copy to the OIT labs guy, who went nuts over it. I got a public commendation in front of the entire university IT staff for my work.

wweboy

We were rolling out a huge program for one of the most money making departments in the company. This program was going to change how a lot of departments worked and how we interfaced with outside clients.

My network administrator's wife went into labor and so I had to pick up the ball in run wiht it. I learned the program we were rolling out in Three days I then gave a presentation showing how the program works and how it flows though the company and how outside clients interface and submit new jobs to the company.

The following people were in attendance
My boss
Owner of the company
VP of sales
Department head (his folks would use the software)

Everyone was blown away that we'd only had the software in house for 3 days and yet I was able to help explain what everything did and market it as a great investment. Everyone patted me on the back and just stood in awe and that felt damn good to me as I'm young and did a lot around the office but it was always stuff nobody sees or cares about.

I was given the ball and I made the best out of it that is one the proudest moments in IT.

stuh84

I guess schooling an entire department of people who have been in the networking industry for at least 10 years longer than I have on on IPv6, and getting them from scared to look at it, to wanting to know when we would implement it, that was a good one

I know a lot of people in different departments in our place, some of them who are supposed to be more capable than the one I'm in, but quite regularly I'm solving their BGP problems, or fixing their Linux issues etc, schooling them on SSL/cryptopgraphy, its almost a daily occurrence. Now, if only I could translate that into more wages and more responsibility.....