Res 341 Week 1 Paper

The performance of network administrators and system engineers in their day-to-day office duties can sometimes be very intense and full of stress. There are often times during the normal work day when there are fires to put out that require research. Also, when implementing something new to the infrastructure can require some research from the IT staff if there is not any previous experience in doing so. Otherwise, if a setting or key part of the configuration was not entered correctly, it could adversely affect production. This can happen more often than one would think if a clear plan of attack is not outlined. Proactive research in an IT Department is very important during the planning phase of an implementation. It is important to stop, think and do some research before jumping in to a project that may be a little over ones head.

In the article, "How I bailed a colleague out of DNS-AD chaos resulting from an ill conceived upgrade", it was reviewed that a network administrator of a company performed an upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003. The administrator was new to the field and did not understand the value of having a clearly defined project plan. Needless to say, following the completion of the upgrade, there were some severe issues showing up in the event logs, name resolution was not working resulting in missing host names and group policies were not working as well. Due to the lack of understanding of DNS (Domain Name System) and its importance in an Active Directory environment, AD seemed to have been corrupted and was not resolving log-in requests, etc. DNS is a key player in Active Directory and if not set up right from the beginning, bad things will happen.

Now in a panic the administrator called upon friends in the field to help with his dilemma. It was evident that important technical information was not researched and planned out from the beginning of the upgrade to Windows Server 2003 which created barriers for the new administrator who had not done an upgrade of this capacity before. Overcoming these barriers now required additional research to be done to fix the problem that had erupted. This upgrade was to take place over a weekend and unless resolved could mean the domain and e-mail could not be up and functional Monday morning.

The problem the company faced now was the possibility that come Monday morning, DNS, AD and Exchange (since DNS and AD are also important in the e-mail process) could be down for the count. As an administrator, the spotlight is on you during these types of situations and the blame will all fall on the administrator's shoulders if the network isn't working per company's expectations.

The parties involved in this post implementation research were the administrator who performed the upgrade and the author of this article. The author who was a business acquaintance was called on for advice on this situation. With the author's assistance, the administrator researched online forums, Microsoft.com, Windows IT Pro Magazine and also browser based research