Ok, so, as I described in my intro;
http://www.techist.com/forums/f33/hi-251344/
I'm looking to compare notes a bit and hopefully this is a good discussion board for doing so. I didn't seem to find as many industry related boards as I might have believed would be out there, but this one seems to have a healthy membership and activity of posting – 2 million posts is impressive!
Where do I begin?! First of all let me just say that there may be a volatile political situation that influences my experience negatively and that should be taken into consideration for any people who are considering a career in tech. I believe my situation is extremely unique in many regards.
I'm going to skip all the drama that has transpired in my department in my inquiry at least initially and cut to the meat of the issues that I am interested to hear feedback regarding. I'm sure this is pretty far from ‘Best Practices' – I'm just curious how far beyond the realm of acceptable our network situation is.
Apparently our Network Admin from what I was told verbally by my former supervisor – upgraded the servers a few years ago and didn't push out a patch that would allow for all of the machines on our network to receive updates to their operating systems by his command. When I first started this position I took it upon myself to perform Windows Updates on machines as I got my hands on them one by one and I have seen machines take in the neighborhood of 150 Windows Updates alone. Rebooting and rescanning several times to get them caught up which might take an entire day to perform.
We have over 1,100 employees in our agency. I'm not sure how that ranks, but it's far too many to be trying to address updates one machine at a time I can tell you. Our agency handles sensitive medical records and financial information for our clients. I originally was doing these by my own prerogative out of a sense of duty to try to keep these machines from both causing me headaches due to infections and the possibility of a breach of sensitive information.
However, during my employment with this agency there has been such a seemingly hostile attitude toward me which is likely influenced by politics beyond the usual office politics – I have been keeping screen shots of machines as I am still coming across them to this day that are not updated. I'm talking about updating to IE 8 (not using 9 here) from IE 7 that was rolled out like 3 years ago now. I've done several Service Pack 3 installs on XP machines this summer as well.
They hired a new girl who from my understanding is supposed to be solely charged with learning and administering SCCM – which I have never understood why our network admin wasn't using himself and we needed a new employee just to learn it and administer it.
System Center Configuration Manager | Server Desktop Management
She started in May I believe and has been to classes on how to use it, but I believe the best they have done is push out Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 machines and I don't think they did that right because I am still logging into machines and the install is completing upon my log on with an admin account. I have even questioned it causing a few machines to hang up for users until I logged in to complete the install.
Quite honestly, I like the new girl, but I don't think she really does anything all day long – not unlike several of the others. I, on the other hand, seem to have never ending scrutiny over my competency to perform the basic role that I am tasked with here. I'm not a 21 year old, cute, and straight out of college chick either.
This is my initial query – I've never worked on staff of any other network. I imagine that it wouldn't be considered acceptable, but does this happen more than I might think or is this something this guy should be fired over? My impression is that he knows more than anyone else about what is going on despite what I consider gross neglect to administer the network and they are scared to get rid of him for fear of not knowing what to do.
http://www.techist.com/forums/f33/hi-251344/
I'm looking to compare notes a bit and hopefully this is a good discussion board for doing so. I didn't seem to find as many industry related boards as I might have believed would be out there, but this one seems to have a healthy membership and activity of posting – 2 million posts is impressive!
Where do I begin?! First of all let me just say that there may be a volatile political situation that influences my experience negatively and that should be taken into consideration for any people who are considering a career in tech. I believe my situation is extremely unique in many regards.
I'm going to skip all the drama that has transpired in my department in my inquiry at least initially and cut to the meat of the issues that I am interested to hear feedback regarding. I'm sure this is pretty far from ‘Best Practices' – I'm just curious how far beyond the realm of acceptable our network situation is.
Apparently our Network Admin from what I was told verbally by my former supervisor – upgraded the servers a few years ago and didn't push out a patch that would allow for all of the machines on our network to receive updates to their operating systems by his command. When I first started this position I took it upon myself to perform Windows Updates on machines as I got my hands on them one by one and I have seen machines take in the neighborhood of 150 Windows Updates alone. Rebooting and rescanning several times to get them caught up which might take an entire day to perform.
We have over 1,100 employees in our agency. I'm not sure how that ranks, but it's far too many to be trying to address updates one machine at a time I can tell you. Our agency handles sensitive medical records and financial information for our clients. I originally was doing these by my own prerogative out of a sense of duty to try to keep these machines from both causing me headaches due to infections and the possibility of a breach of sensitive information.
However, during my employment with this agency there has been such a seemingly hostile attitude toward me which is likely influenced by politics beyond the usual office politics – I have been keeping screen shots of machines as I am still coming across them to this day that are not updated. I'm talking about updating to IE 8 (not using 9 here) from IE 7 that was rolled out like 3 years ago now. I've done several Service Pack 3 installs on XP machines this summer as well.
They hired a new girl who from my understanding is supposed to be solely charged with learning and administering SCCM – which I have never understood why our network admin wasn't using himself and we needed a new employee just to learn it and administer it.
System Center Configuration Manager | Server Desktop Management
She started in May I believe and has been to classes on how to use it, but I believe the best they have done is push out Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 machines and I don't think they did that right because I am still logging into machines and the install is completing upon my log on with an admin account. I have even questioned it causing a few machines to hang up for users until I logged in to complete the install.
Quite honestly, I like the new girl, but I don't think she really does anything all day long – not unlike several of the others. I, on the other hand, seem to have never ending scrutiny over my competency to perform the basic role that I am tasked with here. I'm not a 21 year old, cute, and straight out of college chick either.
This is my initial query – I've never worked on staff of any other network. I imagine that it wouldn't be considered acceptable, but does this happen more than I might think or is this something this guy should be fired over? My impression is that he knows more than anyone else about what is going on despite what I consider gross neglect to administer the network and they are scared to get rid of him for fear of not knowing what to do.
