pgwinkley

I would like to clarify that this was not technically my first attempt at POTA, I had previously attempted to activate Stanmore Park G-0535, however that neatly coincided with the sun exploding and rendering HF communications pretty much useless. Certainly no hope with QRP.

So as the Easter weekend rolled around we had not really made any plans. Primarily because every time we attempted to plan a weekend away over the last year or so, you could pretty much guarantee that we would end up with continual rain. However, as the weekend drew closer, the Met Office seemed pretty convinced that we were going to experience that most unusual of phenomena, a sunny bank holiday.

So with zero plans and only a few days to go, Claire and I decided that we should walk a section of the South Downs Way. When the plan was floated I stealthily checked the route and discovered a number of potential spots for playing some radio.

Although we had decided to walk the route from the beginning we also decided that Winchester was not somewhere we had any particular desire in walking through. Fighting her completionist tendencies, Claire located a car park just outside of Winchester which was directly on the South Downs Way, and a B and B some 16 miles further down the route.

In addition to packing the usual hiking paraphernalia for an overnight hike (although finding a B and B cut our loads down dramatically due to the lack of tents, sleeping bags etc) I packed the lightest HF setup I could put together. My trusty FT-818, superlight EFWH covering 80,40,20,15 and 10, battery, mic and speech compressor, Waterproof notebook, and pencil, SOTA beams carbos pole and ground spike. I also threw in a Slim Jim for 2m and my FT-3 and RH-770 telescopic antenna. Total weight of radio equipment, around 3kg.

The first day was due to be a fairly long hike, so I didn’t anticipate being able to play any radio but I got lucky and we made better than expected progress. Claire was happy to take an hour’s break on Old Winchester Hill Nature Reserve. There are a lot of signs telling you what you can’t do here which is pretty much anything that vaguely resembles fun. I did, however, manage to find a spot on the fence line to set up my antenna. Conditions weren’t amazon on 40m with very little inter-g. A quick spot on the did succeed in netting me 9 contacts on 40m and a further 3 on 20m before Claire began to complain about getting cold and we had to pack up and move on. For the first time out portable, I met another Ham, 2 in fact brothers who were out hiking. Alas, I can’t remember their callsigns and failed to write them down. But still, it made a change from the usual ‘are you fishing’ type questions.

I had intended to continue the radio fun at our accommodation, but after the walk and a solid meal, I was well and truly done so a good night’s sleep was all I got there.

Thanks for reading and a big thank you to everyone who called in while I was out portable and made the activations possible.

Thanks for reading.

This week I have really understood the value that having an assistant to support me brings.  Many months ago, after my predecessor was ‘let go’ and I was given the defacto promotion to ‘person who is responsible for keeping this janky old system from crashing’ I requested a second member of staff for the IT department.  Initially, it was suggested we hired a gap year student who had been at the college previously.  I dug my heels in and said that I needed someone who actually knew the basics of user support and troubleshooting and we really needed someone who had some experience or something like an A+ certification.  The result was what I have come to learn is my boss’s default mode of operation when he is being asked to spend money than he wants to.  Which is to delay making a decision until people get fed up with asking and go away.  So after 2 months or so I caved and agreed to hire basically anyone because I couldn’t keep up with the workload.

Now we got very lucky.  The former student they hired turned out to be a very quick learner and to possess common sense.  This was great because I really hadn’t got the first clue what I was doing training a new employee on the helpdesk.  So for a week or so she followed me around, learned the basics, like checking things are actually plugged in and switched on and very soon she was undertaking the bulk of initial responses and dealing with an increasing number of first like tickets independently.  As her experience grew, so did her confidence and she became more proactive in dealing with tickets.  Another significant task we have had is setting up Zoom sessions for both teachers and students who are having to self isolate thanks to Covid.  Not only did she deal with all of these, she also dealt with the whole process from end to end.  Organising her time and making sure that all of the work got done.  The only involvement I had to have was when there were too many tasks needing simultaneous attention.  When I would essentially be told what needed doing when and just have to rock up and do the work.

It was clear for me to see that she was incredibly valuable and will be sorely missed when she leaves to go to uni.  During the two months before her hiring, I made very little progress with the myriad issues that the network, servers, etc had.  What I hadn’t truly appreciated until this week was just what an effective filter she actually is.

This week my lovely assistant was off sick, and I got absolutely nothing useful done.  What I hadn’t realised was how many interruptions she has been shielding me from allowing me to focus on prolonged tasks.  Simply dealing with things like answering the phones, logging tickets and managing all the incoming tickets and emails had meant that I could lock myself into a problem on the server and focus on the task for a number of hours without having to break my concentration.  IT support is by its very nature interrupt-driven.  People aren’t going to have issues at convenient times.  But that makes finding the mental space necessary to get your teeth into complex problems tricky.  So that is my main takeaway from this week.  It has been a humbling experience, reminding me of the value of a quality IT assistant.  She will be a tough act to follow when the time comes for her to move on and start her own career.

As you may have gathered from the wall of text above. My week has mostly been taken up with covering first-line support and printers.  I bloody hate printers! Although I will admit it was nice to leave the server room, speak to some humans face to face, and close off some easy tickets rather than over stretching my skills by solving problems I don’t fully understand.

I did have my 6 month review.  Which went pretty much as expected.  I managed to gain a small pay rise, but most significantly I got a year subscription to CBT nuggets which means that I can really focus on my professional development and gain some certifications ready to move on from this place.

 

Hi and welcome to my blog.  I thought it would be fun to start doing occasional (for that read when I remember and am motivated to actually it down and write) day in the life posts.  These seemed like a fun idea for me, because it would create a regular snapshot of what my day to day is actually like and might prove useful for someone who is thinking of starting down this career path.

So this will be the first post in the series.

Around 08:00 I sauntered into work.  My official start time is 08:30 but I like to get in early enough to ensure that I am adequately caffeinated before the main bulk of users are on site.  My usual start to the day is fire up my computer and grab a coffee, check in with emails and the ticket system and then start planning out the work I am going to complete that day.  Things started out fairly normally and I had just finished checking on the status of various tickets when I got a call on my mobile from the college’s IT assistant.  There was a problem with the large MFD in the other building she had been unable to resolve and also several of the computers didn’t have an internet connection.

Once I got to the other budding in became apparent that both issue were related and several computers were completely lacking an network connection.  To establish the scope of the issue we checked a number of computers and discovered the issue was limited to just one floor of the building.  When it became apparent that the entire floor was offline we traced the issue back to the switch that supplies that floor.  The issue seemed to be that it was turned off.  Further investigation proved that someone had completely unplugged the the supply to the kitchen, where the switch is located.  Restarting the switch not only restored network connectivity but also meant the staff could make a coffee.

Whilst running down the issue we were alerted to the fact that the scan to email function of the same photocopier had stopped functioning some time ago, but no-one had thought to alert the IT staff.  Helpful.  Investigating the issue proved frustrating.  The MFD was clearly having one to two issues as I was unable to access it remotely through the browser due to an issue with the SSL.  I spent a fair bit of time trying to use the controls on the machine to resolve this but ran out of time (and patience and ideas) as I had a call booked with the account manager for the company that supports the very printer I was fighting with.  I logged a ticket with their help desk and then jumped on a Teams call to discuss the current state of the service and what plans we had for the future.

The call had barely finished when the phone rang with a support engineer from the same company, he eventually managed to get bought the issue by using internet explorer to access the printer.  Apparently the printer had reverted back to some antique security protocols that only IE would recognise.  Once access to the printer was established the issue became apparent and once the sercurity protocols were all brought up to date normal functionality was restored.

Finally, after 3 hours I opened my notebook to see what tasks I had planned to complete and decided it was definitely time for another coffee.

The main task for the remainder of the day was pulling off CCTV footage for the police, they had raided one of the houses opposite the college at some point over the last few weeks and were looking for footage prior to the raid to document the various comings and goings.  Unfortunately, the CCTV system can only handle extracting 1-2 days footage at a time so this took quite a bit of time.  In the end I got it all pulled off onto an external HD for the police to collect at a later date.

After the morning rush the rest of the day was pretty calm.  I managed to work on and close off a few low impact tickets that had been hanging around for a while and carried out an audit on the backups.  Finally, for the first time since I have worked here, we have a proper 3-2-1 backup structure which has completed without errors.  Just need to find time to test the recovery now!

I even managed to squeeze in a bit of study at the end of the day.  I am currently working towards getting my AZ104 in preparation for our full migration to the cloud.

Thanks for reading.

Pete

Well this will be a short post, because there is very little of the week to review.  I have been on annual leave for the majority of this week and only worked two days.  Largely those two days were taken up with day to day admin tasks and dealing with calls and logistics.  Though, I did have my lovely assistant to help me so we spent the days improving some security such as setting bios passwords for all users machines.

Other than that we got to spend some time running down the more troublesome outstanding tickets.

Next week will be interesting because I am not actually working at all, spending most of the week away on a first aid training course and then enjoying the bank holiday weekend.

Well I am not exactly posting these every week but I am slowly improving, who knows maybe one day I will hit my goal of writing a weekly review every week!  In my defence, there was very little of interest that happened during the previous week.  I spent most of the week showing cablers around the site or attending BETT.  Although it was interesting to see professionals at work designing the physical layout of a network.  BETT was fine, lots of sales type stuff and loads of cool hardware that I knew I would never get the authorisation to buy.

This week I have learned a valuable lesson.  Well perhaps to valuable lessons.  The first is that no one really understands what my jobs actually is and what I do on a day to day basis.  Sure they know that I am there to fix things when they have gone wrong but aside from that, they have no idea.  The second is that people are way more impressed with spreadsheet that they are with servers. The joys of being the only tech on site I guess.  Let me explain.

Every week, I have a catchup with my line manager, we go through a run down of what has happened during the week and discuss plans moving forward.  It is pretty informal but does work very well to keep senior management in the loop.  It also acts as a nice way for me to review the week and what progress (is any) we have made on the IT side of things.  Now when I started in the role, one of the largest hurdles to overcome (aside from the fact that I hadn’t got a clue what I was supposed to be doing) was the complete lack of documentation for anything.  Literally nothing was documented so everything had to be discovered first hand.  As I have been stating in previous blogs, the first few months went by in a blur of outages and upgrades.  We essentially fell from one crisis to the next and slowly clawed away and improving stability.  As I have gotten to a point where I am not spending every available minute firefighting.  I have begun to start to consider my wider role.  So one of the projects I have undertakes is documenting everything.

The first hurdle I had to deal with, was not really knowing how to do this.  So I spent a fair amount of time reading around on the subject and playing with different systems to see what fit both my and the business needs.  I eventually settled on using One Note and playing with overall structure to maintain some semblance of organisation as more and more documents are added.  I have also begun creating a knowledge base, consisting of guides and checklists for some of the recurring tasks that need to be completed.

This week, I decided to sit down and think about the routine maintenance that needs to be carried out on the various hardware and systems that we have.  With my new found love of documenting everything I do, I decided to go all in an create a spreadsheet which could be used for tracking all of the routine maintenance tasks, grouped roughly by frequency (daily, weekly, termly and yearly).  I also was fairly brain dead after a particularly hectic Tuesday so had dedicated significantly more time to formatting than was strictly necessary.

So Friday rolls around and I am sat with my line manager giving him a run down of all the tasks that have been completed.  Things like patching security updates so we aren’t exposed to vulnerabilities, updating and maintaining the servers so that everything keeps ticking along smoothly, so nothing super important or anything and then we get to the agenda point for me to show the spreadsheet.  Suddenly, he sits up and takes notice.  “This is excellent.” he declares “I am going to show the rest of SLT this afternoon in our meeting.”  He exclaims, with the enthusiasm of a primary school child who has been allowed to bring his new puppy in for show and tell.

So there we have it, documenting everything is important.  Not only for future you and the people who come after, but also because nicely formatted spreadsheets help non technical staff discuss what you do during meetings.  In some ways I would like to be a fly on the wall at one of these meetings.  In others, I am concerned I would end up chewing my own leg off our of boredom, particularly if a spreadsheet that dull can elicit that much interest.

I have not been very good about keeping up with my weekly reviews.  I will try and be better about updating them in the future.  I think they are actually really useful for focusing my career objectives.

Over the last few weeks I have found myself focusing more and more on the job of being a sysadmin, rather than focusing on the technology that I am working with.  At first, when I started this job, I was really focused on learning the technologies.  There was a massive learning curve, there were just so many things that I had never worked with before.  And none of them worked properly.  However, over the last few months, I have slowly made progress with these things.  I have developed an understanding of the core technologies, networking, servers, etc and through trial and error have managed to move things onto a more stable footing.

So now I have some time and space to actually consider what the job entails when I am not continually fighting fires.  A while ago I joined the Sysadmin subreddit.  This has proven to be a super resource.  The users on there have put a lot of effort in to collating resources to help people to develop as a sysadmin, particularly at the start of your career.

One resources I have found particularly useful (recommended by the sysadmin subreddit) is the book ‘The Practise of System and Network Administration’.  I bought a used copy and have found it to be an incredibly useful reference.

One of the questions that I have been going around on his how and what to document.  One of the key pieces of advise that keeps being handed out is to document everything.  But having landed in this role without ever having someone to learn from I didn’t really understand what good documentation would look like.  Consequently, I was sort of frozen by indecision and hadn’t really made any progress on building up a body of documentation.  I had done some research on the subject online but hadn’t really found anything particularly useful for someone like me who didn’t really even know where to start.

So when my copy of the book arrived in the post, the first thing I did was delve into the chapter on documentation and it gave me sufficient structure to begin creating the documentation that I had been spinning my wheels on for some time.

Fast forward a few weeks and I have my regular catch up with my line manager (not technical) and show him the documentation I had been working on and he was super impressed.  So I can safely say that the advice on documenting is not only useful for me and whoever takes on the role after me, but also helps to showcase the work I have been doing to people in the organisation who don’t have the same technical understanding.

So yeah.  Document everything.

This week I found myself pondering on a question that has come up a few times in the past, what exactly does a sysadmin do when they are not firefighting problems?

Luckily, not too much of this pondering took place.  Storm Eunice had barrelled through the country, stating on Friday and had caused significant disruption all round.  While we escaped fairly lightly here in London, we still had experienced some disruption to power and phones etc.

When I arrived on Monday there was a peculiar problem with the internet.  We had an internet connection, however the were a number of things not working properly.  Most notably,  the internet.  We could only really access sites hosted by Google.  So I did what any good IT person would do and turned everything off and on again.  Specifically, the router and firewall.  This restored full connectivity and enable me to go and make a coffee.

Further investigation showed that we must have lost power to the most at some point and consequently our primary domain controller had failed to reboot.  Reattaching the hard disk (I believe I have ranted extensively about this in previous posts) allowed for a successful reboot but also required a manual reinstall of Azure AD connect in order to fully restore the sync service.  That took at least half a dozen attempts to get working as I ran into a number of different errors including having to manually reimport the AD power shell command-lets.  A further knock on was that a number of students were unable to access their accounts due to password issues, luckily a password change and sync resolved all of those issue.  I am sure there were a few other issues, but they have fallen from my fallible memory.

Thursday brought another first for me.  I was visited by the lovely Mark and Jamie from Misco in order to discuss the work that we are putting out to tender.  Primarily, re-cabling the entire network.  It was a great experience and was really helpful to talk through the issues with someone far more knowledgeable than me in regard to networking.

After that, the fun didn’t  stop.  Over the course of Thursday, our printers all began giving error messages and intermittently refusing to print.  Some investigation revealed that the issue may well have been caused by an update failing to install.  A simple fix I though foolishly.  Alas it turned out the reason that the update had not installed on the print server was because automatic updates had been disabled on the server sometime in early 2019.   In total it took the better part of 8 hours to bring the server up to date.  Full functionality restored.

So that at least answers one of the questions, when you aren’t fighting fires make sure updates are being applied properly.  I also discovered the excellent resources on reddit.com/r/sysadmin .  They have a wealth of knowledge in the wiki and I have purchased a book recommendation to help me understand better what I should be doing.

 

Today, I came across an interesting issue that I thought I would share.  Helpfully though I did forget to take any screenshots to show you what I mean.

This morning, when I logged my computer on, I was greeted with this message in the chat bar for chats that I had with external contacts “Due to org policy changes this chat is no longer available”.

Thankfully the issue was fairly easily resolved because it seems some people had some real issues with this issue that they ended up escalating to Microsoft support.  The issue seemed to be limited to just my machine and appeared to be trying to force me to use Skype for Business for any external contacts.  Initially, I confirmed that no changes had been made to the global settings and then checked using Teams on my phone.  Which confirmed that it was an issue local to just my laptop.  I did a quick spot of googling and hit on upon a workable fix.

These are the steps I went through (that actually worked, not all the steps I took!)

1. Close Teams, and then expand hidden icons in the taskbar, right-click on Teams, and quit.
2. Open File Explorer and then navigate to %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams.
3. Delete all the things!
4. Restart computer.
5. Sign back into Teams.

Hopefully, this will help someone else, it was nice to have a problem that was relatively simple to fix.

Thanks for reading.

Pete

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