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
