Welcome to another edge of your seat, rollercoaster ride of a week. I am getting a little better at remembering to post these!
It has been a moderately interesting week, made significantly better by only lasting for 4 days thanks to Easter weekend.
It was another assessment week at the college, tbh when isn’t an assessment week of some sort, which entailed printing approximately 1 billion test papers. So inevitably, there were several printer breakdowns. Luckily none were terminal and all were resolved within a matter of minutes. Although, it was rather exciting when all of the MFDs simultaneously developed errors. Luckily all of them were caused by users forcing things were they shouldn’t go. So, with a little TLC they were all back up and running in a matter of a half an hour or so.
Other than that I have been mostly running through the general day to day of a system admin. Checking up on the various key pieces of infrastructure and making sure that they function well. We had a few issues, mainly with the backup server running out of space to create checkpoints so backups were once again stalled. I discovered approximately 500gb of archived Vritual Hard Disks and checkpoints to be the culprit so that was fairly simple to resolve. Leaving us in a position were, for the first time since I started, we have a full back that has completed without errors or warnings. Quite the milestone I think.
The only other point of note was a visit from two detectives for the Metropolitan Police. It turns out a house across the street from the college had been used for running some drug dealing enterprise and they were after a couple of weeks worth of CCTV to ascertain who had been coming and going in the weeks leading uptown the raid. The positive of this was that I finally took the time to figure out how to download video files from the CCTV to external storage. The downside is that due file restrictions on the CCTV it can only deal with 4000 files at a time, which is about 2-3 days worth of footage. The end result was it took the better part of 7 hours to fully extract all the footage the officers wanted.
I also built a failover Domain Controller for the network. I am not 100% sure that I did it right, I shall have to figure out a way to test it before we actually have to use it in anger.
I am beginning to think that I am getting the hang of this job, or atleast the day to day parts of it. I still have a colossal amount to learn but I don’t feel like I am living in a a dumpster fire anymore. Which is nice.
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog.
Pete