Turns out that I’ve been busier than forecast. What is it I do? I work in the IT field as an enterprise computing professional. I work on projects from patching and maintenance, to identity management, to name resolution, to desktop configurations. I apply highly disciplined troubleshooting techniques to solve complex global problems. I fix processes and create new ones where needed. I make recommendations to senior managers for long-term improvements and strategy.
I’ve been busy lately.
As an example, a co-worker and I were working on our DDNS configuration. When I first got to the company, co-worker and I agreed that there was a lot to be done to fix name resolution across the enterprise, but that because this enterprise is a de-centralized IT shop with shared name resolution, fixing it would not be a fast deal. Oh sure, everyone could agree it *needed* to be fixed, but everyone had different ideas how to fix it. And there were not a lot of people willing to pitch and help with the details, just the “what”.
But that’s pretty common in my business – a lot of chiefs, but not a lot of braves. 
The issue? Well, machines were ”disappearing” from DDNS. That’s a problem in and of itself, but the weird thing was that nobody could prove that the records that “disappeared” were there before. We dutifully dug in anyway and found that there were some horrible process issues, permissions issues – both on the records themselves and for the management of the records, and perception issues as well as various other broken or semi-working processes and components such as workstations and servers that could not, or would not properly register themselves.
Fast forward a year and a half and we’ve been slowly and steadily working to clean this up. I wrote a few scripts and .net applications that worked on the permissions. I worked with many of the business units to get their records cleaner. We worked with the vendor to get scavenging of stale records corrected. I also worked to highilight the importance of process and name resolution using the outages as backdrop for those conversations.
These things take time. A lot of time in this type of environment.
I’ll write more of the details about our escapades at a later time. For now, we’re on the road to healthy name resolution and will be there sooner than if we had not done these tasks.
Till next time.
