It always worked out somehow…

Whatever you do, don’t give up
When nothing in your life is going right, when problems
torment you and money worries surround you…
Rest if you need to, but whatever you do, don’t give up.

When too many mistakes have been committed, when your entire universe
threatens to crumble and, exhausted, you feel your confidence ebbing away…
Rest if you need to, but whatever you do, don’t give up.

You know, life is strange sometimes, with its share of surprises and unforeseen
events, and it is not given to us to know in advance how far we will have to
travel or how many obstacles we will have to overcome in order to achieve
happiness and success.

Think of how many people stopped fighting, when perhaps all it would have
taken was just one more tiny step to transform failure into success. And yet,
one step at a time is never that difficult.

So you must have the courage and the tenacity to take
that tiny step more, knowing that life is a great and powerful friend that is
always there by your side, ready to help.
You will soon find that this attitude will summon up, from the deepest part
of yourself, life forces that you never even suspected and that will help you to
achieve what you undertake.

But, first and foremost, remember:
When, in your life, difficult moments arise…
Rest if you need to, but whatever you do, don’t give up.

Anonymous Author

I think life is about learning to not hide from the difficult things in our lives.  Hey, it’s not all Polyanna-ish sunny days and puppy dogs tails!  Bad things happen. They happen for reasons we don’t even come close to understanding. We need to learn to thrive in adversity and find the beauty in each day of our short life. 

When I was growing up my father, when asked how he was doing, would reply, “I woke up breathing.”  I used think I understood that.  I do now.  It’s the basics.  If I wake up breathing, everything is possible.  If I’m not breathing, things are going to be much more difficult.

Or as I like to put it, if I wake up breathing, the rest is easy.

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain.”

That says a lot to me.  I don’t want to hide from life.  I want to experience all of it. Every waking second. Every pleasure, every pain, every happiness, every sadness.  All of it.  I can’t get enough some days and secretly I sometimes get mad if I fall asleep.

As  the old year goes out and the new one comes in, I am stopping to reflect back on the past year…  I wouldn’t change a thing.  For that I am grateful.  For my God, for my health, for my family, for my friends I am even more grateful.  For the pain. The sorrow. The happy times and the frivolity of it all.  Not one second would I change.

Certainly there are some things in my life I might wish were different.  But that’s short-sighted and I know it. I think those low times will help me to more deeply appreciate the good times.

To date I have not been wrong about the highs and lows and the relationship they have with each other. I doubt I’ll be proven wrong.

To my God, my family, and my friends – THANK YOU! Thank you for all of it. I’m looking forward to the new year and all that it brings.

My your new year bring you the joys, sadnesses, and fulfillment of life.

            I’m often reminded that what is obvious to me is not always obvious to everyone else. Sometimes that is on purpose – somebody is trying to be clever or is trying to get me to commit to something in a sneaky way.  Sometimes its just because we take a different meaning from the same sentence. 

            One of my favorite truisms is that if you have a room of 10 technical people and ask them to give an opinion to solve a given problem, you’ll get 11 different answers.  Think about that for a second.  What I’ve noticed over the years is that there are many right answers in my business and that people that label themselves communicators don’t tend to communicate very well amongst themselves.  They don’t usually lack the passion though.  That’s a big plus.  

            So what’s my point?  My point is that effective managers are those that foster communication among their staff.  The best techs in the world are ineffective if they fight too much amongst themselves. 

Now?  I also work on technical issues ranging from desktop standardization to name resolution to email issues.  In fairness, the company I’m working at right now has a good messaging team that handles the overall environment.  My interaction is more advisory (sounding board) and looking out for the interests of my business unit. I also have a lot to do with the Active Directory use and implementation as well as the unix integration work. I work with various products including tools from Quest, NetApp, RSA, and many others to help drive technology forward and solve business needs.  I also work to identify and fix process issues because as I mentioned above, the root is the best place to solve many of the technology issues faced by companies I’ve seen.

So, on to the DNS issues. 

DNS was an issue because the primary forward zone was set to only allow authenticated updates.  The reverse was, however, set to allow anyone.  Since the majority of the hosts were not in the same realm as the forward zone, most failed to update their records.  That led enterprising technical personnel from various business units to adopt unsanctioned workarounds to get their jobs done.  I’d have done the same for what it’s worth. Unfortunately, it did not help the name resolution issues. 

I worked with many of the business units to migrate their workstations to the primary Active Directory domain.  I also worked to help them change their process to adjust to their “new” domain.  I also worked to idenfity the issues with DNS/DHCP and how to fix them.  A co-worker and I worked with the vendor to better understand the cycles needed and I also wrote code to fix permissions and report on the status of the updates. 

To date, it’s working much better. We still need to go after the network and server outsourcers to adjust their process, but for now, we have stability restored.  We also have a working implementation (for now) of name resolution.

Network is next. We need to get them to true up their processes on a global scale.

I’ll keep you posted as to how that goes.

I believe strongly in competition.  I’ve seen what happens when a company like Cisco or Microsoft don’t compete.  It’s ugly.  Competition is far better for them and more especially for their customers.

http://blogs.cisco.com/trackback/6389/iS1225rL/  for the Cisco information related to the PostPath purchase.

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.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2540560/Gnome-returned-after-worldwide-tour.html

A little about me. 

I was born, much like many others – in a hospital. I’ve always been fascinated by machines and working with information technology is just an extension of that fascination and excitement. 

I decided to start this blog to see if I can keep a disciplined approach to writing often.  I think I can.

I have a lovely family two dogs a cat and a day job in IT. I love sports of all kinds but prefer to participate versus watch or count statistics. I’m originally from California, USA but now make my home in North Carolina where I’m semi-active helping people through my local church. When I write I prefer to put most of the commas at the end of the document and let the reader sprinkle them where they like.

Hopefully I’ll get more of these post out than I did during my last stint of blog posting. I think I can.

‘Till next time. 

(as promised here’s a few extra commas and a couple of apostrophes in case you feel some were missed. Enjoy. )

,,,,,,,,,,,,,”””””””””’