A couple of months ago I took a job doing simple data entry for an eCommerce company.  The pay has been crap, but it beats working fast food.  There are simply too many highly skilled technical people in this area looking for jobs, so my contract work has been few and far between.  A month after I started, the senior technical person quit, leaving me as the only person with any technical qualifications.  At first I did the more technical jobs because it was necessary to complete my real job of data entry.  One thing led to another and now I’ve basically been put in charge of everything computer related.

We’ve since hired another data entry person and are looking for another so that I can concentrate fully on what I wanted to do all along – network administration.  I will, of course, be insisting on a pay raise ASAP.

The most difficult task awaiting me is the complete rebuilding of the network.  It’s based on a win2k domain controller, but as far as I can tell, the person who put this mess together was a hard-core crack user.  It’s a complete mess.  There is no logic to the groups or the permissions.  People are constantly having problem using necessary resources.  I plan on replacing it with a Linux/Samba server and just picked up “Samba 3 by Example” to help me along.

Other things on my list are…

1. Lock down the Point of Sale terminals, preferably with a diskless workstation solution.
2. Find a replacement PoS software package.  We’re using AIMsi, but no one is happy with it.  Hopefully something that works on a diskless Linux box for the PoS portion, but Windows for everything else.
3. Redesign the entire eCommerce website to not use tables to format (grrr, I hate that).  Get it to display nice on other (non IE) browsers, too.  A skilled web designer would be nice, but I don’t think we have the budget for one.
4. Get the office network and power rewired.  It reallly needs it.  No, I’m not doing this.  I’ll let trained professionals play with cables.
5. Replace the Linksys consumer level router with something like Smoothwall or some commercial level router.  The Linksys is a good unit, but was never designed to handle 20 computers on a T1.
6. A million other little things I can’t remember at the moment.

Input is welcome.

Addendum (10/26/04): I am now of the opinion that everyone’s dislike of AIMsi is due to a lack of training.  People wouldn’t bitch about it if they knew what they were doing.  My only AIMsi complaint is it seems to be Foxpro based, which is rather old technology.  I would much prefer something SQL based (MySQL, not MS SQL).

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