Thx kiddo, I'll keep that in mind. A guy who works for the contractor is former Army. He says "Microsoft technet is your friend...", lol, but he also told me to look into some boot camp courses. Maybe after a while. First I've got to get things in order.

 

I have been in DP(dataProcessing) since 1973 in the Navy, I know now it's IT or IS, been a keypunch operator, key to disk, computer operator, computer ops supervisor, Programmer and now a DataBase Administrator for a county government. I oversee several databases on MS2k servers, SQL, and also a mainframe. We have several programmers, network analysts. We have been lucky to have had a defined policy for just about everything. There was a time when we didnt have internet,, (I guess I am dating myself) So some of the policies had to evolve as the technology changed and grew. We always know who 'surfs' the most because it's their computers that get viruses and have to get wiped clean. We are a contracted service in the county so all depts have to pay to use our services. That's how we meet budget. The 24x7 agencies, like sheriff and pd's probation and juvy hall are our biggest customers, along with mental health, health, planning, buildings, recorders, voters, retirement and auditors . Now with the mainframe being phased out, depts are finding it cheaper to purchase their own applications and have us(IS Dept) maintain the app and the equipment. Our dept has a budget somewhere in the 7-10 million $ range. If I can help you with anything let me know what the issue is and I'll try and get some options for ya.
John

 

IT Project manager here. How's it going so far?

 

Getting things on track, its a gradual process. I've realized that I'll never be caught up on work, but as long as the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, I'll be okay.

 

I've been working with computers probably since the early 80's and love em but yup when users are left to run amuck, it gets very bad. I've done my time with main frames, software support, some hardware support, then onto training software, on up to project management where I supervised everything from complete network installs to new application projects. Now I'm back to supporting software and some webdesign stuff. I've always preferred the software side of things.

I don't envy you having to deal with all that. Most places I've worked have had things locked down when it comes to surfing and installing stuff. I'm often amazed at how far things have come since I first started working with computers. I remember huge rooms for the mainframes and now a small closet will often hold the same storage. Heck my little one inch Ipod has more memory then my first PC...lol.

Good luck getting things ship-shape.

 

My first computer was a Bally Arcade in 1980 w/ 1.4 kilobytes of ram and you loaded BASIC programs via a cassette recorder. Then I got an APF Imagination Machine that had 16K of ram and could do 80 columns of text accross a tv screen. Then I got a Timex-Sinclair computer that had I think 32 or 64K of ram. First PC was a 386sx-16 (a whole 16mhz of CPU speed, woo-hoo) with GeoWorks an early GUI. After the 386 which I bought already built, I then built my own boxes from thence on.

 

My first computer was a TSR 80 with 2 8" floppy disk. Later I moved up to a IBM Peanut. I love playing with them so much, I started my own computer repair company going on 18yrs. now and still having FUN...!! Check out our web site, I'm the guy in the middle www.soundbytes.org.

 

I had a trs80 (coco2) also... great little machine.

I'm the sys-admin for a local hospital. 3 sites, about 1200 desktops and roughly 120 servers with about that again for data devices... SAN/library/direct attached etc.

Group policy is about the only thing you can do to save yourself... it's going to be a delacate ballance finding what works for you without crippling the users. We have to have local admin rights because of a certain clinical app we use does frequent updates and they need to be done as a local administrative user... what we've found works is stripping away features and access but not rights. The 'average' user can't do anything other than what we've laid out for them but if you get someone in a unit with any tech savy they can still do what they want.

That's when the 'pain of death' policy comes in to effect. And our front line techs are getting less and less tolerant of the extras... if they can't solve a problem on the floor within 30min they re-image... say bye-bye to your goodies :)

 

Yes, our main law enforcement app requires local admin rights per user, which is a huge part of the rub. Not only that, but the program that the state requires us to use to run state-wide and national wanted checks, criminal histories, and other inter-agency comms requires that we have our workstations on static IP's. No DHCP here. Although we have a project under way to start using static DHCP and let work stations receive the same IP all the time through their NIC's MAC address, which at least relieves some of the fumbling around with manually managing static IP's.

I was able to get the dept administration to agree to put all users under an enterprise level web filter.... lasted all of approximately 4 days before users cried and whined and made up excuses why they needed unrestricted internet for official purposes. The upper management then decided to take us off the web filter and leave it wide open again. Mistake squared. Cubed, actually. But that's just my lowly opinion as an IT unit spv.

I've got one guy that we finally ended up putting a new drive w/ fresh XP image in his laptop beginning of April. By last week of April he had it mucked up and brought to its knees again with spyware problems. It was a new record as far as turn-around time on getting re-infected. I bark and growl to my chain of command, it flows over to the user's chain of command, and ultimately not much happens. Such is my plight.

 

Hello,
I work in IT here in Atlanta.
I am currently a Contract Consultant with IBM supporting 140 iSeries Midrange Computer Systems.