Rantings Diversified

I have to brag.
You see, my dear readers, the past month or so I have been planning and scheming to replace our company’s network with a new and shiney Server 2008 domain and a SECURE presence.   We installed and tested and deployed the whole thing in three days.  Yes we did!
In three days the entire network was replaced and deployed almost without error.  Please note I said almost.    You see we have a Linux based firewall that I decided to keep for awhile because it works very well.  I had to balance this with an Active Directory Domain Controller.  The DC connected all the users with the hard work of the two kids I work with and they busted ass to make sure everyone got on the domain fast and well.  Meanwhile I was working on the back end to make sure that the load was balanced and the servers worked as I wanted them to do.  Monday, day three, was way tense as we had a small (HA!) DNS/DHCP problem.  Through the afternoon we all banged our heads on this problem and then one of the kids I work with made a huge breakthrough reconfiguring the Linux based firewall and, “Poof!, all was well.
As the rest of the day went on I became a bit more concerned because noone was bitching nor complaining and noone was telling us of any problems.  Last night I was very worried.
Well this morning I went to the office and to my amazement all the logs and reports told me there were NO problems.  I walked out back to check and make sure I was in the right office.  I was!
OK, so it took awhile for this to sink in but … Holy Shite!  It worked!
First and foremost I have to thank Mitch and Joe who gave up their weekend to make this work and they are the ones who worked like dogs to get all the users hooked up on Monday.  Kudos to Joe who figured out the problem with our firewall.
The best affirmation of this was the response to an email I sent to a couple of friends who are also Network Engineers detailing what we did this past weekend.  Their response was, “Bullshit.  It takes more than three days to implement a network like that”.
Ha!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 21:54 and is filed under Rantings Diversified. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.