The One Man IT Shop

I know there’s many of you out there in blogland who can sympathize with me.  Sometimes being the ONLY geek around can be a little tiring.  Today alone I’ve had to be an expert in telephony (both PBX and VoIP), security (computer and physical), network architecture, TCP/IP, web design, web administration, database administration and general Windows troubleshooting.  I’ve also had to help make some decisions regarding various policies and procedures and I have to switch out the backup drives and check the logs to make certain everything is really backed up.  Actually there’s lots of logs to look over.  NO, I don’t read every log, I grep through them and look for problems.

That was just a summary, to be more specific:

I have several projects on the back burner that I need to do some more research for so I can submit a proposal with a price tag attached to be approved, such as the VoIP upgrade, or the building wide WiFi.  I’m supposed to research some software that tracks events and allows for event registration on our website.  I have to setup a blog for an upcoming mission trip, and get the proper users to register then give them the right permissions.  We’ve just implemented a new access control system (computer controlled Mag-Locks for the outside doors) and I’ve been involved in setting up all the schedules and getting policies in place to keep things running smoothly.  Someone’s phone quit working, which I traced back to yet another bad port in our ancient PBX, so I rerouted the line to another port.  Then I had to setup a phone in another room in the building so we can do a conference call with a vendor who is doing a product demo tomorrow.  One of our users was having trouble with our TimeClock software, which I traced down to a subnetting problem.  I had to edit some info on the website.  I need to update the sermon podcast.  This weekend I’m planning on finishing the big upgrades to the server with RAID5+hot spare and moving all server functions to VM’s.  I don’t remember if I posted the results of the last weekend I spent on this project but I ran out of time and had to plug the old hard drives back in place until I got more time to finish.  I recently read an article about a tool that will let you integrate Google Apps for your Domain with an LDAP server.  Since we use Samba+LDAP, I need to look into how that would help us.  Google Apps + Samba + LDAP should give me most of the same functionality as MS Server 2003 + Exchange without all the $$$.  The access control system has a few “issues” so we had to contact the company that installed it today and find out why these “issues” weren’t taken care of last week like they were supposed to be.  So now their crew just showed up to finish the job and I’ve got to hang around until their done.  I was hoping to leave early, since I got here early to make certain all the doors opened when they were supposed to since this is the first day of school (did I mention we have a school here?).

Anyway, all in all it’s been a pretty busy day and I’m exhausted.  I sent an email out to all the staff today letting them know there will be some planned downtime this weekend while I work on the servers and I get a couple of responses back from people telling me what a great job I’m doing and how much I’m appreciated.  It may be tough being the ONLY geek on staff, but it is all worth it.