The intended audience of this blog is IT professionals.
Likely just going to be lost in the void, but shit oh well here we go again.
As mentioned in the 4th surviving post on this blog this is not the first time I’ve had a crack at this blogging thing. The reason for stopping the during last two instances was mainly related to effort and enjoyment, well rather a lack of.
The amount of time spent writing the two previous public posts and a handful of unpublished drafts was not enjoyable as I was trying to write them in the context of introducing the everyday person to IT and covering all bases on how to perform a specific task. In this instance I am switching to more a wiki article style of posting as it allows for copy/pasting from private wiki’s I am involved in and hopefully mainly solving issues other IT professionals have not been able to work past.
About me.
I am in IT.
An Australian, from a Dutch and Aussie background. Hence the .nl domain name. Though it may not be the most common career out there it is a very board one as IT is an industry and yet it isn’t. An IT professional can work for one of the big IT companies; Microsoft, Dell, HP, AWS… but more often than not, an IT professional is working in an industry far far away from IT and yet they are still an IT professional (I believe the stat is around 40% work directly for IT companies, at least in Australia).
Working in IT most commonly means supporting a computer system that is running a business. Yes there are web and software developers, hardware manufacturers, network engineers, cryptographers and so many more rolls out there but they are all making IT and will continue to push it forward. Even once a new idea has been through of; even once a new product has been developed/tested/released; even once a new kind of network protocol has been proposed, written, tested and even pulled to pieces by a RFC; it, as a part of an IT system, has only lived the shortest part of its life. For once that magic ‘go day’ has passed and the hype surrounding its release made the news.
Somebody has got to support it and in a Business, that support is IT.
IT is such a fast paced place that my next job or career move may not have even been speculated to be needed or thought up yet. Acronyms are so very common and confusing at the best of time and yet they all make sense….at least until next year when something new with the same acronym comes along.
If you were to work in the Sales office for <insert favourite kind of ice cream brand here> and you were asked by another employee. Do you think we need those IT guys anymore? We haven’t needed them for anything in the past month and they aren’t around our office much. Please answer with Yes, the less IT is needed day-to-day the more stable the computer and networking systems are. The less you see of IT, the better the behind the scenes work is being done. The more automated and monitored a system is the less work your IT people need to do on a daily basis leaving more time for supporting unplanned events, preparing for breakage (What the plan if we lose a HDD from this server; do we have a backup of these systems) planning for the future, (should we upgrade to a SDSL link here or can we look into symmetrical fibre)or just writing bash scripts to fill your lunch break.
The best kind of IT administrator is a prepared one, having a backup plan for everything is key to keeping a system running. You have no idea how stressed I get when there is even one server not working correctly or a NAS/SAN is rebuilding after a disk failure. Preparing for when something breaks not if something breaks.