This week, IT Manager Republic has featured the daily diary of Tanya Buba, IT manager for a network affiliate television station in Louisville, KY.

8:30 A.M.
I don’t have to be in until 11:00 A.M. this morning, and I know I’ll be working all weekend, so I take time to get things in order around the house before the work marathon begins.

11:00 A.M.
Corporate is coming in to finish up some unfinished business from its last visit. We’ll be working late tonight, and I have some unfinished business of my own to take care of before corporate arrives.

I pick up a project that I started a few months ago: compiling a list of what ports each networked device is using in the data center. This will help us identify devices that are not using the correct port or ports that are not being used by any device that can be opened up for future use.

After crawling under some 30 desks to retrieve this information, I am ready for some coffee. I head to my office to put the data in a spreadsheet.
Get caught up on this week’s diary.Monday: Meeting the demands of a new promotionTuesday: Working while staying home with a sick childWednesday: Tips for setting up a new machineThursday: Preparing for the corporate visit
1:00 P.M.
Sales calls me to see if I can resolve an issue regarding some files that have suddenly disappeared. A quick check on the system shows they are pointing to the wrong directory on the server. I solve the problem by reconfiguring the path.

The general manager’s administrative assistant is having a problem with the PC that downloads and prints reports each morning. It won’t boot up. I set the PC to run ScanDisk to check for drive errors. It takes a couple of hours, so I leave it to finish on its own. When I return, it hasn’t reported any errors, so I run defrag and will delve into it deeper on Monday.

3:00 P.M.
Corporate is due any minute, so I spend the next hour responding to e-mails and voice mail received during the day. I also take some time to clean up my office, since I know it will get pretty hectic over the next couple of days.

4:00 P.M.
A three-person team from the corporate office arrives. We plug in the fluke that will determine what kind of chatter is on the network. A device is discovered that is talking up a storm, broadcasting to any device that would listen.

Some checking reveals a NetPort express print server that seems to have amnesia and doesn’t know how to report its own device name. It seems that it thought another device on the network would be able to report it. I perform a firmware update and the device has a meltdown. This could be the reason users have complained about the printer falling off the network over the last couple of weeks. I have a spare single-port device that isn’t being used, so I configured the device using Intel’s NetPort Express 5.41. Using NetWare Admin, I set up a print queue for the users. A test of the new device shows that it works fine. On Monday, I have to remember to reconfigure the users’ systems that print to that device.

5:30 P.M.
Most of the users have gone home, so we go to work configuring ArcServer 2000 backup agents on Exchange and our two Novell servers. Both agents on our Novell servers are updated to the newer version, and we verify the configuration. In the morning, we’ll check to see that we got good backups.

8:00 P.M.
We end the day at 8:00 P.M. and we still have a lot to do this weekend, so we agree to call it a night. We’ll pick up where we left off on Saturday morning. I plan to work more than 30 hours over the weekend. My boss will give me one “comp” day for putting in this extra time. I know it’s not an even trade, but I’m glad I will receive at least one additional personal day.
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