As far as Windows environments go, I’m used to administering very small businesses. Some clients were still at the workgroup level, with no dedicated server. Most clients had one server and a handful of workstations running as a domain. Now I’m into a slightly larger business where I have an actual rack with 3 Windows servers (one of which has yet to be turned on and integrated) and a Linux box acting solely as a fax server. There are about 20 2K/XP workstations present. E-mail and web serving are handled from without by a rather flaky budget hosting service (DreamHost, so at least I have some level of control).
The former sysadmin left something of a mess for me. Things basically work from day to day here — I’m not running around putting out fires — but it’s a pain to implement anything new, though. There are no working backups, so I’ve taken that up as job #1. None of the servers had ever been defragged, and the PDC is incapable of defragging its system drive for lack of space. There’s no group policy, roaming profiles, application management, no clear delineation of tasks amongst the servers (though their various hardware configurations are highly suggestive of how it could be).
I feel a little overwhelmed. My gut says to format everything and start from scratch, but I can’t really see how one can do so with a running business. I’m tempted to ask the owner to shut down from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day just so I can go to town. With how slow business is during the recession, that could be viable.
The question I’m asking of you folks is, where would you begin with cleaning up someone else’s mess? Where can I find a good checklist of the basic functionality that any Windows domain-based LAN should provide? I’m looking at a set of articles at TechNet right now on Infrastructure Optimization ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/bb944804.aspx ). It seems promising in this regard. Any other suggested reading?
Given my move from single to multiple servers, how do most small businesses divy up the work? I’m tempted to take two of the servers and make them into redundant primary and secondary domain controllers, and use the third as a dedicated file server. They have a lot of data here, and the one box has monster disk capacity (Raid-1 mirror for system & Raid-5 of 7TB for data). I could start by making the unused server into the new PDC, which would free up the current PDC to wipe and rebuild into a SDC. This seems sane.
I’m grateful for anyone’s thoughts. Thank you, and sorry for being so long-winded.
-Jim Jones