A Little History
I was hired at the Fokas companies group, mostly on my hardwares knowledge and generic windows skills and was thrown into a position where I had to administer an Active Directory domain and provide help desk support for almost 130 on a daily basis. Not only that but I also had to become familiar with other software, like ERP, Payroll etc so that I could provide the first line of support there as well.
I was fulfilling my position within one month. I was starting to get bored within two months. This is when I started using my spare time to create more tools to help me and the other IT staff
My first plan was to organise the AD which had been hastily set up by an external associate, then I deployed tools such as System Update Services (SUS, now WSUS), Distributed File Shares (DFS) etc in the network. None of that had been asked of me however. They were on my own initiative.
After all the native Microsoft tools I could find were exhausted, I took a break and started learning to use Linux, which was a chapter I had never opened before.
I won’t go into details, but one year and 4 distributions later, I was confident enough to try and setup my own server in the enterprise, more to see if I could do it than anything else. Thus the Jabber project was born.
At some point disaster struck, taking out a part of our AD authentication and although I did not have the knowledge to handle it, I did find ways to allow users to access their file shares and emails and discovered a way for the administrators to connect to remote desktops. As a result, the user downtime was minimal while we searched for a the cause of the problem.
In the last months I stayed there, I was already considering to leave due to various mounting concerns but that knowledge didn’t stop me from researching and deploying, what I like to think of as my last and greatest gift to Fokas, Zabbix. I researched it, installed it, set it up to do most of what I wanted and then resigned and moved to the UK and later on to Germany.
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