philipnet

But probably not  !

In the past I’ve mentioned that I’m fed up in my current position and have been looking for a new job.

Well next week will be my last with my current employer and on the 18th of July I start working for a technology company up in London.

As for the change to UNIX, well I will be supporting UNIX servers (they’ve already lined me up for a course in them) but also Windows desktops. It’s a small company and so I really doubt that they have any need for SMS, although there might be a practical need for the likes of MOM.

Over the last few days I have been reposting most of my blogs that were on sms2003.com on to my windowsadvice.com blog. Now whilst the information is still accessible on the old server, I’ve totally lost any ability to manage, organise or amend them.

So I asked Steve (who setup sms2003.com) if he could send me a dump from the database of all my blogs, and he did. In fact he send me an export of the whole database which included everyone’s blogs and all the comments (including the spam!).

The first task was to figure out what on earth I should do with this .bak file I had as an attachment in my email. I recognised the file extension from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place what it was or what I should do with it. A bit of Googling gave me the right hint – I should try importing it into SQL Server 2000. Ah ha! I had realised where I had seen it before, so I muddled along into Enterprise Manager and tried to restore the database.

Except that it kept failing. It took a bit more Googling and a hunt in the Options tab to work out that I needed to modify the location of where the database was being restored to, in order for the process to work.

Now I had the data in a usable form, I needed to get the pertinent parts out of the database and into a text file. For that, I just exported the contents of the blog_Content table where ever I was the author. That did mean that I didn’t get any of the comments, but then I didn’t particularly feel the need to move them across.

One thing to note, SQL stores the " character as two " characters. So I substituted the two "s for one in the exported text. Then, for almost every entry in the export, I cut and pasted the title and code content into BlogJet, tidied up the formatting, checked the spelling and made the occasional grammatical change before uploading it to windowsadvice.com . Then using the admin console in Community Server I pasted in the date and time the post was originally made.

Recently the blogs on sms2003.com have been shut down and the bloggers moved over to windowsadvice.com . For me that means I have a new audience and a new set of fellow bloggers. So I thought that I had better introduce myself, again.

My name’s Phil and I am an I.T. Technician at a Further Education college in the UK. Because of the varied ways bloggers who post about their job have been treated, I’m going to let my employer remain anonymous. In my job I am currently using SMS2003 and trailing MOM2005. I am the only one who really uses SMS, the rest of the team just use Remote Tools to look at other user’s Desktops  .

As it stands, I am looking for a new job. I feel that I’ve come to the point with my current employer that I can’t continue to grow professionally and that my skills and abilities are underutilised. I am looking to move on up into a full/proper System Administrator role and believe that I have the skills, experience and ability to be successful in this. If you want to know how this is going or just find out about me as a person, then check out my blog on my own website.

As sms2003.com has closed I will shortly be migrating my old blogs from that site to this one (resetting the posting date and incorporating comments as I go). There will be a subsequent blog on the issues I encountered and how I overcame them.

I've been a bit busy over the last few days so it's only now that I've really had a chance to sit down and post a reply to my previous post.

Thankfully Friday wasn't what I was expecting. It was better. In amongst the rest of the work I do, I'm going through the rest of the logs I sent off to Adam to see what he saw and hopefully highlight the main sequence of events that occurred on Thursday and any previous contributing factors. I hope that I can highlight the main cause(s) of Thursdays problem, but I will have to see.

As it is, I'm still looking for a new job. I do feel that my skills are under utilised, that I am capable of greater things than are currently required of me and that I can go far.

I’ve been a subscriber to the MSSMS list on ListLeagues for a few weeks now.

And one thing that gets me is that there are loads over posters in the USA, but seemingly none in the UK – apart from myself – although I think there are a couple in other parts of Europe.

As it is I’ve recently posted something to the MSSMS list about the to be mentioned update to the MS04–028 scan tool and I’m currently waiting for an official response. Yet it’s gone half six in the evening here.

There’s taking your work home with you, and there’s taking your work home with you!

I'm currently an IT Technician in a UK college. I started about four months ago and one of the more interesting points brought up at my interview was SMS. SMS was presented as a technology that could be used for rolling out critical updates, pieces of software and remote control of user's desktop machines. While it was presented as a “you will be working on rolling out SMS” little did I realise just how difficult that would be for me/us to realise.

Currently we've got the client out to most of the machines and from that we can do inventories, scans and remote desktop. But that's it. At one point it was a struggle getting the machines assigned to a site and only yesterday did I finally manage to roll out a critical update to our test machines collection  .

My aim for this blog is to detail the highs and lows of my experience with SMS 2003; to have an easily accessible place of reference for myself, and, hopefully, a resource for other IT Admins who may not have the luxury of time.

I'll leave you with a promise. Just from my work yesterday I have about 4 entries I want to write, all regarding rolling out critical updates. I don't think I will get time to write them all today, so they will get finished off next week.