Keeping up your network Infrastructure is a difficult task. Especially, when going through red tape. It is hard to get management to buy into new servers and switches when they are out of date and out of warranty. This is because they look at the network as an old car that can be fixed up and run forever. Hello! Your corporate infrastructure is NOT an old car. What can an admin do? Well, for starters you must document all failures and making graphs help. Make sure you have base lines and make a comparison of the issues you are having. When management can see this on paper with pretty graphs, they realize that they must act and then the burden is taken off of your shoulders. Oh, and make sure to get them so sign off on approving measures to improve the infrastructure or not. Keep a copy of this for yourself. As an old boss of mine always said, “CYA insurance”!

Managing a small network is not too difficult, but you can make it easier.

I really recommend installing applications from http://www.adventnet.com/.If you have a small network to manage you can use their enterprise class software for free.

Each of their suites of management software comes with a free version which has almost all of the paid versions functionality. Usually, you can monitor 5 - 10 computers/servers and this is great for us admins looking to make our jobs easier without making a purchase request for software that costs thousands.You do know that each time accounting sees you coming, they wonder how much it's gonna cost them. But
with using Adventnet's software you can provide services on the cheap.

I just updated the Symantec AV script to do some new stuff.

1. You can now drag and drop a .txt file with the names of hosts in it and the script will run auto-magically!
e.g.:

Server002
accounting1
workstation003

2. It will ping all hosts to make sure they are alive.

3. It will check to see if the security certificate on the host matches the one on the AV server.

4. It will wait 30 seconds to make sure the AV service is started.

I hope you enjoy the script!

Recently, I had the pleasure to work with a client on a backup issue (coincidently, I love Backup Exec). But their was a problem... When installing Veritas Backup Exec CPS Server 11D make sure that Symantec AV is version 10 or greater before running the upgrade. When SAV 9 is installed the CPS server installation fails and your systems is left in a foul state. The best thing to do is to remove CPS and NAV, then start over. You will also lose your backup jobs if this is done. So, save yourself the headache and make sure you always have up-to-date software installed!

If you are having trouble removing nav try NoNAV.exe from Symantec. It rips out all of the junk left over by a failed NAV install and leaves your system is a pre-NAV state.