Today I started a new contract, so far so good – one day in I can login to the internal network. But my pass doesn’t quite work and I don’t yet have an email account, so one out of three on the first day. But to cover the security aspect a little bit more, no one on the site where I’m working has sufficient admin rights to sort out the problems – we’re waiting for a nice man in France to sort out the issue.
Having had a chance to look at some of the documentation, I have come to a couple of conclusions. The core network switches are named after the Marx brothers, from what I can gather given the way that the network works – it may well be that they were set up by them as well. There are some systems with names from the Lord of the Rings, a little passe perhaps? I have been in the computer room and have seen most of the kit, it has raised some questions already. Especially about the timetable for the move, the systems are in constant use and from what I can gather none too stable. So there could be some interesting times ahead, we’ll just have to wait and see!
I did notice that the software in use is mostly from around the 2003 era, well all the windows products are anyway. With some of the freeware that’s in use being more up to date, well Open Office is anyway so I’ll probably use that. There are only a few people left in these offices, there will be fewer left by the end of August and some time over the next six months someone will probably have secured the new offices and will have told me where the are.