Big bang weekend, day 1
Today we started our migration from the tycoCE.com AD domain to the tycoFS.com AD domain.
Until yesterday the plan was for me to go to Woerden, but that left no-one from IT in Waalre, and thus no-one to collect all the laptops from the technicians. So yay, one trip less to Woerden.
* Bounce *
Around 15:00 we started kicking people of the network. At least one in four acted surprised, despite multiple mails, starting 2 weeks back and the last one being sent just a few hours before that. *Shrug* I guess that is their problem. We gave plenty of warnings and I heard plenty of people talk about it before. If someone does not read their email for two weeks then it is not our fault.
There is a downside to it though. Quite a lot of the users did not modify their power settings as we asked them to do. This will cause their computers to go to stand-bye or hibernate after a few hours, and thus they will not get migrated to the new domain when the scripts run. It was temping to ignore that and point to all the mails we sent, which clearly stated what we where going to do, and what the users needed to do themselves. It also stated what happened if this was not done (no more network from Monday morning.). Half of the users is a bit much though, I ended up checking almost every single computer in Waalre and correcting them. Doing this manually took quite some time, but I nearly finished it. I would have finished it if I had an extra half hour, but the alarm will arm itself at 10PM, regardless if I left the building or not.
For the computer/AD savy people under us: Yes, I know this can be done via a policy. We tried that... except that we discovered yesterday evening that the policy did not work, and postponing the migration is no longer an option. So a manual 'quick' fix was the safest way to go.
Not all is bad though. Quite a lot of other things did go as planned. We have a new mail server, the mail has been copied to it and we changed all of the mail drops. One of the two file servers has been migrated, and the extranet server has been migrated. All without serious problems.
One of the small 'oopses' which did occur was when someone in Woerden tried to change network settings on our web server (in Waalre) and accidental hit 'disable' instead of 'properties'. This happens to be our oldest server without a management card. Luckily I was in Waalre and it was quickly fixed.
This had the unexpected advantage for me that we now like to have someone on site in Waalre when we change the rest of the servers in Waalre. Yay, yet another trip to Woerden which got cancelled. (Can you tell I do not like driving a car to work?) :)
*Bounces some more*
All in all, I guess everything went OK. If we do not hit any surprises then we might actually finish a day early.
Until yesterday the plan was for me to go to Woerden, but that left no-one from IT in Waalre, and thus no-one to collect all the laptops from the technicians. So yay, one trip less to Woerden.
* Bounce *
Around 15:00 we started kicking people of the network. At least one in four acted surprised, despite multiple mails, starting 2 weeks back and the last one being sent just a few hours before that. *Shrug* I guess that is their problem. We gave plenty of warnings and I heard plenty of people talk about it before. If someone does not read their email for two weeks then it is not our fault.
There is a downside to it though. Quite a lot of the users did not modify their power settings as we asked them to do. This will cause their computers to go to stand-bye or hibernate after a few hours, and thus they will not get migrated to the new domain when the scripts run. It was temping to ignore that and point to all the mails we sent, which clearly stated what we where going to do, and what the users needed to do themselves. It also stated what happened if this was not done (no more network from Monday morning.). Half of the users is a bit much though, I ended up checking almost every single computer in Waalre and correcting them. Doing this manually took quite some time, but I nearly finished it. I would have finished it if I had an extra half hour, but the alarm will arm itself at 10PM, regardless if I left the building or not.
For the computer/AD savy people under us: Yes, I know this can be done via a policy. We tried that... except that we discovered yesterday evening that the policy did not work, and postponing the migration is no longer an option. So a manual 'quick' fix was the safest way to go.
Not all is bad though. Quite a lot of other things did go as planned. We have a new mail server, the mail has been copied to it and we changed all of the mail drops. One of the two file servers has been migrated, and the extranet server has been migrated. All without serious problems.
One of the small 'oopses' which did occur was when someone in Woerden tried to change network settings on our web server (in Waalre) and accidental hit 'disable' instead of 'properties'. This happens to be our oldest server without a management card. Luckily I was in Waalre and it was quickly fixed.
This had the unexpected advantage for me that we now like to have someone on site in Waalre when we change the rest of the servers in Waalre. Yay, yet another trip to Woerden which got cancelled. (Can you tell I do not like driving a car to work?) :)
*Bounces some more*
All in all, I guess everything went OK. If we do not hit any surprises then we might actually finish a day early.