Robert’s Rants & Rationalizations

I HAVE TO VENT!

Here’s the email thread from today regarding the addition of ‘www’ to the local dns. I must confess, our IT department is very small…it has only two techs and one manager, but whenever I request something very similar to this, we go back and forth as if they have to look up what I’m talking about.

BTW, our IT doesn’t run the intranet or manage it because there isn’t one. My department (non-IT) manages our website, and I watch over a couple PCs running httpd, php and mysql on our intranet, but they are for department use, primarily, and not officially the intranet site even though it has some links and hosts photo albums of employee celebrations and events.

The last time I asked to have “communication” added to the DNS, the manager said to have the desktop tech (actually, the manager of IT calls this person ‘the helpdesk’!) change the name of the PC to ‘communication’. In a smaller, much smaller organization, this would work okay, but it would break, eventually.

BTW, I talked to my supervisor who is out gaining valuable cross-training. He said that the little knowledge he is gaining will make him dangerous when he gets back. Is that the same for me…is my years in “IT” making me too dangerous at my work?

BTW, I replaced titles for names, etc., so it really isn’t that easy to figure out who is who!

Update!
The IT Manager and I had a ‘conversation’ (I had to restrain myself at various moments, honest) and the result is that the manager WILL NOT allow the DNS entry of “www” because the use of it will confuse the staff into thinking that “www” is actually THE world-wide-web and not the intranet site!

Would you want your employees to go to your intranet site, even by accident, instead or before they surf the internet? That’s BIG, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading,
Robert

Robert,

[The manager of IT] is going to get back to you on this. Thanks,

Network Specialist

—–Original Message—–
From: Robert Kim
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:13 PM
To: Network Specialist
Subject: RE: Request “www” domain name within the ad.mywork.com domain

Network Specialist ,

The plan is to use that machine name, ‘www’, and point it to the current ‘communication’ (wins name; 100.225) pc which is running the Apache web server ( http://communication.ad.mywork.com ). When the intranet is setup, we can easily publicize the site by telling employees to simply enter ‘www’ and press return which will work because you guys have the pc’s setup correctly (I’ve been at places that they don’t always enter the subdomain that the PC is within! You can test this by just entering, w/o ‘http://’, ‘communication’). If we use ‘www’ publicly now, we would only have to change the IP number to direct visitors to the newer site.

Robert

—–Original Message—–
From: Network Specialist
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 1:42 PM
To: Robert Kim
Subject: RE: Request “www” domain name within the ad.mywork.com domain

Robert,

Could you please clarify, because I don’t understand what you are requesting. Maybe if I understood what you and [co-worker] are trying to accomplish with the 192.168.100.225 machine, it might help. Thanks,

[Network Specialist]

—–Original Message—–
From: Robert Kim
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 1:08 PM
To: Network Specialist
Subject: Request “www” domain name within the ad.mywork.com domain

Network Specialist,

I’d like to have the local DNS updated with “www” (full name, ‘www.ad.mywork.com’) and associate it to the “communication.ad.mywork.com” (192.168.100.225) pc in the Community Hall.

This is not a high priority…more ‘normal’.

Thanks,
Robert