I remember almost a year ago I googled for article about this. I’ve been a system and network administrator for more than two years in medium sized company, dealing with Windows Servers, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Firewall, and VMWares.

Then, for an unknown crazy reason I applied for a programmer position in one of the biggest software house in Indonesia. I was accepted and suddenly had a dillemma of choosing to stay as an administrator or to shift career as programmer.

Being a good information age generation, I looked for what other people’s opinion in online forums. Some are pros for career in sys and network administration, and some others are pros for career in software development.

To be honest, they made me even more confused. But I finally made my choice.

Now after 8 months of work as Java EE programmer, I want to share about what I know about these two IT careers. Please note that I don’t think one is superior than another although during this article I may be a bit inclined to software development career.

It’s Not The Career That Make One’s Success

Like most of the fresh graduates I know, I used to think that success is closely attached to one’s career. That some careers are naturally better than the others. However, through time I realized that this thought is not true.

There are successful administrators and there are successful developers. On the other side, there are also unsuccessful administrators and unsuccessful developers.

What makes the difference?

It’s The Person With The Right Career

In the online forums that I found those who are pros of each side listed the reasons why one career is better than the other. They all speak from their experiences and observations.

Some of the wiser members, however, posted that one should ask himself about what career is more suitable to him rather than only looking for the salary number or future overseas outsourcing trend.

Why I chose what I chose

I accepted the work as programmer and I don’t regret it a bit. It’s not because I don’t like the work as an administrator, but because I enjoy the process of creating something so much.

Making something has been my passion since I was a kid, and now I enjoy making software in every step.

So what should you choose?

Ask yourself this question,

“Will I excitedly wake up every morning to do this career?”

Some of my work colleague said that they actually don’t like coding and it’s really sad. I think they are not only waste their time here, but they also waste their life.

For me, someone can only achieve his greatest potential when he does what he really enjoy. And since life is not as long as we always think, choose a career where your passion is.

Just one comment about the Symantec Mail Security Anti-Spam feature. It is very good software that can help you reduce 99.9% of spam emails. It is 99% accurate in keeping the spam email from going to your inbox. Until now I only receive 1 spam email for the whole two weeks. However it needs to update its database every 20 minutes or less. And this update can take up to 4 GB of internet bandwidth every week. Well, that’s quite a price for keeping spam email out of your email huh!

Allright, back to how to change the SMTP routes of three most popular MTA (sorry, I don’t include Exim cause I didn’t able to tried it..)

In Sendmail:

Step 1. Login as root
Step 2. Find the file mailertable. Usually its in the directory /etc/mail, if it isn’t, search with the find command: #find / -name mailertable
Step 3. Edit the file as neccessary. Follow the following format:

domain.com 192.168.100.100
sub.domain.com 192.168.100.101

Step 4. Compile the mailertable file with the following command: #makemap mailertable

In Postfix:

Step 1. Login as root
Step 2. Find the file transport. Usually its in the /etc/postfix, if it isn’t, search with the following command: #find / -name transport
Step 3. Edit the file as neccessary with vi or other text editor. Follow the following format:

domain.com 192.168.100.100
sub.domain.com 192.168.100.101

Step 4. Compile the transport file with the following command: #postmap transport

In Qmail:

Step 1. Login as root
Step 2. Find the file smtproutes. Since qmail directory structures is quite confusing compared with Sendmail and Postfix, I stongly suggest you to use the find command: #find / -name smtproutes
Step 3. Edit the file as neccessary. Follow the following format:

domain.com smtp:192.168.100.100
sub.domain.com smtp:192.168.100.101

Step 4. Restart the server ( I tried to restart the service, but it didn’t change. Even worse, it stops forwarding email to the SMTP destination.)

Last week our Windows 2000 printer server had repeated problems in a single day. As the rule of thumb of Windows 2000 printer server troubleshooting says, I stopped the printer spooler service, waited a few seconds, and then started the service. Based on my experience, most of Windows service will show an fail message when I clicked on the restart service button. That’s why I prefer to click on the stop button and the start button after several seconds.

Anyway, it did solve the problem for about half an hour until the next user complained that she cannot print also. Then I restarted the Windows to make sure all the troubles caused by any lack of available memory resources will be solved. It came up and it solved the print problem.

But a few hours afterward the problem re-occured and so I did the restart ritual of both service and Windows all over again. I thought that was all for that day, but on the following day I discovered that my work colleague restarted the Windows once more after I left the office because of the same problem.

The problem no longer occur until today, but me and my work colleague has worked on plan to replace the printer server to new hardware and upgrade it to Windows 2003.

As always, we tried it in a testing environment with very similar condition. Here are the steps to upgrade Windows 2000 printer server to Windows 2003.

The Steps:

1. Download the Windows Print Migrator 3.1 from Microsoft website. This software will prevent you from adding all the printer manually.

2. If your printers are mostly HP, most probably you are using HP JetDirect. Then you need to download the HP Web Jetadmin from HP website. Without this, the printers can be imported yet the status won’t be “Ready”.

3. Login to the Windows 2000 Printer Server and Disable Kernel Mode driver blocking, following these steps from ChicagoTech.net:

- Run Local Group Policy. Open Run and type gpedit.msc

- Explorer Computer Configuration,

- Select Administrative Templates,

- click Printer.

- On the Right pane, right-click on “Disallow installation of printers using kernel mode drivers”

- Select Properties and check Disabled.

- Click OK to close the Local Group Policy.

4. Run the Printer Migrator on your Windows 2000 Server and choose Actions>Backup. It will backup all your printer driver and configuration into one cab file.

5. Login to the new Windows 2003 Server , install the HP Web Jetadmin.

6. Copy both Printer Migrator and the cab file it created to the new Windows 2003 Server.

7. Run the Printer Migrator and choose Actions>Restore, selecting the cab file.

8. That’s all folks! May the force be with you!

*during the test environment we tried to maintain the same printer server name so users need not to reconnect all of their printers and it does WORK! ;D

Last weekend we added a new storage for company File Server. We need to move all the Departments’ folders to the new storage while maintaining the folder security permission. There are thousands of folders inside around 50 different main folders. We certainly cannot afford the chance of losing the folder permission security properties that already created for several years.

What I know is Windows Server 2003 can only retain these security properties if the folder is copied in the same partition. While if you copy the folder across different partition, it will remove all of the security properties. Sounds like disaster to me…

My work partner then told me about the xcopy command that can be use to solve the issue.

How to do it:

I used the command xcopy to move all of these folders. It worked flawlessly. Here is the syntax:

xcopy "C:\Source Folder\Folder1" "D:\Target Folder\Folder1" /s /i /o

/s means to include copying subfolders
/i means to create the folder1 folder
/o is to include the folder and file ownership and ACL information

for the complete option you can type xcopy /?

If you prefer a GUI version of xcopy, you can try the free DupliTree from the following website:

http://5ko.free.fr/en/duplitree.html

I have tested the software and it seems to work pretty well. However I didn’t use it during the actual moving of the folders cause I was kinda afraid if the software crashed during the process.