This site focuses on systems administrators, but everyone at every level, technical or not, needs to report problems. As the first point of contact, your trouble ticket (or e-mail, or problem report, or service ticket, or helpdesk request, or whatever your organization might call it) sets the tone for the future interactions necessary to get that problem solved. When you submit an effective trouble ticket, you increase your chances of skipping unnecessary intermediary steps and reaching resolution faster.
Continue reading “How to Submit an Effective Trouble Ticket”DNS is the Problem
For our blog’s inaugural article, we chose one of the most common, yet vexing problems that new administrators encounter: DNS misconfiguration (domain name system). Many of us stumbled our way through these problems in the early days of TCP/IP emergence as the dominant network stack. We mainly knew of DNS from working with our Internet service providers at home. That knowledge was incomplete, so we could not fully understand the situations that greeted us in business environments. The struggle was so pervasive that I once saw someone say, “The answer is DNS; the question is irrelevant.” Over twenty years after I learned the rest of the story (the hard way, of course), new administrators still make the same mistakes.
Continue reading “DNS is the Problem”