After going back and forth with the Sophos support department, I think I finally nailed my ongoing issue. My problem was that I couldn’t authenticate to my NetWare servers to create an area for updates for both the NetWare servers themselves and our Windows workstations/servers. It finally dawned on me that I screwed something up during the initial install, thanks in part to the documentation. During the install, the documentation deviated with what I was actually seeing on screen. The docs wanted a user called EMLibUser1 on both the local management machine and a matching user with the same details in eDirectory. When I finished the install, I took a look at the local windows users created. The install automatically created a user called SophosEMLibUuser1. To match my eDirectory user, I went ahead and renamed that user instead of my eDirectory user so they would match. Apparently, there is a section in the Sophos Library Manager MMC that specifies what user it’s going to use on the local machine to handle remote CIDs. Once I changed that to EMLibUser1 and restarted all the services, I was finally able to authenticate to my NetWare servers. See, this is what happens when I bother reading the documentation BEFORE I bumble my way into installing something!

One major thing that has changed since I went from desktop support to system/network administration is that I now think about my work day in terms of 24 hours. With my last position, once my day was over, it was over. These days, I can’t exactly down a server for maintenance in the middle of the day and only impact a single person. Server work happens at night, during weekends, and during maintenance days made known to the users well in advance(and reminded many times). Thankfully, I don’t work in an environment where losing a server at 7:00 pm will cause money to be lost. At worst, a short term outage causes complaining and my phone ringing off the hook.

The 24 hour thought process comes into play when I need to do work on a server and I have to start worrying about the backup processes running and how many hours the maintenance might take. If I know it’s going to take four hours or so, I’d prefer not to tack that on the end of my day. I’m more likely to make a mistake 11 hours into a work day than 3. So either I come in late or come in during the weekend. Even then, I have to make sure there are no night classes, no board meetings, and nobody who determines my yearly raises around when I start pulling plugs. It’s a different dynamic than I was previously used to.