The witch is dead

It's only taking prodding, and death threats to various factions of my company but last week I finally turned off our legacy Windows NT domain. This may sound like a small feat, but our payroll system was still running on an NT machine, and I was not under any circumstance going to bring that into the current domain. So there floated a PDC, BDC and application server running that I couldn't get rid of. Anyone with experience with payroll will know the cost and complexity of payroll systems, particularly when multiple unions are involved. We have accruals and seniority rules that we have keep careful track of for scheduling and some individuals can work multiple job codes sometimes all in the same shift. It was a mess, and migrating our legacy data to a new platform was going to be a costly endeavor.

In the end the threats of bodily harm did the trick, as they did bite the bullet and migrate their data (otherwise I might have had to operate that server in perpetuity). I was a little nervous about shutting down WINS, as a few other admins that had migrated off NT said that they ended up standing up WINS servers later on. My understanding of Active directory was that it could run on just DNS.  I guess I'm out of excuses, and will have to start working on migrating our Exchange 2003 server to Exchange 2010.

This years to do projects are Exchange 2010, Active directory 2008 or 2012 (need to see if all of our clients will work on 2012), the second half of our desktop deployment and the final death of XP in our organization, a completely overhauled Backup System (new software, tape hardware and a disk2disk with deduplication), expanding the coverage of our wireless network, and working on to get our preventative maintenance/asset tracking system integrated into a different software package so I can retire that creaky piece of shit.

How's that for some IT nerd?