First Post!!!

Hi, This is my new IT Tech Blog.. This blog is going to contain helpful information related to Information Technology, So anything along the lines of networking, software and hardware.



A little about myself.

I am 28 Year old male working in the HEALTH CARE industry. The company I work for owns a Hospital in Long Beach CA also we own various clinics, pharmacy's, private doctor offices and of course our business offices. This being said Me and our team are responsible for roughly 1500 users...

A little about my everyday environment.

We have a WAN connected with Telepacific between our various sites. We have 2 main outs for our Internet split - one is threw Charter and the other is going threw TPAC as well.

We have mostly Windows XP machines for the end users, with a couple windows 2000 machines here and there, NO vista yet for the end users but some of the more PC sabby people have it (with no problems).

All of our routers are Cisco routers now and about 85% of our switches are also cisco. We still have some that have not been replaced yet..

Recently just migrated to Cisco VoIP solution at most of our main sites, We went from an older NORTEL system over to Cisco VoIP and rolled out over 500 IP phones in a week!!! It was a huge project and finally over, Thus we use Cisco Call Manager and Cisco Unity for voicemail.
Also 2 of our sites are using SHORTEL VoIP as an Alternate solution.

For internet and content filtering we use a device called FORTiGATE by a company called FORTiNET. This devices is an all in 1 solution... Content Filtering, Virus Protection, Spam Blocking, FIREWALL, Vpn Connections (SSL & IPsec) and MORE... This product has proved to be extremely good.

Servers... Our servers are Truly a mixed... The majority being Server 2003. We also have a few linux servers, Some IBM AIX unix servers and Windows 2000 Servers (almost gone). We decided to go with the HP series blade servers.. We also have a very nice SAN system by compellent which we have been using to virtualize more and more servers with VMware thus creating more physical resources for us.


We run 2 major web servers with IIS. We have our Intranet website running on a linux box using DEKIwiki. We have a public DNS server to publish our dns. For DHCP we went away from using Windows 2003 server like most companies use and we went with a solution called "Infoblox" This thing runs great and SO fast - it hands out DHCP addresses extremely fast, it is very easy to use and has a nice GUI...

That is just a short note of the things I handle on a daily bases. My hope is to be able to pass on any knowledge that I can from my daily experiences and learning's. There is a lot of tech related help stuff on the Internet but sometimes I find them to not be realist or not explain how something would be in a typical network and frankly sometimes people assume whoever is reading the guide/writeup will understand everything. I know some people are not too tech sabby and some times fall in the role of IT person, I also know that learning something can be tough when people don't start from the basics and explain things, Sometimes people expect you know as much as they do when they explain something and you end up saying WHA?!?!

My goal

To help anyone who needs help or even get some interesting informative feed back on things I post on here. So the beginners can feel free to learn and the advanced people can feel free to post their experience or what their understand may be.