IT Setup, Troubleshooting and Repair
From 2000 - 2006 I worked for a company called Sonic.com in Novato. Back then Sonic.com was a Multimedia authoring software company that made software products for audio and video professionals. I came in as their systems administrator. At that time I already had lots of experience with the inner workings with computers, but that was the first time I started to learn about handling technology on a service level. Where I was a liaison between the company and vendors of various Internet services like mail and websites. But I also maintained the companies internal servers and services. I gained a lot of experience with how mail servers and website servers communicate on the back end to the point where I could trouble-shoot and resolve most communication problems related to why websites were not display content correctly, or why email was not being delivered.
My business revolves around maintaining and managing desktops, websites, and mail related services for companies, but I mostly handle special cases where the IT staff neither has the time or the knowhow to handle these issues. Sometimes a vendor, a general IT person or a web developer can handle it, sometimes it requires someone with expertise in specific areas of technology. I have extensive experience with communication protocols and computer hardware/software.
An example of this was a customer of mine called me and explained that their web designer was having trouble with getting their website contact form to talk to their hosting provider’s mail server. The hosting provider in this case was Godaddy. Godaddy doesn’t actually support this issue because from their point of view the customers mail service is working and the contact form script in question was having the problem.
This ended up being a problem with a secondary mail provider that Godaddy was was using to serve the customer email. The security measures (to prevent spam) was preventing the website contact form from talking to email server. I had to configure the website contact form to handle these new security measures. But sometimes I switch a customer to a less strict mail solution and migrate their mail if they don’t need that kind of security so that the form can talk to the mail server.
Other times, web developers are handed a pre-existing website that is old and have to figure out why some legacy code isn’t working the way it’s expected after they give the site a face lift. One time I came in and actually had to use a network analysis tool to see what kind of response the legacy code was sending to the website visitor so I could isolate the problem code. The result was that after I found where the site was failing to serve content in the code itself, I gave the customer (Web Developers) the location of the legacy code. It was a image caching solution that was not working with the new development of the site. Once they removed that code the page with the problem started working again.