We have been having an odd issue on our Citrix servers at work since we upgraded them from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003 in late February. You can’t open MS Access files by double clicking on them, it just does nothing. All the file associations are correct, as are permissions, it’s just a strange occurrence. It hasn’t been high on the priority list to do as users can still open the files from within MS Access using File > Open and navigating to the file from within Access. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about the issue as we had not put in place our ticketting system until recently; I only got it fully setup and functioning last week.

I fixed them up today, we have about 50-60 of our employees using both of these servers at work so it’s impossible to do serious work on them (involving reboots; or risking it) during business hours. Fortunately I can do the work remotely in the comfort of my own home, all rugged up (it’s getting wintery in Melbourne). So fixing the problem didn’t end up being overly difficult, I did a full uninstall of Microsoft Office on our servers (We have 2 in our Citrix “farm”), rebooted them, re-installed Microsoft Office 2003, applied all the updates and rebooted again. I tested both servers and everything looked to be functioning correctly under several different test and live user logins.

During all of the testing I noticed that the scripts for some users were running of a domain controller at another of our sites…not the 2 domain controllers which are at the same site as the Citrix Servers. It wasn’t a big issue, logins functioned, but were just slower than usual as they would travel on a 2MBPS VPN link to the other site (about 10km away), authorize and pull the scripts back down to the Citrix box when a user logged on. When they should have been using 1 of the 2 DC’s in the same room, connected to the same 1GBPS switch! The problem was that Active Directory Sites and Services was incorrectly setup; the DC at the other site was sitting in the main office’s Site OU, not it’s own. So I moved it over, checked that the correct subnets were assigned to the appropriate sites (which they were) and viola; when logging in to Citrix it would now do it faster and use one of the 2 DC’s in the same server room.

Which leads me to the point of my post; our work has grown (and continues to) very rapidly and our IT infrastructure structure and systems were not designed adequately to cope with this. It’s not that anything there is drastically wrong, we have around 150 users who are all working happily away and the systems are performing well enough. But the systems were never designed for much expansion, they were designed to cater for the problems at the time, quick fixes. As such, we have a lot of ad-hoc solutions to problems that have sprung up along the way. It’s like a kid’s tree house with little odd rooms tacked on all over the place!

But quite frankly, I love it! Of course, everything needs to be fixed, a lot of it completely re-designed and implemented from scratch. But it is a great experience for me starting out in IT, I am learning so much every day and putting in place everything I am learning in my Microsoft Certifications. Obviously the aim is to get everything working as smooth and efficient as possible, but it does make me think that if it was all running as smoothly as I plan to have it, work would be very boring.