Poping

Welcome back. Today was hectic.

After solving some issues yesterday, I came to the office this morning and what awaits me? Three users made complaints of not being able to access there emails. As a network Administrator, one of your core skills an competence is that you have to be patient and also be a good listener, because some of the complaints I always get from users are very annoying. You also have to understand that in an organization, because there is what you call division of labour no one wants to do what they think is another man's job.

One of the users complain was easily solved because all I had to do was run up to her office, checked her desktop and I just pin pointed the problem. She could not access her mails because she was not connected to the network. Apparently, when the cleaners where doing there jobs this morning, they mistakenly unplugged her cable from the face plate. The cleaners are very good at interfering with my job. I run a couple of kilometers weekly through our office just to plug a users Ethernet cable back into the network.

The second users problem now was that she could pop her mails from the Mail Server, but she was popping old mails from 2006. What! This Is 2008 how did that come about? Well I figured this was an effect of the small changes we made yesterday to our MailServer. Remember we uninstalled our mail server completely yesterday. The version that was uninstalled was KMS 6.4. Now because our subscription license expired sometime in November 2007, and we did not readily have the 6.4 version ready for installation, I decided to install Kerio MailServer 6.3. Kerio MailServer runs forever without a subscription license. The only problem is that you will not be able to upgrade to latest versions and there will be no Virus Definition Update for the inbuilt McAfee Antivirus. That said, I also found out that because of the changes we made yesterday, users were not able to log into there Webmail interface of the MailServer. This was really strange because I never thought downgrading would cause this kind of a problem. I checked on our MailServer to see how much mails this lady had in her Inbox storage, and I found out that she only had about 3mb of mails and I was sure that she had a lot of junk mails that would occupy some 1Mb. So I just decided to delete her mail account, which will delete her mail storage folder. Then I created it again.