Other Client Success Stories
Professional services
Advertising/Marketing/PR
Financial services/banking

Disaster Stories

Without sufficient planning, and regular maintenance, A simple problem can quickly do major damage to an organization.

Client case study:
Educational Institution

Client needs: A training lab with a domain controller serving over 450 students suddenly has a critical DNS error preventing students from accessing their data and printing. In this case there was only a single Active Directory domain controller, no backup server, so there was no backup of the Active Directory Database. A Joho Engineer spent several hours trying to repair the server, but the configuration was too badly damaged to be fixed in a timely manner.

Solution: The decision was made to clean-install the Active Directory and re-create the 450+ user accounts. Groups and Directory permissions had to be re-created, printer drivers re-installed, and Group Policies setup again. The work took several days to complete.

Results: Some classes were inconvenienced or cancelled, the client had to spend very late nights adding all user accounts, and the students had to reset their passwords. As the client did not have a support contract with Joho, expensive non-contract overtime rates and an emergency callout fees were incurred. Due to lack of technical direction and budgetary constraints in the past, the client had not considered the consequences of such a failure, and the backup they had in place was not able to backup and restore the Active Directory. The simple addition of a second server, acting as a backup Active Directory controller would have enabled simple re-installation of DNS services on the faulty server which could have been carried out on a routine maintenance visit without any downtime incurred and at no extra cost to the client. An additional benefit of having a Backup Server is that provided it has sufficient disk space, it could act as secondary storage for all files, which can be copied incrementally from the primary server every night.

Content copyright 1999-2009, Joho Technology Inc. All rights reserved.