Saturday, 10:30am - The big thing for today?  Make sure the rest of the staff that hasn’t come in since Christmas can get their work done when they come in.

For the most part, this involved going from desktop to desktop, adjusting settings and making certain that each user can access their files and print.  Even waiting on ExMerge to finish was less painful than this, because I could at least do other things.  There’s some things I would have done differently here, but I’ll outline them in a later post.

After 8.5 painful hours of going from desk-to-desk, I finally adjusted and tested every PC that needed it.  Things were still not working like I wanted, especially in the way of GPOs.  I was tired though, and decided that I would let it ride until Monday and fix things then.

Sure, right…

Sunday, 2:00am - I awoke feeling nasty…VERY nasty.  I’m pretty sure it was something I ate, but regardless, I was unable to go back to sleep.  Hey… I’m awake, and I have to be at church early to direct video and prepare a movie clip.  May as well go in since my mind is pretty clear.

It’s amazing what you can do with some sleep!  Throughout the course of the morning, not only was I able to get the last handful of PCs switched over to the new domain, but with some testing, I also managed to iron out the GPOs issues that had plagued me the day before.  To make matters better, after doing some "wrenching" in Exchange, I got RPC-HTTP working just how it needs to be.  All this because of some stomach nasties … talk about a blessing in disguise. 

So as it now stands, our users are equipped to go back to work tomorrow.  Email is flowing everywhere it needs to be, shares and home directories are accessible by all users, printers are ready, and user profiles are switched over.  All that’s left is to bring the rest of the servers online, which should be doable within a day.

This has been both a grueling task (partly because of my time limitations) and a wonderful learning experience for me.  Expect to see a post coming up on how I would do this if I had to do it again (which I hope doesn’t happen anytime soon).

Total work time so far:  54 hours