David Nauendorf

In July on 2019, a position became available in the development team which I was promoted to. In this role I was given significantly more responsibility, taking on management of our physical network and server infrastructure including the cleanup and maintenance of our server room, patching & updates of local linux servers, and backups. This was alongside my standard junior software development tasks.

As a support engineer I was part of a small team responsible for supporting over 900 ID scanning devices for various companies around Australia in the hospotality and retail industries. Shortly after starting at Scantek I became the operations team leader. I was given the additional responbility of being a technical and customer service escalation point for the operations team.

Many of the improvements I have made and tasks that I have taken on were beyond the prescribed scope of my role. This was recognised when I was given a title promotion to Associate Systems Engineer. Following this title change I maintained my responsibilities, however there was a greater expectation on improving my environment through scripted automation and tool creation.

A web application based on Oracle PeopleSoft is used internally for case management. Often the application locks up with a specific type of error and technicians would only respond to the issue once end-users began reporting problems. So I created a PowerShell script on a scheduled task to parse the PeopleSoft error logs every 5 minutes and check for [STUCK] error codes that occurred within the past 5 minutes. The script then sends an email alert to the web developers and generates a SCOM monitored Windows event configured with a text messaging service. This means that the appropriate teams can respond proactively to these errors before end-users are significantly affected.

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After being promoted to the Desktop Support Team my responsibilities shifted to second level support. I also took on a more significant scripting and tool creation role. Any tasks requiring scripting would come to me, including anything from simple information retrieval to bulk creation or modification of Active Directory objects. I also took over the support and maintaienance of an ASP.Net web tool, used to automate account creations and modifications, along with a Ruby based dashboard platform, Dashing, which is used to display call data and phone status data for each service desk technician, and basic alerting data for important infrastructure.

Significant updates were made to the call data dashboard appearance and functionality, including modifications to the background Ruby job that pushes call data from a MySql database.

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Over time I created many useful custom PowerShell cmdlets that made a number of administration tasks quicker. I eventually put these cmdlets into a PowerShell module for all technicians to make use of.

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I started at Kinetic IT on the service desk team serving as the first point of contact for all Department of Child Protection staff across the state. Our team was responsible for level 1 troubleshooting, logging and escalation of tickets, carrying out simple administration tasks such as account creations and maintenance, creating mailboxes and distribution groups, and modifying account access through Active Directory and the Exchange Management Console.

One of the manual tasks required of service desk staff was the creation of specialised user accounts required for external contractors to access content on internal department systems. I created this graphical tool using PowerShell to automate the creation and configuration of the Active Directory and Exchange components of these accounts.

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A common troubleshooting step used to resolve user profile related incidents is to recreate the users local Windows profile. This process requires backing up important local data such as email signatures, desktop items, sticky notes content, browser favorites etc. I created this graphical tool with PowerShell to streamline the recreation process saving a great deal of time. The tool allows a technician to remotely list, backup, delete, and restore user profiles.

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During a rollout of a new Standard Operating Environment (SOE) there was a requirement to identify computers with non-stnadard software packages installed. I created a graphical PowerShell script for the project team that generates a baseline CSV file conatining the details of all SOE packages. The script then takes a list of computer names and generates CSV reports for each containing any differences found. This was used to ensure all specialised software was reinstalled following the rollout at each site.

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