While some technicians will hide their mistakes I try to be transparent so that I have a high degree of trust with my team and any supervisors.
So when I made a change early Friday morning that accidently broke user VPN login for half of the company on the west coast, I confessed and rushed to repair the problem. I was grateful that most West coast employees would not be online for another 2-3 hours.
What Happened
I had made a change to user login attributes in what I thought was the demo environment but was actually the productions SSO environment. This caused usernames in active directory to change and the VPN relied on that username to verify users. So when users tried to user their normal username the VPN couldn’t not find them.
But I put together a plan and restored the usernames in a matter of hours and implemented safety checks to prevent this from happening in the future.
In total we had a small number of people (around 20 to 30) who were unable to login to the VPN, but otherwise they were able to access other core systems. My quick thinking and problem solving skills allowed me to restore systems back to normal by the time the Sales team finished lunch.