Mapped major processes, providing the first clear view of data flow in 10 years.
Author: Steve Burns
Primary Technical Interviewer
Was the final technical interviewer for level 3 positions in multiple departments. Other departments relied on me to apply a strong level of technical questioning to ensure only highly qualified applicants made the cut.
Managed Administration of Salesforce
Despite my inexperience, I had the CIOs seal of approval to continue to manage the Salesforce environment of over 250 people. I had assumed the administrator position when the tickets for Salesforce support started to flood in shortly after we had adopted the software and just after we ended our relationship with the Salesforce vendor…
Timezone Border VPN Fix – Full Story
The Help Desk ticket had been in progress for over 5 hours over 2 days as a remote user could not connect to the VPN. Despite hours of troubleshooting by both a Level 2 and a Level 3 technician, nobody could figure out why. John my colleague in the help desk said he had checked…
Resolving A Curious VPN Failure
A remote employee’s VPN connection kept failing despite 5+ hours of troubleshooting by Level 2 and Level 3 technicians who tried everything. When I learned where the user lived, I immediately recognized an unusual pattern and taught the Help Desk something they will never forget. FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED HERE.
Azure Entra Connect Optimization
Improved security of the Entra Connect sync servers by ensuring they were properly using dedicated service accounts. Additionally, I ensured the permissions of the other dedicated service accounts were locked down to the least permission necessary.
OKTA Service Account Lockouts Resolution – Full Story
For months, I had been fighting a recurring problem with our OKTA Active Directory integration service account. Multiple times per week – sometimes multiple times per day – the account would lock out, breaking OKTA’s ability to synchronize user information from Active Directory. Each lockout meant manual intervention: unlock the account, reset the password in…
OKTA Domain Admin Service Account
Spent countless hours resetting an OKTA AD service account due to it constantly becoming locked out. Ultimately the problem was the OKTA service account was a member of a group that was connected to the Domain Admins group via 3 or 4 nested groups. FINISH THIS STORY HERE.
Vendor Bug Fix
Spent dozens of hours fixing a vendor’s database error (UNIX time issue), restoring report generation. Core of the problem was vendor’s software was running in a Microsoft SQL server environment per their own recommendations, but they had released an update for their software that changed variables in database use values only found in a MySQL…
Correcting MY MISTAKE
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…