The StoneHenge blog

As with most small businesses, when it comes to IT, our own needs take a back seat to our clients. In our case, we have a definite need for an IT support shop to provide internal development servers, test environments, and everything else associated with software development. We also have a sales effort, human resource management, and payroll to support.

Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 is the primary back office system for us. While this provides us with email, file services, print services, and payroll, it does not cover the sales or development efforts.

Now we get inventive.

Sysadmin 1-2-3

1. To avoid head count for server support, our development center is out-sourced on a per server basis to a local hosting company.
2. The developers manage the database servers, source control, and test environments directly as part of their normal operations. They added a wiki on their own to support their Agile process.
3. However, we wanted control and visibility to bug tickets and progress reports. MANTIS is an open source bug database with a web front-end. It is extremely easy to use and provided good management reporting out-of-the-box.
4. We recycled an old desktop machine using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to run this service. Once we had the LAMP stack in place, using MYSQL to support ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT was an easy step.
5. Using another open source program called WEBMIN to allow web-based administration. I setup a simple scripted backup of the MYSQL database using the default scripts included in WEBMIN.
6. We also have office workers using desktops, laptops, PDAs, Blackberry phones, and so on. I needed to track licensed software usage for our Microsoft products, again with no budget. SPICEWORKS solved that problem. Using Active Directory credentials for Windows devices and SSH for non-Windows devices, and SNMP for routers, wireless access points, phones and so on, SPICEWORKS can track software installed on the boxes, events, warrantee periods and a host of other helpful things. It even includes a self-service help desk for IT issues.
7. Finally, those sales guys needed help too. Microsoft Business Contact Manager provides the feature we needed, but it had one limit. The database belongs to a user and that user must share the database with others to allow everyone to track the contacts.

Since I needed a spot for SPICEWORKS, we reused an older desktop with Windows. Setting the desktop to autologin and run Outlook with the Business Contact Manager add-in was easy. Sharing the database with the sales force was done using a security group. SPICEWORKS runs on the same box, so now we have continuous monitoring and BCM.

So, aside from the out-sourced servers, we have a one-person IT shop supporting the entire business in a cost effective way that excludes additional overhead.

Ben Crumby is the systems administration division of StoneHenge Partners