Network Administrator

Law Firm Network Admin

I started at Rogers Townsend & Thomas (RTT) in a hybrid role in their Charlotte office. The Charlotte office was originally a different lar firm that merged with RTT just prior to me joining, so the IT team at that office was relatively small - a manager and two technicians (including me). This was a classic ‘jack of all trades’ role where I was responsible for daily helpdesk staff as well as overseeing the entire server and network infrastructure.

During my time in the Charlotte office, I gained hands-on experience with several new technologies including HP switches and Dell servers and storage systems. One particular instance of troubleshooting I remember occured when the entire network suddenly went down with essentially no traffic reaching any destination. The switches that were in place at the time were a bit limited in their management capabilities, so the troubleshooting was reduced to a bit of trial and error. After about 20 minutes, I was able to narrow down the issue to a copier that someone had unplugged from the network for some reason, but someone else “reconnected it”. In reality, they took the ethernet cable end that was plugged into the copier, and plugged it into the network jack nearby creating a fun little switching loop (these switches had no protection against this).

After the merger between offices was complete, the Charlotte AD and Exchange infrastructure was merged with the the main office infrastructure in Columbia, SC. During a multi-hour email outage, I was able to prove my troubleshooting skills to the new IT Director (who had been with the firm for only a couple of weeks) and have the Exchange environment back online in short order. The issue ended up being drives that were full due to excessive logs that hadn’t been properly removed by the backup processes.

Other projects I was a part of with RTT included a large phone infrastructure replacement, where we transitioned from an older Toshiba phone system to a more modern Cisco system. We worked on-site with Cisco experts from CDW to deploy and configure the system across multiple offices in both North and South Carolina. In addition, I planned and orchestrated a full datacenter migration from an on-premise datacenter in the main office to a colocation facility in downtown Columbia. The move was completed with only minor issues that were quickly resolved, and was finished with all systems back online ahead of schedule.