Some Real Navy IT - (MedBoard: Joint Base Lewis-McChord) Day 160

I sent my squad leader a text this morning reminding him of my MOU today. I then headed into the naval shipyard in Bremerton. Once there I settled into my usual morning routine of checking both my army and navy emails and then surfing the web and reading the news. I try and do anything to keep myself at least somewhat busy.

I then imaged a machine, but more than just image a machine I actually learned quite a bit of new stuff. I've imaged many machines before, but there is a lot more this machine needed once it was imaged. The navy has some strict rules for all the machines that end up on the network. I had to run a scanning utility on the machine that checks for all the vulnerabilities, and then go through step by step fixing each of the vulnerabilities it found. There were a couple I had to leave how they were because of what the machine was going to do, but I did get it up to 98.5% compliant, which is what it needs. I then had to install a few things, run all the security updates, and then do some configuring of settings. I then learned how to "sysprep" the machine so I could make a new image from it.

Once I made the image, I then played around quite a bit with the new machine before heading to lunch in my car. When I got back from lunch we had a department meeting. The director went over everything that is going on and what he expects the future will hold…it doesn't look to optimistic.

I went back to playing around with the new computer and did some testing on it. Unfortunately I could never get the program they use to actually work. My co-worker said to try an older image, so I started the whole process over again. Because I started the whole process over, I didn't finish before I left for the day. The work will be waiting for me when I get back after the weekend. I finally felt like I had a normal day of I.T. work and it felt good for once even if I didn't get a whole lot done, I did learn quite a bit.

The kiddos came over tonight for the weekend and we all went out to eat. After dinner I took everyone to the local community college men's basketball game. I wanted the kiddos to see the difference between high school and a junior college basketball team. It was a lot of fun…even if our team got beat pretty bad.