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I just had a "power user" email me about a certificate error they are getting when they check their mail using IMAP, and he included screen shots which would be pretty cool except they are full screen 10 megapixel images pasted directly into the email and for some reason there are about 20 of them which drill down into the exact certificate in question and he emailed it to everyone in the dept. instead of just me. A for effort brah but details! Details!
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 13:58 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 13:14 |
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We are having an outbreak of "Internet Security 2011" ransomware in our network. Thank foresight that we revoked local admin privileges from everyone before this happened. Removing it is now as simple as killing the process and deleting the exe. Even some of our more...vocal opponents of this policy are now grudgingly admitting that we're not trying to make their lives more difficult by reducing privileges.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 15:04 |
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SamDabbers posted:We are having an outbreak of "Internet Security 2011" ransomware in our network. Thank foresight that we revoked local admin privileges from everyone before this happened. Removing it is now as simple as killing the process and deleting the exe. Even some of our more...vocal opponents of this policy are now grudgingly admitting that we're not trying to make their lives more difficult by reducing privileges. I highly suspect that's spreading through some unpatched vulnerability, possibly in the java runtime (the app itself is a windows app but I think it's getting invoked through the java web updater). I've nuked java on all of my machines and run full scans using three different kinds of antivirus and that seems to have fixed it.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 15:09 |
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I was able to get rid of it with InTune and Malwarebytes.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 15:12 |
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hieronymus posted:I highly suspect that's spreading through some unpatched vulnerability, possibly in the java runtime (the app itself is a windows app but I think it's getting invoked through the java web updater). I've nuked java on all of my machines and run full scans using three different kinds of antivirus and that seems to have fixed it. That's unfortunate because a few of our business apps are written in Java, so I can't just blow it away. Also, we have to use JRE 6 update 29 because update 30 (the latest?) breaks the app  psydude posted:I was able to get rid of it with InTune and Malwarebytes. At first I was using MalwareBytes but once I realized that it was just finding a single executable in the user's profile I skipped to just killing the process and deleting the exe.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 15:33 |
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I know it's been brought up that automation is going to destroy a lot of IT jobs in companies, but the BLS' projections for the industry are still positive: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos305.htm#projections_data Perhaps we'll see as shift from large, organic IT departments to smaller departments designed to liaise with the larger firms that host services off-site and employ the majority of the IT workforce. With global internet traffic expected to reach one zetabyte by 2015 (according to Cisco), I don't see the number of jobs for sysadmins, DBAs, and netadmins shrinking any time soon. psydude fucked around with this message at Feb 9, 2012 around 16:40 |
| # ? Feb 9, 2012 16:37 |
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psydude posted:I know it's been brought up that automation is going to destroy a lot of IT jobs in companies, but the BLS' projections for the industry are still positive: I think if you're the person designing the automation (i.e writing scripts, setting up jobs, designing the infrastructure) then you'd be in a better position than most. Possibly near term for the current trend of virtualizing everything for HA, jobs might slightly increase, but also with job reqs and training requirements
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 17:10 |
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SubjectVerbObject posted:This would happen at my old company to lists of 1000+ users and I always wanted to reply with an attached 5MB email etiquette guide. I figure that would solve the problem for a while. Why can your users send e-mails to such massive distribution groups anyway?
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 17:39 |
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I don't know much about the automation of IT. But I would guess that programming won't be touched by it. Likely network engineering type jobs (coding routers/switches) won't be hurt to bad. Sure if Cisco ever got a good GUI together it may slightly decrease the work needed, however even with a perfect GUI you would need to be good at troubleshooting routing/switching issues. I think where I could see more automation is on server side, but I don't know much about that area of IT. I will say that I think companies will start doing more hosting. Smaller to medium sized businesses may just host their stuff at places like Rackspace or anywhere else that will give them support for a monthly fee. It beats the price of an on-staff IT specialist, though of course it doesn't beat the convenience and effectiveness. It's up in the air I think.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 17:40 |
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We already host most of our services offsite because it's cheaper and easier than having to manage it ourselves.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 17:45 |
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psydude posted:We already host most of our services offsite because it's cheaper and easier than having to manage it ourselves. I'm with you. You'd be hard pressed to convince me to NOT outsource email at this point. I've been talking to some of our developers, and we basically have a 2 million dollar lab environment here that could easily be replaced by Amazon EC2. It would save us tons of money and 3 headcount and be faster. I'd be interested to see if anyone offered a hybrid virtualized SMB solution yet. Just send a SMB a couple DL380's running VMWare, and throw in some cloud magic backups and manage their entire environment for them.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 18:28 |
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skipdogg posted:I'm with you. You'd be hard pressed to convince me to NOT outsource email at this point. I think what is outsourced and what is not is becoming more and more vague. Your org can have an exchange server that is on your domain, accessible via RDP etc but is hosted as a vm in a datacenter somewhere with backups, maintenance etc being taken care of by the hosting provider.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 18:58 |
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We're about to move to Office 365. We've already been using online services for our exchange server, so it'll be nice to sync our local active directory structure with that to achieve a single sign on for the domain and email. Hopefully this will alleviate 95% of password reset requests that I get.
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| # ? Feb 9, 2012 19:07 |
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psydude posted:We're about to move to Office 365. We've already been using online services for our exchange server, so it'll be nice to sync our local active directory structure with that to achieve a single sign on for the domain and email. Hopefully this will alleviate 95% of password reset requests that I get. Edit - Looks like the limit used to be 25... aksuur fucked around with this message at Feb 10, 2012 around 01:08 |
| # ? Feb 10, 2012 00:37 |
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E3. One thing we don't skimp on it IT, as evidenced by our $100,000 capital expense on upgrading all end user hardware and software as well as our servers last year. This year we're putting in Cisco enterprise wireless gear; I can't wait to nerd out configuring that stuff.
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| # ? Feb 10, 2012 00:40 |
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psydude posted:This year we're putting in Cisco enterprise wireless gear; I can't wait to nerd out configuring that stuff.
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| # ? Feb 10, 2012 01:38 |
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In my experience (higher ed) Cisco gear has been way overpriced for its featureset.
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| # ? Feb 10, 2012 13:21 |
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Captain Foo posted:In my experience (higher ed) Cisco gear has been way overpriced for its featureset. Until very recently when we started buying 2960s to do our switching, we were putting 3750s everywhere (also higher ed) 
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| # ? Feb 10, 2012 13:39 |
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adorai posted:Cisco wireless has some nice features, but I would really urge you to look at some of the less expensive vendors. Specifically ubiquiti unifi has some really nice gear that is very, very inexpensive. I'll look into it, but ultimately it's up to my boss. Anything would be better than the freakin' airports we're using now.
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| # ? Feb 10, 2012 14:24 |
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Most emerging IT jobs ten years from now will be in systems integration and project management, mark my words.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 06:10 |
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balakadaka posted:I think if you're the person designing the automation (i.e writing scripts, setting up jobs, designing the infrastructure) then you'd be in a better position than most. Possibly near term for the current trend of virtualizing everything for HA, jobs might slightly increase, but also with job reqs and training requirements Pay will also take a hit, since most of those jobs will be filled with people right out of school ready to jump into them at any price. Misogynist posted:Most emerging IT jobs ten years from now will be in systems integration and project management, mark my words. Despite my (sadly) usual negative attitude, I don't see the Cloud being the end-all of IT. While it makes a lot of poo poo easier, it also puts reliance on the Internet that I don't think can manage it. Our infrastructure is one of the last things to be updated, and with various ISPs getting pissy about bandwidth, we may hit the point where it becomes cheaper to move some functions in-house to avoid those fees and outrages caused by old equipment. While IT will eventually fold into a management position, I doubt it'll go completely away. Right now we're talking about how to save money and simplify matters, but all we seem to be doing is making businesses completely reliant on an aging network. That cannot end well.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 06:53 |
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:Despite my (sadly) usual negative attitude, I don't see the Cloud being the end-all of IT. While it makes a lot of poo poo easier, it also puts reliance on the Internet that I don't think can manage it. Our infrastructure is one of the last things to be updated, and with various ISPs getting pissy about bandwidth, we may hit the point where it becomes cheaper to move some functions in-house to avoid those fees and outrages caused by old equipment. While IT will eventually fold into a management position, I doubt it'll go completely away. Right now we're talking about how to save money and simplify matters, but all we seem to be doing is making businesses completely reliant on an aging network. That cannot end well. Not only that, but there are plenty of decision-makers who hear explanations about the Cloud and their little MBA minds think, "Our private data on the internet? Some hacker could pull it out of the air or the people in charge of the clouds could just take it! Everything important or sensitive must be in-house or it's not safe!" Cue mandatory passwords of the format username-employeebadgenumber-001. Data secured. Point being, I don't think we're ever going to reach a point where executives and decision-makers embrace wholesale the most appropriate or efficient computer technology for a company if that technology is at all new.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 07:30 |
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balakadaka posted:I think if you're the person designing the automation (i.e writing scripts, setting up jobs, designing the infrastructure) then you'd be in a better position than most. Possibly near term for the current trend of virtualizing everything for HA, jobs might slightly increase, but also with job reqs and training requirements Companies fall into two camps currently that are in this phase of maturity in automation. The first camp are those that try to duplicate everything they do exactly as a script and inevitably fail to get cost savings because you just multiplied out all the errors in your processes (the saying "to fail is ops, to fail efficiently across 1000 nodes is devops" applies). The second camp does this reaaalllyyy slowly and documenting the hell out of everything... and they have massive cost overruns through bureaucracy. Companies will only be able to automate so much away before the fundamentals of your business change (hence the drive for companies wanting that "business agility" in their IT services - things change faster than IT can handle them because of all the red tape around infosec, compliance, etc.). What this means for most IT guys is that if you can have your day-to-day tasks be encapsulated into a series of shell scripts and reports full of micromanagement, you should be looking to increase your levels of responsibilities or expand into areas that are not so easy to automate. Most of these people have already lost their jobs though, but many still do exist within labyrinths of bureaucracies in back offices of Fortune 500s and federal government. Also, due to the cloud explosion, a lot of cloud services companies are just hiring those that could have been laid off of their IT departments, so it just shifts the operational expenses to the cloud providers. But the reality of cloud economics (by that, I mean outsourcing) is that people will be spending more on a raw dollar basis for IT unless cloud providers have a race to the bottom and lower costs simultaneously. From another side of the same sphere, I do systems integration work and there's a lot of effort to reduce these costs too - companies know from experience this is horrifically manual labor intensive and oftentimes for very expensive resources. Worst part is the usual point to point integrations tend to not be scalable (both on a technical and business basis). This tends to happen when companies go on acquisition sprees and the business guys go way over the technical guys' heads and nobody really knows how to glue things together efficiently (95% of companies will just let the merger docs fly once you have uttered the words "ITIL" and "web service" without bothering to figure out if your web service is even scalable, security-enabled, etc. and don't factor that into the costs of the merger). Che Delilas posted:Not only that, but there are plenty of decision-makers who hear explanations about the Cloud and their little MBA minds think 1. Finance 2. Telecomms 3. Healthcare 4. Defense (namely, security and IC analytics) 5. Web services For basically everyone else, IT has only a tangential, incidental relation to your core business and they really don't care. If you look at the job postings for IT jobs in the six figure range, you won't see anyone outside those companies typically unless they're a high-level manager. Honestly though, I'm planning an exit out of IT back to development because all the higher-paying work is just boring or really pigeon-holed / SME pure IT (systems, network, storage) consulting work where nobody will be hiring an automation guy that knows message-based architectures from n-tier architectures as a consultant - they want him full-time for the long-haul, and working in FTE positions in Fortune 500 IT is kind of lovely as a technical guy if you ask me.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 20:06 |
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Che Delilas posted:Not only that, but there are plenty of decision-makers who hear explanations about the Cloud and their little MBA minds think, "Our private data on the internet? Some hacker could pull it out of the air or the people in charge of the clouds could just take it! Everything important or sensitive must be in-house or it's not safe!" Cue mandatory passwords of the format username-employeebadgenumber-001. Data secured. The first is that companies are designing their software to be hosted (often by themselves), which means that they finally give a poo poo about the externalized costs of running their software. Microsoft Exchange 2010 is a really good example of this -- running hosted Exchange 2007 with a Single Copy Cluster and shared storage or with Cluster Continuous Replication and inflexible, expensive replication topologies just wasn't a good cost driver. So, Microsoft made all these changes to their software that allow it to be run inexpensively and on commodity hardware. Bottom line, software companies are spending engineering dollars that allow customers to implement the software more simply and with fewer headcount. I expect this trend to continue outward as scale-out cloud environments like Amazon EC2 become more cost-competitive. Targeting public cloud platforms will also mean lower vendor support costs because they don't need to worry about any quirks of a customer's networking infrastructure, though I don't expect we'll see anyone caring about this for a number of years yet. The second effect is that business processes are becoming outsourced as readily as the software itself -- this has tremendous impacts on ERP support roles in particular, but the effects on other industries are non-negligible. One of the main reasons for vendor lock-in within the enterprise is that there's a significant amount of activation energy to switch from one product to another because it requires retooling all the processes that have developed around that product's workflows. But when you can just move the process as easily as the product, and it becomes one bundled and tightly-integrated chain, there are going to be a lot of companies evaluating these options. Like with most big paradigm shifts, it will work for some, and fail miserably for some others. When it comes down to it, the trends are a lot more subtle than "we're moving from Exchange to hosted GMail," and we probably won't identify them until they're almost everywhere. But everyone is right when they point out the risks and apprehensions about outsourcing, whether we're talking cloud or otherwise. Misogynist fucked around with this message at Feb 13, 2012 around 04:50 |
| # ? Feb 12, 2012 20:24 |
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necrobobsledder posted:Uh, there's also the problems that laws keep many companies from even putting any potentially sensitive information under anything other than incredible amounts of lock & key mechanisms due to stuff like SOX, PCI compliance (say, for Visa, Amex, etc.), HIPAA (healthcare), etc. Almost all the big IT shops in terms of dollars spent fall into these industries due to their fundamental business operations being so much about efficient information exchange: I won't disagree with that however as working for a Microsoft Vendor that sells and supports Office 365 - Word, Excel, plus all your data on the cloud I'm asked nearly everyday for various documentation that shows our product meets X, Y and Z certification or standard. With that said, most large companies will more than likely resort to their own cloud not necessarily for security but convenience. It's a hell of a lot easier to change or fix something when you own your own "cloud".
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 20:28 |
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:Honestly, I'd keep in mind that IT isn't the big money field as the last few pages made it out to be. One of the bigger myths out there is that computers and nursing are always going to have jobs. But they don't mention that both fields are suffering a glut of people, and this glut will drive down wages. It's one of the bad things about 'big' fields: they're big because wages are too high, and having more people on hand will create plenty of jobs, but not in the pay range that you see here. Do you have a source for this? Yes, IT is a big field but by no means have wages been dropping or have jobs in the industry been in decline. Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:1) You will have to get certified, and this will cost money. And you might have to certify over and over again to keep it 'current' and that becomes a money sink. If the company wants you do something or be someone, they pay for the certification and this is a standard practice. Yes, that $2,000 to $5,000 certification from Microsoft/Cisco/VmWare that also requires a mandatory 2-week class - the company eats the cost. I've never, ever seen it the other way around after working for 3 IT Consulting firms. Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:2) The industry services many fields, and this will be a sink on your time. IT is not that respected and given the amount of people getting more certifications/degrees/et cetera, chances are you'll eventually be outsourced or simply not paid much until you have to find another job, making you constantly on the job hunt. This is somewhat accurate, however if you get into a senior role where you're constantly working with management you will get plenty of respect and pay. Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:I don't mean to drive you away, but if you're looking for a job, then make sure IT is what you really want. The pay can be there if you want it to be, but it's by no means a surefire thing. Learning this stuff takes a long time and is sometimes inaccessible. And given how the wages are dropping ($40 for Helpdesk is a fantasy, and even $15 is a dream in the Midwest), it may not be worth it. Learning this "stuff" is incredibly accessible especially with virtualization - I have several Windows Servers simulating your typical corporate network. You aren't going to be making $40/h at a helpdesk but $15/h is actually pretty standard pay for helpdesk in the Midwest. I was making that in Fargo, North Dakota a few years ago.
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| # ? Feb 12, 2012 20:54 |
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I just wanted to report how much I hate disaster recovery testing. Even with VMware and SAN replication it's still a pain in the rear end if you want to do a non destructive test that doesn't impact production.
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| # ? Feb 13, 2012 03:00 |
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adorai posted:I just wanted to report how much I hate disaster recovery testing. At a contractor I worked at previously we would regular sell 10k+ worth of various servers, set it up and rent out a small room to companies just so they could do exactly this without impacting production.
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| # ? Feb 13, 2012 03:08 |
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Tab8715 posted:At a contractor I worked at previously we would regular sell 10k+ worth of various servers, set it up and rent out a small room to companies just so they could do exactly this without impacting production.
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| # ? Feb 13, 2012 03:32 |
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adorai posted:I get the joy of using our DR site, multiple extra VLANs, multiple routers natting and masquerading through/to each other, and ipspaces on our netapp. It's not hard per se, just a shitload of time invested. Are you using SRM or doing it manually?
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| # ? Feb 13, 2012 04:25 |
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three posted:Are you using SRM or doing it manually? We are licensed for SRM, have it configured, and tested. Just not in this non-destructive manner.
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| # ? Feb 13, 2012 04:47 |
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First day of my new job =  After paperwork, meetings, and a random printer failure- I finally got to sit down with the fellow who has overseen IT for ~5 years. I rather felt like  after finding out there are no battery backups, no formal backups in place, no documentation, no asset lists, and yea...All I can think about is literally how much work needs to be done. Thankfully, they have completely reasonable expectations and I am essentially my own boss. Project list of the top of my head: Wire new 2nd site. Move servers from "my" office to new site (400amps of dedicated goodness baby!) Move in to my office. Clean server room. Audit all IT assets and tag. Recycle old ewaste. Clean up 100tb of data and rebuild main SAN's. Get the LTO drive up and working for important backups. Setup AD/DNS/DHCP. Setup Exchange 2010 Setup Sharepoint Foundations Setup site to site VPN link Replace main switches/figure out existing vlans Replace Airports with Unifi AP's Standardize laptops and desktops Setup WSUS Setup WDS Create documentation  Thank god for overtime, flex time, and that they an amazing company. This should be fun  .
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 05:19 |
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Wow that sounds like a lot of fun actually, I am jealous.
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 05:27 |
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Corvettefisher posted:Wow that sounds like a lot of fun actually, I am jealous. What this guy said. My old job had some junior stuff like this in addition to desktop support (figuring out a standard image and deploying our inventorying system pop to mind) and holy poo poo I miss that place. Wanna hire me or a goon as a junior sysadmin?
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 05:39 |
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It is going to be fun! My positive attitude towards the "mess" they call IT is what really got me the job in the end. Is it going to be a lot of planning/documenting/work? Sure, but honestly it is with such a cool company. Sadly though I am the entire IT department. Hopefully I can make this change either later this year or next, but I would love to get someone awesome hired here.
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 05:52 |
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I just hope you don't always have to go through a lot of corporate BS to get anything done, that is always the buzz kill to the joy of fixing a totally broken network. That and your IT budget is "0 dollars, that should be enough right?" or "we have a lot of spare parts just make use of those"
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 06:32 |
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There is no IT budget... Lets just throw money at it! Trust me I am dying here, in a good way . It is a 180 of how it was at my old job.I think we have over 2000 cores/700tb/10tb ram in the building??
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 18:03 |
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the spyder posted:First day of my new job = Thats almost exactly what I walked into in December. But I was handed a huge budget to go with it, and tons of flexibility on implementation. 3 sites, 90% of hardware outta warranty, no AD, and in total disarray. But almost $1mil to fix it. Hooray 
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 18:46 |
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I am 25 years old and have a pretty think resume of tech jobs going back to when I was 16. I currently work as a tech doing everything-IT for a bunch of clients of the company I work for. (domain controllers, physical layer, desktops, everything else that comes up) plus experience in linux environments, visualization, management, web dev, etc. If I simply want to make a gently caress ton of money someday where should I be steering my education/experience? I can't imagine making $100k+ but I know it's possible, and seeing what the average IT schmuck knows I feel like I could actually pull it off someday. At my old job we had a college grad with a couple years experience put "High level of experience with PING, NSLOOKUP and TRACERT" on his resume.
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 19:10 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 13:14 |
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Systems engineer with security clearance would not be out of the question. Or you can look into VMware VCP/VCAP stuff 100k is easy to hit with that.
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| # ? Feb 14, 2012 19:15 |
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