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What the gently caress do people do all day in non-IT fields? How do so many people go literally weeks without realizing that at least one folder on the server that they apparently desperately need has been missing?
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Aug 15, 2013 00:09
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skipdogg posted:How's the compensation work? Are you just a flat salary, or do you need to bill your 40 hours against clients each week? I've worked directly with 2 PFE's in the last few years, one guy for SCCM was onsite at least 8 hours a day and really wanted to make sure we got all the time we were paying for, the other guy working on our AD Upgrade project was less interested in time and more making sure we got what we needed from him. I was fine with it, but he was maybe engaged with us 6 hours a day with a 90 minute lunch. If he was booking his hours against us that might have been a rough weekly paycheck for maybe 20 hours of actual time. If I'm prying, just say so, just curious. Salary with a bonus structure that is NOT tied to any sort of sales or hourly goals. We have to log 40 hours week in some way, tasked at having about 70%+ as customer billable time. (that goal is per year, not week or month) For me travel counts as part of my 40 a week, it can be real easy to hit 40 that way.
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Aug 15, 2013 00:20
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Manslaughter posted:I vaguely remember a story from the old thread, anyone care to recall the correct details? I think it was something like this: That was me. And it was even weirder than that: quote:Received a CD-R in the post today. It contained a 700MB zip file. Inside the zip was a folder containing thirty smaller zip files. Inside each was one part of a multi-part zip. I never did figure out what was going on. Whoever sent that CD never contacted me again, so nobody had the faintest idea who they were. I can only guess the CD got sent here by mistake. Sweevo fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 00:36
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xarph posted:Even if they did implement SPF, most companies have their spam filter set to ignore it because no one on the internet can get their SPF right. It just takes one C-level not getting an automated webex mail or something to make a sufficient amount of poo poo to disable it. http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html I had good luck making a couple of contacts in Marketing and Communications who might send blast communications or hire a company to do that kind of thing. Help them out a couple of times and they'll come to you. An invoice came in from Legal for a domain name they'd purchased. The registrar was charging us $105/month for the name and asked $150 for me to change the contact information when I offered to transfer it the hell out of there. I bought the abandoned domain name of the whois contact for $35 and we'll see about all this.
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Aug 15, 2013 00:37
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Especially since there's no legitimate way to meet the qualifications of PMP before, oh let's say, 30. Gonna troll all y'all by getting my PMP. Anyway, an emergency switch upgrade came in today at 3:00 PM. A department is apparently imaging several labs tomorrow and needed their switches upgraded from 2948s to gig, otherwise DOOM! So despite being told a month ago by me that they needed to notify my boss to set it up, they waited until the last moment and then went to senior management to get it done. So I got to stay late again. Hooray!
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Aug 15, 2013 00:40
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I have a PMP, it's a iPod touch. 
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Aug 15, 2013 00:40
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ratbert90 posted:I have a PMP, it's a iPod touch. e: psydude posted:...needed their switches upgraded from 2948s to gig... I loved those... 
bort fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 00:41
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Superdawg posted:I hope you're not considering RI as part of that 'Southeast New England'. Their rates are considerably lower compared to Boston. Turn on keyboard shortcuts and 'e' will archive for them. This does rely on the user being able to learn something or you being able to get in there and create a custom binding to archive on press of delete though. fake edit: This thread moves too fast and I'm getting dizzy trying to follow it.
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Aug 15, 2013 00:43
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Inspector_71 posted:What the gently caress do people do all day in non-IT fields? How do so many people go literally weeks without realizing that at least one folder on the server that they apparently desperately need has been missing? I had someone call in reporting that a folder/share on the fileserver had been missing for MONTHS, I don't even want to state what he told me over the phone when I wanted to confirm the email...
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Aug 15, 2013 00:48
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Sickening posted:Whats that? Microsoft MDT 2012 will incorrectly deploy your image if it has the latest windows updates installed? Whats that? Its all because the default unattend.xml file is somehow incompatible with IE updates? This is not the first time Microsoft forgot about a feature. Group policy on 2008 does not support document libraries.
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Aug 15, 2013 00:50
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bort posted:Do you mean like CatOS 2948Gs? Yeah man, old school.
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Aug 15, 2013 01:01
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GargleBlaster posted:(I hope this isn't stretching the thread definition too much, I got used to "poo poo that pisses you off daily" being extremely flexible) This is the Re: thread. The topic is bound to have drifted a bit by now. quote:And a nice SL CDJ setup come to that. Since there's no way I could afford that setup IRL. My actual kit isn't nearly as cool.
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Aug 15, 2013 01:10
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jre posted:3 hours later, hosting company still apparently unable to locate on button for server they switched off by mistake. Next time you buy mission critical hosting make sure your server has ipmi/kvm access. Of course that doesn't help when the colo customer below you comes in and rips all the cables out of your servers, removes them from the racks and just tosses them on the floor because "it was easier for me to work on my server."
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Aug 15, 2013 01:27
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God I hope nothing like that has ever actually happened, geez.
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Aug 15, 2013 01:49
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Of course that doesn't help when the colo customer below you comes in and rips all the cables out of your servers, removes them from the racks and just tosses them on the floor because "it was easier for me to work on my server." I can't stop reading this. I sort of want to photoshop it on top of a motivation scene like those demotivator posters. This the best thing I've read in this thread.
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Aug 15, 2013 01:51
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Of course that doesn't help when the colo customer below you comes in and rips all the cables out of your servers, removes them from the racks and just tosses them on the floor because "it was easier for me to work on my server." Are there seriously data centers who allow colo customers to have unsecured hands-on access to other customers' systems these days? A web hosting company I used to work for actually did have that kind of access to the facility we rented space from, but our situation was unusual; we actually used to own the entire data center, then we sold off our dedicated server business and the data center itself to another company. We still had hundreds of shared hosting systems scattered across the 300+ racks in the DC, though, which were on a wide variety of ancient hardware platforms and required a lot of regular hands-on attention, so we arranged to retain full access to the DC. Eventually our stuff was consolidated down to a few dozen racks, but since the DC was never built for shared access, we could still have laid hands on any of the other systems in there. (At that point, the DC owner decided to beef up security by having us sign in on a sheet before going into the DC...  ) The two new DC facilities we ended up moving most of our stuff to had the typical individual secure cages, though.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:01
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Isn't that what the split racks are for (if you only have a few boxes)?
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Aug 15, 2013 02:19
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Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to install Windows XP in RAID 1 on a brand new Dell Optiplex 9010. Even though the Intel Q77 Express chipset does not have Windows XP RAID drivers, the Client is insisting that it "must work" with XP due to legacy applications. As always, should you or any of your co-workers put forth any other less insane ideas, the Client will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This ticket will self destruct in 10 seconds, good luck.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:30
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At one of our locations that we took over as a joint venture they had an old server in place but there was a new Dell in a box on the floor of the server room. Apparently it had been there for months because the I.T. Director for the joint venture partner was super busy. About a year has passed and he suggested putting that server in place to help with a project. I asked for the specs: Dell R710 24G RAM 8 Gb NICS with TOE and iSCSI Xeon 5620 processor (2.4Ghz, 12m cache) x2 Perc H700 iDrac Express 5x 300Gb 15K RPM SCSI Drives (all hotswap) This thing has been in the box for... a year and a half? Two years?
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Aug 15, 2013 02:39
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Install Windows 7, install XP mode, set windows 7 on boot to go straight in to full screen XP mode. Bill customer for excessive hours to set this mess up. Either that or pop in a cheap 3rd party RAID1 card which does have XP drivers. (Promise 2300 or similar would do it) Run away screaming because MS is dropping all XP support next year.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:40
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Varkk posted:Install Windows 7, install XP mode, set windows 7 on boot to go straight in to full screen XP mode. Bill customer for excessive hours to set this mess up. I don't get how none of these terrible legacy programs works in a VM at all.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:45
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dennyk posted:Are there seriously data centers who allow colo customers to have unsecured hands-on access to other customers' systems these days? There is one in Auckland; I've found open doors into other peoples racks. I also found a PC on the floor and the eth/power cables snaking through under a locked cabinet door And the one time they had spanning tree issues during the middle of the day....
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Aug 15, 2013 02:49
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dennyk posted:Are there seriously data centers who allow colo customers to have unsecured hands-on access to other customers' systems these days? Yes it really happened. It was a couple of years ago so beer has kind of hazed up the memories but in a nutshell it was a shitstorm of fuckups. I had gone out to exercise leaving my phone inaccessible on what I recall was a Monday evening. Meanwhile halfway across the country a NOC tech escorts some graybeard to his sever collocated below our set of 5 production servers. I don't recall exactly what the grey beard was up to but I guess he was being slow and difficult. During this the NOC tech gets pulled away to help put out some other fire (not literally.) I guess at this point the grey beard gets frustrated, rips our cabling out and pops the severs out of the rack, setting them aside while he continues to align the ions on his ram or whatever the gently caress he felt was so important. 2 hours later and back on my side of the planet I reach down for my phone to be greeted with a wall of frantic texts saying almost everything is down. I get in touch with the data center and they tell me the automatic monitoring for my servers had been disabled when we set them up (this is another story all together) and they'd need to get a NOC tech over to that rack to see what's going on. I hear back shortly afterwords saying our servers had been de-racked and they'd need some time to get them back on and figure out what the gently caress happened. Everything came back not too much later but we did have to rebuild one raid array. I wound up getting the full story from an associate of mine who works there later that week when I followed up for our SLA credit. It could have been oh so much worse but luckily it was a Monday after business hours and none of our hardware was permanently damaged. Sorry if there are any horrible typos in this, it's been typed on my phone.
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Aug 15, 2013 03:46
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I would hope that after they got it figured out someone from the NOC went over and yanked graybeard's poo poo of the rack, set it on the front desk, and put a note on it telling him to leave and never return.
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Aug 15, 2013 03:51
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Dick Trauma posted:At one of our locations that we took over as a joint venture they had an old server in place but there was a new Dell in a box on the floor of the server room. Apparently it had been there for months because the I.T. Director for the joint venture partner was super busy. About a year has passed and he suggested putting that server in place to help with a project. I asked for the specs: Pretty standard server though low on RAM. We have random R410s chillin since their projects got side tracked but they can just be repurposed for testing stuff. Only issue is they usually only have 12/24GB of RAM so there isn't much you can do with them. And that's the stuff that doesn't get shipped somewhere and racked. e: oh and don't buy the perc h310 they are poo poo, get a h710 instead. doomisland fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 04:09
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toe shoes posted:Turn on keyboard shortcuts and 'e' will archive for them. This does rely on the user being able to learn something or you being able to get in there and create a custom binding to archive on press of delete though. I wound up writing a macro that moved the message(s) to another folder and giving it a pig icon. This was from one of our executives who told me to make this 'fix' my top priority over all other projects I had on my list.
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Aug 15, 2013 04:46
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doomisland posted:Pretty standard server though low on RAM. We have random R410s chillin since their projects got side tracked but they can just be repurposed for testing stuff. Only issue is they usually only have 12/24GB of RAM so there isn't much you can do with them. And that's the stuff that doesn't get shipped somewhere and racked. Yeah, having servers sit around unused for a while isn't all that uncommon in any place with a decent-sized IT footprint. At that web hosting company, we had a good-sized provisioning room that was pretty much stacked floor to ceiling with unused hardware. Most of it was old stuff (either kept around to be reused for new builds because we were too cheap to buy new hardware, or to be parts donors or chassis swaps for our ancient production systems if they failed), but we had some new R620s and such sitting around for a few months here and there. Usually the new stuff would be "earmarked for a project" that wouldn't actually happen, then eventually someone would say "gently caress it" and put them to use when some new critical "OMG we need this now!" build came down the pipe and we didn't have any other suitable hardware. At my current place, we actually have no spare hardware to speak of, mostly because almost all of our systems are still under warranty. We basically order new hardware as we need it. Most of our new server builds are VMs on one of our big blade clusters, unless they're just too big for a VM or have some other reason to require their own hardware, so we can still spin up most new projects pretty quickly. We've still had a few servers that have sat around for a year or two before they were actually put into production, though they were racked and running the whole time and it was more because the project they were for kind of stalled out for a while. And yeah, that R710 should do fine, but probably does need some more RAM to really justify it, unless you guys don't have a VM cluster for smaller builds. Hell, we're running a bunch R710s and R720s that have 192-256GB of RAM (basically they're huge search index cache boxes). Actually, that was one of my first projects when I started here; the servers only had 96GB of RAM and would start swapping heavily and die after running for a few days. Apparently several folks had looked at the issue before me and said "Add RAM", so I did some more in-depth analysis and said the same thing, and now they have 192GB each and are perfectly happy (except when the occasional drive dies and it makes the drat PERC controller blow a gasket and drop other random drives from the array... )
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Aug 15, 2013 04:59
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toe shoes posted:Turn on keyboard shortcuts and 'e' will archive for them. This does rely on the user being able to learn something or you being able to get in there and create a custom binding to archive on press of delete though. That's ridiculous, this kind of user would never end up using anything but del anyw- Superdawg posted:I wound up writing a macro that moved the message(s) to another folder and giving it a pig icon. 
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Aug 15, 2013 05:06
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dennyk posted:And yeah, that R710 should do fine, but probably does need some more RAM to really justify it, unless you guys don't have a VM cluster for smaller builds. Hell, we're running a bunch R710s and R720s that have 192-256GB of RAM (basically they're huge search index cache boxes). There are only four users at that location! All the old server does is local AD logins and host an MSSQL 2005 database and some files. For a small company they spent a good chunk of change to have that thing sit in the box all this time.
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Aug 15, 2013 05:19
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Last week the sale of my former company was completed to one of the largest media companies in the US, and now this week the entire C-level staff has been going around to all the stations giving an elaborate canine and equestrian event to us. So the entire station has been running around frantically trying to clean, organize, etc. so we don't look like the terrible small market station that we are. I was hauling boxes around, vacuuming the floors, etc. I'm not surprised that the GM didn't have me outside giving the lawn a trim. As the three hour presentation was going on today, I've never heard the phrase "how is this going to make the company money" used so many times. Between that and the statement "we must all do our best to make the sales departments life easier" I'm thinking that this might be the time to start sending out the resume again. But on the positive side, when our GM introduced me to the CEO, CFO, and CTO she gave my title as Assistant Chief Engineer. I didn't know I had gotten a title bump, and neither did my boss. Might start putting that on my email signature just to see if it flies. On another note, finally getting a pain in the rear end serial to ethernet converter to play nice with a no longer supported microwave receiver made my day last week. It only took me a year of messing around with it every couple weeks to finally figure out the issues. It helps if all four devices are using the same data rate and more importantly that the remote switch is turned on. Oh well, it's not like it is only a two hour drive to the remote location.
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Aug 15, 2013 05:22
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Help Desk escalated a ticket to one of my queues (Portal/SharePoint admin) because an administrative assistant wanted someone from IT to come and take a photo of their team to post on the intranet, because it totally affects production and the company's revenue.
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Aug 15, 2013 06:23
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After years of working here I have realized that nothing is done unless we don't have a choice. Servers don't get bought unless the old one dies first and when they do get bought they have the least amount of resources possible. We have known about XP going out of support quite sometime now, and suddenly a month after the budget passes and we don't have the money to do the upgrade we need to do the upgrade. When I brought up how many computers we needed to replace each year depending on replacement cycle nobody gave a poo poo because they just hoped the computers would deage themselves over time. We have shitloads of 5+ years computers that are just never going to be replaced until 2 years from now and suddenly they will all need to be replaced immediately because nobody knows things get older as time passes. We have been using the pile of poo poo known as eDirectory 6.5 and now that we get an application that authenticates to Active Directory we suddenly need to switch as fast as possible. Of course the ancient servers still work so they will all get Windows and won't be replaced unless they die. The only proactive thing we do is get desktops, but only enough to pretend it makes a dent in the number of computers we have. I've been applying to different places and I found a great one that I hope will get a callback on. I should have done this years ago but I think so low of myself I always thought I could not do anything about it. Now I am taking medication and I am in therapy (not because of the job?) and my self image is slightly improving. Sometimes I just want to quit this job and get it over with. Right now I am waiting on an MCSA 2012 book and a CCENT book so I can get some more certs. The lack of protectiveness has rubbed off on me and it is time to change that. Yaos fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 09:55
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Return Of JimmyJars posted:Next time you buy mission critical hosting make sure your server has ipmi/kvm access. All of our newer gear does have ipmi on it for this very reason, it was one of our ancient ghetto servers that was getting binned in a week anyway. If they'd waited a couple of days to kill it the last of the traffic would have been moved and I wouldn't have cared. Return Of JimmyJars posted:Yes it really happened. It was a couple 
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Aug 15, 2013 11:26
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Wow, robocopy is amazing. I can't believe I've been copying normally like a chump all these years.
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Aug 15, 2013 12:04
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robocopy is excellent, though I did find that running it a second time on a 200GB copy (to get the bits that had changed) still took several hours. I then discovered bvckup (via recommendation on here I think) which does the same as robocopy but whizzed through the differential check in about 30 seconds. Downside with bvckup is it has a few bugs (such as needing UAC on to use shadow copy) and seems to be a 'free time' project, with v2 being where all the bug fixes are going but the author seemingly not having much free time.
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Aug 15, 2013 12:58
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evobatman posted:Yeah, that was my wife, and we sold a few of them through SA Mart. When I got promoted to this position, I got a three-sided desk clock from my employer. The center section has the company logo and a little, incredibly inaccurate clock, and the two sides have spaces for pictures. I put the above QR code in one side. The other side sports this one:  And from my picture collection from the old thread: 
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Aug 15, 2013 14:44
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Things that piss me off, developer's edition: - Having an issue regarding a missing button from one our web-based interfaces that was there previously. Looking into it, it seems a guy in the UK office working on a *completely* unrelated issue decided to exclude it from it's parent component, possibly to clean up unnecessarily looking code. Except that if he just searched the code base for places that it's used, he'd see that of the three times it is included in a screen there's one that uses that button. Thankfully really easy to fix, but that sort of behavior means I can expect more of the same in the future. (There's also the problem that the button there is an exception to the base use of the component and would have been better served attaching it to another component closer to its original intent, but since this software is already bought and used clients I can't exactly justify changing it on them suddenly) - I have a useless Project Manager. I've had two excellent ones back when my responsibilities were towards a single project: easy to communicate with, willing to listen to alternatives, understanding the difference between being a leader and being a somebody with more power over you. Now that R&D is a large part of my work I've got this dude they brought on maybe 6 or 7 months ago. Take everything I said about my previous two and reverse it and you get my state of direct management. To put it into perspective, here's a task he created for me when he was desperate to find something for me to do: TITLE: Work Assignment: Block doesn't display route names DESC: Blocks should display actual route names On the screen in question, the grid of blocks already had a column for route names so I was a bit confused. When he came over to tell me that he assigned me this task (which I already knew because my email told me a minute earlier), I told him what did he mean by route names. After the third time I asked for clarification of what's missing, he tells me that the grid needs a column for route names. Wait... - He's performing his job as a go-between at a bare minimum for everything that doesn't touch on the very first big project he was responsible for. And if it's that project oh man you better believe everything must be perfect and QA tested without a QA person on-board and 'pretty.' That last one is probably the worst bit because he doesn't do visualization well and it's what I'm most responsible for in the User Interfaces. His idea of 'pretty' does not coincide with mine nor with what the client/higher ups want.
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Aug 15, 2013 14:58
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My favorite post from the old thread is Billy the Mountain's client who killed the power on 2 floors of her building when she tried to change her toner. Can't figure out how to quote it from the old thread and get all the icons so here is the link. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3022717&pagenumber=850&perpage=40#post397229849 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3022717&pagenumber=850&perpage=40#post397231907
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Aug 15, 2013 16:09
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I'm not an IT professional, but being the office manager and the most tech-savvy person (read: youngest) at a small business, I'm the de facto IT guy. In general I have to deal with a lot of really basic issues constantly (the most prevalent being that no one can remember their loving PASSWORDS no matter what I do), but there was one a few years ago that particularly stood out. My boss was emailing a one of our (male) dealers, one he knows well and can bullshit around with, and another (female) client that he doesn't know as well, but is very important and vital to getting this particular sale. The dealer mentioned some event related to the project, and my boss, in standard form, responds "will there be bitches there". Only, he hit reply-all. The female client was on the email. He calls me over and frantically tries to figure out how to recall the message. His solution, for some reason, was to tap send/receive wildly. That, of course, just ENSURED the message went out. I told him there was nothing he could do, and suggested he just hope she understands it was a mistake. Nope. Instead, here is his plan. He wants her to think we've been hacked, and the hacker sent out that email. So he commands me to send an email to our entire 2,000 person email list saying we've been hacked. I tried to convince him to just send it to her - I could even make it look like it HAD gone to everyone. Nope. He insisted it go to everyone. I spent the rest of that day working damage control, explaining to everyone that called that no, we were ok, they didn't need to worry about viruses or anything coming from us. The kicker? We're still working (and on good terms) with that client, and she never even saw the email. Sigh.
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Aug 15, 2013 16:40
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Caged posted:Hey, stop that. This thread is off to far to cheerful a start, it will get depressing when someone looks back on it if it carries on like this. Oh hey, calm down mister! If you want depressing stuff, from the old poo poo that pisses you off thread my company can be amazing sometimes. Until last week we had a single server with a 240gig Mushkin SSD in it that hosted all of our mission critical projects, and a single 1TB platter drive for "backup." This server did not have dual power supplies. It has 16gigs of ram. There was no revisioning system on it because the boss wanted us to upload to his svn offsite. Now, as a preface here, my boss is usually really cool, and is one of the best programmers I have ever, and will probably ever meet. The problem is, the guy usually lives in a 256k world where his entire project is > 30 megs and has 20 files in it, so uploading off site to his svn wasn't a big deal. Then I was hired because he wanted to move into the land of embedded Linux, which I know quite well! However he still wanted to use his old way of doing things, but to upload 8+ gigs of stuff at 30Kb/s is drat near impossible, and using svn on 8gigs worth of stuff is also equally terrible and slow. So it never happened. So the old revisioning system literally was: Make a new folder on the 1tb with today's date, then copy and paste the 8gig's worth of project over to that new folder. HOWEVER! Last week we started a new project and things have started to change a bit! Another power supply! Four 3TB platter drives! Another 240Gig Mushkin! Revisioning control! Gigabit ethernet! Another 16gigs of ram! And another server on order! We also signed up for Basecamp (even though most of us wanted to use Google enterprise, my boss is pretty paranoid about Google.) Redundancy! Backups! Project Management! It gives me the warm fuzzies that we now have modern stable equipment! Now I just need a raise and I will be even be happier! FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 17:02
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