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bort posted:If you're not this guy sometimes, you don't do any work (unless you're in Misogynist's Awesome Automated Overworld where you're prevented from bad changes by gentle vortices of DevOp intelligence) 
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Sep 12, 2013 05:05
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routenull0 posted:And you seriously have no idea how bad Netscalers are compared to other load balancing options out there. BigIPs are out of our price range. The Kemps couldn't even reliably pass a cert chain back to a browser, it would just randomly decide to not pass back the intermediate cert. We aren't very high throughput. We do 2-30 Mbps of traffic (most of the time under 10Mbps). We do less than 10 SSL TPS most of the time. The issue we had is we are running about 300 unique portals and the Kemps were choking under the configuration.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:20
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I was just giving him a hard time; surely something else lovely will come up and make his life miserable. I mean, this is IT  I've actually never had the misfortune to use totally god-awful load balancers. Old job had Coyote Point's that were ancient and very EOL but never skipped a beat (thank god since I'm not sure we could have gotten support) and the new place actually has money so we're moving from various lovely things to the aforementioned F5's which appear to own. They're handling many gigabits of traffic without breaking a sweat.
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Sep 12, 2013 06:27
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So I'm in a bit of an interesting situation. I've been a sysadmin in the US Navy for the past 2 years, I was the senior administrator for all of our servers (Windows 2003, Exchange, etc.) as well as the resident SME on Active Directory, Powershell, and VMware. I have my A+, Server 2003, and Sec+ certs. I was informed not too long ago that I'm getting medically discharged in a week (honorably). Now I'd LOVE to continue doing this on the outside, but I'm worried that 2 years of experience won't be enough to carry me out in the "real world." 80% of my experience was gained during periods of "this is broke, fix it and make sure it doesn't break again" and the other 20% I got from books. My knowledge of civilian best practices are very slim outside of AD, most of my servers were in a state of constant tweaking/upgrading while I learned more about what I was doing. That being said, should I apply for a typical help-desk job to get into the environment a little more, apply for a sysadmin job and hope I don't fail horribly, or say "gently caress it" and just get my bachelors degree and try again in a few years?
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Sep 12, 2013 09:49
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App13 posted:So I'm in a bit of an interesting situation. Use your GI bill, man.
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Sep 12, 2013 12:08
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bull3964 posted:BigIPs are out of our price range. Brocade's ADX is not a terrible option as long as you don't mind lots and lots of code updating.  Seriously, though, it's a decent piece of hardware and the Brocade support people I've worked with have been tops. They just love to keep making firmware updates.
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Sep 12, 2013 12:29
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Does anyone here volunteer at IT education? How did you get started? Is this a valid alternative to drinking at night?
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Sep 12, 2013 13:24
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BurgerQuest posted:Does anyone here volunteer at IT education? How did you get started? Is this a valid alternative to drinking at night? I did and got a Teaching job that way, it's a real good motivator. Basically I took an ICM class loved it just asked the teacher "Hey mind if I set in some classes and help out?" He said sure, donated a bit of time to helping students, put together some paper work/study sheets, and then went a bit further went to rebuild the Lab environments for ICM/VCAP courses. Then I just asked for a job and they said sure. I still drink a bit like a six pack on Friday night because what the gently caress else is there to do, but no where near the amount I use to. It's a great motivator and good way to get in some networking with people, and a great way to find out what you don't know. It also provides a spot of cash for things which is always nice. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 13:39
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Anyone mind looking at this and providing some criticism/suggestions. I am writing something about entry to IT and covering the different kinds of businesses you could land in. Small shops Small shops tend to be understaffed, overworked and not very good for upward mobility. The exception would be startups, where getting in on the ground floor has the potential to lead to very lucrative mobility and money. Lone wolfs are more common in small shops where there is no money to pay the salary for teams of peers. Enterprise Typically in enterprise environments it will be silo’d job roles, where everyone does a specific task, rarely moving out of their comfort zone. Things move slower as red tape to approve work is thick, but not as bad as government. Work flow could go either quickly or slowly depending on the company and you will find yourself more involved in working as a group. Meetings for changes are common in enterprises, and sometimes meetings to discuss the meeting discussing changes. Change management is prevalent in enterprise, so that accountability can be recorded for auditing. In enterprise IT you're seen as a cost center that doesn't provide anything, profit wise, to the company - your budget will be awful so your technology is typically dated back several years. Enterprise is great for "lifers", those of us who just want to work their 9 - 5, collect a paycheck and go home. Service Provider Service providers are vast, often complex environments. These jobs are even more silo’d than the enterprise environment and you will find getting into one too early may pigeon-hole your career. I would only recommend service provider jobs when you are in a position to leverage your experience for great monetary gains or there are limited alternatives in your area. Starting out in a service provider call center and working your way up seems easily done as long as you have the raw talent and the desire to move ahead. Don’t be surprised if you don’t end up where you meant to go in the end due to being sidelined into a job role that was needing to be filled. Government Government is a slow moving beast. Most positions within government require secret clearance and are contracting jobs, only a small amount of government IT work is full-time positions. Most government IT contractors are ex-military since you need security clearance. The two routes to get security clearance are through the military or your company sponsoring you, and why would a company that doesn't deal with the government want to sponsor you? The red tape is very thick in government, which usually leads to low turnover, high job security, and long lead times for changes. Sepist fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 14:30
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Why would you want an alternative to drinking at night? Come join us in the GWS beer thread. You need something to spend all those fat stacks of IT cash on. Might as well be expensive beer.
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Sep 12, 2013 14:37
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routenull0 posted:Having spent the first 1/2 my career dealing with gear in MaBell / AT&T Colo's, I thankfully got a good foundation and training on cabling / lacing standards. I try as much as I can to teach the guys below me how to cable / lace properly, but they'd rather "just get it plugged in" so they can go back to the cli work. I personally feel that part of being a good network admin/engineer is knowing how to cable / lace properly to ensure minimal issues later. No one knows how to lace anymore, including new guys at the telco. Some old telco dude saw me lacing a bundle at a service entrance and asked who in my family was a retired MaBell guy. (no one, but an old MaBell guy taught me years ago).
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Sep 12, 2013 15:25
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Anyone want to share their janky backup stories? We backup every client and server on the network (except for a handful of laptops that use a service to backup over the internet) using Retrospect 7. These backups are sent to a set of 4 Synology 5-disk setup (WD Greens, joy) over the network each week and then from there, sent to another WD Green in an eSATA dock, I collect them all and give them to someone who takes them home for the weekend. Then they go back to a big fire safe where we keep 1 set of backups for each month for the past year. This 'works' but it's consumer hardware so we're constantly RMA'ing greens and outgrowing the backup drives (didn't groom so it's 2.1TB and won't fit on the disk...) or the docks flake out etc. It's also not automated in any real way. I would like to buy a Barracuda backup device but the one we need would be like $40,000 and the boss says no. The other problem is then we couldn't do an offsite backup. Internet connection is to slow to backup 6-8TB to 'the cloud', we're already using most of our bandwidth at nighttime to clone our VMware environment to a co-lo. We have fiber going across the street to our other office so we could run another backup server there, but then of course we're not protected from a nuclear bomb or Mothra wiping out both offices. Also we have to buy two piece of backup hardware, and my boss is all "OMG WHAT WILL WE DO WITH ALL THE WD GREENS I BOUGHT"
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Sep 12, 2013 15:53
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You have nearly several terabytes of what exactly?
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Sep 12, 2013 15:56
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We had all our data on a Netapp FAS 270 that I backed up to a 1TB external HDD nightly. It took the (inevitable) failure of both our rack, and our 1TB HDD for management to realize we needed to change something. That was 6 months ago, now they just use TWO 1TB HDD's. App13 fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 15:59
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Tab8715 posted:You have nearly several terabytes of what exactly? Who the gently caress knows. But users are special snowflakes and they can't be told what to do. A good 3 TB of that is PST files. Let me introduce you to my friend the 100GB PST file... The majority of it obviously doesn't change on a daily basis. Our systems generate a ton of email but everything is basic stuff - Microsoft Office files, photos...
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Sep 12, 2013 16:01
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Bob Morales posted:The other problem is then we couldn't do an offsite backup. Internet connection is to slow to backup 6-8TB to 'the cloud' You really have 6-8 TB of UNIQUE data per day? Or 6-8 TB total with a very small portion that changes daily?
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Sep 12, 2013 16:04
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God drat, Morales. Have you considered YOTJing? Your recent posts make your company sound pretty miserable.App13 posted:That being said, should I apply for a typical help-desk job to get into the environment a little more, apply for a sysadmin job and hope I don't fail horribly, or say "gently caress it" and just get my bachelors degree and try again in a few years? Helpdesk is going to be beneath you. You already have admin experience, resetting passwords and clearing paper jams is not going to teach you something new. "poo poo is broke, figure it out" is how most sysadmins get started, anyway. To me it sounds like you're plenty qualified to start applying for Windows admin jobs. Also (and sorry, as a civilian I am really ignorant of how they work) presumably you have some level of security clearance? With that and your Sec+ you should be able to move to the DC/Virginia area and start pulling down fat stacks at a government contractor. The Bachelor's is up to you. I'd never discourage anyone from pursuing a degree if it's what they want, and if it's financially viable. But it's not mandatory in IT like many other fields. It will get you past HR at some companies, but just as many give no fucks if you have a BS as long as you have the experience to do your job. Like the other poster said, are you eligible for the new GI Bill? That would certainly make school more attractive. But sliding into a clearance-required contracting gig and making ~6 figures right out of the gate is attractive, too.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:32
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Sepist posted:Anyone mind looking at this and providing some criticism/suggestions. I am writing something about entry to IT and covering the different kinds of businesses you could land in. Sepist posted:Enterprise Budget is not a problem. While IT is deemed a cost center (realistically, it's a cost center at every business not in the IT sector, not just enterprises), budgets are fine. You're more likely to see enormous SAN deployments, multi-site MPLS VMware clusters, and the like at enterprise shops. Because they have the budget. The difference (and problem) for you is that they have hardware refresh cycles. And if you come in 2.5 years into a 3 year cycle, it's going to look dated. If you come in 1 month after, it'll be impressive. But you can always get it if you prove a business need or benefit to the company. Enterprises (or groups inside enterprises large enough to have pull) standardize because it's easier on everyone. You may find old software. And yes, sweeping changes will require meetings. But (again) that's standard at every well-run company. Somebody should be reviewing your changes and pointing out business needs you may have been unaware of. You probably won't find many enterprise shops running CoreOS. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Enterprises don't run unproven technology. Sepist posted:Service Provider Sepist posted:Government Most positions within government:
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Sep 12, 2013 16:56
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Good stuff, thanks. Most of this I am pulling from previous positions/things others have said that I remember so there's definitely room for improvement in the presentation.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:17
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Jedi425 posted:Brocade's ADX is not a terrible option as long as you don't mind lots and lots of code updating. Even an ADX 1000 HA pair looks to be about twice what we spent on the VPXs. Here are some fun highlights of our romps with Kemp. Before we did a network reorg such that we isolated all loadbalancer traffic to it's own subnet, we had VIPs on multiple subnets. As a result, we had to setup a default gateway for each VIP to override the main one to ensure traffic went where it should. Well, remember what I said about us having hundreds of portals? The Kemp claimed to support 500 VIPs, but one day we added a new site and the whole drat thing crashed and had to be factory reset. We loaded a config backup, it was up and running. We then added that site again. Kaboom. Both were amazing fun because it managed to replicate the configuration to the HA partner BEFORE it went kaboom so both were 100% dead and required hands on via a console cable to revive. After rounds with Kemp, it was finally established that we overflowed the routing table due to the number of VIPs we had since we were setting a gateway value there. To their credit, they were able to turn around a patch to us to increase the size of the routing table in a few hours. Things went fine for awhile, then a new firmware version came out. We updated and immediately lost one of our units. Fortunately, it doesn't auto-update both members of the HA pair and we were still able to run with reduced redundancy. The cause of that one? They forgot to roll our routing table patch into the mainline code so we had the same blowup after we updated. The Kemp units boast high throughput numbers for what you pay, but it's clear that they don't intend you to have more than a dozen or so VIPs on the units (even though they say they support hundreds.) The interface isn't really capable of dealing with much beyond that and there's no real CLI (only a text based GUI via SSH). More recently, we've had issues with random sites stopping traffic. The only solution has been to reboot and failover. My suspicion is that it's an HA bug and the passive partner is grabbing the VIP randomly. The main reason why I think that is we had an similar problem where it stopped passing traffic on ALL VIPs and a failover didn't resolve it, we had to hard bounce both devices to bring everything back up. The GUI also stopped letting us do certain functions (like add a new real server to a VIP, you know, not important or anything). I suspect it's because it's low on resources. Some of the bugs we are seeing might be fixed in a newer firmware, but we're afraid to update right now. We have less than 20% of memory remaining and the newer firmwares include a bunch of new features. It would just be our luck that we update and over-strip the memory on the devices. So, no matter what the issues that may pop up with the VPX, they will seem minor from where we've come from. I'm just marveling at the interface for now. I can actually manage hundreds of VIPs without trying to tear my hair out. There's also a real CLI so new site setup can be scripted! Yes, my standards are low. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 17:32
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Yeah I agree with pretty much everything evol wrote, except government where I have no experience. What you've posted strikes me as biased and can be distilled down to "everywhere is loving miserable to work, except startups, cause you might get sweet IPO cash". It's hard to generalize an entire industry into a couple paragraphs and I get that, please don't take this as me making GBS threads on you, but I'm not sure that distillation is doing your readers any favors. There are great small businesses/startups to work for, and great enterprises. There are also many terrible examples of both. In particular, claiming that Enterprise is the one where you will have no shot at spending a big budget is a bit of a wtf. Sure, you'll always want more, but the enterprise is where you get to play on the million dollar SAN or 40 gigabit switch. Small business is more apt to be the realm of backing up to a QNAP filled with 2 WD Greens and daisy chained 4 port D-Links. I'd also add that in a small shop you're likely to be on-call 24/7 which can be pretty terrible for your mental health and social life. It's a big part of why I left that world.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:33
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I would love to work in the rail industry like Norfolk Southern or CSX where they apparently don't get taxed as much due to some funky old laws. Seems like it would be fun if I ever want to get out of VAR's/MSP's
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Sep 12, 2013 17:48
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I would love to work in the rail industry like Norfolk Southern or CSX where they apparently don't get taxed as much due to some funky old laws. Seems like it would be fun if I ever want to get out of VAR's/MSP's You also get sweet, sweet railroad pensions through the RRB, because it's basically communism.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:55
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Docjowles posted:God drat, Morales. Have you considered YOTJing? Your recent posts make your company sound pretty miserable. I just did. I am just trying to fix up everything I can and wait for the IT Director to be fired (rumors are floating). We need someone who's been where we are and took things to the next level (or up to something current). Current guy is a loving tool who only buys AMD and only buys refurbished HP poo poo. Had I known it was this bad I would have never took the job, but at least it's a challenge in certain ways.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:57
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Bob Morales posted:I just did. I am just trying to fix up everything I can and wait for the IT Director to be fired (rumors are floating). We need someone who's been where we are and took things to the next level (or up to something current). What metro are you in?
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Sep 12, 2013 18:05
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Ok. I've hit something that I have spent the past two days banging my head on how to fix and all the searching is not helping me. I'll plug my HoTS thread with a quick synopsis. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3569891 How do I change the remote server address that RDWEB points you to to tell the gateway that it has a separate external and internal name? When you google this it's always quickly devolves into some red herring on ssl certs.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:24
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evol262 posted:What metro are you in? None, really. 2 hours north of Detroit in a dwindling old auto town of 40,000 people. My personal situation has changed a bunch this summer so I'm going to consider re-locating over the winter but I need to sharpen some skills first. I'm back to Windows admin after almost 3 years of Ruby development.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:24
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Bob Morales posted:None, really. 2 hours north of Detroit in a dwindling old auto town of 40,000 people. Ouch, nevermind. For some reason I thought you were in Minneapolis.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:35
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The long standing nightmare of having each department budget for their own (read: 1 pc) computers each year is finally over. We have convinced the big wigs to give complete control over PC purchasing to IT so we can purge Windows XP forever and get the whole business on an actual 5 year cycle  So uh... Are there any recommended IT inventory systems? Spiceworks is awfully slow and not particularly good for tracking purchases of say monitors. Something that could easily track PC and PC related purchases, group them out per dept. or cost centers and maybe even run some reporting without being a full blown ERP would be great.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:08
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Bob Morales posted:2 hours north of Detroit in a dwindling old auto town of 40,000 people. Flint? Don't get murdered.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:28
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Docjowles posted:Yeah I agree with pretty much everything evol wrote, except government where I have no experience. What you've posted strikes me as biased and can be distilled down to "everywhere is loving miserable to work, except startups, cause you might get sweet IPO cash". It's hard to generalize an entire industry into a couple paragraphs and I get that, please don't take this as me making GBS threads on you, but I'm not sure that distillation is doing your readers any favors. There are great small businesses/startups to work for, and great enterprises. There are also many terrible examples of both. In particular, claiming that Enterprise is the one where you will have no shot at spending a big budget is a bit of a wtf. Sure, you'll always want more, but the enterprise is where you get to play on the million dollar SAN or 40 gigabit switch. Small business is more apt to be the realm of backing up to a QNAP filled with 2 WD Greens and daisy chained 4 port D-Links. Early draft, I guess I harped right on the negatives. Good point that I shouldn't keep it written in such an unfavorable way. I don't particularly like small shops so I am surprised that my own writing comes off that way. I should probably make the budget part more  as I am definitely basing it on my own budget talk experiences.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:40
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Mierdaan posted:Flint? Don't get murdered. Keep going north for another 30 minutes. Still gonna get murdered.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:42
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Sepist posted:Early draft, I guess I harped right on the negatives. Good point that I shouldn't keep it written in such an unfavorable way. I don't particularly like small shops so I am surprised that my own writing comes off that way. I should probably make the budget part more I personally love the size of company I'm working for right now. Big enough to have a nice budget and get the things we need, not so big the entire place is drowning in red tape.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:52
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skipdogg posted:I personally love the size of company I'm working for right now. Big enough to have a nice budget and get the things we need, not so big the entire place is drowning in red tape. That's pretty much the company I work for too. It's hard to beat a place like that if you enjoy the people you work with and don't have a boss who micromanages.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:53
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GreenNight posted:and don't have a boss who micromanages. I'd accuse my boss of having a script that IM's me every ~2 hours with 'What are you working on?" but he's not that competent.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:10
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Bob Morales posted:I'd accuse my boss of having a script that IM's me every ~2 hours with 'What are you working on?" but he's not that competent. Yeah, I might have mentioned this before, but we have a manager here who makes their users schedule bathroom breaks. My boss sits 20 feet from me in an office, and there could be days I don't ever see him. As long as shits not broke, he doesn't care what I do. Which is pretty awesome and why even though I don't get paid a ton, my job rules.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:20
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GreenNight posted:Yeah, I might have mentioned this before, but we have a manager here who makes their users schedule bathroom breaks.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:28
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evil_bunnY posted:Hahahaha. He'd have my resignation letter on his desk in minutes. I know right? She's the customer service manager for our call center. She's the type that every single email is "high priority" and if she calls you and you don't answer, she calls everyone else in the dept looking for you, and then walks around tracking you down.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:30
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GreenNight posted:I know right? She's the customer service manager for our call center. She's the type that every single email is "high priority" and if she calls you and you don't answer, she calls everyone else in the dept looking for you, and then walks around tracking you down. There's one prof here who's kinda like that, and the look on her face when I slammed her for talking to me the way she does to her first year PHD's was worth taking the job. Last time she showed up to my office looking for our head of services: he's moved, but his new office is on the ground flo yes I know where the ground floor is you'll have no trouble finding it then.And I went back to my screen. Again, the look on her face was worth the reprimand I'd have gotten from my boss, were he to give a poo poo about what she says. evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 20:33
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GreenNight posted:Yeah, I might have mentioned this before, but we have a manager here who makes their users schedule bathroom breaks. That sounds like a huge liability. I'd probably go to a doctor and come back to work with a note to HR saying that it's medically necessary for them to make reasonable accommodations for me to use the bathroom when I need to, rather than according to a schedule. It's totally reasonable for a company to set bathroom times if you guys are flying planes or diving or something, but if the bathroom is just down the hall... gently caress it, I'd probably resign too, that policy is probably the tip of the iceberg.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:34
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