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Sirotan
Oct 17, 2006

Sirotan is a seal.


Paladine_PSoT posted:

Did you ask how the company's commitment will effect your next paycheck?

I was told that an increase in pay was on the horizon but how much that will be seems nebulous. He did insinuate it would be substantial but I also know we pay people poo poo here soooooooo

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Paladine_PSoT
Jan 2, 2010

If you have a problem Yo, I'll solve it

Sirotan posted:

I was told that an increase in pay was on the horizon but how much that will be seems nebulous. He did insinuate it would be substantial but I also know we pay people poo poo here soooooooo

"We want you to make a commitment to us! Oh, yes we'll give you some kind of raise, the details are sketchy at the moment, I'm going to have to hash that out. We'll discuss that at your next timely annual review, I'm sure... this economy... a true rogue wouldn't worry about that, you're a true rogue with the rest of us, right?"

guppy
Sep 21, 2004

sting like a byob

Caged posted:

I've left my iPhone in a ceiling space before when using it as a torch. That was a fun one to track down.

I'm aware of the European usage of the word "torch," but in an IT thread you can never be sure what the job will drive someone to.

SyNack Sassimov
May 4, 2006

Let the robot win.
            --Captain James T. Vader


Agrikk posted:

The tale of NetWare makes me sad. I loved working in NetWare (my first cert ever was a CNE) and like you said, their functionality was way ahead of Microsoft.

But Microsoft advertised and Novel didn't and I started getting ignorant Directors and C-types coming in to my office asking if I'd heard about Windows Server and how "everyone is using Microsoft now" so why weren't we?

I wasn't around for it, but I got the impression it wasn't all about the marketing and advertising and that Novell also didn't innovate and compete well with AD?

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Potato Alley posted:

I wasn't around for it, but I got the impression it wasn't all about the marketing and advertising and that Novell also didn't innovate and compete well with AD?

eDirectory was/is fine.

Microsoft used their monopoly position to ship a free, built-in competitor to eDirectory which could manage your entire Windows infrastructure at zero cost, basically.

Why muck with Netware when everyone's already familiar with Windows?

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

Potato Alley posted:

I wasn't around for it, but I got the impression it wasn't all about the marketing and advertising and that Novell also didn't innovate and compete well with AD?

IMO, Novell got there first and basically trusted in the knowledge that "those who know use NetWare" to maintain their market share. Problem was that Microsoft advertised, and didn't pay attention to the fact that "those who didn't" are also those who make the ultimate funding decisions.

Then they failed to keep innovating and by the time the realized what was going on, momentum had shifted to Microsoft and the rest is history.


evol262 posted:

eDirectory was/is fine.

Microsoft used their monopoly position to ship a free, built-in competitor to eDirectory which could manage your entire Windows infrastructure at zero cost, basically.

Why muck with Netware when everyone's already familiar with Windows?

Not quite. Novell's NDS was years ahead of Active Directory. At the inception of NDS, Windows NT was using flat domains.

BUT, Microsoft saw that NDS was a Good Thing and then spent the next few years developing AD for Windows 2000, while NetWare merely provided incremental upgrades. At that point, what you say is true.

Novell basically blew a five year lead by sitting on its laurels. Sorta like BlackBerry and Kodak.

Agrikk fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Dec 10, 2013

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Agrikk posted:

Not quite. Novell's NDS was years ahead of Active Directory. At the inception of NDS, Windows NT was using flat domains.

BUT, Microsoft saw that NDS was a Good Thing and then spent the next few years developing AD for Windows 2000, while NetWare merely provided incremental upgrades. At that point, what you say is true.

Novell basically blew a five year lead by sitting on its laurels. Sorta like BlackBerry and Kodak.

I don't even think Win2000 domains were a significant improvement over NT4-style domains.

The big win for us was unified infrastructure. It's fair to say that Microsoft could do no wrong in 2000. Rebrand Sybase to SQL Server? Take over the market. Release a terrible MTA that barely works? Take over the market. NDS/eDirectory's writing was on the wall as soon as Microsoft entered the LDAP market. No matter how technically superior NDS was, it couldn't compete with "free". This hasn't really worked for Microsoft lately, but a big part of Hyper-V's adoption is just the fact that it comes with Windows.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

MS also did a hell of a lot better than Netware on the user experience front too, little things like if two PCs have an explorer window open viewing the same shared drive and one makes a change, the other gets to see that without having to hit F5 first. It's this kind of stupid poo poo that senior managers make decisions on. Netware rapidly started to look dated and clunky.

The main thing that used to bug the poo poo out of me with Netware was its reliance on mapped drives, and increasingly clunky login methods. It was basically impossible to get a Windows service to authenticate with Netware without some serious flaky bodging, so if you need to run a service that does anything with network files you're basically hosed.

The rest of the problems I encountered regularly were caused by implementation stupidity that was supposedly best practice advised by Netware certified people. A common setup in Netware orgs I had was that users would have their own home directory, typically F: or H: mapped to SERVER:VOL1\USERS\JBLOGGS) and the manager would have access to everyone's home directory for their department via S: mapped to SERVER:VOL1\USERS.

Some manager would then come along and realise that they have a copy of their work on the F: drive and then another copy on the S: drive, and helpfully try to free up space by removing the copy on the S: drive that they never use, then suddenly all their work is gone!

Not the fault of the OS, but I encountered it so many times it got silly.

Don't even get me started on login contexts, another clunky as poo poo mechanism that would result in failed logins if someone else had used your machine. Basically the same problem as the desktop engineer leaving the domain set to Local PC, only instead of a choice of Local/Domain you had to go browsing through a tree structure several layers deep to find your exact location within the directory. You could guarantee that the directory services would be having a slow day on the day someone important has this issue.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Lum posted:

MS also did a hell of a lot better than Netware on the user experience front too, little things like if two PCs have an explorer window open viewing the same shared drive and one makes a change, the other gets to see that without having to hit F5 first. It's this kind of stupid poo poo that senior managers make decisions on.

I'm not a manager but I consider that way more important than a little thing. Have phone calls constantly because someone can't see the files that someone else swears are there, or use something different? Easy decision.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.
Hah hah hah. poo poo currently not pissing me off: Project billing.

I had a PM tell me just now that I wasn't billing enough to the project. Apparently building and deploying a set of four VMs should take me nearly 40 hours of work and since I only billed about five so far (and THAT was stretching it) I still have about a week's worth of work left to bill.

I literally have 35 hours of gently caress-off time to bill.

Guess it's time to do some Christmas shopping online or catch up on my reading through my iphone. For a week.

Simpleboo
Oct 19, 2013

I was trying to work on some lantronix products today and they just don't hold settings unless you use the browser inside of their program.

Also I accidentally perpetrated a man in the middle attack on my own network today cutting out our system for 3 minutes.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Sirotan posted:

So I just had my annual review (only 6 months late!) and was told how wonderful I am with the exception that I need to work on "polishing" my interactions with upper management. Apparently some VP complained that I wasn't kissing rear end enough?? That's how I read it anyway... :allears:

Also got the annual "we love you, you are an asset, the company wants to commit to you if you will commit to them!" spiel. I really want to believe him this time but I should know better.

Re-posting part of the last interaction I had with my old boss about similar themes:

:v: (knowing that I've been very unhappy there for months) You're doing great work and if you leave we're going to lose at least 6 months on this project; what can we do to keep you here?
:geno: I told you what you can do to keep me here months ago; give me a decent raise and some flexibility.
:v: You don't deserve any of that because you're doing the bare minimum.

So yeah. Talk is cheap.

nitrogen
May 21, 2004

Oh, what's a 217°C difference between friends?
Welp, the trigger on the reorg was officially pulled today.

Good News: The guy who i really didn't want to work for is not my manager.
Unknown/Bad news: My manager is on the other side of the country, on the East Coast. I have little clue who this guy even is.

Simpleboo
Oct 19, 2013

Che Delilas posted:

Re-posting part of the last interaction I had with my old boss about similar themes:

:v: (knowing that I've been very unhappy there for months) You're doing great work and if you leave we're going to lose at least 6 months on this project; what can we do to keep you here?
:geno: I told you what you can do to keep me here months ago; give me a decent raise and some flexibility.
:v: You don't deserve any of that because you're doing the bare minimum.

So yeah. Talk is cheap.

At that point shouldn't you just walk away? If they really do want you on that project they will have to fold and offer you the money and flexibility you want.

guppy
Sep 21, 2004

sting like a byob

Agrikk posted:

Hah hah hah. poo poo currently not pissing me off: Project billing.

I had a PM tell me just now that I wasn't billing enough to the project. Apparently building and deploying a set of four VMs should take me nearly 40 hours of work and since I only billed about five so far (and THAT was stretching it) I still have about a week's worth of work left to bill.

I literally have 35 hours of gently caress-off time to bill.

Guess it's time to do some Christmas shopping online or catch up on my reading through my iphone. For a week.

So your PM is ordering you to commit fraud? :waycool:

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

Caged posted:

I'm not a manager but I consider that way more important than a little thing. Have phone calls constantly because someone can't see the files that someone else swears are there, or use something different? Easy decision.

When I say "little things" I mean like the person who builds a perfect house, but forgets to paint the doorframes vs the person who slaps something together using sheets of plywood and a staple gun, but then tarts it up really nicely, really good paint job, thoroughly cleaned etc.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Lum posted:

only instead of a choice of Local/Domain you had to go browsing through a tree structure several layers deep to find your exact location within the directory. You could guarantee that the directory services would be having a slow day on the day someone important has this issue.

I envy your use of past tense here, I still have to do this (some of our legacy applications require you to log into Novell to use them).

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

guppy posted:

So your PM is ordering you to commit fraud? :waycool:

Hah. You know, I hadn't really thought about it like that...

SSH IT ZOMBIE
Apr 19, 2003
No more blinkies! Yay!
College Slice

Simpleboo posted:

I was trying to work on some lantronix products today and they just don't hold settings unless you use the browser inside of their program.

Ahhh...Lantronix devices. Our company is littered with hundreds of terminal servers in various closets that were put in as a stopgap solution a decade ago to support serial based label printers that don't yet support ethernet. You see, the application was also moving from an old Sequent server to a 650 pSeries Power 4 box. It was really a time of modernization.
That application has been moved to LPARs sitting now on a pair of Power 770 systems. The Lantronix terminal servers are still in service, yellowing with age, much unlike a fine wine.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Does anyone make decent serial device servers any more or is it just Brainboxes?

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Simpleboo posted:

At that point shouldn't you just walk away? If they really do want you on that project they will have to fold and offer you the money and flexibility you want.

He didn't really think it would have put them 6 months behind (even though that's true if they wanted to do everything with the project that they originally said they did). Telling me that was just another manipulation tactic. And you're right, the right response was to leave, which I did not long after. They pushed my development duties onto my colleague (the DBA) and as of yet no disaster has struck.

Lord Dudeguy
Sep 17, 2006
[Insert good English here]
Wow. AT&T just cut us off at the knees.

I've been working for the past month on getting the SIP infrastructure together for our big Lync 2010 cutover. We wanted the new setup to be better than the old, and that meant lots of redundancy.

Redundant IP Flex SIP Trunks with Inbound Alternate Routing? Check.
Survivable Branch Appliance for our largest site (100+ users)? Check.
Lync Environment in VMWare with multiple ESX hosts? Check.
Multiple Session Border Controllers for PBX redundancy? NOPE.

Sonus doesn't support Virtual IP failover. AT&T doesn't support multiple SIP routes per trunk. Both vendors, originally promising a fully HA setup in the end, have turned up their noses and told us to piss off.

At best, all we can offer our users is an "on-hand spare" solution now. loving :smith:. This poo poo is crushing. I have no idea what my boss is going to do or say tomorrow about this.

guppy
Sep 21, 2004

sting like a byob

Agrikk posted:

Hah. You know, I hadn't really thought about it like that...

You... didn't think billing customers for doing nothing was fraud?

Varkk
Apr 17, 2004

guppy posted:

You... didn't think billing customers for doing nothing was fraud?

Depends, it can be a grey area where dodgy businesses like to hide.
If they were quoted a figure for a build and that figure was based on it taking 40 hours of his time which was agreed to by the client before it started then they might be in the clear.

If they are however straight up inflating the time on their bills just for extra cash then if it is proven they are hosed. Well he will be because the company's lawyers will make it all his fault as a rogue employee.

Khisanth Magus
Mar 31, 2011

Vae Victus
Is it so much different than a lot if auto repair places that will always bill you for x number of hours on any given repair regardless of how long or actually takes?

quicksand
Nov 21, 2002

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
It really depends on how they are billing the client and the contract they have with them.

If it is solely time and materials, then it's super fraudulent. But if it's fixed fee, then they could take 800 hours or 10 minutes but still bill that 40.

It sounds more likely that it is fixed fee and the PM is trying to keep his resources at a certain utilization rate to justify something to someone.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




Inspector_666 posted:

We've been having a seemingly never ending string of issues with Unisys techs at the moment, including one dude showing up for a job and being refused entry to the building because he looked so messed up.

I got a Nortel service tech banned from my site. I was yelling when I made that call. Always a slob, no shower for a week of heavy drinking, smelled exactly as bad as you'd think. And they only agreed to quit sending him out when he put a bad board in our PBX and cost us a bunch of money. Y'know, I usually have those incompetent bastards blocked out of mental roll of incompetent telecom companies. I had almost forgotten Larry.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


tl;dr version: YOTJ is awesome.



It's now the end of my 3rd day of YOTJ and I am quite happy about this place.

When done with the training/induction stuff that is during office hours (with supplied morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea!) we will be going into shift work with each day split into three lots of 8 hours. I haven't officially even done any of the work the job title states as we have been put through a course to make us all Fatigue Management Officers - which is apparently a nationally accredited cert.

My god the perks, the perks are amazing.

*50% car rentals with certain companies,
*40% off domestic flights through 2 of the major airlines
*25-35% off international flights
*The company buys up a bunch of tickets for various sporting events and makes them available to staff with travel packages at greatly discounted prices.
*Fleet price discounts when buying a new car (30% off with one manufacturer)
*Discounts off Private Health Insurance, and the company has a 'back door key' to a number of doctors offices around the country so we get preference over walk-in public even without the private health insurance.

That's all I've seen so far, when I get my login for the intranet I'll be able to find what else there is.

The bosses are awesome, and the team I am with are pretty cool, some of us have some similar military background fields so the inside jokes are flying everywhere.

Those of us who got in (12) were out of about 1000 qualified applicants nationwide. feelsgoodman.jpg

The particular location has just start renovations on a grand scale and our operations floor is the only one completely finished with brand new awesome equipment with multiple backup hardware idling waiting to jump to if our primary gear goes down. There's even a blacked out, soundproof room with lazyboy chairs if we need to take a 'strategic nap' (official term).

The company is in the middle of enterprise bargaining when I joined and looks like the pay, conditions and perks will increase from here.

Pissing me off:
Getting used to night shifts again and preparing for a hosed up circadian rhythm.

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?
Maybe i'm being dumb, but what does YOTJ mean?

IT chat, I got a job in my first real IT position (meaning this one isn't just volunteer). Its a helpdesk, but we close 90% of calls at first level and i've been closing the stuff that usually gets assigned to advanced support if I can (gunning for that position). It pays well enough, more than any of my friends fresh into the workforce make and the hours aren't bad (8 to 4:30 or 10-6:30).

Downside? They hired so many new people that I don't really get many calls anymore. I did at first, because I was the first of the new hires, but they want to assign more tickets to the new guys rather than me because they want them to get more experience (as they've seen me work and they're not worried about my knowledge).

That's all well and good, but I want to work dammit. I've had so much free time that i've read this entire thread in about a week.

underlig
Sep 13, 2007

dogstile posted:

Maybe i'm being dumb, but what does YOTJ mean?
Year of the Job, decreasing alcohol abuse, staying sane by moving from "soulsucking, slow death"-job to something new and better.

Sometimes it's a miss but most often it's just what the goon ordered.

KennyTheFish
Jan 13, 2004

dogstile posted:

I've had so much free time that i've read this entire thread in about a week.

There is no free time, only documentation and study time.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


underlig posted:

Year of the Job, decreasing alcohol abuse, staying sane by moving from "soulsucking, slow death"-job to something new and better.

Sometimes it's a miss but most often it's just what the goon ordered.

In my case, I was actually an alcoholic for a long period at last job.

Lum
Aug 13, 2003

dogstile posted:

That's all well and good, but I want to work dammit. I've had so much free time that i've read this entire thread in about a week.

You could always start on the old thread? It had a few thousand pages IIRC :)

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
At this point I feel obliged to remind everyone that YOTJ actually does have an SAclopedia entry:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2385

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?

Lum posted:

You could always start on the old thread? It had a few thousand pages IIRC :)

I've moved over to "a ticket came in". I'll get to the old thread in a few days.


KennyTheFish posted:

There is no free time, only documentation and study time.

Yeah I made the mistake of opening up a powershell book in front of the manager and he responded by throwing five tickets in my name. Looks like i'm doing that study thing another time. :shrug:

Edit: Plus side, I now do it every time i'm bored and want something to do. Just asking for a ticket gets me a "help, my program isn't refreshing" which is just a service restart on the server. Opening up that book gets me meaty tickets.

Zamboni Apocalypse
Dec 29, 2009
"YOTJ - the IT equivilent to Goatse, except the hands are spreading open a printer."

(That, or "are pouring out a drink".)

(gently caress printers.)

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

WhoNeedsAName posted:

gently caress documentation! Just do what the guy how I took over from did and delete everything in both your local and remote drives including all the process guides, backup license keys for every piece of software, support contract information... Everything! The guy didn't print a single thing out or back it up properly so I'm pretty much building it all from scratch again.

I'm hoping that I can recover at least some of it from an old backup tape but the chances are slim to non-existent.

Beats the hell out of the guy who preceded me. All of his documentation was either non existent or "Ideal World" poo poo that had no bearing on what he actually did.

A c E
Jun 18, 2007

Is this weird? Is this too weird? Do you need to sit down?
Currently pissing me off: gently caress Canadian internet.

Current speeds at my work.

Small business on what should be 5/1. Called them yesterday after finding that and they fixed something. It was fine(ish) when I left yesterday. Came in today to it being utter poo poo again.
Here's one from yesterday: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3158716754
One test returned: 0.02 (though I lost the url for those results)

We have 3 sites.
- One in a majoy city, in a huge business area (hundred of business) and we can only get 6/0.8 DSL or 5/5 from a wireless provider which has 2% packet loss both making VoIP a nightmare.*
- One in downtown Toronto that can't get more than 6/1
- The site I'm currently at with the lovely speeds can only get 5/1 from a wireless provider, which is less upsetting because we are out in the middle of nowhere.

*I've spent the last 2 weeks dealing with ISP poo poo, trying to prove to the packet loss issue to our 5/5 site is their equipment (actually, it's interference because it's only an issue from 9-5 M-F) but I've had to show them it's not us saturating the lines. Trying and failing to find anyone who can offer anything to our sites.

Meanwhile, my home connection:

TWBalls
Apr 16, 2003
My medication never lies

Simpleboo posted:

I was trying to work on some lantronix products today and they just don't hold settings unless you use the browser inside of their program.

Also I accidentally perpetrated a man in the middle attack on my own network today cutting out our system for 3 minutes.

I have a Lantronix Spider single port IP KVM that I've connected to some cheap KVM switch. I have a choice of either using their terrible, crash happy program or using a browser which spawns a Java program which also likes to crash but not nearly as much.

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Powdered Toast Man
Jan 25, 2005

TOAST-A-RIFIC!!!
How can I convince my boss that in the real world, sometimes Windows is necessary (in our case, we have Windows client machines that aren't going away for various reasons), and trying to kludge something with OpenLDAP or Samba4 to replace Active Directory is a bad idea? :shepface:

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