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I'm late to the funny email address chat, but I have a user "gstringfellow". I snicker every time I get an email from her. We've since switched to first.last@.. but she hasn't complained about it so we haven't changed her yet
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Dec 21, 2013 05:58
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SBS definitely used to use .local by default, and I'm not sure it even gave you the option to use something else. But SBS not following best practices was never really surprising, if you ran the BPA after install it would throw up hundreds of errors.
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Dec 21, 2013 11:32
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That looks like a good idea until there's a hardware failure on one of those servers and you need to pull it out fast to open the chassi...
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Dec 21, 2013 17:57
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lol internet. posted:That looks like a good idea until there's a hardware failure on one of those servers and you need to pull it out fast to open the chassi... I don't see a problem there. Unplug the cables in back and slide it out on its rails out front. Great cable management and kudos to the guy who took the time to do it. Thats how I would rack my servers and it made things a hell of a lot easier when its organized in back. We'd put cable wraps with the servers name on the cables too so we knew where each cable was plugged into the switch as well as the server.
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Dec 21, 2013 18:05
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lol internet. posted:That looks like a good idea until there's a hardware failure on one of those servers and you need to pull it out fast to open the chassi...
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Dec 21, 2013 18:47
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Misogynist posted:What's wrong with your environment where critical services are placed on 1U servers with no inter-machine redundancy, and 15 seconds to unplug a half dozen cables is significant to production?
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Dec 21, 2013 21:11
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Hung out with three today he is a pretty cool guy. Charlotte seems good enough now let's just hope I can land a job down here.
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Dec 22, 2013 00:05
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Contingency posted:Network Engineers: Your standards are excellent. I taught the CCNA and now I have a former student who recently completed his CCNP ROUTE, and yet can't seem to get his 802.11 radio up on a SR520W, despite me sending through a show run from my working 1041 AP and suggesting he google, like I did, to get it working. I would suggest, if hands-on testing is impractical in your interview schedule, to give candidates a 15 minute written test with general IT questions that focus specifically on self-management, eg: "You have received a client wireless device which appears to be fully operational, with the exception that it is not connecting to the client's wireless network. How do you proceed?" "Management has informed you that you will be visiting a company-owned site tomorrow to perform hardware upgrades. How will you prepare?" "The CEO's laptop won't boot, the company IP phone system will not take inbound calls, and a client's WAN is offline. What case do you prioritize and why?" Bullet points will suffice, and answers of course will vary. This approach gives insight into the person's communication skills and mindset, you can see if they put it in chronological order, or spit out ideas. Those who write "what kind of device?" or "need more information" are missing the point and probably will need hand-holding down the line when they meet esoteric equipment or poo poo hits the fan.
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Dec 22, 2013 10:01
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I wouldn't pass on interviewing a candidate just because their work history leads you to believe that they won't be good at trouble shooting. Trouble shooting is about procedure and thinking through the problem; you can have someone who worked on a front-line, customer facing gig for years and loving sucks at trouble shooting.
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Dec 22, 2013 16:07
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Gap In The Tooth posted:Bullet points will suffice, and answers of course will vary. This approach gives insight into the person's communication skills and mindset, you can see if they put it in chronological order, or spit out ideas. Those who write "what kind of device?" or "need more information" are missing the point and probably will need hand-holding down the line when they meet esoteric equipment or poo poo hits the fan. I've been in this racket for a very long time on both sides of the desk. If a candidate seems completely clueless about a question and the hiring team is doing their job right vetting resumes, there's roughly a 50/50 chance it's actually the interviewer's communication problem and not the candidate's knowledge problem. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 16:46
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Misogynist posted:I bombed an interview once where they literally asked the question, "How would you troubleshoot a problem?" and wouldn't elaborate any more on what kind of problem.
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Dec 22, 2013 17:32
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Misogynist posted:"How would you troubleshoot a problem?" "I'd do a great job!"
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Dec 22, 2013 18:20
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I got that once and think it's a pretty good question. It would let me see if someone would jump right into the equipment/technical issue or would lead off with who they were going to help and how that might affect the next steps. Do I know this person? Do they like phone support or prefer in person? Do they like explanations or do they just want me to get it done? And maybe most importantly to person doing the interview: Is it an executive/partner? Sperging for 15 minutes about ticket workflow would also be hysterical Roargasm fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 18:25
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Hardest question for me in an interview remains "So what do you do in your free time?"
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Dec 22, 2013 20:35
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Hardest question for me in an interview remains "So what do you do in your free time?" That's the hardest question on a date. Job interview it's not so bad. Work doesn't care if all you do is play video games and watch anime.
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Dec 22, 2013 20:38
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GreenNight posted:That's the hardest question on a date. Job interview it's not so bad. Work doesn't care if all you do is play video games and watch anime. poo poo, in DAF's case they'd probably be happy to hear "Oh, I just work more."
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Dec 22, 2013 20:46
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All Day I Dream About ESx
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Dec 22, 2013 20:49
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Inspector_666 posted:poo poo, in DAF's case they'd probably be happy to hear "Oh, I just work more." ^Pretty much this, and that gets boring. Hopefully I can spend a good portion of this week updating my much neglected blog Anyone got some good tips on changing states for jobs? I checked th A/T subform but may have glazed over it. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 20:56
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Does anyone have experience with pfSense? I have a firewall set up at my house, with the WAN interface connected across the yard to my parents' house (heh), so it has an IP of 192.168.0.20 (with the gateway/my parents' router being .1) - the LAN interface has an IP of 10.2.2.1/24. DNS servers are set to 8.8.8.8 and 4.2.2.2, okay no problem. The computers at my house can get to anything just fine, but trying to resolve DNS from the pfSense box itself doesn't work. DNS Forwarding is off, DNS redirect protection is off, there's no rule blocking local networks on the WAN interface, and I checked /var/etc/resolv.conf and the only two entries are "nameserver 4.2.2.2" and "nameserver 8.8.8.8". The box can ping the DNS servers and can ping anything else by IP address, but just isn't resolving names for some reason. Any ideas?
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Dec 22, 2013 21:04
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QPZIL posted:Pfsense You actually want /etc/resolv.conf, not /var/anything. Dilbert As gently caress posted:^Pretty much this, and that gets boring. Hopefully I can spend a good portion of this week updating my much neglected blog You don't need to know anything for changing states if you're not licensed or in a regulated profession. If they recruit you, ask for moving assistance. If you apply there, don't (generally) unless it's a huge burden for you and you're highly placed. Get them to pay for your flights for in-person. Ask for a one month lead after accepting instead of two weeks so you can find a place. And tell them hobbies. They ask so they can get a sense of you as a person and whether you fit with team/company dynamics. "I go home and work more or read about VMware" outside of a "what is your environment like at home" question says "I'm on the road to burnout". Tell them you teach if you want an answer which sounds better, gives the sane impression, but also says "if I get close to burning out, I can stop doing this and relax a bit", whereas "I work more" says "when I get burned out, my output at work directly suffers" Home brewing? Reading? Climbing? Warmachine? Comics? Just tell 'em what you like. Al evol262 fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 22:57
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psydude posted:I wouldn't pass on interviewing a candidate just because their work history leads you to believe that they won't be good at trouble shooting. Trouble shooting is about procedure and thinking through the problem; you can have someone who worked on a front-line, customer facing gig for years and loving sucks at trouble shooting. I am quick to mention to coworkers that there's 10 years of experience, and then there's 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. This is the first candidate that made it to me, so I have not had the luxury of weeding out a mediocre, but experienced, troubleshooter. I believe the difference between an average troubleshooter and a good one is knowing what not to try. I do not expect to have that regurgitated to me, but it is something I'd look for when evaluating a candidate. If you had a VPN connectivity issue, you wouldn't want someone contacting the client to verify the PSK when the tunnel is up, or a desktop tech attempting a Winsock fix when the PC isn't configured with a default gateway. An average troubleshooter would have a mental checklist of possible causes, but someone decent should be able to internalize the system and ask appropriate questions. How does this relate to what you've said? I'm looking for quality experience that would provide the opportunity to develop these models or knowledge of the tools that would be used to pick apart the problem (if your bread and butter is the ASA, you should be comfortable with packet-tracer). Basic configuration tasks don't provide an opportunity to develop these skills and that's why I recommended a pass. I thought he had potential (and I like potential), but it would a take a year to catch him up to speed. Given his background, there was a good chance he'd be one of our better troubleshooters, but that's way too long for what would be our senior position. That's a year that could otherwise be spent improving our infrastructure (ex: monitoring), which he had no experience implementing. Gap In The Tooth posted:Your standards are excellent. I taught the CCNA and now I have a former student who recently completed his CCNP ROUTE, and yet can't seem to get his 802.11 radio up on a SR520W, despite me sending through a show run from my working 1041 AP and suggesting he google, like I did, to get it working. These are good questions--thanks. The way this went down is that my acting manager popped into my cube and asked if I'd mind talking to the candidate in two hours. We're an ASA shop, and he had ASA/PIX experience, so my goal was to The questions I came up with: 1. You have protocol analyzers on your resume. Which one do you work with? If he said he was comfortable with Wireshark, I would have asked how to only display traffic sent between host A and host B, and big kudos if he could at least fumble through the syntax. Given the candidate's response, I should have had a generic question lined up like "what setting/mode do you need to enable to sniff all traffic?" 2. You have ASA experience listed at your most recent networking job. What sort of work did you do? (and also trying to get a feel for if he stayed current) If he was a stronger candidate, I would have also asked if he could tell me the difference between ASA 8.2 and 8.3. My coworker didn't know, so I may end up throwing that one out. I'd like to ask a ASA NAT question, but it might not be fair since some people are "I'll know what's wrong if I see it" and I'm not able to recall the syntax off the top of my head either. Maybe "what does a policy NAT statement look like" and looking for general format. 3. VPNs (we have a ton of them). What VPNs have you set up in the past? What troubleshooting experience do you have with them? If he was a stronger candidate, I would have asked how he would rule out an incorrect PSK or distinguish between a phase 1 and phase 2 problem. A candidates are experienced with the infrastructure we use, B candidates are experienced with other vendors' infrastructure, and C candidates don't solid experience with either. I may be giving B candidates an unfair advantage because I can't assess their level of proficiency as easily as I can with Cisco equipment (they'd otherwise be a C candidate). General questions would level the playing field, but it's tough to avoid turning them into "guess what I'm thinking." QPZIL posted:Any ideas? Does the problem go away if you set the WAN interface to DHCP and let the upstream router populate the DNS servers used? Contingency fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 23:10
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I'm new-ish to IT, but I've been troubleshooting for a long time. My observation on troubleshooting is that there are basically two styles: Logical Troubleshooting and Mystical Troubleshooting. Let's pretend we've received a complaint that the CEO's desk radio isn't picking up his favorite station. Logical Troubleshooting is based on plans and heuristics. 1. Define the problem: What is the actual complaint? What doesn't work? What does it do instead? -This step is VITAL because it ensures that we don't waste time fixing something that isn't broken. This also gives us a way to define success. "When I do A, I expect B. Instead I get C. When A -> B, I've solved the problem" -This is also a good time to do some research on previous similar incidents. 2. Determine big-picture possible causes. -The three basic areas for this problem might be: "The radio station itself", "transmission medium", "the radio receiver" 3. Design a test that narrows down these choices. -Use CEO's radio to try to tune into another station- Tests to see if the radio station is transmitting -Move CEO's radio into hallway to try and tune into station- Tests to see if there's something blocking the signal in his office -Use a different radio to try and tune into the station- Tests to see if the problem affects all radios or just the CEO's radio. -One common heuristic is "Half Split." A more sophisticated technique might be "Look for easy and effective splits first." If you can eliminate 25% of the possibilities with a check that takes 15 seconds, be smart! 4. Isolate further if desired. -If the radio seems to be the problem, either replace it or go back to step 1 focusing on the radio itself. You'll now be looking for more detailed symptoms, things like power lights and whether you can hear static or nothing. You'll be isolating down to "Power", "Tuning","Audio Amplifier","Control/Options" etc. 5. Implement a fix. 6. Why did the fix work? -This step is important, it's how you grow. It's okay if your answer is "I don't know" but if the problem keeps coming back, it's a sign that you haven't really solved the problem. This step helps you improve your solutions. The other troubleshooting style is what I call "Mystical Troubleshooting." I think of the "Tech-Men" from Asimov's "Foundation" series. They're trained to perform maintenance in a ritual fashion but they don't know why it works or what they're actually doing. I'm sure there are some really great techs out there who can intuitively solve all sorts of problems, but I have no idea how you'd try to figure that out in an interview. The Mystical Troubleshooter's weapon is his "Bag of Tricks" Their process might look like this: 1. Reboot computer 2. Reset password 3. Give local Admin rights 4. Delete profile 5. Reinstall Windows 6. Escalate to Tier 2 If I had to do interviews to find a good troubleshooter, I'd want to figure out what their troubleshooting style is, and if they're a logical troubleshooter, how good they are at it. Let's imagine a piece of software that was poorly designed and needs read/write access to a file that's in "Program Files" (Don't tell the interviewee this, but use it to provide answers to specific questions) "Suppose you get a call from a user, a piece of software was recently installed on their computer but every time they try to run it, they get an error. Take me through your process to fix it." If they say something like "I'd ask another tech, I'd check our documentation, or I'd check the ticket history" tell them that the problem has been resolved in the past by giving local Admin rights. At this point,if they ask stuff like "Is this time critical?", that's an indicator that they're attempting to balance "Do it the right way vs. Do it now!" Hopefully, you and the interviewee will be able to role-play through the steps where you check the error message to find the configuration file and come up with a solution that gives the user exactly the rights they need in order to run the program.
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Dec 23, 2013 00:51
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Step 1 for network troubleshooting: is the ethernet cable plugged in? You wouldn't believe how many times the tier 1 guys seem to miss that.
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Dec 23, 2013 01:21
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Roargasm posted:All Day I Dream About ESx If the virtualization thread ever gets restarted, this needs to be the title. "Straight outta CompTIA" is the all time best SH/SC thread name but that's pretty good.
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Dec 23, 2013 03:06
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Docjowles posted:If the virtualization thread ever gets restarted, this needs to be the title. "Straight outta CompTIA" is the all time best SH/SC thread name but that's pretty good. Eh, It's overdue for a restart. With some new found freetime might as well.
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Dec 23, 2013 03:24
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psydude posted:Step 1 for network troubleshooting: is the ethernet cable plugged in? troubleshooting TCP/IP connectivity is the one topic I ask all helpdesk and desktop candidates to figure out who is any good. You wouldn't believe how many don't know how to get to the command prompt.
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Dec 23, 2013 04:20
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Count Sacula posted:troubleshooting TCP/IP connectivity is the one topic I ask all helpdesk and desktop candidates to figure out who is any good. You wouldn't believe how many don't know how to get to the command prompt. Troubleshooting TCP/IP connectivity? You mean telling the user to reboot?
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Dec 23, 2013 04:41
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One of the questions of troubleshooting that tends to get overlooked but shouldn't is "when did it stop working/when did it last work/did it ever work?" You have no idea how often things fall into the last category. It can save a lot of time chasing your tail trying to figure out what changed broke functionality if you have someone fess up "Yeah, it never worked."
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Dec 23, 2013 05:15
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bull3964 posted:One of the questions of troubleshooting that tends to get overlooked but shouldn't is "when did it stop working/when did it last work/did it ever work?" In my support experience, users are basically always wrong when they answer these questions. Not like consciously, maliciously lying, but wrong all the same.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:18
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Eh, It's overdue for a restart. With some new found freetime might as well. With December 2013 rapidly becoming Month of the Layoff, January 2013 will see every thread restarted.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:23
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All I can say all I wish for this is a month/Christmas is a job, I hope I get a job before Jan 31st. I am shooting for Varrow and appreciate the goons whom have rooted for me to get there, It seems really awesome I feel a perfect fit there. Just dunno; Well gotta give it my all after Jan(family emergency came up and delayed stuff). I thank you all for your help, gotta shoot for the gold here. PS: if anyone has insight to Varrow that I haven't spoken with already I appreciate it.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:31
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bull3964 posted:One of the questions of troubleshooting that tends to get overlooked but shouldn't is "when did it stop working/when did it last work/did it ever work?" I loving hate when people get indignant at me when I ask them that.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:44
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psydude posted:Step 1 for network troubleshooting: is the ethernet cable plugged in?
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Dec 23, 2013 05:50
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evol262 posted:
This ends in a "oh what cartoon show?" or "what comic books" and MLP(even if the luna comics/episodes were amazing) is not an answer, neither is Rick and Morty, Dan vs., and I guess Gravity Falls is okay... Leads into "My kids watch that lol" I mean I play video games with some goons, but the CS answer is "Oh I remember the 1.6 days" <insertlong rant of why CS:go is different>. I think I should just start working aside from walking a mile a day and call "workout a hobby" Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 05:51
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:This ends in a "oh what cartoon show?" or "what comic books" and MLP(even if the luna comics/episodes were amazing) is not an answer, neither is Rick and Morty, Dan vs., and I guess Gravity Falls is okay... Leads into "My kids watch that lol" Don't ever mention MLP in an interview.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:08
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Paladine_PSoT posted:Don't ever mention MLP in an interview. I never mention it outside the internet, after winding up drunk cosplaying as DAN Vs. at vegas to the person I co teach with and a few goons there... Guaranteed never stop being made fun of, even though I go to those cons to make fun of poo poo and be an rear end in a top hat, and hit/other with some cosplay chicks. Nothing more demotivating that "Hehe watch that mlp episode?" in front of a class load of students... Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 06:13
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You could use the next month to read the goonlifting threads, get a gym membership and learn to lift. It's probably a really good idea in the long run considering IT can be a pretty sedentary job and you don't want to permanently put your back out of commission while picking up a router. It's a good "hobby" and it'll help you pick up cosplay chicks.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:20
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:It's a good "hobby" and it'll help you pick up cosplay chicks. Haven't needed yet but will check it out.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:22
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three posted:VMware is failing at cloud ( I hope not. My boss thought this a few years ago. I thought otherwise, bought a bunch of VmWare stock when it was in the 40s, sold it and made a good chunk of change. Regarding Hyper-V, I've always thought that who would want to deploy virtualization ontop of a bloated Microsoft OS, but just started looking in to it and Hyper-V's a bare metal hypervisor, and actually likely even more lightweight than ESX\ESXi, with a Windows install for management of that hypervisor. We have a bit over 1k VmWare based virtual servers, mixtures of OSes. Mostly windows 2008 R2, some 2003, some Linux. I don't see us switching over to Hyper-V anytime soon, we have much bigger fish to fry, but I wonder if it would be more cost effective. Over the past few years, I've found myself heavily pulling away from Microsoft administration, and gotten heavily involved with and training in pSeries\System P type IBM hardware. Besides that, I've found myself in an application administration role for a few things, RightFax, SAP BusinessObjects, and a few other things. My boss keeps talking about wanting a "self service portal" where users can do password resets. I can think of a few ways to accomplish it. 1) We own something called Entrust IdentityGuard. We never set it up due to a lack of time and some limitations of the systems we'd be integrating it with. It's basically a neat identity management suite. It acts as a radius server, and you can set up security questions, and user keyfobs or OTP grid cards for 2 factor authentication. I think it also has a password reset module. Could in theory use this. 2) Our domain was like updated from NT->2000->2003->2008. It's still named after the company name from 15 years ago. LDAPS was never enabled. Could I just set up LDAPs on a few existing DCs, but not all of them, and use those for resetting passwords through LDAP? I'd probably write a small PHP application that asks a user for their username, last 4 of the SSN, and employee number, and the app would email their work address with a new temporary password that I could reset thorough LDAP. I'd probably build this out and test in a test environment before attempting enabling LDAPs in production since I don't know of any potential issues. I probably would not enable LDAPs on ALL of the DCs, because we have dozens and really someone else on the team builds them and does the configuration. I imagine updating the certificate is a bit of a pain. Are there any potential pitfalls to this? 3) I could probably just write the front-end in PHP, which would output some sort of TXT job file and FTP it to a windows server running a PowerShell script that would actually do the resetting of passwords using native API instead of LDAP. This is the lazy way out. 4) I could let one of the other folks on the team that do ASP + .NET on IIS do this. My team has some weird dynamics. One of my coworkers kinda likes to be the guy that does everything, and doesn't like people touching his code or servers, he'd rather hold all the keys and has an odd sense of pride in his work. A few people are like that, a really weird sense of narcissism or protectiveness. I really don't have this mentality so I really don't understand it. 5) We actually have a team of dedicated programmers. My boss could ask their manager if it's possible, and I could just work on other stuff that I have to do. I'll probably talk to my manager about it sometime after the new year. I hate this gnawing constant lack of direction. One week I'm completely underwater on some projects and issues where I have limited experience, which delays work on projects and issues where I actually know what to do. The next it's slow and the prior week's issues have resolved themselves and I am caught up, and I'm looking at tacking something like this. Something like this I don't think will have a lot of long term maintenance or operational work, so I'm more prone to volunteer to work on it since it's a safe thing. The other thing that's going on is more and more staff are ditching PCs, and moving to Apple computers, and we need a way to manage them. Looking at some active directory extensions we could use, Apple Remote Desktop, or just writing a bunch of custom scripts if we have no budget. I might opt to work on this more than the other thing because this is probably closer to *nix administration than the other project. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Dec 23, 2013 |
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Dec 23, 2013 06:33
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vCloud & vCHS
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:This ends in a "oh what cartoon show?" or "what comic books" and MLP(even if the luna comics/episodes were amazing) is not an answer, neither is Rick and Morty, Dan vs., and I guess Gravity Falls is okay... Leads into "My kids watch that lol" "Dilbert, when you are off work what do you like to do?" "I spend a lot of time teaching community college courses on [insert subjects here]. If I need to unwind I like to watch tv, read comics, and play video games. I've also started working out.". All you need as an answer. People just want to know you can form full sentences, are comfortable talking about yourself, and don't answer human head collecting. I am curious, where you were before were you way younger then everyone else? My current job the majority of my coworkers are around your age or a bit older. I have mentioned MLP in conversation, same with gravity falls and no one has subjected me to the tormeny you seem to get. Though you may also of just worked with assholes. I hope your next job has less assholes.
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