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Yup, but I'm more of adding onto what Evol explained earlier. You didn't necessarily need to know Powershell before but now it's nearly a requirement for Windows Administration.
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Aug 20, 2014 18:46
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Tab8715 posted:Yup, but I'm more of adding onto what Evol explained earlier. You didn't necessarily need to know Powershell before but now it's nearly a requirement for Windows Administration. Oh yeah, Powershell is probably the most useful skill I've learned as a Windows admin, it's powerful and surprisingly enjoyable.
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Aug 20, 2014 18:47
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CLAM DOWN posted:Oh yeah, Powershell is probably the most useful skill I've learned as a Windows admin, it's powerful and surprisingly enjoyable. Powershell has given me a niche to fill in our IT department since I'm the only one who really knows it, and it helps everyone else out to be able to do mass AD user changes and gather data. I'm very happy to have learned it, and can't see doing bulk operations any other way.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:06
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hihifellow posted:Powershell has given me a niche to fill in our IT department since I'm the only one who really knows it, and it helps everyone else out to be able to do mass AD user changes and gather data. I'm very happy to have learned it, and can't see doing bulk operations any other way. Likewise, I'm the newest person on my Windows team and they view me as that young whippersnapper who can whip up anything in Powershell for them. I really like doing it too, never enjoyed scripting before this.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:11
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GreenNight posted:Not necessarily. About 4 or 5 years ago we moved from GroupWise to Exchange and I can count on one hand how many times I had to use Powershell, and that was only to get a report of mailbox sizes. I literally just did this for ~800 users. I am finally on the tail end of the implementation, but Jesus Christ I am glad it is almost over. I haven't had a work free weekend in 2 months.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:21
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CLAM DOWN posted:Likewise, I'm the newest person on my Windows team and they view me as that young whippersnapper who can whip up anything in Powershell for them. I really like doing it too, never enjoyed scripting before this.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:43
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CLAM DOWN posted:Likewise, I'm the newest person on my Windows team and they view me as that young whippersnapper who can whip up anything in Powershell for them. I really like doing it too, never enjoyed scripting before this. The Powershell ISE is really nice for writing/running scripts, since it has tabbed windows for having multiple scripts open, a sidebar with available commands, etc.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:51
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lampey posted:Wages are going up mostly because there is a tech bubble. You don't need a degree to have soft skills, and many people with and without degrees have terrible soft skills. It is a stereotype in general that many people in IT have poor soft skills.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:59
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mayodreams posted:I literally just did this for ~800 users. I am finally on the tail end of the implementation, but Jesus Christ I am glad it is almost over. I haven't had a work free weekend in 2 months. We had it easy - no public folders, no archiving and no pst files. Suck it, users.
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Aug 20, 2014 23:22
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Anyone messing with Rundeck for orchestration? It's been in the back of my mind for ages but I finally had time to test it out this week. It's pretty slick. Especially once I found out that it has a SaltStack plugin, since we're using Salt extensively already.GreenNight posted:We had it easy - no public folders, no archiving and no pst files. Suck it, users. More like lusers, amirite? 
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Aug 20, 2014 23:31
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Na, they didn't have any of that stuff with GroupWise so they didn't know what they were missing.
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Aug 20, 2014 23:39
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Docjowles posted:Anyone messing with Rundeck for orchestration? It's been in the back of my mind for ages but I finally had time to test it out this week. It's pretty slick. Especially once I found out that it has a SaltStack plugin, since we're using Salt extensively already. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 00:26
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Is there any credibility that the demand for software is infinite?
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Aug 21, 2014 01:29
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GreenNight posted:We had it easy - no public folders, no archiving and no pst files. Suck it, users. Living the dream... meanwhile, I'm over here helping a professor remount a 9gb .pst in order to find an email from 2002
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Aug 21, 2014 01:45
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Tab8715 posted:Is there any credibility that the demand for software is infinite?
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Aug 21, 2014 01:59
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Thank loving Christ! I finally got my Remedy account fixed so I can work on tickets. It's only been a month of calling ESD a couple times a week and having them bumble around in my permissions, tell me I'm good to go and to wait an hour, then determine that poo poo still doesn't work. I finally asked my team lead to jump in on this and, since he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, ESD finally handed it off to the Remedy team. They took 5 minutes to fix everything and stayed in an IM chat with me until I saw what I needed to see. The ESD folks are brain dead even for government helldesk, and it got to the point where the 2nd shift Exchange folks were making memes and posting them all over their cubicles. My favorite was a South Park image with the caption "ESD helps you with your email account. And...it's gone." Apparently they generated a critical ticket after trying to help a Major General with his email account and accidentally deleted it. The commanding officer finally put his foot down and said no new meme posters, but he intentionally neglected to mention anything about existing ones (probably because we made him look so drat good the last few months - our detachment has closed the majority of Messaging tickets for the entire 24th AF and it's been noticed by the command staff. Of course, that probably won't stop them from killing our detachment off at the end of the contract in the middle of August next year).
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Aug 21, 2014 02:38
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CloFan posted:Living the dream... meanwhile, I'm over here helping a professor remount a 9gb .pst in order to find an email from 2002 We have multiple users with 50GB+ Groupwise archives and one was a whopping 80GB. Mind you, 2-3GB is the max Novell recommends. We had to port everything over, and it this is hands down the worst project I've ever worked on. I could do a long bitch post, but the tldr is that users run the roost, there were no standards for accounts or archiving, and no documentation. Bonus Fun Fact: there were no size limitations for attachments internally so there are literally messages with 1GB attachments, and people used it for a content management system for creative projects, which is how you get 80GB archives.  We had a migration partner that had tools for converting them and injecting them to O365, but the amount of work I did was/is never ending, particularly post cut with the archives that are still being found.
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Aug 21, 2014 03:20
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Thank loving Christ! I finally got my Remedy account fixed so I can work on tickets. It's only been a month of calling ESD a couple times a week and having them bumble around in my permissions, tell me I'm good to go and to wait an hour, then determine that poo poo still doesn't work. I finally asked my team lead to jump in on this and, since he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, ESD finally handed it off to the Remedy team. They took 5 minutes to fix everything and stayed in an IM chat with me until I saw what I needed to see. My job for like 3 months pretty much consisted of being The Guy Who Calls ESD. They had just cut their staff in half and the hold times shot up to 45-75 minutes every call. I started tracking exact times and I was spending 15+ hours a week just waiting on hold listening to that loving music. I swear I still sometimes hear WE ARE THE LAAAND OF THE FREEEEE, THE HOOOOME OF THE BRAAVE and I haven't called them in months.
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Aug 21, 2014 03:54
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Misogynist posted:"Orchestration" is a term very loosely applied to Rundeck, since it's really not good at anything of the sort, but it's a great C&C console for repetitive tasks. We're using it all over the place and, yes, using the Chef plugin to provide node data into Rundeck directly from our Chef server. We're shifting more and more functionality into heavily customized middleware, though. Looking forward to trying out Consul and some other tools. We'll still likely use Rundeck to provide a nice quick interface to all the scripts that run our deploy processes. Yeah, orchestration was a poor choice of words. I'm eyeing it for two main use cases: giving developers self-service access to a few things they ask Ops for constantly, and getting some visibility and consistency around how and how often our NOC people perform certain tasks. Both of which it seems super well suited for. For example, I said the other day our devs do all their own deploys. But if poo poo seriously goes south and they need to restart Tomcat or whatever, Ops has to do that. Once in a blue moon, they have a bad deploy when literally all of Ops is offsite at a team lunch or something and then we all get paged with HOLY poo poo RESTART TOMCAT NOW. I'd love to give them a button they can click to do that themselves. So I guess my question is more organizational. Any resistance to allowing tasks like that to creep outside of Ops? And if so, how did you deal with it? Also, sounds like the Chef plugins are nicer (no surprise, really). The Salt plugin lets you send job steps out through Salt instead of SSH, but I still had to write my own script to dump out node data for targeting the job. If I didn't hate Java with the fire of a million suns I'd consider writing such a plugin.
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Aug 21, 2014 04:50
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Docjowles posted:Yeah, orchestration was a poor choice of words. I'm eyeing it for two main use cases: giving developers self-service access to a few things they ask Ops for constantly, and getting some visibility and consistency around how and how often our NOC people perform certain tasks. Both of which it seems super well suited for. For example, I said the other day our devs do all their own deploys. But if poo poo seriously goes south and they need to restart Tomcat or whatever, Ops has to do that. Once in a blue moon, they have a bad deploy when literally all of Ops is offsite at a team lunch or something and then we all get paged with HOLY poo poo RESTART TOMCAT NOW. I'd love to give them a button they can click to do that themselves. Ops doesn't trust dev to do simple tasks correctly. This is an organizational problem mostly caused by lack of accountability or responsibility. If you have people who do cowboy things and break production, they should be gently educated and eventually taken to task if it forms a pattern of behavior. If the organization refuses to do this, then it's time to involve more stringent access controls, further compounding the effects of an untrusting culture. Ops doesn't have the time to explain and codify the ground rules for working in that type of environment. This is more common in environments with poor automation, where it's very easy to do dangerous things the incorrect way. A better solution is to create a safe, standard way of doing these dangerous things. Sometimes you can't, or shouldn't; example: restoring a large-scale production database from backup should probably have an SME on hand before someone clicks the button. There's obviously special cases, and you probably wouldn't apply this to the trading floor of the NASDAQ or an airline reservation system. There's also various situations like regulatory compliance that may impact what people are legally allowed to do to systems. But in general, I like to empower and trust people to do things themselves until they've proven they can't. I like not being a bottleneck. I like not getting called when I'm on lunch because someone needs to push an emergency patch to all of prod.
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Aug 21, 2014 05:36
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Ahh...so we're going through a merger. We're technically something like 40% bigger, but, some decision was made where IT falls under the leadership of the organization being absorbed. We lost our CIO. Today we got word, our director is being moved to a different role. My direct manager has in the past mentioned not wanting to work under anyone else and has some weird stuff posted on his Facebook about new beginnings. Basically, bad end. New leadership hates virtualization. Good luck with that, we have over 1000 VMs... I've been pretty stable for 10 years now where I am, so much for that. Might foresee myself taking one of those resume assistance offers from SA soon. Our director was in tears, she's been with the place for 28 years. So sad. What's even more baffling is that IT is generally well reviewed and thought of at our hospital. They are also migrating to several of our systems, our EMR, our email, etc. Why break up organizational structure that is working? Just politics I guess, surely nothing based on logic. I guess we'll see how this goes. I've spoke with the new director several times on the phone. I'm worried that we're going to be hamstrung when it comes to purchasing equipment to keep the place running. Like, our storage vendor is EMC. They are great. The place we are merging with buys whatever is cheapest at the time, so they have a mixture of IBM, NetApp, EMC, and other vendors. He's also very...namedroppy. We were talking about an interim solution for file sharing between organizations. We own an MFT product, it works well. We got on a call with him, and he was like, what would *namedrop CEO* prefer? We have xyz. I recommend you look at it. That was the end of the discussion. What should have happened is we meet to figure out the positives and negatives to both. What ended up happening was the other organizations's employees started calling me directly to get on what we have circumventing the pissing match between our now defunct leadership and the other place's. This is going to be hell. Our infrastructure is pretty stable, and our hospital is also in the black. Theirs is in the red. To me it seems like things can go bad in so many ways. A couple people on my team are leaving, also likely our DBAs are going to be siphoned into their own group which is horrible because we work so close with them. Hopefully we will still sit near them and not have to go through their manager or them through our manager. But I just work here..I'll just keep doing what I do till I'm told to stop. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 06:38
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Sadly, common merger stuff. Anecdotally, when we bought another bank, we kept our application, our admins, our devs, their managers (ours got let go). The acquisition before that (when the bank I worked for got bought), they kept our application, their admins, their devs, our managers. Somebody who's never met any of you is rearranging names on an org chart so it looks less messy to them, because IT is ultimately a cost center and you're all interchangable anyway, but retraining staff on a new EMR costs real money so they'll keep it  I hear healthcare IT is even worse than finance, though. Maybe a  blessing in disguise.
evol262 fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 07:10
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:But I just work here..I'll just keep doing what I do till I'm told to stop. You may want to put feelers out now. Just in case you get unceremoniously fired for no reason, or just in case they make a bunch of decisions that make your job hell. You might get lucky and everything shakes out so that it doesn't affect you personally very much, but if the worst happens it would be better if you didn't feel like you suddenly have to scramble for a new gig.
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Aug 21, 2014 07:45
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Basically, bad end. New leadership hates virtualization. Good luck with that, we have over 1000 VMs... 2. I've become the embodiment of that attitude. Tonight I was asked which of two code issues I was more concerned about. Concerned? I'm concerned about negotiating a two state solution and getting St. Vincent to worry more about her music than her stage presence. I'm not concerned about code issues at all, someone call me when it's fixed, I'm going to dinner. MC Fruit Stripe fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 09:10
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evol262 posted:I hear healthcare IT is even worse than finance, though. Maybe a Finance and Healthcare are bogged down in huge amounts of regulation so are a pain. Having done 3 acquisitions in the last 4 years it always seems that the name of the game is running both companies sets of systems together for as long as possible creating yet another layer of crap and once it looks like it is working get rid of all the staff from the company that was acquired. At least the last one was also on Salesforce so moving their CRM data over was easy.
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Aug 21, 2014 12:31
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Daylen Drazzi posted:ESD stuff EIS is the new name now. I think they keep changing it with the hope it allows them to escape the reputation associated with the old name (it doesn't work).
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Aug 21, 2014 15:19
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Looping back on salary talk: Was having a long talk yesterday with my mentor (worked with/for him at various positions over the last 20 years) and he said that the biggest reason they've lost candidates in the last 12-18 months is the candidates have a better offer. He said 75% of the time. This is Big 4 consulting, and he's very data-sensitive, so I'm confident he's not pulling the number out of the air. talk: the reason why we were talking about offers is that I had just gotten off the phone with "my recruiter" - in 3 weeks I've gone from PM-ing someone tangential to a post in SH/SC Jobs to a final approval interview with an SVP person. This is an alarmingly specific dreamjob: work at [x] company in [y] division with [z] responsibilities. They had me on campus for 5 hours meeting with all of the constituents I'd be working with - it's a very integration-heavy position. The last interview was with a very heavy hitter in the industry: I knew who he was by name. Question1: what did you do to prepare for this interview? Answer1: I watched "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - Gene Wilder Version. I feel like Charlie Bucket. That got a big smile. Question2: management style: Carrot or Stick. Answer2: Ear. We spent the next hour+ discussing as many particulars of the job as he was able to. There was a lot of "we can't talk about that until you're on-board". Back to recruiter... She made a point of letting me know that my salary requirements were "in range", and asked me 3x if I had another offer. I was very open about my current situation and roadmap. She seemed more nervous than I, made it clear that they were fast-tracking me, etc. TL:DR - wages are going up because there's more money moving around again, there are new IT initiatives being executed on, currently employed people with a history of performing are highly desirable, and intelligent companies have started to figure that out. Feral Bueller fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 15:40
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mayodreams posted:We have multiple users with 50GB+ Groupwise archives and one was a whopping 80GB. Mind you, 2-3GB is the max Novell recommends. We had to port everything over, and it this is hands down the worst project I've ever worked on. I could do a long bitch post, but the tldr is that users run the roost, there were no standards for accounts or archiving, and no documentation. We finished our GW to exchange migration recently and it was the biggest goddamn clusterfuck I have ever seen. I'm sure exchange is great, but not when you have morons running it. I've shared some of the stories with another it goon and got  back.e: I hate PowerShell so much that admining our Linux servers became my favorite part of the job. Pedestrian Xing fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 16:07
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I'm working for a company that does a broad amount of things, like filming, websites, and a few IT contracts. I got hired to be the only IT guy, so I took over lead on all the contracts they had and I go out to these businesses and take care of all their IT needs. Luckily, there's only 3 and not the 12 they used to have. The first, hasn't had an issue in a year and only call every once in a while if they want something a little more complicated. They know how to restart their servers, fix email issues, and generally are pretty well off on their own short of catastrophic network issues. The second, is a very small company with a network more complicated than a large business, with about 6 employees. No one knows how to use a computer there so I'm there three times a week just restarting a computer or uninstalling a search bar someone installed on accident. The third, is a medium-large sized company that should honestly have an IT department of their own with 3 people at minimum on it. They're so needy that I spend probably 6 hours a day there, and I'm hardly ever in my own office getting work done for the company I actually work for. They're spontaneous and ask us to do things at the last second (IE: they wanted 10 computers formatted with two days notice, and wanted them set up at another location over an hour away. They don't have all the equipment for this (Keyboards, mice, cables) and we're not even sure what their new lab looks like, so we're unsure how networking that is going to be. Again, this location is an hour away. Another great thing this company asks of me, is to sit in on their board meetings to make sure their conferencing system is working properly. This entails plugging a conference phone into the wall and turning a laptop on, it's super simple but they need me to come set it up every single meeting (Usually once a week, and they want me to set up a test the evening before). Not only do they ask me to set it up, which is reasonable, but they ask me to sit in on these meetings to ensure nothing goes wrong (If the laptop resets they can still access the phone, they just won't have video). These meetings last anywhere between 4 and 6 hours and completely grind my workflow to a complete stop, since all I can work on is anything we have based in the cloud. Hire some loving IT people you dummies. Another quick question, I need a way to crack Windows 8.0 passwords for people at this office who are constantly forgetting their windows passwords. Since I didn't set these computers up, none of them have the Admin account enabled for safe mode, I don't have any recovery discs, and there's no other way to reset these passwords I can think of since I'm not familiar with Windows 8 (Other than it's really stupid to use)
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Aug 21, 2014 18:56
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stubblyhead posted:
For anyone who's interested, I decided to accept their offer provided they come up on the base salary a little bit. He says he'll get back to me this afternoon, so hopefully they'll decide I'm worth it.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:10
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Did you tell him you'll accept it if they come up? I have been burned by saying it that way. They may come back and say no can do (I have had this happen and later my new boss told me he would have added 30k to my salary if I had pushed it). If they come back like that and you're willing to walk away, tell him you've decided not to accept the offer if they aren't willing to work on that number.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:16
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Flameingblack posted:Another quick question, I need a way to crack Windows 8.0 passwords for people at this office who are constantly forgetting their windows passwords. Since I didn't set these computers up, none of them have the Admin account enabled for safe mode, I don't have any recovery discs, and there's no other way to reset these passwords I can think of since I'm not familiar with Windows 8 (Other than it's really stupid to use) I've used this boot disk with great success in the past. I've never tried it personally on Windows 8+ but their website claims it still works. It doesn't "crack" the password but it lets you blank it out so you can log in and set a new one, which should be good enough.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:16
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Flameingblack posted:
Assuming they're all just workgroup computers with no domain or any management, when I need to get into a local account I: Boot computer with a boot disk to get a cmd console or similar (linux works too) Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32 Rename utilman.exe to something else, utilman2.exe Copy cmd.exe to utilman.exe Reboot Activate the ease of access button on the log on screen, this will open a command prompt Use the net command to change the password - ie. net user "bob" password - replacing bob and password as neccessary. Reboot and login with the new password At some point you should restore utilman.exe back to the original program Tell the idiots to get on a domain.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:18
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Sepist posted:Did you tell him you'll accept it if they come up? I have been burned by saying it that way. They may come back and say no can do (I have had this happen and later my new boss told me he would have added 30k to my salary if I had pushed it). If they come back like that and you're willing to walk away, tell him you've decided not to accept the offer if they aren't willing to work on that number. I don't feel like I phrased it as an ultimatum, just that I felt my experience and qualifications merited a little more money. I know they want me pretty bad so I'm sure they can come up with something. I expect they'll at least go halfway, which would be fine by me.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:36
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Docjowles posted:I've used this boot disk with great success in the past. I've never tried it personally on Windows 8+ but their website claims it still works. It doesn't "crack" the password but it lets you blank it out so you can log in and set a new one, which should be good enough. Seconding this. Although, here again, I've never used it on Win8 or above. Win 7 and below, it's never let me down.
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Aug 21, 2014 19:53
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And they accepted my counteroffer at the full amount!
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Aug 21, 2014 21:57
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stubblyhead posted:And they accepted my counteroffer at the full amount! Just asking alone makes you look like less of a pushover and when you start working they already have a better opinion of you. If you don't ask you never know what you could have missed out on (plus future bonuses and raises are based on what you make not what you could have made). So good job!
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Aug 21, 2014 22:06
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Ahh...so we're going through a merger. We're technically something like 40% bigger, but, some decision was made where IT falls under the leadership of the organization being absorbed. We lost our CIO. Today we got word, our director is being moved to a different role. My direct manager has in the past mentioned not wanting to work under anyone else and has some weird stuff posted on his Facebook about new beginnings. High five merger buddy. I'm in a similar boat. A large investment firm bought four medium companies with plans of combining them. The new reorg structure was released a few weeks back and all the IT staff are flipping poo poo. Each company had their own IT Manager + support staff. All the IT staff are now under a single person who is so far over his head it's not even funny. It's getting to the point where I bet we are going to start seeing people leave. The best part is, I'm watching this happen as the IT Manager of a fifth company- who is being bought for it's software/IT/contracts. I have no idea what their plan is for me- I can see it working a few ways, the only one I like is letting me come in and clean house.
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Aug 21, 2014 22:21
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For all you guys who are going through merger growing pains - bail out, please, for your own sanity. Update your resume and move on. You'll be so much happier, I promise. I went through what you're all describing back in '06 and stuck around for far, far too long. It's not worth the frustration and pains of mixing company cultures. It really isn't. Start fresh.
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Aug 21, 2014 22:38
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JHVH-1 posted:(plus future bonuses and raises are based on what you make not what you could have made) This alone is an excellent reason for asking for more pay. To reiterate something I put together in the old poo poo that pisses you off thread a few years ago: quote:For the sake of argument, let's say your initial offer is $70000. If you get a 5% raise after one year, and another 5% raise after another year, you're looking at $77175. If you negotiate just $5000 more to start and get the same percentage increases, your first raise puts you at $78750. You're making more after one year than you would be after two under the initial offer.
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Aug 21, 2014 23:37
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