|
Richard Noggin posted:I know I had a lot of trouble getting ours to work. I'm assuming the cert meets the requirements from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189067(v=sql.105).aspx I made progress without support (waiting for them to call back still)! My certificate was missing the X509 KeySpec option of AT_KEYEXCHANGE, I fixed that up and re-requested, and I can now see the cert in the drop-down menu. Only now, when I "force encryption" in SQL Server, the db engine service won't start. It starts fine and recognizes the cert when "force encryption" is set to no. e: solved it, I had to grant the service account read permission on the private key, apparently being an administrator isn't enough. Victory! CLAM DOWN fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Aug 27, 2014 |
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 23:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 19:51 |
|
|
HatfulOfHollow posted:And that shouldn't imply anything bad about them. I've spent nearly my entire career in the large enterprise. Every company I've worked for has had a team of people who deal with the money and handle getting quotes and actually paying for things. The architects and senior engineers in these companies only spec out new systems and then hand it off to procurement to get quotes. I haven't had to actually talk to a salesperson in the past decade.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 00:01
|
|
|
Misogynist posted:In the places I've worked, procurement doesn't usually get involved in technology purchases from reseller channels or VARs. The reasons for this are two-fold. One, the cost of error can easily outweigh the potential savings if the people in procurement don't understand what it is that they're buying. A trivial error in a specification delivered to them in a quote can slip a project's completion date by months. Two, most computing hardware vendors don't let their channel partners bid against each other anyway. If the request comes in directly, or if it comes in to one specific reseller, that reseller gets the vendor's preferred pricing for the project. If you submit that same quote to another vendor, that vendor will give you higher pricing, because they aren't counted as having generated the lead, and they don't have access to the vendor's preferred pricing. I've worked for three very large companies over the past decade and in all three instances it's been this way. An architect specs out systems but procurement is handled by someone else. I don't know who they're buying from, but I know that when we make requests for new hardware it goes through an internal buyer. We have a budget that procurement is aware of, but they handle all of the actual money. I haven't thought about how much hardware costs in a long time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 00:16
|
|
|
My current job the infrastructure team handled things like hardware and support contracts and anything else involving money (large company). In my job before that the hardware purchasing and assignment was done by the same people that handled sales and account management (small company). That kinda made sense because they were able to spend more time calling vendors and since they were sales people were better at negotiating deals on any larger orders and had relationships with the hardware supplier. So I basically have never had to purchase that kind of equipment my entire time being a sys admin.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 00:28
|
|
|
I am not sure what I would do if I wasn't handling the procurement of our (datacenter) hardware. It's so important to get exactly right and extremely technical. I just wouldn't trust a purchasing agent to get it right. Of course, they probably don't trust me to get the best deal, but I probably do get the best deal because of the way partner and var purchasing works.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 00:41
|
|
|
So the network guy asked me to write a batch script to make his upgrading easier. He has push out stuff to all the Citrix servers tonight, there are like 40. I whip it up in a half hour. Batch's xcopy isn't really cool with writing to UNC addresses, so I ended up making it mount a folder, drop payload, dump the mount, move on to the next. I then ported that script to Powershell. I had never used Powershell before then. It was much more clean, didn't require the hackiness of mounting drives, and accounted for leading zeros in the naming convention all within one loop instead of 2 successive ones.  I think I should have sacked up and gone into programming. I got the basics down cold in college and never had any trouble with it. I imagine once I got to anything requiring pointers the Dunner-Kruger would fall away. Although a case can be made for having some natural talent based on the fact I can belt out a for loop after not touching any sort of code for over a year as fluently as I can order a cheeseburger.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 04:52
|
|
|
Hello. Took my third ever interview today, for a Service Desk role. Result: absolute massacre. Just thoroughly disassembled. Started out well enough, questions about how I got into computing, school and work history. Minor blundering over my answers. Some technical questions (procedure for resetting AD passwords, "tell us what DHCP is and what it does", hypothetical "unable to boot into Windows" scenario troubleshooting steps). Arrived at the answers reasonably quickly. We then went into the more abstract, "why should we pick you over other candidates" types of questions, where we ended with my foot thoroughly in my mouth, and the interview went out on a nice, high being-able-to-drive-would-be-good-for-this-role-oh-but-you-don't-drive note. Naturally, they enjoyed talking with me, and they'll get back to me within the next few days, but 
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 05:02
|
|
|
skooma512 posted:I think I should have sacked up and gone into programming. I got the basics down cold in college and never had any trouble with it. I imagine once I got to anything requiring pointers the Dunner-Kruger would fall away. Although a case can be made for having some natural talent based on the fact I can belt out a for loop after not touching any sort of code for over a year as fluently as I can order a cheeseburger. Hi, scripting is also programming. And unless you're writing in a small subset of languages (go, c(++), obj-c, swift, Fortran, d, rust -- OK, not that small, but very small as far as the field goes given the dominance of JavaScript, java, .net, et al), you don't need to know pointers. Having moved around on the infrastructure side and into Dev, scripting doesn't translate, though. Good scripters can be good devs, but the mindset and skill set required to work with a team and making sure your code plays nice are very different. When you're not writing 100-1000 line scripts by yourself to solve a problem and moving on, but going into a codebase with tens or hundreds of thousands of lines you didn't write and dissecting it to write patches or add functionality to the same thing day in and day out, it's... You might be good at it. I was, much to my surprise. But it's simultaneously more and less satisfying, and it doesn't translate 1:1. You shouldn't conflate being good at one with the other. Cleverly gluing together system utilities in for loops is very different from building (and properly encapsulating) your own. Not to devalue either, but they're not that similar, despite both being programming
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 05:59
|
|
|
Some day this Shoretel upgrade project is going to be over.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 07:10
|
|
|
When that day comes, the new version will be released.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 13:15
|
|
|
Turned into an all nighter due to weirdness with the distributed voicemail servers. Since my day started yesterday around 0430 I think I'll be leaving early today before my brain turns completely to mush.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 13:19
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:Turned into an all nighter due to weirdness with the distributed voicemail servers. Since my day started yesterday around 0430 I think I'll be leaving early today before my brain turns completely to mush. I'm sure I'm not the first to have commented on this, but your job and your user name appear to cause similar amounts of pain/discomfort.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
Dark Helmut posted:I'm sure I'm not the first to have commented on this, but your job and your user name appear to cause similar amounts of pain/discomfort. It used to be worse. Check his post history.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 17:04
|
|
|
Dick, is this the job that was your escape to the promised land after.. Tony was it? From back in The Bad Times.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 17:16
|
|
|
adorai posted:I expect my staff to handle around 20-25 tickets a day, give or take depending on volume and difficulty. I wouldn't take this as a for every company though, Jim Trud. The company i'm at usually has a 8 tickets closed a day average because there's just so much red tape to cut through (and x amounts of tickets not counting due to reasons). Best thing to do is look at your competent workers. Not the best, because they're statistical anomaly's, same as the worst guys (there is a guy in my workplace who manages to blaze through double the tickets everyone else does in a day, I have no idea how he does it). Once you look at them, just see how many tickets they do per day for a week and you have your answer for you company. Our experiences might be different depending on what you support, what your users are like, what the companies policy's are and how they track tickets. E: For example, the company I work for pulls around 80-100 tickets a day with 10 first line engineers, with 3 more in training. We average around 8 a day as previously mentioned on first line. In my team, we actually tend to manage maybe one ticket per day per engineer, due to the tickets we get having 12 points on them, which end up being a mix of development requests, environment changes and fiddling with the software. A lot of our time is currently spent arguing with development on what is and isn't a feature too. dogstile fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 27, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 18:15
|
|
|
RE: improving help desk metrics When I was on helpdesk we would have hundreds ( thousands?) of tickets a day. The metrics used were: first call resolution, time spent in aftercall, ticket accuracy, schedule adherence. That was it. No time spent on the phone, no # of tickets. All the deskjockeys were then ranked daily by their metrics. The reward for being at the top was getting to choose your schedule for the next rotation. I liked how transparent the metrics were. But I'm glad I got the gently caress out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 19:04
|
|
|
Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:The metrics used were: first call resolution I wish that the ticketing software used at my company was good enough to figure out how many tickets had been submitted prior to me finally fixing an issue. Any metric that can't account for the following scenario is worthless: 8:00 AM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 8:11 AM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 8:43 AM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 9:27 AM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. User says they've been locked out multiple times. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 1:10 PM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. User says they've been locked out multiple times. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 2:10 PM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. User says they've been locked out multiple times. Account unlocked. (Ticket time 3 minutes) 3:10 PM User calls helpdesk for account lockout. User says they've been locked out multiple times. Pulled security logs from domain controller. Identified source of lockout. Logged out Remote Desktop connection that's apparently using expired credentials. (Ticket time 45 minutes) If you're only measuring on ticket time, the morning shift guys look like superstars and the tech who came in at 3 looks like an idiot for taking 45 minutes to unlock an account, despite the fact that she actually fixed the problem and the user is actually able to get some work done now. I think this'd be a good scenario to look at when choosing ticketing software as well. If you can't use the software to identify a pattern like this, you need better software.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 19:46
|
|
|
AutoArgus posted:Dick, is this the job that was your escape to the promised land after.. Tony was it? From back in The Bad Times. Yes, and in all fairness this job was fine for the first 2.5 years, which is longer than I spent working at the Tony place. I wasn't working too hard, had nice views out an actual window and ate free food. But from the beginning I knew there was an undercurrent of unpleasantness and as the company quickly expanded everything went to Hell in a handbasket. It's not the worst place I've worked, it's just disappointing and frustrating and at my age I've had enough of the same basic issue: bad bosses. I think back on my life and wonder how things would've turned out if I hadn't spent so much of it working for shitheels.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 19:51
|
|
|
Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:RE: improving help desk metrics I used to be on a tech support helpdesk and absolutely every single metric you could possibly imagine was recorded and critiqued. No matter how well you did there was always room for improvement which was just excruciating aggravating. Curious, to those that have had positions like this did you get to see your own statistics? I was never told why but we weren't allowed to anyone's, an average or even our own. Maybe a manager can chime in, is there a good reason for this? I would have like to have known how well I was performing...
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 20:06
|
|
|
I actually got to see mine. My managers thought it'd be motivating for us all. What actually happened is that we saw how many of the tickets that we fixed being credited to other teams due to the system and everyone just got pissy at it instead. It's probably better that you don't see your metrics sometimes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 20:11
|
|
|
Tab8715 posted:Maybe a manager can chime in, is there a good reason for this? Proactive Butthurt Mitigation.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 20:34
|
|
|
Tab8715 posted:I used to be on a tech support helpdesk and absolutely every single metric you could possibly imagine was recorded and critiqued. No matter how well you did there was always room for improvement which was just excruciating aggravating. The entire rank and metrics complete with names was on a daily updated site that all could see. That's what I meant by transparency. I liked it. You could see who was at the top and talk to them about how to improve (they were always helpful to me at least). You could see where you were falling behind and focus on that metric. Combined with the idea that the quarterly schedule was chosen based on rank, if you wanted a certain schedule then you tried to be higher ranked. Alot if people didn't like it but oh loving well. It was a game with clear rules that you learned to play, which was exactly what was needed to meet sla's.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 20:50
|
|
|
Auuuuuuughh as much as I enjoy working on the dark side as a consultant (Seriously, its great, except for these days), the days where a client decides that You Are The Problem (TM) and everyone involved gets defensive and reaches for their CYA documentation just suck out loud. Everything gets smoothed out in the end but every time a day gets filled with meetings to figure out what the hell just happened I get flashbacks of helpdesk days.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 21:07
|
|
|
Sarcasmatron posted:Proactive Butthurt Mitigation. Butthurt from what? I could see not sharing everyone's statistics but not be able to my own? Eh... EDIT - Personally, I kind of feel it would be wise to run your call center like Moneyball. Tech's should see their stats, know what they're good at where there's room for improvement. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Aug 27, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 21:11
|
|
|
AutoArgus posted:Auuuuuuughh as much as I enjoy working on the dark side as a consultant (Seriously, its great, except for these days), the days where a client decides that You Are The Problem (TM) and everyone involved gets defensive and reaches for their CYA documentation just suck out loud. Everything gets smoothed out in the end but every time a day gets filled with meetings to figure out what the hell just happened I get flashbacks of helpdesk days. You're easier to blame and easier to get rid of. Everyone wins! Except you.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 21:15
|
|
|
Finally got a job offer today! My current company is outsourcing it's IT and all the staff are being offered jobs with the outsourcing mob. But anyway... yay. Same $$$, going from a job title of Senior Sys Eng to Sys Eng, but apparently "we don't have seniors" so that won't change. And going from in-house IT, back into the consulting world. I asked the transition manager "How will I know that I'm better than (other employee) if we have the same job title?" He replied with "Jousting in the hallways". Which is something I can get behind.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 08:03
|
|
|
Congratulations on your job! Also that is a hilarious response to a hilarious question. And to put your mind at ease...Loten posted:going from a job title of Senior Sys Eng to Sys Eng, but apparently "we don't have seniors" so that won't change --- edit: My own entertainment for myself. I was walking a new guy through a process which required him to send information to one of our vendors, so I gave him 4 pieces of information to tell the vendor, but item #1 was: 1. You're new, stupid, and doing only what MC Fruit Stripe told you to do. I slay me. MC Fruit Stripe fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Aug 28, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 09:08
|
|
|
I have two ex-coworkers, both were super incompetent and had titles of "wireless admin". After they left they both changed their resume so all of their previous jobs, including this one, had senior as a suffix. Only reason we know is both accidentally applied months later to positions at our company through recruitment companies
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 14:11
|
|
|
My job title contained Senior since I left University when I was 22 which shows how it is thrown about just like how Director is thrown about for anyone who would have been a manager years ago.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 14:16
|
|
|
Master Builder 
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 15:15
|
|
|
wrong thread
whaam fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 28, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 16:23
|
|
|
whaam posted:I don't see an enterprise networking thread just the home one so I'll ask here I guess. The Cisco thread is kind of the de facto enterprise networking thread at this point.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 16:32
|
|
|
Docjowles posted:The Cisco thread is kind of the de facto enterprise networking thread at this point. My bad, was searching for "network" in the titles and glazed right over that, thanks.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 16:49
|
|
|
.
Methanar fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Aug 6, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 17:37
|
|
|
Holy poo poo I wish I was that focused and motivated when I was 17
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 17:46
|
|
|
When I was 17 I was still in grade 11, what the gently caress Alberta? Did you skip a grade dude? You seem a little young to be absolutely sure this is what you want to do.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 17:47
|
|
|
You also seem a little young to be living in a shack with 4 dudes that don't speak your language. Why? Ignore the Chinese part, but a young kid living anywhere with a bunch of people that don't speak his language is probably going to get taken advantage of in some way, shape, or form.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 18:09
|
|
|
CLAM DOWN posted:When I was 17 I was still in grade 11, what the gently caress Alberta? Did you skip a grade dude? You seem a little young to be absolutely sure this is what you want to do. In the United States it isn't uncommon to graduate when you are 17, generally the cut-off is November 30th to determine what age you have to be when you start school.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 18:10
|
|
|
.
Methanar fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Aug 6, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 18:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 19:51 |
|
|
Methanar posted:Alright I need some reassurance here that I haven't hosed up. A 4-year degree from a university in something like 'Information Systems' or 'Computer Science' is much, much better than a 2 year 'IT', 'networking', or 'security' degree. BUT That two year degree can be a foot in the door at a decent company for a decent wage, and you seem pretty motivated and knowledgeable already, so you should do just fine.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 18:12
|
|