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Velcro is more expensive than making sure your cabling crews have cutters. Not saying I never arced a cabinet during a decom, just saying I never arced one that didn't deserve it (looking at you 7u Compaq servers).
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Sep 18, 2014 21:32
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Sickening posted:Will this piece of equipment/wire ever move again? Yes? Then use velcro, no zip ties. All equipment/wire is going to move again. Also if I slip and cut one of these wires, is there enough voltage flowing through them to kill me? If so, gently caress you if you zip tie it. These are also home clients, so I'm using scissors to remove them, not snips.
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Sep 18, 2014 21:36
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Zip ties are fine for holding stuff down in trays or management (poo poo on the back of the patch panels that goes off to floor ports). For all the patching then yeah gently caress you use velcro.
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Sep 18, 2014 21:52
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JosephSkunk posted:Velcro is more expensive than making sure your cabling crews have cutters. Not saying I never arced a cabinet during a decom, just saying I never arced one that didn't deserve it (looking at you 7u Compaq servers). First off, if used properly the Xcelite shears will snip the ends of zipties clean into the lock. If there are nubs, it means whoever was cutting the ends was either using scissors like a dumb loving shithead or they weren't making the small amount of effort to make sure the shears are fully flush with the top of the ziptie lock before cutting. These are the shears I mean. If you don't have these and you use zipties regularly, well you're doing it wrong. Also, arced a cabinet? Are you loving serious? You think it's just a fact of life in IT that sometimes you'll cut into a live AC wire? (Why are these cabinets still plugged in anyway if you're decomming them?) Did you learn IT at JoeBob's Networkin' & Grits Skool? Secondly, if you get the crappy Monoprice velcro rather than the good name brand stuff, it's cheap as poo poo, and frankly other than being a little rougher and not as flexible, it'll hold cables just as well. The labor cost for dealing with zipties later (which you will have to do, because all cables will need to be moved eventually and always sooner than you expect) far outweighs the extra upfront cost for Velcro. Snipping zipties, adding the new cable or removing old cables, then reapplying zipties and snipping the end of the new ziptie as opposed to "barely open Velcro, insert cable, close Velcro". If you're doing a long run the time difference is even more absurd. The only thing I ziptie is the supply cables for UPS', because those tend not to be replaced all that often and the cables themselves are big and heavy so Velcro isn't as good at managing them. Ziptying cables in the back of patch panels is also acceptable though frankly I've seen cases where often enough new patches needed to be added because the office expanded or whatever and they hadn't planned ahead, so putting velcro there is not a bad idea. But yeah, zipties in regular use in cabling? Please get hosed.
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Sep 18, 2014 22:32
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JosephSkunk posted:What in THE hell boy. You use zip ties on everything not network, and use velcro for network. You also trim that poo poo down, and any DC tech worth his salt knows to be careful for those nubs, as they should be EVERYWHERE. It's you. You are the reason this job makes me bleed. 
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Sep 18, 2014 22:46
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So while I'm elbow deep in some machine renaming / IP configuration for one of our sites I generally have someone from the site on the phone with me. I have a nice little stereo headset for longer calls so I don't kink my neck. My conversation with the black plastic on my head and purposeful clicking and typing was not a strong enough context clue that I may in fact be busy, but this did not stop the shambling corpse of our oldest Accounts Payable rep from rapping her cold boney finger across my cubicle wall to get my attention and proceed to explain in one dust-menthol flavored breath that her keyboard was broken. Mind you, I can multitask with the best of them, but I'm going to finish my technical and -production related- tasks before I go play Help Desk monkey because nobody else could be bothered. Once I arrived at her desk, I asked her to demonstrate the errors. There were none. She lurched forward in anger and spat on the screen in anger. The computer had made her a liar by all counts. She says all of the characters had little dots over them, and that it was in some weird language. Either way, it wasn't doing it now so I took my leave. As I'm exiting and about 15 feet away she cries out, "Thanks for coming up to see my computer, look like you could use a little exercise today anyway. Thanks Slightpirate's_coworker's_name. Now, I'm a larger gentleman. I dress for my bodytype and I haven't let anyone really get under my skin with fat commentary in years. Also, I know that she probably meant "thanks for helping, aren't you glad you could get away from your desk for a bit?" but she didn't say that. She made a rude comment that caught me off guard and then called me the wrong name. How rude.
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Sep 18, 2014 23:00
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Sounds like she was the victim of a confirmed exploit kit infection (grrr drive by downloads from redirects!) that due to a zero day of which there is no patch available yet her machine was confirmed as sending C2 server traffic calling back to an as of yet unidentified throwaway Russian domain. Her PC must be wiped at once. Here's a 3 year old loaner laptop. We'll have it back by Monda...Wednesday.
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Sep 18, 2014 23:21
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Ya'll need to be more assertive. Someone calls you by the wrong name? Correct them.
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Sep 19, 2014 00:14
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Potato Alley posted:Also, arced a cabinet? Are you loving serious? You think it's just a fact of life in IT that sometimes you'll cut into a live AC wire? (Why are these cabinets still plugged in anyway if you're decomming them?) Did you learn IT at JoeBob's Networkin' & Grits Skool? I'll do my best  OK I may have been a little flip for the fun of it. I've been working for a rather large corporation in IT for a while now, and in our prettiest production DC (when i worked there a few years ago) the cable policy was as I stated, zip ties for non-network, velcro for network. And yes, my hands would often bleed from being threaded into places where I couldn't see that had zip-tie-spikes all over. All flippancy aside, it would have been nice of they used velcro, but ties were also used in a lot of places where velcro of the standard width would not have fit (they had VERY exacting standards at this place). The only cabinet I've ever had an electrical incident had a huge Compaq POS that, instead of an industrial power cable, was cabled to power with the kind of electrical cable that would normally go to a lamp or something like that. It had been zip-tied so tight that the zip tie was cutting into the insulation, and there wasn't room for my cutters to slip underneath. I tried twisting the zip-tie slightly to make enough room to get a box-cutter in at least, and the twisting was evidently enough to finish cutting through the insulation. Huge flash, sparks everywhere, lost all servers in the rack whose power wasn't striped (this was an old rack badly cabled). Was this last paragraph in my defense? Hell no, I made a mistake and I won't make it again. I still have a pair of melted snips at home. Our decom processes were far too tight for us to remove power cabling beforehand, at least from the PDU. We were only allowed to remove the server, then remove cabling afterwards. Keeps accidents down  edit: Just noticed that you recommended the same snips that I was using a lot of the time. I had several pairs depending on whether or not someone "borrowed" them, fortunately those weren't the pair I melted. Nice choice! JosephSkunk fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 02:12
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slightpirate posted:look like you could use a little exercise today anyway That is so... juvenile. Wow. In the rare instance I get poo poo from someone in the workplace, my favorite reply is "Don't worry I can be professional enough for the both of us" with a cheery grin. Frankly I'd find a way to mention the crap she gave you to your direct report, given her attitude already it might be enough for someone to help her out the door. She's got to have enemies already with the way she sounds.
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Sep 19, 2014 02:23
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EoRaptor posted:That claim doesn't jive with Adobe pricing at all. Creative Cloud licenses are infinitely transferable, so it could be moved to someone else with about 3 mouse clicks. They are also billed monthly, and can be cancelled at any time, even if you signed up for the annual plan, so the only cost is the months billed and the backdated price difference between the annual and monthly rate. He's pulling numbers out of his rear end or your reseller is ripping you off. That is interesting, I didn't know it was monthly. I figured we could let someone else use it if needed--although not a lot of people use Design stuff where I work. I think it's in the low single digits--so it wouldn't necessarily be totally "wasted", although that's certainly not an ideal solution.
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Sep 19, 2014 02:43
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You also do still have the option to buy a single license for a lump sum.
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Sep 19, 2014 03:14
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My Chinese coworkers and their inability to communicate, at all. I'm not racist and I consider a few of these guys my friends, but holy gently caress are they not bright and love to work in their silos. Of our entire team (20+ people in the U.S. and China) I would say ONE of these guys would be able to find a job in the U.S. on their own. Long story short, a higher-ups personal development VM went offline two days ago on our office VMware environment, with little or no fan fare. First I heard about it was when our our Chinese IT Manager asked me if it was possible to export a VM as an OVA, and transfer it onto a standalone ESXi server because doing this with VMware Converter is apparently too hard. This would also be moving the VM from my monitored vSphere Enterprise environment onto a standalone server that the IT guy set up to host gently caress-knows-what. He didn't size it, he didn't scope the requirements, he just heard "shits down" and thought "Lets try moving the VM to different hardware that I just built myself and forgo any documentation as to where this VM actually lives now. Boy I sure hope it doesn't go down again." Come today I finally get more details as to what is really going on with this VM. Turns out the filesystem went read only. The Chinese Network Manager's first reaction? The SAN is down. The SAN that hosts our entire dev/qa environment MUST be down because this guys VM is in a read only state. gently caress me sideways. It took multiple email threads trying to find out what the gently caress was actually going on with this server to get more information about the problem. I was finally able to identify it (because gently caress standard naming conventions) and open a console window to view a bunch of ext3 filesystem dirty messages. Trying to log on..hahaha no, I (as the primary Linux/Windows/VMware sysadmin) don't get logins on this box, so I can't loving fix it. So the dude is stuck with his hosed up VM until someone from China can log in and troubleshoot it. gently caress my life, I want to quit this company so bad.
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Sep 19, 2014 04:17
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Not IT related, but airport shutdowns piss me off. One guy goes into an terminal so you shut it down for three hours and force everyone to leave so 1000 cops can fail to find him? It's not like I wanted to go to Denver or anything.
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Sep 19, 2014 05:28
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JosephSkunk posted:oddly sensible post OK, your calm and reasoned response to my goony aspergers post has made me realize it was a rather blithering post about a not-all-that-important-in-the-grand-scheme subject. Apologies for the unnecessary ad hominems. However, it's still my contention that zipties are almost never the better choice. I think you can make things look prettier with zipties, because they're far more controlling, so to speak, than velcro (they cinch tighter). However from a manageability perspective redoing a cable run that has zipties is a huge pain, whereas as I said adding something to Velcro is a simple operation that doesn't need tools. As far as width, they do make thinner Velcro, although I don't think it goes any narrower than 0.5", whereas a ziptie is obviously more like 1/8". But I guess I would try to avoid having a situation where I couldn't thread Velcro in. I've also built and used combination Velcro-zipties, where you make two slits in a strip of Velcro near the middle, and then thread a ziptie through at right angles. The ziptie goes through the Velcro, then around something solid, or something that has small holes, and cinches tight, and then you put the cables in the Velcro. This is especially useful for the back of racks if you have nothing to cinch cables to but the square rack holes, since the zipties will go through those and Velcro wont. I'm still a little surprised that you wouldn't at least unplug servers at the server end before getting a snipper anywhere near them? Still the danger of cutting into the cable, but at least it wouldn't fry the server. quote:The only cabinet I've ever had an electrical incident had a huge Compaq POS that, instead of an industrial power cable, was cabled to power with the kind of electrical cable that would normally go to a lamp or something like that.  Holy poo poo, this is horrifying. I can't say in those circumstances then I blame you at all - that's absurd, and I probably would have done the same in terms of twisting the cable to get snippers in.
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Sep 19, 2014 06:00
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Wicaeed posted:My Chinese coworkers and their inability to communicate, at all. It's interesting how I can empathize, albeit for a different reason. I work with people with thick accents from from India, Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia, the UK, Southern US, and South America, and don't have any particular problems, but everyone from China I meet has an English accent I just can't parse around 25% of the time.
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Sep 19, 2014 06:00
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My Chinese coworker is practically unintelligible, and is also the smartest guy in the building, so I've got two reasons to listen carefully when he speaks.
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Sep 19, 2014 07:03
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Ah language/accent barriers. The reason why I love live chat. The problem I usually find with overseas support is when they just aren't trained on the product properly or haven't even seen it, and are operating from scripts. Basically they are a barrier (often with time consuming accent differences) between me and someone's online knowledgebase. Unfortunately that tends to get them a reputation for being thicko foreigners when really they're no less intelligent than anyone else, it's the idiots at our end who don't see the value in providing proper support and just pick the cheapest minimum thing they can do. Which is to give some scripts to someone in a developing country or one with a much weaker economy, who they don't have to pay much. mewse posted:Rebuilding your VPS is a good exercise to make sure you have all your backups in order Yep, I agree with that. It's always a very useful exercise and also good for refreshing the documentation. Honestly it'd been a lot easier if they'd just let us spin up another virtual box, give us 30 days to transfer then shut down the old one though? Technically that's exactly what they're doing but it has to be done as a new contract (and the reason is obvious, the price has gone up). Fair play to them, they want to put up the price if we want a new virtual box (despite it being virtual and quite possibly on the same host hardware), business is business. But business being business that also means we have to get quotes from multiple suppliers and compare reviews etc as it's a new contract with a price increase. That's company policy. I was just really venting at having more work to do evaluating suppliers  Anyway, it's been interesting so far, I do want to leave them now. I sent in a ticket to accounts+billing asking to cancel and explaining the situation, but that we'd certainly still be considering them for renewal, we just need to make sure we're free to choose by securing a cancellation (they have a minimum notice period of 30 days before the next annual invoice). This ticket got "escalated to the relevant department" and ignored. 2 days later I called them to chase it, but got told they couldn't handle or discuss cancellations over the phone and it MUST be via the ticket system Fair enough they need a written paper trail. So I bumped the ticket asking if it can be acknowledged Another day, still ignored (conveniently, they answer all other tickets within an hour or so) There's no way to delete the credit card details, so at worst case we may have to block the card. Sorry but I have a very minimal tolerance (pretty much zero) for companies that make cancellation difficult. I know it's stretching reasonableness a little, but dealing with "Three" made me permanently loathe this kind of poo poo. Retain your customers by making them want to stay, not by making it a pain in the arse for them to leave. Even if it's not on purpose then answer your bloody tickets in a reasonable time! Or chase it up for me instead of dismissing me when I'm chasing it on the phone. Stuff 'em - I just got a purchase order signed for a new VPS with a new supplier. They also use SSD, are a little bit cheaper, and get better reviews. GargleBlaster fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 10:23
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I'd be tempted to update the ticket with that info, but I bet they'd be even more assholish after that.
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Sep 19, 2014 12:14
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Don't be afraid to leverage social media to complain about how hard it is to cancel service.
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Sep 19, 2014 13:05
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Every two weeks I send an all-staff email warning about phishing, with examples. Sent the most recent one three days ago. Last night I get an email at 1215am from the CEO forwarding an obvious phishing email about his Apple ID. Even though the grammar is terrible and it says "Apple UK" and we're in loving California he logged in to their fake website and then backed out. Here's the very first line of the email: This email is to to inform you we regret to announce you that your iCloud and Apple Account has been temporarily frozen until you can confirm your iCloud/Apple details. 
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Sep 19, 2014 14:23
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User awareness only helps when they need to be afraid of reprimand should they gently caress up and disclose data. A buddy works at a place where they have "The Gulag". Essentially Red Team goes around trying to get people to gently caress up and when they do they have to go to companies security mandatory I am a stupid idiot class. Enough of those and I imagine your employment status changes.
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Sep 19, 2014 14:43
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Dick Trauma posted:Every two weeks I send an all-staff email warning about phishing, with examples. Sent the most recent one three days ago. Last night I get an email at 1215am from the CEO forwarding an obvious phishing email about his Apple ID. Even though the grammar is terrible and it says "Apple UK" and we're in loving California he logged in to their fake website and then backed out. I like to think that the typically bad grammar in phishing emails is there on purpose to allow the scammers to sleep well at night knowing that they're only thinning the herd by hurting stupid people.
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Sep 19, 2014 14:46
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internet jerk posted:User awareness only helps when they need to be afraid of reprimand should they gently caress up and disclose data. A buddy works at a place where they have "The Gulag". Essentially Red Team goes around trying to get people to gently caress up and when they do they have to go to companies security mandatory I am a stupid idiot class. Enough of those and I imagine your employment status changes. They have a people employed whose sole job is to get people to commit security violations? I am pretty sure that sounds like an annoying place to work.
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Sep 19, 2014 14:49
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baquerd posted:I like to think that the typically bad grammar in phishing emails is there on purpose to allow the scammers to sleep well at night knowing that they're only thinning the herd by hurting stupid people. There is the theory that they deliberately make them look obvious on the grounds that only the truly stupid will fall for them. As opposed to the mildy-stupid, who will fall for a well-written one at the beginning, but get wise before they get to the point of giving away money - which wastes the scammer's time. I am not sure if I agree that this is deliberate, rather than a happy coincidence, but I am sure there is a research paper in there somewhere.
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Sep 19, 2014 14:58
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Sickening posted:They have a people employed whose sole job is to get people to commit security violations? I am pretty sure that sounds like an annoying place to work. It's common in places where security actually matters. A lot of major US defense contractors get hit by serious, no-poo poo probable state actor hacking attempts literally daily. Any place that requires a clearance is likely to have a honeypot squad.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:22
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Its not even that hard to not breach protocol. Read what you shouldn't do, don't do those things. Actually look at an email and read it before blindly clicking on that link. Can't see it being that annoying.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:29
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poo poo that pisses me off: Employers blowing smoke up my rear end about the company's future and funding. It appears that today we may shut down and I'm suddenly unemployed. My first inkling something was wrong was on Monday when I didn't get paid. (This is a little bit pre-emptive, I really don't know what's going on, but I'm going to get called into the boardroom at some point today and be told. The way I see it, there's a 1/10 chance everything will be fine. 4/10 chance that we merge with another company and have to move to an office that would mean 3+ hours of commuting for me. 5/10 that we just shut down and I'm poo poo out of luck.)
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Sep 19, 2014 15:32
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teethgrinder posted:poo poo that pisses me off: Not getting paid is a serious red flag. Me not getting paid outside of some kind of technical error means I don't show up to work the next day until its resolved.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:35
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dogstile posted:Its not even that hard to not breach protocol. Read what you shouldn't do, don't do those things. Actually look at an email and read it before blindly clicking on that link. Except you add the human element and the thing that looks so good on paper suddenly can be headache. Its probably my twisted view on things because I lack basically any respect for security concentrated jobs due to me never actually working with one that was remotely competent. I am looking forward to the day where I do though.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:40
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Sickening posted:Except you add the human element and the thing that looks so good on paper suddenly can be headache. Its probably my twisted view on things because I lack basically any respect for security concentrated jobs due to me never actually working with one that was remotely competent. I am looking forward to the day where I do though. Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in?
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Sep 19, 2014 15:43
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in? I work for a large clothing manufacturer. I have previously worked for a fortune 500, financial lender, data analytics, and communications company.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:46
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Sickening posted:Not getting paid is a serious red flag. Me not getting paid outside of some kind of technical error means I don't show up to work the next day until its resolved. There have been issues prior with funding and it's always worked out in a satisfactory manner, but it looks like this is it.
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Sep 19, 2014 15:50
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Sickening posted:Except you add the human element and the thing that looks so good on paper suddenly can be headache. Its probably my twisted view on things because I lack basically any respect for security concentrated jobs due to me never actually working with one that was remotely competent. I am looking forward to the day where I do though. It's probably you dude. A place that requires actual security is probably going to annoy everyone a little, I just don't see it as being that big of a deal. No more annoying than "don't plug in your drat memory sticks" or "hand in your phone before you go into this site".
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Sep 19, 2014 16:34
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Our product was sold to a client with about 200 users last year, it works but just barely, it can be very sluggish and have timeout issues during the busy times of the year. The sales team is doing a demo for a 2000 user client today.
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Sep 19, 2014 16:48
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spog posted:I am sure there is a research paper in there somewhere. Microsoft Research have you covered
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Sep 19, 2014 17:29
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I love an out of control project. We currently have a $100k proposal for a tech refresh. I don't believe the environment we're buying this equipment for needs anywhere near what we're throwing at it. I'd probably spend $40k compared to the $100k which is getting thrown around. This is not because I believe things need to be done cheaply, I'd just much rather use this money elsewhere, rather than drastically overallocate resources into an environment which will never use it. Just had a half hour phone call about the purchase - we started at $100k, and now it's up to $150k. This has somehow become MORE expensive. 
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Sep 19, 2014 17:30
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baquerd posted:It's interesting how I can empathize, albeit for a different reason. I work with people with thick accents from from India, Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia, the UK, Southern US, and South America, and don't have any particular problems, but everyone from China I meet has an English accent I just can't parse around 25% of the time. I'd love it if someone found some equivalent thread somewhere where Chinese/Indian/Filipino people were bitching about English speakers just to see what bothered them. Though it'd probably just be "ugh their noses are so big that is so gross."
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Sep 19, 2014 18:04
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Last night we replaced a server at one of our nearby sites. The old one was left there, but the name or IP address weren't changed. If people needed to pull data off of it, there's external drives available. Sysadmins had repeated several times to everyone that if anyone needs anything off of the old server, do not plug it into the network. This morning, boss goes over to that site to do something, heard some of the users needed stuff off the old server, so he plugs it in and turns it on. Then he got confused when poo poo broke.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:28
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Potato Alley posted:I'm still a little surprised that you wouldn't at least unplug servers at the server end before getting a snipper anywhere near them? Still the danger of cutting into the cable, but at least it wouldn't fry the server. At this place, they employ a lot of people to do work who don't know anything else, and govern them by very tight process instead of expecting them to know anything. You can picture each and every mishap that's happened in the past by the set of current processes that we were governed by. I imagine that a guy once unplugged the wrong cable and that's all it took. I agree overall that velcro on everything is nicer for the tech doing the rack/cable work, but economies of large enough scale don't really do a lot of moving of assets, and we work on a scale few match. Those racks sure look pretty when done "just so", with their power cables micro-managed to a T and SCSI cabling (yes I'm old) in a giant fan spanning the back of the cabinet. I like to try and imagine the ridiculous mishap that resulted in the "SCSI rainbow" (just what it sounds like) covering the back of our cabinets that include drive bays.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:50
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