Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

My god, just suck it up! Do it a few times, make your boss happy. Smile and nod. Break out of the stereotype.

Make sure to wash first


Listen to Dr. A. Tobacco.

FISHMANPET posted:

Yeah I'm not even supposed to be doing user support, I built everything from scratch in that department 5 years ago (while on help desk, everything is stupid) and now my replacement is on a 2 month vacation so they've slotted me back in. I'm less than thrilled. After that I get to "run" (nobody knows what that means yet) another help desk while the person that "runs" it now goes on maternity leave.

Hopefully I'll be able to :yotg: before even this 2 month sentence is up.

What's your actual position in this company (that owns multiple Help Desks with no set plan for management coverage in any)?

Two months of PTO. This might be an unpopular opinion but unless it's due to health issues or something on that level then eight weeks paid time off being taken all at the same time is bullshit.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?

internet jerk posted:

Two months of PTO. This might be an unpopular opinion but unless it's due to health issues or something on that level then eight weeks paid time off being taken all at the same time is bullshit.

I kind of agree, there was a guy who skipped out for a month just after a new client was installed, leaving me to handle the 250 tickets or so they raised in a few days (sometimes I wonder what our trainers and field techs are doing).

Two months and i'm fairly sure I would have started etching "die" over and over again into my desk.

psydude
Apr 1, 2008

Heartache is powerful, but democracy is *subtle*.
poo poo, if you're sick enough that you need to use 8 weeks of PTO then your ST disability insurance should be kicking in instead.

Roargasm
Oct 21, 2010

Hate to sound sleazy
But tease me
I don't want it if it's that easy
Told a user that we couldn't support the printer he found because it was too old and way out of scope. Came in this morning and found this in my mailbox :tipshat:




Dark Helmut
Jul 24, 2004

All growns up
You got served.

Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

That's adorable. Can you imagine the satisfaction felt as he placed it down on your desk in your mailbox? :smuggo:

Bloodborne fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Oct 3, 2014

Hughmoris
Apr 21, 2007
Let's go to the abyss!

Roargasm posted:

Told a user that we couldn't support the printer he found because it was too old and way out of scope. Came in this morning and found this in my mailbox :tipshat:






You know he is strutting around his coworkers, talking about how he straight up served the IT guy.

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?
Put it on his desk and set it on fire. (Don't actually do this)

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Tell him you only use Energy Star-certified printers and be done with it.

Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

Print this page out and put it in his mailbox. Highlight the price.

http://www.amazon.com/Canon-Office-Products-IP2820-Printer/dp/B00HM0IV8E/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1412345185&sr=8-3&keywords=printer

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
We don't have any "help desks" because departmental help desks are heavily discouraged by central IT, but we have 3 rooms where IT people sit and answer calls and help people that walk in. My current role is "employee" and we're loath to describe it any farther than that, but I'm probably closest to some kind of senior Windows admin. I've been told that when our current lead Windows admin retires I'm a lock for his job. He retires in 8 years.

Really everything is hosed and I'm in a department of people who, for the most part, would be unemployable if they didn't work here. I need to get out before my skills atrophy and I end up stuck as well.

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy

Inkjet huh?

Edit: I just joined a startup. As in, NEW company, and all of their printers are inkjets :facepalm:

I'll be phasing those out immediately.

Orcs and Ostriches
Aug 26, 2010


The Great Twist

Roargasm posted:

Told a user that we couldn't support the printer he found because it was too old and way out of scope. Came in this morning and found this in my mailbox :tipshat:






I have a Windows 95 install disk if you want to flatten his machine (or give him an old Pentium) so he can have a supported OS.

Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

FISHMANPET posted:

we have 3 rooms where IT people sit and answer calls and help people that walk in.

My current role is "employee" and we're loath to describe it any farther than that

That is literally a Help Desk. What's the function called if not a Help Desk? Discouraged by central IT?

Employee is a status not a role, do you not have a grading system or titles or anything that gives you a job code/classification? Systems Administration Adviser/Representative/Principle/Penguin/etc. It sounds like your work environment is run by clowns.

Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

Zero VGS posted:

Inkjet huh?

Edit: I just joined a startup. As in, NEW company, and all of their printers are inkjets :facepalm:

I'll be phasing those out immediately.

Dudes trying to push a printer from 1743 on IT to support. For 30 bucks I think the smug in question would be alright with it.

DrAlexanderTobacco
Jun 11, 2012

Help me find my true dharma

FISHMANPET posted:

We don't have any "help desks" because departmental help desks are heavily discouraged by central IT, but we have 3 rooms where IT people sit and answer calls and help people that walk in. My current role is "employee" and we're loath to describe it any farther than that, but I'm probably closest to some kind of senior Windows admin. I've been told that when our current lead Windows admin retires I'm a lock for his job. He retires in 8 years.

Really everything is hosed and I'm in a department of people who, for the most part, would be unemployable if they didn't work here. I need to get out before my skills atrophy and I end up stuck as well.

If you don't get up from your throne and speak to that person who's ticket you're working on, your muscles will prob. atrophy too

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

internet jerk posted:

That is literally a Help Desk. What's the function called if not a Help Desk? Discouraged by central IT?

Employee is a status not a role, do you not have a grading system or titles or anything that gives you a job code/classification? Systems Administration Adviser/Representative/Principle/Penguin/etc. It sounds like your work environment is run by clowns.

In title I'm a Systems Admin I, which means I need help wiping my own rear end. In practice I'm like a level III, but that's all just arbitrary anyway.

I work at University, and University IT is trying to centralize help desks. My department IT director, who recently got promoted to college IT directory (hierarchy goes University > College > Department) thinks that we should keep everything to ourselves. So in political terms we don't run a helpdesk. Everything is run by clowns.

Bloodborne
Sep 24, 2008

Godspeed sir. Keep your options open which I'm sure you already know.

In other news I don't even know why I pick up calls from external numbers at my desk anymore. It's always always always some vendor cold call because I downloaded a whitepaper that one time.

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy
I'm still figuring out how to build the network at my new job and for once I actually have too many options.

200 laptops all on a workgroup, they use Office365 and salesforce and that's it. They're scaling up very quickly. I want to put them on Active Directory with Spiceworks and folder redirection to a file server, at a minimum.

On the other hand, this is a sales company so I absolutely need top availability, if I have the DC go down or for whatever reason people can't complete login I'm as good as fired.

Without breaking the bank, how can I build a super-reliable, redundant domain? I have no server hardware yet, I can probably spend 100k if my case is good enough for it but that might be overkill. We own Microsoft Azure and some VM monitoring software but not much else.

The way I did things before was to get two identical hardware servers, raid 1+0 SSD's, dual power supplies with dual UPS on both, maybe even a net appliance with dual uplinks on two different ISPs so even if one goes down we're still in the game. Does anyone know if Windows 2012 Server with Hyper-V would save me some money over VMware at this scale?

On the AD side it'd be swell if Azure could actually do GPO/LDAP, it seems worthless without it. Are they planning it at any point or is it not workable on a technical level?

I feel like I need a crash course and I probably shouldn't be asking the forums to do what is probably a consultant's job. Are there any kind of smart, unbiased consultants I can track down to ask this stuff?

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

If you don't get up from your throne and speak to that person who's ticket you're working on, your muscles will prob. atrophy too

My new job has an open seating arrangement, and a pullup bar. So the whole userbase gets to watch me bang out 20 pullups at a time. They'll think twice before doing something stupid :black101:

Feral Bueller
Apr 23, 2004

Fun is important.
Nap Ghost

FISHMANPET posted:

I have no doubt they would love it. They'd also love it if their meal was free, but that doesn't mean they should do it. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. And I'm sure at least one person would say "hey why aren't you cooking my meal instead of telling me it's going to take longer?"

To extend the analogy, there are a lot of busboys who think that they're chefs.

BigPaddy
Jun 30, 2008

That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.


EoRaptor posted:

we just need to rank code auditing as a much more valuable part of our day to day expenses than it is now.

It would be nice to get people to understand that I need to estimate for testing and some time to cover rework first. "Oh but it will work first time I am sure" no marketing/sales poo poo head, it won't, because you can't find 10 minutes to actually tell me what it is you want beyond some vague headline you can sell to your manager to get your bonus.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Obviously you guys don't know me so I could be making all this poo poo up, but I am the lead sysadmin for this group (in that I actually do sysadmin stuff, we're currently engineering a domain migration), and essentially the number 2 Windows guy on staff. I also have no problem communicating with staff and this office is mostly ladies in their 50s, and they all love me. I'll go up there to help them with stupid stuff because it is so close, and often that's easier than trying to fix something over the phone. But I'm not going to walk upstairs just to ask a simple question.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


If they have Office 365, what's the need for a local file server? I'd just setup SharePoint and through everything on it. Granted, this is a lot easier said than done...

What I would do, is setup a hybrid environment. Get your local DC up, get everyone on the domain, lock endpoints down with GPOs then get ADFS+SSO working between your local environment and O365.

I was under the impression you shouldn't or couldn't virtualize AD?

Good luck with the project, let us know how it goes. :)

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
AD can be virtualized no problem. And having the DCs be redundant is trivial, just install two, the protocol is designed to be robust, so as long as a client can reach one of them you'll be able to connect. But also I guess you can put an entire domain in Azure now? :yaycloud:

Dark Helmut
Jul 24, 2004

All growns up
In the time we've all spent going back and forth discussing your propensity to avoid human contact, you pretty much negated any time savings you would have had vs putting in face time with your user base. :smugdog:

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


FISHMANPET posted:

AD can be virtualized no problem. And having the DCs be redundant is trivial, just install two, the protocol is designed to be robust, so as long as a client can reach one of them you'll be able to connect. But also I guess you can put an entire domain in Azure now? :yaycloud:

Yea, someone earlier mentioned you have a Site2Site VPN to Azure AD however I'm sure you want something locally incase of any service interruptions. Internet connectivity or Azure.

Feral Bueller
Apr 23, 2004

Fun is important.
Nap Ghost

FISHMANPET posted:

Obviously you guys don't know me so I could be making all this poo poo up, but I am the lead sysadmin for this group (in that I actually do sysadmin stuff, we're currently engineering a domain migration), and essentially the number 2 Windows guy on staff. I also have no problem communicating with staff and this office is mostly ladies in their 50s, and they all love me. I'll go up there to help them with stupid stuff because it is so close, and often that's easier than trying to fix something over the phone. But I'm not going to walk upstairs just to ask a simple question.

In 2004, I was hired to provide Tier 3 operational support for the ISP of a top 10 research university - 2 FTEs and approximately 2 dozen part-time students providing Tier 1 and 2 support. One of the first major issues I solved was a cross-departmental issue that was impacting user email quotas. I solved this problem by getting up, walking approximately 25 feet, and having a 5 minute conversation with a developer in one of the other departments. The impact at the university level was significant, and enabled the university ISP to execute against several significant campus-wide initiatives impacting 300,000+ users.

I've been in management since 6 months after I started there, and I'm making 3x what I was making in 2004 and having a lot of fun in the process.

You can either choose to look at face time as a waste or an investment. YMMV.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Like I said early, it's not that that example is particularly egregious, it's just one of a million examples of the nonsense management. My boss seems to believe customer service is 100% giving the customer what they want in this instant, and never stepping in to say "hey maybe this would work better." He'd rather people come to us with their solutions for us to implement than their problems for us to solve. And that get's pretty demoralizing because you keep implementing these awful things that you know won't work but my bosses aren't even willing to entertain the idea that maybe we should be pushing for another way. Especially when everything blows up and "I told you so" isn't cutting it.

I don't subscribe to the idea that IT should just be a punching bag that anybody can dump their poo poo onto, but I seem to be the only one at work that thinks that way.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
And for the love of God I'm not saying I'm refusing to ever physically talk to a user, I'm saying there's no point for every single interaction with the user to be face to face.
E: Also I recognize the value of face time, I'm currently in a different building from the rest of our IT staff and it's a little isolating. We also recently rearranged our offices so the people that worked together more often were closer to each other (as opposed to the previous scheme of sit at whatever random desk is open when you get hired).

FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Oct 3, 2014

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy

Tab8715 posted:

If they have Office 365, what's the need for a local file server? I'd just setup SharePoint and through everything on it. Granted, this is a lot easier said than done...

What I would do, is setup a hybrid environment. Get your local DC up, get everyone on the domain, lock endpoints down with GPOs then get ADFS+SSO working between your local environment and O365.

That sounds about right, we have Sharepoint and Onedrive but people here still save everything to their C drives which I'd like to correct.

The Federation Services thing is new to me (Windows 2003 for the past 10 years) and sounds pretty awesome. I've set up SSO for Spiceworks before but having it for the few external sites we use would be pretty bitchin' and probably cut down on password reset tickets.

Tab8715 posted:

=
I was under the impression you shouldn't or couldn't virtualize AD?

I'm reading here that it can be done but it looks pretty ugly to me: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/virtualizing-active-directory-domain-controllers-general-best-practices.html

Tab8715 posted:

Yea, someone earlier mentioned you have a Site2Site VPN to Azure AD however I'm sure you want something locally incase of any service interruptions. Internet connectivity or Azure.

I can't make this up, apparently our remote office with programmers is 100% Mac, I guess they're on their own for the time being. I like how an exec told me "We don't need to worry about IT for them, they're programmers, they can fix all their own issues" :lol:

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD

Sarcasmatron posted:

In 2004, I was hired to provide Tier 3 operational support for the ISP of a top 10 research university - 2 FTEs and approximately 2 dozen part-time students providing Tier 1 and 2 support. One of the first major issues I solved was a cross-departmental issue that was impacting user email quotas. I solved this problem by getting up, walking approximately 25 feet, and having a 5 minute conversation with a developer in one of the other departments. The impact at the university level was significant, and enabled the university ISP to execute against several significant campus-wide initiatives impacting 300,000+ users.

I've been in management since 6 months after I started there, and I'm making 3x what I was making in 2004 and having a lot of fun in the process.

You can either choose to look at face time as a waste or an investment. YMMV.

This story has exactly zero bearing on what he is talking about but thanks for that

Roargasm
Oct 21, 2010

Hate to sound sleazy
But tease me
I don't want it if it's that easy
Uptime is not the selling point of cloud service and I don't think that's the game you want to get into in your shop. In the absence of a backup line, your ISP is now a single point a failure. If you want redundancy, build two physical DCs. Even if the servers are crappy and had a 1% chance of exploding every day, the chance that DC1 AND DC2 would explode on the same day would be .01%. Same deal with network adapters on VM hosts - having a fallback adapter reduces the chance of simultaneous failure by a huge amount. When you're building an IT environment, identify points in your system that can fail and build redundancy.

This also applies to the fact that you're about to make yourself the Everything guy at your company, and there's probably no redundancy for you either :o:

mayodreams
Jul 4, 2003


Hello darkness,
my old friend

Zero VGS posted:

The Federation Services thing is new to me (Windows 2003 for the past 10 years) and sounds pretty awesome. I've set up SSO for Spiceworks before but having it for the few external sites we use would be pretty bitchin' and probably cut down on password reset tickets.

I've done two O365 tenancies with ADFS here and it is really not hard to do.

Side point/rant:

I've decided I'm tired of this company's approach to running infrastructure into the ground, and I'm looking elsewhere.

I get a message from an internal recruiter for a place and job that looks really good. I respond back and we arrange an interview for this morning, and he/she asked that I complete the 'candidate cover sheet' with some bullshit questions like '3 things that make you tick' and my overall GPA. I gave an N/A for current compensation and 'negotiable' for desired range. She/he responds back that I need to provide the the compensation answers, so I gave a range that I am looking for, and declined to give my current pay.

I get a response that the interview is cancelled and 'good luck with my search'.

I was furious because I took time off to have an interview in quiet (I work in a cube farm so it is impossible for me to do this at the office) and I get blown off? I wrote the following reponse:

mayodreams posted:

Are you serious? My current compensation is personal information that is irrelevant to any conversation we were to have regarding a new opportunity at COMPANY.

I am extremely disappointed because out of the about 100 emails I've gotten this week this is the only one I've responded to because I was genuinely interested in the company. Thank you for wasting my time by requiring information upfront that immediately puts me at a disadvantage for the entire process. I guess I should take this as an indication of how COMPANY treats its employees.

Good luck in your search as well. I'm sure you will find an abundance of very qualified and intelligent senior level people who are willing to lay down at the outset.

I know it is snarky and angry, but what utter and complete bullshit.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Also set expectations. One of the labs I worked at for a while wanted 100% up time and I'm like "dude I can't guarantee 100% nor do you have the millions of dollars it takes to be able to even guarantee anything close to that."

BigPaddy
Jun 30, 2008

That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.


Roargasm posted:

Uptime is not the selling point of cloud service and I don't think that's the game you want to get into in your shop. In the absence of a backup line, your ISP is now a single point a failure. If you want redundancy, build two physical DCs. Even if the servers are crappy and had a 1% chance of exploding every day, the chance that DC1 AND DC2 would explode on the same day would be .01%. Same deal with network adapters on VM hosts - having a fallback adapter reduces the chance of simultaneous failure by a huge amount. When you're building an IT environment, identify points in your system that can fail and build redundancy.

This also applies to the fact that you're about to make yourself the Everything guy at your company, and there's probably no redundancy for you either :o:

That sounds like it costs more than the bare minimum possible to make things work. I am afraid I am going to reject your capital request and instead spend the money on nicer conference rooms and business cards for directors and execs.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Yes, you can visualize AD, just have multiple physical hosts and set affinity rules to keep your redundant DCs on different hosts, have an external time server to point everything to, and disable DRS for those VMs.

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy

NippleFloss posted:

Yes, you can visualize AD,

Now I want a bumper sticker that says Virtualize DCs

Richard Noggin
Jun 6, 2005
Redneck By Default

NippleFloss posted:

Yes, you can visualize AD, just have multiple physical hosts and set affinity rules to keep your redundant DCs on different hosts, have an external time server to point everything to, and disable DRS for those VMs.

In VMware-land, you can't have affinity (we're actually talking about anti-affinity here) without DRS, which means you're on at least Enterprise licensing.

high six
Feb 6, 2010
HUrray. I got an actual IT job. Help desk, yeah, but it is certainly better than delivering pizzas. Gonna start the Monday after next. At least this time I didn't rip the rear end of my pants at the interview.

Kinda nervous, too, since this will be my first "adult" job.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Zero VGS
Aug 16, 2002
ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE
Lipstick Apathy

high six posted:

HUrray. I got an actual IT job. Help desk, yeah, but it is certainly better than delivering pizzas. Gonna start the Monday after next. At least this time I didn't rip the rear end of my pants at the interview.

Kinda nervous, too, since this will be my first "adult" job.

Congrats, just be sure to watch your professionalism, especially over the phone. A lot of phone-support based helpdesks have a boss monitoring all the calls so if you're recorded saying something incriminating there's no wiggling out of it. I just watched a co-worker tell a joke about "what do you call Miss Piggy's douche? Hogwash" and while vaguely amusing it's not worth the risk of someone in earshot having you fired on the spot. If you have to check over your shoulders to tell a joke, leave it out of the workplace because it's a stupid reason to lose a job.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply