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Sheep posted:Depends what you want to be adminning. For Windows you'll probably want to head for the Microsoft certs, for Linux an RHCSA/RHCE wouldn't be a bad start, etc. I'm of the opinion that everyone in any sort of hands-on admin role should, if they don't have the cert itself, at least have knowledge roughly equivalent to what is required for the CCENT and probably parts of ICND2 as well. Thanks, what MS cert should I aim for first? And yes, dealing with users is part of the reason why I'm aiming to go more "behind the scenes" so to speak  Plus that poo poo just interests me way more than "This website won't load, my printer won't work" etc.
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Oct 22, 2014 17:34
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MCSA is a good one to aim for if you want to dive into Windows and Microsoft's certification overview page is pretty comprehensive. Also keep in mind that the evaluation version of Server 2012 is something ridiculous like 6 months so you get plenty of time to practice before you have to flatten and reinstall. I recommend to my people that they enroll in a (reputable) community college and do classes there if they want to advance without necessarily chasing vendor certifications and want to get hands-on experience with things that we don't work with on a daily basis in the company. Lots of people use stanly.edu which offers pretty much the exact same curriculum I did (also being in North Carolina) for one of my Associate's degrees, so I can vouch for most of it being pretty solid, obviously depending on which instructor you wind up with. For example Stanly's Networking Technologies degree is basically "CCNA: the Associate's degree". Sheep fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 17:39
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Sheep posted:MCSA is a good one to aim for if you want to dive into Windows and Microsoft's certification overview page is pretty comprehensive. Also keep in mind that the evaluation version of Server 2012 is something ridiculous like 6 months so you get plenty of time to practice before you have to flatten and reinstall. Great info, thanks. Enrolling in a CC to take courses or something similar is something i'll definitely consider when I graduate with my 4 year degree (in a field completely unrelated to IT) in May
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Oct 22, 2014 17:46
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Is the Server 2008 MCSA still the recommended route, or have the 2012 materials/test come far enough along to learn the newer tech?
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Oct 22, 2014 17:52
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:Thanks, what MS cert should I aim for first? And yes, dealing with users is part of the reason why I'm aiming to go more "behind the scenes" so to speak MCDST always(ok, almost always) tells me a desktop guy has his poo poo together and is serious about what he does.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:19
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Sheep posted:I recommend to my people that they enroll in a (reputable) community college and do classes there if they want to advance without necessarily chasing vendor certifications and want to get hands-on experience with things that we don't work with on a daily basis in the company. Lots of people use stanly.edu which offers pretty much the exact same curriculum I did (also being in North Carolina) for one of my Associate's degrees, so I can vouch for most of it being pretty solid, obviously depending on which instructor you wind up with. For example Stanly's Networking Technologies degree is basically "CCNA: the Associate's degree". Before you go doing this with networking, make sure that you ask about how much CLI time you'll be getting. I've encountered a few network techs/admins with degrees in "networking" that had never done any sort of CLI work.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:29
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psydude posted:I've encountered a few network techs/admins with degrees in "networking" that had never done any sort of CLI work. How is this possible?
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Oct 22, 2014 18:36
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psydude posted:Before you go doing this with networking, make sure that you ask about how much CLI time you'll be getting. I've encountered a few network techs/admins with degrees in "networking" that had never done any sort of CLI work. To expand on this, I'm going back to school at a CC and my "networking" class is basically us reciting the OSI model over and over. No labs or hands on. Its a required class for my degree 
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Oct 22, 2014 18:39
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Is the Server 2008 MCSA still the recommended route, or have the 2012 materials/test come far enough along to learn the newer tech? Would also like to know the answer to this question. I'm studying Server 2012, but if the test materials are still being refined I might just go for 2008.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:42
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Nebulis01 posted:We did something similar here, ended up having to re purpose a few old offices as quiet rooms for people to actually hunker down in and get poo poo done. It's been great for team morale though. How was it (I'm guessing you mean the open plan) great for morale?
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Oct 22, 2014 18:45
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monster on a stick posted:How was it (I'm guessing you mean the open plan) great for morale? You get to see that others, particularly management and executive level, are generally hard at work all day long, which is otherwise very difficult to see. People are motivated to minimize disruption, so the desk cruisers, sports guys, and gossipers all quickly get stared down, and that gets pushed to non-work hours. The downside is that it doesn't work for all types of offices. Anywhere people will be on the phone a bunch (sales, technical support) can't do this type of plan successfully.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:56
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monster on a stick posted:Random Most of the startups in manhattan use an open floor plan like that, but they usually have plenty of conference rooms and other places to camp out if you need. My last job they switched to something like that with cubicles on the outside and tables on the inside. Its OK, except if you are on the phone a lot then its annoying. I really got tired of overhearing some of the less competent co-workers technical discussions for hours on end. The job before last people had either cubicles or offices (sometimes 2 people to an office) and they decided to move everyone into a shared space and it pissed off my one co-worker losing his private office. I didn't find it too bad most of the time since most of our work was via e-mail and tickets and phone calls were pretty rare. However when the president and VPs would come back to the office drunk at night and making a racket it was not fun. That place was a madhouse though in general.
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Oct 22, 2014 19:17
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syg posted:Have a bit of a career dilemma here. I've been working for a large manufacturing company for about 8 years now. I've gone from helpdesk to sysadmin to syseng and am the most senior technical person in the company now, responsible for all infrastructure (networking, vmware, storage, security, linux) as well as budgeting, vendor management, future planning, etc. We are undertaking a large networking project involving all of our plants, which is going to generate a lot of networking work for me and also allow me to specialize a bit. The nice thing about really good generalists is that if you give them enough runway, they can be an expert in whatever you want a few months down the line. They'll probably also give better perspectives than the tired, comfortable people who have been doing the same thing forever. (People like Mark Zuckerberg seem to confuse this with "younger people are smarter," when it's really "people who aren't cynical as poo poo work harder.")
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Oct 22, 2014 19:26
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Misogynist posted:If you specialize in something long enough, you won't have any problems finding a job in that thing (unless you overspecialize in something insane like mainframes or whatever). If you don't specialize long, and find out that the specialization isn't for you, interviewers aren't likely to hold it against you. I've switched positions four times in the last four years, from Linux/storage administration, to automation lead in a web operations environment, to technical manager of a cross-functional Windows/Linux/storage/HPC team, back to a web operations engineer for a small startup. This is what I tend to find. I will have a project to say, build a pair of vmware datacenters, and I'll go from barely being familiar, to an "expert" within a few months. Then once everything is in production it doesn't need to be touched for a few years and I forget half of the stuff I've learned. The same thing happened with storage. I spent months working on SANs and performance tuning our netapp gear for our applications and then... nothing. I was a command-line whiz with the storage stuff, now i have to google every other command on the off chance I actually have to login to it. It looks like the same thing is happening with networking for me now. I've spent the last few months diving deeper and learning more in those months than the last 10 years about networking. Unlike the vmware stuff this will need constant tinkering, and the scale is much larger, so it really is temping to dig really deep. As far as serving the company, I'd say that we use networking very heavily and the datacenter stuff less so. We have a lot of disjointed plants (40+) and lots of challenges around WAN connectivity and how to best utilize that connectivity to further the business, whereas our datacenter side of things is fairly basic, 10 esx hosts (40 guests) serving a few internal applications out over the internet as well as internal ERP servers. There would be a huge benefit to the company to have a full time network engineer.
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Oct 22, 2014 20:01
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Misogynist posted:They're not going to stop interviewing just because you said you like them unless they're total idiots. If they like you, they'll make you an offer and if you decline it, they'll move onto the second-best candidate on their list. You have no obligation to take a worse job that you haven't even verbally accepted an offer from, just because you want to come across like a really nice guy to their hiring manager. I'd like to give full story for the whole event. I went to that first interview for the help desk position just thinking I was going to see another recruiter but it turned out the job was working for the for the staffing company itself. I made it to level to 2 then 3 coming up now, ugh these interview stages. I bring up that point to ask a question: would the head recruiter that I'm dealing with receive commision like he would with any other client? I would think the obvious answer is no because he works directly for the company. I'm not sure however I've been told he could but I think someone here would have the best idea. It would explain why he's being so pushy and doing what's called a hardsell. I normally brush this stuff off but I was forgetting I'm dealing with a recruiter. DropsySufferer fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 20:33
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monster on a stick posted:Random We have this type of layout with some pretty nice half-wall hexagonal shaped "cubes". It's really nice except for when this one loving guy is here talking loud as gently caress on the phone holy poo poo shut the gently caress up 
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Oct 22, 2014 20:48
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DropsySufferer posted:I'd like to give full story for the whole event. I went to that first interview for the help desk position just thinking I was going to see another recruiter but it turned out the job was working for the for the staffing company itself. I made it to level to 2 then 3 coming up now, ugh these interview stages. If he's being overly pushy, blow him off and make him sweat. If I ever come across as pushy, I've failed somewhere along the line. Whether he is getting commission shouldn't really matter to you. Is this job or isn't it the best fit for you in your situation? If I remember your original post correctly, I think the real mistake you made was committing verbally before you were through the process. Depending on how small the town/market is where you live, you could be burning a bridge. It's perfectly normal to have two opportunities and let each one know you're interested but have to go through the motions. Just need to set their expectations - "I'll have an definitive answer on x day"
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Oct 22, 2014 20:52
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Dark Helmut posted:If he's being overly pushy, blow him off and make him sweat. If I ever come across as pushy, I've failed somewhere along the line. Whether he is getting commission shouldn't really matter to you. Is this job or isn't it the best fit for you in your situation? Having some other irons in the fire, so to speak. As a recruiter, how do you feel when you're told this? Is it pretty much expected? Rude?
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Oct 22, 2014 22:06
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So I've got some consulting opportunities coming up and I've been thinking about starting an LLC for them. Anyone done this before? Did you list yourself as a 1099 contractor in order to get paid?
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Oct 23, 2014 03:35
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Anyone have any experience working with ipsoft or know anyone there?
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Oct 23, 2014 03:53
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jaegerx posted:Anyone have any experience working with ipsoft or know anyone there? FWIW, that is the company I bitched about a few weeks ago that blew off a first interview because I refused to give my current compensation. Oh, and the same recruiter messaged me on Linked in last week like nothing had happened.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:54
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mayodreams posted:FWIW, that is the company I bitched about a few weeks ago that blew off a first interview because I refused to give my current compensation. Oh, and the same recruiter messaged me on Linked in last week like nothing had happened. I had a different experience. I put n/a as well and told them I wanted a competitive salary for the area and my experience. I sent you a pm to compare some notes.
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Oct 23, 2014 05:05
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People powering dual corded devices from the same PDU. That's resilient right? 
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Oct 23, 2014 10:54
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A longshot but does anyone have an recommendations for recruiters in Melbourne and surrounds?
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Oct 23, 2014 12:10
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Total Meatlove posted:People powering dual corded devices from the same PDU. That's resilient right? Haha, story time. So our infrastructure here looks like something that was built by a bunch of highschoolers on their big final project for their Introduction to Computers class. Like, it's so bad that it needs to be entirely redone. Anyway, my boss and I had just received new management servers for our IPSs and were setting them up. We racked them in the SAN rack because there was some space free, and then went to plug a monitor into the back center PDU (note: we didn't plug in the servers yet), however for some reason it's not turning on. Hmm, that's odd. 2 minutes later, the sysadmin and a bunch of security operations officers come running in about how our VDI environment is completely down. The sysadmin said that he thinks the domain controller is down, so I ask him where it's located. He gives me a blank stare. Then, I ask him where the server manifest is. Again, nothing. At this point I tell him to try to log in to vSphere, but he informs me that he doesn't have the password for and and that the KDB file is on a VM. Fan-loving-tastic. In the course of this, I notice that one of the SANs in the rack where we were working is off. I ask him if that's the storage for the ESX environment and he tells me that the ESX servers are located two racks over. I tell him that I'm aware of this, but that ESX hosts usually use some kind of separate storage. One of the DBAs comes in and we figure out that the SAN that's out is most definitely the storage for the VMs. I go around back to check out the power situation and find both power supplies from all 3 drive shelves and one power supply from each controller plugged into a dual 20 amp 110v PDU. What's more? There's no other replacement PDUs for that one and there's no space on any other PDUs. Also come to find out that the breakers are unlabeled and there's no wiring diagram anywhere in the facility, so I had to do a manual trace through the floor to find out where this line runs. Finally, the decision is made to just plug one of the PSUs from each shelf into the single PDU with 3 free plugs in the next rack over (I actually took the time to add up the load on the circuit). Everything comes back up, but now the ArcSight database is corrupted, causing our DBAs to work until 6am the next day on trying to fix it. And today, there's a ton of problems with VDI because the sysadmin never bothered to reboot the ESX hosts after the storage array came back online. Oh yeah, and the federal manager sent out an email saying that my team (made up entirely of security and network engineers) is going to be the "power team" in charge of the redesign of the power. You know, rather than hiring an actual electrician or even an electrical engineer to come in take a look (we told him no). psydude fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 12:37
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Recruiters. I'm a jack-of-all-trades guy and they want me to come in and discuss a job at a local bank, 300 locations, they want 5 years of Cisco experience blah blah. I could probably do the CCNA in a month or two but the biggest place I've even setup was only 6 sites. Thanks for wasting my time!
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Oct 23, 2014 13:35
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For those of you who said A+ was bullshit gently caress you! This is the hardest i've worked in school in a long time.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:15
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Bob Morales posted:Recruiters. I'm a jack-of-all-trades guy and they want me to come in and discuss a job at a local bank, 300 locations, they want 5 years of Cisco experience blah blah. I could probably do the CCNA in a month or two but the biggest place I've even setup was only 6 sites. Thanks for wasting my time! I had an interview setup by a recruitment firm, and the owner of the firm called me pre-interview (like, 35-40 minutes before) and then made it very clear that nobody had actually matched up any of my skills with the posting. I should have told them to go gently caress themselves, which I kind of did end up doing later. b0nes posted:For those of you who said A+ was bullshit gently caress you! This is the hardest i've worked in school in a long time. A+ is bullshit because you have to memorize all sorts of pointless information that you will never, ever use.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:26
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b0nes posted:For those of you who said A+ was bullshit gently caress you! This is the hardest i've worked in school in a long time. um best of luck in your career wearing a headset E: I make that snarky comment and realize that at this moment I am actually wearing my headset.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:01
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b0nes posted:For those of you who said A+ was bullshit gently caress you! This is the hardest i've worked in school in a long time. I think the term people use to describe the A+ is "mile wide, inch deep". The hardest thing about it is they just jump around to all sorts of different poo poo, and once you pass the test you probably won't have to know the specifics of how DDR ram works or whatever. But who am I to talk, I just got my first help desk job so
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Oct 23, 2014 15:21
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psydude posted:You know, rather than hiring an actual electrician or even an electrical engineer to come in take a look (we told him no). Ours is all labelled. Twice. With pretty colours.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:36
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b0nes posted:For those of you who said A+ was bullshit gently caress you! This is the hardest i've worked in school in a long time. Hold your criticism until you take the test. You will see why people say what they do.
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Oct 23, 2014 16:30
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Total Meatlove posted:People powering dual corded devices from the same PDU. That's resilient right? Definitely one of the more annoying points I have to beat into the heads of hired rack and stackers for Datacenter moves, and even then I have to check up on that poo poo anyway like a hawk. It's also one of the things I emphasize to any new guy who works with me as well.
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Oct 23, 2014 18:21
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psydude posted:Oh yeah, and the federal manager sent out an email saying that my team (made up entirely of security and network engineers) is going to be the "power team" in charge of the redesign of the power. You know, rather than hiring an actual electrician or even an electrical engineer to come in take a look (we told him no). On the other hand, if your datacenter is running on 110V, it sounds like some ancient hosed-up legacy computer room anyway, so maybe it's much more difficult there than what I had to deal with. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think that people who work in a datacenter for a living should have at least a basic understanding of the fundamentals.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:00
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Misogynist posted:Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think that people who work in a datacenter for a living should have at least a basic understanding of the fundamentals. I don't work in a datacenter anymore, I work in a security operations center. I'm one of only two people in the entire building who really knows about DC operations since they gutted the entire infrastructure staff here a year ago under the assumption that it could all be done remotely. The entire power infrastructure needs to be redone, because it's effectively at capacity and is starting to fail.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:11
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psydude posted:I don't work in a datacenter anymore, I work in a security operations center. I'm one of only two people in the entire building who really knows about DC operations since they gutted the entire infrastructure staff here a year ago under the assumption that it could all be done remotely. The entire power infrastructure needs to be redone, because it's effectively at capacity and is starting to fail.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:16
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So after changing my boss's settings on his computer and flipping everything upside down on his desk, I come in today and find my logon/off sounds changed, my speakers blasting "MAN, YOU ARE ONE PATHETIC LOSER!" and my keyboard/language settings changed to Dvorak. Which is hooked into my roaming profile. I love where I work. I died laughing after getting over nearly making GBS threads my pants when the speakers started yelling at me. So I'm working on 2012 server MCSA, what other resources have you all used to just play around with creating an environment to test your new skills in? Reminds me, I should look into getting rid of the Dvorak thing.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:37
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fromoutofnowhere posted:Reminds me, I should look into getting rid of the Dvorak thing. Embrace it and thank him for opening your eyes to a superior typing system
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Oct 23, 2014 22:26
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:Embrace it and thank him for opening your eyes to a superior typing system Man, gently caress that. QWERTY represent!
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Oct 24, 2014 01:09
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:Embrace it and thank him for opening your eyes to a superior typing system
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Oct 24, 2014 02:29
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