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Punc posted:I'm hoping they'll just go like "here's a lot of money", so that I just have to say yes again. Sounds like it's too late, but in future you should always counter with a higher salary (or some other non-salary form of compensation). As long as your're not a dick about it it's very unlikely they'll retract the initial offer, and there's an excellent chance they'll at least meet you halfway. And a company that does retract that offer is probably not a place you'd want to work anyway. Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I'd take it because it's a start in an IT career and not a retail dead end. Agreed, you'll get some hands-on experience both with the tech and with dealing with users. I imagine you'd also get a complimentary membership to (if it's anything like my local Y) a pretty decent health club!
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Nov 17, 2014 21:27
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stubblyhead posted:Agreed, you'll get some hands-on experience both with the tech and with dealing with users. I imagine you'd also get a complimentary membership to (if it's anything like my local Y) a pretty decent health club! Yeah from what I've been told it is a complimentary membership which is cool so I can start working out again. The interview went very well, had a young girl in HR, the CFO (who joined 4 years ago as a bookkeeper) and a HR intern. It honestly was the least stressful and laid back interview I've had, they were making jokes so I fired some right back, didn't get technical at all, more just how you'd handle situations. They also mentioned finding an IT Director so I am wondering if they're scrambling and lost a few people. Find out this week if I got the job, I want so badly to quit this crap.
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Nov 17, 2014 22:26
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goobernoodles posted:What do you guys look for when comparing SLA's of potential ISP's? We currently use Integra and getting reamed. We're paying a ridiculous $6400/mo for Hosted Firewall, VPN, 20Mb EoC to Seattle HQ, 12Mb bonded T1's to Portland office, MPLS, PRI's for in house PBX's as well as long distance, DID's, etc. CenturyLink is hot loving garbage and so is the GUI on Fortigates. For things like this we use Sonicwall.
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Nov 17, 2014 22:28
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stubblyhead posted:Sounds like it's too late, but in future you should always counter with a higher salary (or some other non-salary form of compensation). As long as your're not a dick about it it's very unlikely they'll retract the initial offer, and there's an excellent chance they'll at least meet you halfway. And a company that does retract that offer is probably not a place you'd want to work anyway.
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Nov 17, 2014 23:49
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vibur posted:What's the conventional wisdom on this for something like local gov't or a school system where the salary range is public and the other compensation is usually a hard rule? Then you know what you're in for and neither side should really care.
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Nov 17, 2014 23:51
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vibur posted:What's the conventional wisdom on this for something like local gov't or a school system where the salary range is public and the other compensation is usually a hard rule? Usually there's an in place step system because other positions are union and it's easier to manage. Ask not to be started at the lowest step or for additional comp/vacation time. I started at step 7 of 10 when I worked .gov and manged to snag an extra 5 days of comp time because of the salary issues.
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Nov 17, 2014 23:52
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vibur posted:What's the conventional wisdom on this for something like local gov't or a school system where the salary range is public and the other compensation is usually a hard rule? Presumably you wouldn't be playing the "see who blinks first" salary negotiation game, because it would have been published in the listing.
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Nov 17, 2014 23:52
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Stuck in the middle of two VARs fighting for our business.  Powerman 5000: When VAR's Collide; Hella' annoying remaster One of them got our CIO's email and sent some quotes when both I, management, and purchasing told them to stop it. But if they keep switching our rep that somehow makes it OK. Got some message from LinkedIn from an employee at a local consulting firm that deals with our EMR and AIX, they want to touch base. It's either going to be some sort of job offer, or, a thinly veiled sales attempt. Not sure which so I responded with my information, stuff we're working on, and a heads up we're not looking for any outside help at the moment but if they want to discuss ideas or thoughts, I'm totally OK with that. We do reference calls all the time with other hospitals. Never hurts to share what we do, or look for better ways to do things. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 00:59
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mewse posted:I work with shoretel stuff and would love for someone to start a VoIP thread goobernoodles posted:On a side note, anyone recommend or not recommend Fortinet Fortigate UTM's? I'm going to kick the hosted firewall to the curb soon. Didn't see a networking thread. Looking for an intuitive GUI, easy site-to-site VPN setups with cheap models for construction job sites, and the ability to have 2nd WAN connection as well as a potential for having two in HA.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:41
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goobernoodles posted:On a side note, anyone recommend or not recommend Fortinet Fortigate UTM's? I'm going to kick the hosted firewall to the curb soon. Didn't see a networking thread. Looking for an intuitive GUI, easy site-to-site VPN setups with cheap models for construction job sites, and the ability to have 2nd WAN connection as well as a potential for having two in HA. Adorai is right, they are great, both feature set, ease of administration and price.
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Nov 18, 2014 02:09
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People tend to recommend what they are comfortable with using. I mainly deal with Sonicwalls so wouldn't be able to recommend anything else. I'd like to get hold of a Fortigate and a Sophos box at some point though.
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Nov 18, 2014 03:06
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AAB posted:There isn't a VoIP setup at the moment. The big goal is to get something in that can also move and grow easily. Its going to be a fun process since only 1 of 3 of us have any experience with this kind of thing. See if you can get a copy of your phone bill and DIDs. In addition to your modem(s), every line that you're paying for does something, probably. C/O trunks and faxes are easy, but they can also be things like emergency services, pagers, alarms, or security doors that need to get patched over or kept intact. I'm sure it's a quick process if you know what you want and how to do it, but we had to lean on the VAR heavily. Get a good one. e: I need to stop reading threads backwards, just saw you're 40 users. My building is gigantic with a 50 year old patchwork infrastructure, so it was a hell of a migration this summer. Roargasm fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 03:25
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Punc posted:So, tonight I have an offer interview with my (hopefully) new boss. I've never had a talk about wages (my current job was my first and 5 years ago I just said "yes" to any offer). I'm hoping they'll just go like "here's a lot of money", so that I just have to say yes again. They're probably going to have you convert RPG into .Net. From what I've been told it's not a bad gig. Before .net everything, well a lot of things were written in RPG/COBOL and ran on System/32, System/36, AS/400. There's decades and decades of "old" legacy code that still runs from 1960. Any big enterprise that's been around for more than a few decades (banks,telecoms,govt) has gigantic piles of it. The primary reason they don't covert to something modern is because it simply works. If something needs to be changed there's still plenty of old school programmers that work full-time or vendors that sell these guys by the hour or on a contract basis for whatever changes are needed. There are even colleges that still teach COBOL/RPG. The second reason it's extremely expensive. You go through the code line-by-line and literally re-invent the wheel. We're talking so much that your fortune 500 executives poo poo their pants when they see how much it would cost to migrate to something more modern however some companies are biting the bullet. Someone with more midrange/mainframe experience will probably be able to get further detailed but this is accurate for a summary. Question, how does everyone feel about mandatory reboots for servers in general? When I was at ATT it was standard procedure for a lot but some didn't. I know it clears out cache, memory, etc and was almost required decades ago but how do you feel about it for modern hardware/software?
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Nov 18, 2014 03:34
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Roargasm posted:Whatever you go with, make sure you get dibs on not being the lead admin. Being the phone guy sucks. Getting five bids is going to take hours of meetings by the way - you need to know exactly what your analog infrastructure is going to look like before you walk into these things. This is assuming you don't already have a voip deployment. Why? Being a voip guy is no easy feat, pays well and is in and will probably continue to be in high-demand.
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Nov 18, 2014 03:35
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Tab8715 posted:Why? Being a voip guy is no easy feat, pays well and is in and will probably continue to be in high-demand. I am currently doing it for free, so I'm probably a little bitter. I don't think I'll ever develop the skill set to program a box from scratch, I'm just the only guy in the building who knows how to program the auto-attendant and set up extensions. This might come into play at my next review or interview, but for now, it's just dread that the the phones are going to crash and it's going to be my fault  I have brand new PoE switching, but having the phones tied to the network feels a lot different than just having the internet connection.
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Nov 18, 2014 03:45
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Thanks Ants posted:People tend to recommend what they are comfortable with using. I mainly deal with Sonicwalls so wouldn't be able to recommend anything else. I'd like to get hold of a Fortigate and a Sophos box at some point though. Sophos has a home edition if you want to throw it in your ESX cluster or put it on a spare PC. http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx
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Nov 18, 2014 04:16
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Tab8715 posted:Question, how does everyone feel about mandatory reboots for servers in general? When I was at ATT it was standard procedure for a lot but some didn't. I know it clears out cache, memory, etc and was almost required decades ago but how do you feel about it for modern hardware/software? Well, I think it's mostly bogus on anything NT based and newer than 2003. Though totally would use it as an excuse to get windows patches in and other maintenance. Our Citrix guy insists on weekly scheduled reboots of all the servers, but I accidentally forgot to schedule it on a small farm, and it had uptime of over a year and was functioning fine. Some apps are just poorly written, and leak ram, and rebooting is not a bad idea.
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Nov 18, 2014 05:56
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:So Evol and Dr. Arbitrary Whats "the Keg" and what exactly does this have to do with IT?
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Nov 18, 2014 06:36
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Race Realists posted:Whats "the Keg" and what exactly does this have to do with IT? It's a pretty swell steakhouse that has locations in AZ. Dilbert is trying to coordinate a meetup with some other local IT professionals in this thread. If you're just starting out in IT, it might be a good idea for you to try to do something similar. What part of the world are you in?
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Nov 18, 2014 07:03
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Probably that chain steakhouse. Wining and dining on your vendors' dime is totally a part of working in IT.  Edit: Interesting idea... A certain part of IT is how well you're connected to the community in your area of expertise. Ie, going to user groups, speaking at them, giving demonstrations, reference calls with other customers, etc. If you're known, you can command a higher salary, and have connections if you're looking for new work.  It's not for everyone, though. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 07:03
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:It's a pretty swell steakhouse that has locations in AZ. Dilbert is trying to coordinate a meetup with some other local IT professionals in this thread. Georgia. I joined a few IT clubs in the past (AITP, BDPA, etc) and I just fell out of them due to work at the time.
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Nov 18, 2014 07:39
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I just got moved off of swing shift to days, now I actually have an opportunity to start looking at local user groups. It's exciting!
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Nov 18, 2014 07:46
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fez2 posted:Sophos has a home edition if you want to throw it in your ESX cluster or put it on a spare PC. oh man, thats great.
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Nov 18, 2014 09:17
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Probably that chain steakhouse. Wining and dining on your vendors' dime is totally a part of working in IT. There are varying levels of it. I never went to a user group, but I would never have gotten the awesome job I have now if not for the fact that I happened to accept a flatmate applicant who happened to work for this start up I'd never heard of. Heck just participating in these threads has gotten goons employed.
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Nov 18, 2014 09:48
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Thanks Ants posted:People tend to recommend what they are comfortable with using. I mainly deal with Sonicwalls so wouldn't be able to recommend anything else. I'd like to get hold of a Fortigate and a Sophos box at some point though. We have one Fortigate (that I'm aware of) and while the UI is clunky and the whole way you link everything together is really obtuse, it's pretty neat and seems to get the job done. About my only real complaint is that there does not appear to be any way from the web GUI to dump the current configuration - I managed to do it once from the CLI but rather than being a short script of the changes made like you'd expect from a Cisco device, it was instead all of the default Fortigate settings plus the changes we had made, which made parsing the thing by hand practically impossible.
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Nov 18, 2014 14:51
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Is it bad that I want to switch ERP systems simply so we won't have to keep our useless AS/400 guy around anymore? Guy is a complete moron and so loving useless.
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Nov 18, 2014 16:50
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I am taking quotes from local Cisco techs and I have a resume that says "CCNA, CCNP, CCIE (passed written exam)". That just means he never took or didn't pass the CCIE lab?
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Nov 18, 2014 17:48
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Bob Morales posted:Is it bad that I want to switch ERP systems simply so we won't have to keep our useless AS/400 guy around anymore? Guy is a complete moron and so loving useless. What are you using? I'm assuming he's just a programmer?
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Nov 18, 2014 17:49
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Wait Goon IT meet up in Tempe/Mesa? I'm game what are the details.
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Nov 18, 2014 18:43
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Tab8715 posted:What are you using? I'm assuming he's just a programmer? Harris Data. He's not a programmer, he just knows how the system 'works' (I use that term loosely) and getting information out of him is like getting water out of a rock. He also has terrible, terrible communication skills. But he's been here 25 years 
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Nov 18, 2014 18:43
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lol has he written anything down? There are a lot of people this think job security is making sure no one know how to do your job.
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Nov 18, 2014 18:49
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Just had my first night of being on-call...already hate it. I'm only secondary/back-up on-call (still too new to go on primary,) but I might as well have been primary because the actual primary guy didn't answer a single page after midnight (which was four, about one an hour from 1:30 to 4:30.) Only one of the pages was a legit issue, the rest was just our drat monitoring agent not being able to communicate and the getting reported as offline. It's a repeat problem at this one customer, and we're reluctant to throw up a maintenance/no-paging window because of how our drat paging/alert system is coded/cobbled together, it's all done on a whole-server basis, so what if a REAL PROBLEM GETS MISSED?  (this customer also had three separate, yet totally unrelated, internet outages last month, so we are already on the cusp of being kicked to the curb, so we have to be super vigilant to any problems they have.)How do your employers handle on-call pay? Because I get the feeling we get shafted...we only get paid if we do actual work, i.e. open a ticket (though it is a min. of 1 hour if we do that.) But if it's a nuisance page and all we do is clear it out, or maybe put up a maintenance window, we don't get any extra money. I think that's BS. If I have to get up to do anything, I should get compensated for it. I also believe that merely being on-call, even if I don't get a single page all week, is deserving of a small pay increase for that week since I am forced to be strapped to my phone, pager, and laptop all week long.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:27
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DrBouvenstein posted:the actual primary guy didn't answer a single page after midnight (which was four, about one an hour from 1:30 to 4:30.) Sounds like this guy has things figured out.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:31
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I got time and a half with a half-hour minimum per page out. All of our pages required a ticket.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:32
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We're posting about this in the Enterprise Windows thread right now, but MS released a "hilarious" out-of-band critical update just now that you guys might appreciate knowing about :https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms14-068 posted:This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Kerberos KDC that could allow an attacker to elevate unprivileged domain user account privileges to those of the domain administrator account. An attacker could use these elevated privileges to compromise any computer in the domain, including domain controllers. An attacker must have valid domain credentials to exploit this vulnerability. The affected component is available remotely to users who have standard user accounts with domain credentials; this is not the case for users with local account credentials only. When this security bulletin was issued, Microsoft was aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability. 
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Nov 18, 2014 19:36
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ghostinmyshell posted:Wait Goon IT meet up in Tempe/Mesa? I'm game what are the details. PM DAF
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Nov 18, 2014 19:38
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Zero VGS posted:I am taking quotes from local Cisco techs and I have a resume that says "CCNA, CCNP, CCIE (passed written exam)". That just means he never took or didn't pass the CCIE lab? It probably means he's still studying for it or has it scheduled but it hasn't happened yet. Wouldn't count it as a black mark. e: But yes ask for clarification. I guess he could have decided "gently caress it, not gonna do the lab" which would be dumb, if unlikely. DrBouvenstein posted:Just had my first night of being on-call...already hate it. I've never worked anywhere where on-call paid extra. But I've mostly been on salary and paid enough to be above the threshold for mandatory overtime compensation. And when I wasn't, I was too young and dumb/naive to realize it  . Current job lets you take a comp day with no questions asked if your on-call shift was incredibly lovely which I consider fair. Previous job I was literally on-call 24/7 with no compensation at all and it was loving awful. A big part of why I no longer work there and have no more interest in doing the "lone sysadmin" thing.Getting alerting to where it's only paging you on an ACTUAL EMERGENCY  is both extremely important and extremely difficult. There are tons and tons and tons of blog posts, conference talks, papers etc on the topic since it's by no means a solved problem. This could be a whole thread on its own, really. Some things to think about :If I get this page, is there actually anything I can do to fix it? If not, don't page on it. It's just noise. Is there a real issue but it's one that can wait til morning? Send an email or show the issue on your dashboard but don't page. Is there no problem at all? Look at your thresholds, maybe they're too sensitive. Or maybe you're monitoring something 100% pointless. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 19:44
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Zero VGS posted:I am taking quotes from local Cisco techs and I have a resume that says "CCNA, CCNP, CCIE (passed written exam)". That just means he never took or didn't pass the CCIE lab? Maybe, maybe not. They could have just recently passed the written and are waiting to take the lab, which is understandable since you have to travel for it. Ask for clarification before you make any decisions from it.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:45
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Tab8715 posted:lol has he written anything down? Not really. Today we installed a keylogger/screen recorder so we can see what he actually does.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:46
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NZAmoeba posted:There are varying levels of it. I never went to a user group, but I would never have gotten the awesome job I have now if not for the fact that I happened to accept a flatmate applicant who happened to work for this start up I'd never heard of. Networking is extremely important. It was something that was impressed upon us by the exceptionally hands-on dean of engineering at my school first semester freshman year, and is probably one of the most important things I learned in college. Case in point--I did three years in the NOAA Corps after college, which is an obscure and very small branch of uniformed service in the US. When I went back into the private sector, the hiring manager of my very first job had also been in the corps, and while I'd like to believe I got the job on my own merits, that connection probably got me the interview. The skills and technologies I learned in that job have basically been the foundation of my career to this date. Don't expect your contacts to get you something you don't deserve, but absolutely leverage them if it helps you get a foot in the door. DrBouvenstein posted:How do your employers handle on-call pay? Because I get the feeling we get shafted... I haven't had to do on-call since that job I mentioned above, but back then we got regular time plus a pittance per hour of overtime, which naturally included on-call. We were salaried so 1.5x wasn't a requirement. If I got a call in the middle of the night on my week, I'd bill at least an hour for it, even if I was able to resolve it in just a few minutes. I have no idea what anyone else on my team did, but I never got any flack for it. It does sound like you're getting a poo poo deal, but whether or not you can actually do anything about it depends a lot on what local laws apply and how your position is classified.
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Nov 18, 2014 19:47
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