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Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

nitrogen posted:

Someone ages ago was asking about dropbox-like replacements for corporate use.

https://spideroak.com/business/ <-- check this out.

Bitching and moaning will continue shortly.

We use box.com at my work. It's pretty slick, and supports SSO. Also it's nice having 500GB of space :v:

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Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Inspector_71 posted:

What the gently caress do people do all day in non-IT fields? How do so many people go literally weeks without realizing that at least one folder on the server that they apparently desperately need has been missing?


:psyduck:

This thread moves so fast I always feel like I'm replying to things that happened a million years ago.

I've had customers ask for backups from 6 months ago because they just realized that a folder is missing and they "really need it!"

How important is it if you haven't missed it since like... Christmas?

We have a 2 week retention period on backups unless you signed up for something different, which of course anybody who would have the foresight to sign up for 4/12/52 week backup retention is paying enough attention to know when a "really important" folder goes missing.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

skipdogg posted:

You don't do like a monthly backup that gets sent offsite for DR purposes? This policy seems odd to me. We have lots of data that might only get used on a monthly or just a few times a year that still needs to be backed up and kept around.


I work for a dedicated hosting provider, so customer disaster recovery isn't (directly) our responsibility. If you're bringing a new device online and don't have special requirements for backups, you'll get 2 week retention.

Offsite backups for this many devices would carry significant expense, and for most of our customers it's just not necessary. For example, if you're running an ecommerce site, how valuable is store/customer data from 4 months ago? Hell, if the device fails or a table gets dropped, you're going to wish you had backups from 4 minutes ago.

If you have the funds and have a seriously redundant DR plan, we can store backups offsite for up to 52 weeks at 2-3 different locations.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

go3 posted:

"more than half" oh dear

"all" is technically more than half.

poo poo that concerns me: a ticket didn't come in. Yesterday and today have been insanely light, and that usually means there's a storm brewin'. One of our datacenters is probably going to be hit by a(nother) truck tomorrow.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Experto Crede posted:

Can someone recommend a polite way to tell a client on the phone that, no, they don't need to write out the whole ticket whilst on the phone with me?

Usually when I am keeping customers from something they'd rather be doing they'll just say something like "Hey, do you need me on the line? If you want you can just [send me a ticket/give me a call back] once you figure out what the problem is."

I never take offense; in fact I'm happy to have them off the phone once I know what I need to do to get them sorted.

I had a guy call in:

:argh: "Hey I really need to talk to <network engineer> about <ticket ID>."
:science: "Okay, just a moment while I pull that up."
:argh: "Actually I'm about to enter a golf tournament, can you just have him call me?"
:science: "Uh... okay."

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
I'm thinking the first copyright year is also the year they fired their graphic designer.

E:f,b

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

GargleBlaster posted:

We also have the ability to password protect prints on the MFPs, though even with step by step instructions and pretty pictures it's one of those things typically deemed "too complicated"..

I enjoy not being in corporate IT for that reason. If somebody says "that's too complicated" in response to me taking time out of my day to answer a question they asked, I get to be a snarky child and say "Well, then I guess you aren't going to get what you want." and go back to work.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
We use SameTime, and I am 100% sure that we use it because somebody paid a lot of money for it before realizing it was garbage, and now they want to justify the purchase.

:smith:

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

skipdogg posted:

I keep a D610 around for poo poo like that. Oh, here's your loaner, I'll let you know when this one is fixed. Enjoy WindowsXP on a single core laptop with a 5400 rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Take better care of your poo poo.

The loaner I got from IT which they were nice enough to give me while they re-imaged my work laptop with Windows 8 was actually better than my work laptop. :(

Though I work at a technology company that (largely) employs people who can handle being treated like adults, and I kind of love your strategy anyway.

Science posted:

My old workplace used Sametime (and everything Lotus :gonk:). It's awful in every conceivable way, but as far as I could tell it has no limit on how big a smiley can be. This lead to awesome competitions in our group chat to see who could link the largest animated gif before Sametime shat itself.

Brilliant. I will have to play with that.

Also, since I work on a team where most of the people use Linux for their desktop, and libmeanwhile is garbage, half the time they receive text surrounded by the HTML tags that are meant to format it, and unless they give people nicknames, the name just shows up as their full AD identifier. (or whatever the term is)

Comradephate fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 21, 2013

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Ursine Asylum posted:

I'm a fan of my company for the sole fact that everything I do is on remote hosts with screen sessions. I actually downgraded my work computer to an Air because I didn't need a 6-pound behemoth of a MacBook Pro for work that I could literally do from my smartphone.

Similar situation: I do everything through SSH pretty much. The loaner already had putty, chrome, and box sync on it, so I really could have just gone on using that, but I imagined they would want it back at some point.

The only reason I even have a laptop is because that's what they gave me on my first day. I just locked it to the dock and called it good. I use several monitors, so it's pretty much just a fixture on my desk.

When I'm up for a replacement I may cross over to the dark side and get a macbook.

I have a zenbook (which I love) for my personal laptop that doubles as a work laptop on the rare occasion that I travel.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

nitrogen posted:

We used SKYPE until 2010.

We used Skype at my last job, though everyone worked remotely. If you're irresponsible enough to accept that a 3rd party you have no visibility into has access to your confidential business communications, it's really not a bad platform, and it makes it really easy to call/video chat with somebody if need be. It also (theoretically) uses end-to-end encryption.

E: Speaking of IRC, is there an SH/SC IRC chat?

E2: got it.

Comradephate fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Aug 21, 2013

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
What a fuckin' nightmare.

I would like for you to know that I wore flip flops and an Against Me! shirt to work on Tuesday.

I think I like my job too much to be in this thread.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

SRQ posted:

I live with my parents, I'm a student. I love my parents.

if they wake me up again because the internet isn't working instead of just loving rebooting the router i will burn the house down
IM NOT A WIZARD ALL I EVER DO IS PULL THE POWER CORD OUT AND PUT IT BACK IN

Have you given them a list of suggested troubleshooting steps, or just whined about it on the internet?

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
E: Me dumb, can't read thread.

Added myself to the form and spreadsheet.

Comradephate fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Sep 21, 2013

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
In older versions of Plesk, it stores email account passwords in plaintext in the SQL database. Which isn't as terrible as it seems, because the SQL database is owned by root, and if you have access to it you can just change the password, but, it's still pretty bad.

Whenever I'm on one of those devices I'll do a query to pull up the usernames and password WHERE password LIKE '%password%' and I'll usually get a few dozen hits. Throw in '%Passw0rd%' or '%123' for extra fun/sadness.

It's a real mystery why we find them sending spam all the time.

Edit: domainname123 is INSANELY common, as well.

Comradephate fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Sep 23, 2013

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
If we drug tested I am 100% sure half of my coworkers would be fired.

Having an employer that understands that the things I do on my time are my business is important to me.

A monitoring alert came in.

A silly number of devices that were running Plesk 8 got compromised over the past few days, and now the customers are upset that they have to migrate to a new device immediately, instead of at any time over the last 3 years since we started telling them to move away from Plesk 8 or upgrade.

The compromise was kind of cute though. They replaced openssl, openssh, mcrypt, and a few other packages, commented out sshd_config and marked it immutable, then replaced chattr with a non-functional version that is also marked immutable.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Antioch posted:

I've told them my rates are $500 an hour cash only outside the normal working and on call hours stipulated in my job description. I don't think they realize I'm serious.

The next best thing to a nice hearty "Go gently caress yourself."

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Farecoal posted:

I've been reading the saga of Dick Trauma and the Idiot Boss and despite having never worked in IT or even an office job or even understanding half the technical terms, the complete, frustrating idiocy of the boss started getting to me. I know it was an unusual case but do most of you guys have to deal with a lot of similar issues? I don't know how'd I'd survive.

My boss rented a lake house for us on Tuesday and my entire team was drunk by noon, and full of fajitas and bratwursts that he made by 1. :smug:

So basically, it varies a lot.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

wintermuteCF posted:

:yotj: Year of the Job time! :yotj:

tl;dr version: 56% pay raise over my old desktop lead role at a new company to administrate Active Directory and Exchange for a fairly large energy company. Closer to home, pretty flexible hours, no direct user contact (only escalations from helpdesk), more interesting work, and a boatload more money. It's also nice to get back into the swing of things after six months off from my last job (was finishing up my bachelors degree).

I'm so pumped I can barely see straight!

Sounds excellent. Congrats!

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

TobyObi posted:

So it's a 16GB read/write USB stick, designed to be plugged into randomly infected computers, over and over again.

That doesn't sound risky at all!

I don't know if this is the case, but it could easily have a r/o partition for the anti-malware poo poo, and a separate r/w partition that you can do what you want with.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
Freaking out on a $9 keyboard is a really sad way to get fired.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
I had a guy come out to repair some cheapo 14" laptop I had made worse while attempting to replace the hard drive (they decided to position the hard drive so that every single piece of the laptop has to be disassembled to remove it) and he was a goddamn wizard, so they aren't ALL incompetent.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Sylink posted:

Yah, that make sense, but gently caress high frequency traders so I'm not sure how I feel :commissar:

not to derail too much, but HFT is generally seen as a good thing. It speeds price discovery and actually makes the market more stable, and makes it harder for the warren buffets of the world to see gaps and make billions off of them.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

FISHMANPET posted:

Anybody who calls Dell instead of chat is literally doing it wrong.

You have to call for some things. :(

For any kind of warranty repair, you have to give the service tag number - well as you may know, not all dell products have service tags, including 24" ultrasharp monitors. If you get on live chat they just give you the number to call to receive actual assistance.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

sfwarlock posted:


me: "Don't I get, like, two writeups first?"
HR looks at my boss.
Boss picks up a postit notepad and writes
"LATE ON xx/yy/zzzz" - shows it to me - "First warning." Sticks it to the paper.
me: "And hold on. (Jerry) is always here after me, so is (Tina)..."
He starts writing again. Same thing. "Second warning."

me: "I see what's going on here... gently caress you. You can't fire me, I quit."

If this is accurate, I hope you sued them for lots and lots of money.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

GreenNight posted:

How do you prove it?

In most (all?) states, companies are legally required to obey their employee handbook, if one exists. If the handbook says that you get two writeups for being tardy before being fired for it, they'll have to prove that. That's why companies normally have you sign a dated write-up: If they fire you and you dispute it, they can say "here's the scan of the write-up from 02/07/2014, and here's the scan of the write-up from 03/07/2014 after he showed no improvement. That's why we fired him in April."

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

It'd be suuuper easy to argue that he was dismissed before quitting, or that he quit under duress.

lawyers exist to get around these kinds of things. :)

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Agrikk posted:

A ticket came in:

Uh hey AWS, you by any chance have any backups of all of our company?

A new updated mantra for the cloud: RAIDResilience is not backups.

People might get all kinds of hot and bothered by sexy topics like block level replication and/or online backups replacing traditional magnetic media backups, but man it's hard to hack a tape sitting in a shoebox.

(of course it's easy to de-gauss a tape sitting in a shoebox, it's easy to drop a tape sitting in a shoebox...)


Edit: ...and for all of you AWS users out there: For the love of god, enable multi factor authentication on your main accounts! It's free and takes five minutes!

It sounds like they had backups - what they didn't have is backups not controlled by their AWS account. I bet the folks at Iron Mountain or whatever are going to get some nice business out of this.

+1 for MFA. MFA everything that is accessible outside of your network.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Inspector_666 posted:

Also how much code could have just been outright stolen during this. I would assume anything that was on any of the stuff that got deleted could have also been exported.

Not as possible as you might think. Amazon does not retain private keys, so the ability to access the account and delete nodes does not imply an ability to access the nodes. If the EBS volumes weren't encrypted (they should have been, and can be on the amazon side) then they could potentially be mounted on a new device with a new key, but Amazon is 100% hands off on the nodes once they boot - there is no out of band management, so if you don't have the SSH key, the box is a zombie now.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

GreenNight posted:

An engineer sends me an email asking for a newer PC out in the testing lab. Here are his requirements:

120 gig SSD
2 gigs of memory
64 bits or greater OS
i3 CPU
biggest LCD possible at least 20 inches large
keyboard
mouse
1 power cable

The things he chose to specify are bizarre, but that's the most modest request from a user maybe ever.

Compared to the other stories from users sabotaging their laptops in the hope of getting a faster one, this guy sounds like a gift from god.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Billy the Mountain posted:

The decision to tell the client or not was made way above my head, and for me to blow the whistle would result in my immediate termination. I got one kid with a second on the way, and I know for a fact I will not find another job doing what I do and making what I make.
But yeah. It is the "Hope they don't ask for backups older than a month.

We racked and fired up a Datto the day the Zenith BDR got pulled, so they do have backups, just not going back more than a month.

Since this law firm is used to keeping everything and never deleting anything, most of our restores for them are usually the "restore something accidentally deleted within the last day" variety.

I don't agree with the decision, it is unethical, immoral, and short sighted. Everything I did is documented to hell and back, and my team lead witnessed what I did and has my back 110%.

If you're going to be extremely unethical and lie to your client you should at least do it in a way that covers your rear end.

Tell them the Zenith caught on fire or something, and then sell them some offsite backups. Bam, now you're getting more money and they don't think you're hilariously, insanely, wildly incompetent.

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Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice

Thanks Ants posted:

Our new helpdesk guy is going to piss a lot of people off if he carries on how he's started. Yes some clients (all of them) are colossal idiots, but you can't let them know that you think that. And being here for less than 8 weeks and telling people way above you that they aren't doing their jobs right isn't going to end well - sometimes the information you are given won't be complete or has changed, but you don't sit on your rear end and tell someone who has nothing to do with you that they hosed up and need to go and fix it. Sorry kid, you know what's up technically, but there's more to it than that.

If somebody else is wrong about something that affects a client, the new guy should totally bring it up. The place a lot of people in this industry fail is at understanding when and how to bring it up.

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