tactlessbastard posted:

For those of you keeping score, we're now up to six technicians and 7 calendar days on the MFC in the front office.

tactlessbastard posted:

For those of you keeping score, we're now up to six technicians and 7 calendar days on the MFC in the front office.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

See if you can quietly remove something from it. Watch the next tech feel relieved and then despair as they replace the missing part and it still doesn't work.

tactlessbastard posted:

For those of you keeping score, we're now up to six technicians and 7 calendar days on the MFC in the front office.

EoRaptor posted:

The company that offers the lease outsourced onsite support to a third party company. That third party company bills by the visit, and has no incentive to do anything but try and fix the current device. Sane actions like replacing it are in no way an option they will initiate. Your company will need to call your rep and escalate if you want that.

neogeo0823 posted:

That one is good, but lately, I've taken to my supervisor's choice of phrase of "chuck it in the gently caress-it bucket". I'm sure it's a reference to something, but it's just so damned catchy.

Bob Morales posted:

You guys wanna hear about the job I've been working for the last 11 months?

Bob Morales posted:

I started working at a manufacturing company, we have a lot of machines that work with metal and then a lot of people that also work with the metal. It's about 3 times bigger than the place I was at.

I don't really know where to start. I think I originally applied for the job titled 'Project Manager', but I do a mix of systems admin/network admin/programming. Our main computer system that handles sales, inventory, etc, is all written in VISUAL BASIC. Not .Net, not C#, Visual loving Basic, either 6.0 or VBA. I was told I would never have to touch that code.

At the end of the final interview, I was asked "What kind of computer do you want us to get for you?", I responded with "Whatever 14-inch business laptop you guys buy, Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever. Plus a 27-inch monitor"

It was met with "we don't buy laptops for people, you can't get real work on a laptop", so I just said get me whatever desktop you use then.

My first project took about a week. I wasn't given any passwords for anything, or server names, or anything. The project was an internal website that was basically a fancy dashboard of all kinds of information about the company. Shipping and production stats, work schedules, sales volumes...

It was originally created by a data analyst that was originally putting data from SQL queries into spreadsheets all day long. All kinds of people started asking him for more and more data and access to it. He figured out if he did some stuff with Python, some Javascript graphing libraries, and all that kind of stuff, he could automate most of his job so that's what he did. Pretty decent project IMO.

Of course, he was the only one who knew anything about how this worked, and because the IS manager isn't a good manager, they were never ever able to learn about the project. He still worked there, so he hadn't left the company or anything. I was able to download the site, get a dev/test version of it running on my PC, and basically documented how the whole thing worked.

It's a run-of-the-mill web app, based on Python/Bottle along with some AngularJS in the front-end. It also uses MongoDB in addition to the MySQL stuff to get the production data. I did Ruby on Rails development for a few years and have played around with Django and Flask and Bottle, so the website looked pretty on-par compared to what I was used to seeing. MVC etc.

Anyway, I present this huge document to my new boss, and he basically says "This is the only time I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about this project. It's such a huge mess, there's files all over the place, it's object-oriented which means once you get to a certain size nobody can understand it. I've read that OOP has been terrible for years." This is coming from someone who thinks the right way to do a web page (we won't call it a site) is a 7,000 line PHP file. Files all over the place being there's a folder for templates, folder for controllers...

So anyway, he has me hand the project off to a helpdesk guy that he wants to promote to programmer. Good intentions. However, he can't develop features etc because he's still doing helpdesk calls all day. This makes our boss mad (the lack of productivity) and causes him to say he mad a mistake handing it off to the helpdesk guy, and at the same time proves his thoughts of the site being impossible to manage!

So back to the organization of the department. There's the boss, his kid (more on that later), two visual basic programmers, 1 php programmer, me, two helpdesk guys, and then one guy that's kind of both. And then on second shift, there are 3 helpdesk/hardware guys. We run two shifts of production, and we try to not interrupt people during the day that work on 1st shift when we can fix their issues on second shift (computer replacements or equipment moves, wiring etc).

Now let's talk about infrastructure. The boss has a 100% MICROSOFT IS EVIL mindset. We have a handful of computers that are using Active Directory, nothing else does. Maybe like 30% of the office PC's. Everything else runs on CentOS, a couple are still on v6 and the rest are on 3-year old v7. Very reluctant to upgrade these at all, even to the newest point release.

We had a bunch of the trash 2009-era Cisco small business that are really Linksys gigabit switches. They also had settings on them that basically made them into hubs, they are scared to death of VLANs (they can leak apparently) and we make all our cables. Even patch cables. We had something like 3 of them fail in the first few months that I started, including the one on my PC that I diagnosed. 100mb connection instead of 1gb. Oh look someone made a my patch cable out of a solid wire cable. Why would they do that? "We make all our own cables, 90% of purchased cables don't certify" the boss proudly says.

These were all replaced with Ubiquiti switches quite recently. I suggested we use HP Aruba, but what do I know. We also use Ubiquiti for cameras and NVR's and we have all kinds of weird poo poo issues with those, and their support isn't much help so why not buy switches from them too.

Let's talk servers. Good news, they don't build their own. They buy Dell. However, everything is bare metal. There's no virtualization. I asked, and the reason was that storage costs are too high. The best part is when a server is purchased, they buy two! One is a hot-spare. It gets installed in a different server room at the other end of the building. It gets backed up every day from the production server. So if one goes down, you just change IP addresses on the hot spare and you're good.

I showed my boss all the CPU graphs of all the servers, they're all just piddling around at like 5% usage. Every server is a dual 18-core Xeon whatever, always super overkill for the basic poo poo they run. They then get saddled down by only 16-32GB of RAM (most servers again don't use it anyway) and a pair of SATA spinning disks or SSD's in RAID. The mailserver for example had a pair of 256GB SSD and a pair of 4TB drives. The new mailserver went against everything I specced out and they got the same drat thing and just put 4 4TB drives in it. Why didn't you just add two drives to the old loving server?

Anyway, back to the CPU and memory graphs. I tried to explain they were so uner-utilized that we'd be perfect for VM's. And then instead of buying drives for every server, we can buy a SAN! And then since we aren't buying TWO servers we'd be saving money. Shot the gently caress down. Oh well.

We bought a pair of Dell servers last October, one of them is still un-used and I was denied when I asked if I could use it for a development server. Okay.

Did I mention we don't use patch panels? What's the point anyway! Just run the cables from the switches to the server room straight to wherever they are going. I wanted to mention that we use patch panels on the other end (aka walljack)... So recently when we installed the new switches, I think everyone was convinced having patch panels in the racks would have made things easier. having 3 feet of extra cable in the rack is a pain in the dick! Plus, using pre-bought patch cables to connect the switches to the servers instead of having to make 60 loving cables would have saved about 2 hours of time as well (shielded cables with their special grounding connectors take a bit longer to make, not sure why we even need them in the server room but okay).

Each server has it's own USB backup drive. And the script doesn't check to see if the drive is mounted so the backup script will fill the system drive if you're not careful! We have real backup software, but it's like 6 versions old so we can't add new machines to it anymore. They're just backups why should they be centrally managed and monitored?

Also, none of the servers are the same. Some 700's, some 500's, some 400's, just order the same loving servers. It prevents having issues like "oh we can't add this card or this drive to that server" and we could share parts etc. Their server ordering process is loving goofy. We call Dell, and instead of specs we say "we need a server for mail/files/whatever". Then the guy sends us a quote, and we tell him we need more drives or more memory. Then we buy it. Why the gently caress wouldn't you just tell the drat guy what you need in the first place? Also, the helpdesk guys do the ordering of the servers.

The helpdesk guys also get to set the servers up! "They need the experience". Well how about letting them do that with test servers until they know what the gently caress they are doing. What the flying gently caress. I'd rate myself a 7/10 with Linux and I'm by far the most knowledgeable person there. One server has poo poo installed from source, one is using this repo, one is using some other repo, one is CentOS 7.2, another is 7.5, whatever Indian Linux tutorial site came up when the tech googled "install named" is what's running. Don't even get me started on how hosed up DNS is.

Alright, so we have a bunch of remote warehouses all over the country. At some point in the company's history, an internet outage prevented one of these warehouses from shipping product, so a rule was made that even if the internet is down these places need to be able to ship. So, each warehouse has partial copy of the database. It's "replicated" by a VB6 app running at our office, that checks each row of the database with ours and theres, and adjusts appropriately. It's usually 15 minutes behind, there's a copy of this app for each warehouse, and we have replication issues like you can imagine. When that happens and an order gets screwed up or duplicated, we blame it on the users for UPDATING THINGS TOO QUICKLY.

That's enough for now I'm going to watch football

Super Soaker Party! posted:

Happy with the one Nimble we have so far, though I'm extremely paranoid about HPE turning it into poo poo (like they do with everything else). There were already warnings of that because when we started talking to Nimble they weren't bought yet and the quoting process was extremely easy, as in the sales guy sent me a spreadsheet of pricing immediately on request with no bullshit about registering opportunities and all that other crap. By the time we got to actually purchasing, HPE had locked it all behind their usual lovely sales process (not that they're the only ones, I hate every SAN vendor for doing this) and it was like pulling teeth to actually get the thing purchased. We ended up going through a VAR simply because that's how HPE does business and we couldn't just easily order the drat thing even though we knew what we wanted. I mean technically you can on the site but I firmly believe HPE makes their site a pile of poo poo on purpose so that ordering things off it becomes harder than just asking a VAR to spec the parts.

As far as HPE's own chassis, assuming the new one we have is from HPE, my biggest complaint would be that the thing's huge, depthwise. Something like 35-38" deep. (Also 4U, but eh). Seems absurd given that it's full of 2.5" flash drives and as far as I know they're not spaced depthwise through the unit and are all at the front. So far operations/configuration-wise however, no complaints, and given that no one has time to be a storage admin anymore I'm a big fan of the simplicity and ease of setup. Guess we'll see how long that lasts.

Thanks Ants posted:

Yeah the amount of stuff that is a two sentence email that people book in as a meeting a week out and then also don't provide an agenda for

fist4jesus posted:

My company has recently started putting monthly patronizing newsletters in the toilets on the backs of each door.
This months one includes suggestions that showering and not coughing constantly are good life tips.

Bob Morales posted:

Sickening posted:

A big part of my company is logistics as well. Your boss sucks. Your boss is pushing technology they think they know. This job isn't good for you long term as its kind of a loser, but if you like the paycheck then live with it for now.

Sickening posted:

A big part of my company is logistics as well. Your boss sucks. Your boss is pushing technology they think they know.

Sickening posted:

A big part of my company is logistics as well. Your boss sucks. Your boss is pushing technology they think they know. This job isn't good for you long term as its kind of a loser, but if you like the paycheck then live with it for now.

Bob Morales posted:

I started working at a manufacturing company, we have a lot of machines that work with metal and then a lot of people that also work with the metal. It's about 3 times bigger than the place I was at.

AlternateAccount posted:

Nothing like being hired for your expertise and experience and then being consistently overridden by a know-nothing blowhard who reads C-NET articles like

Bob Morales posted:

Bob Morales posted:

Sirotan posted:

Bro you need to gtfo of manufacturing and also probably Flint. UM ITS is going to be posting ~40 open positions any day now, I can PM you when that goes live if you have any interest? Even Detroit has a better tech job market if you don't want to move to the rental hell that is Ann Arbor.

Bob Morales posted:

Ratmtattat posted:

Pissing me off: Having to sign off on a super invasive background check for a position where I'm not dealing with any money. Here's hoping that not good credit is not a disqualifier for my new job.

Ratmtattat posted:

Pissing me off: Having to sign off on a super invasive background check for a position where I'm not dealing with any money. Here's hoping that not good credit is not a disqualifier for my new job.

Bob Morales posted:

I've been applying for jobs lately, and everyone wants a background check, driving record check, drug test (for our legal marijuana), physical...

Bob Morales posted:

I've been applying for jobs lately, and everyone wants a background check, driving record check, drug test (for our legal marijuana), physical...

I haven't in almost 2 years and I have a clean slate when it comes to everything else, so I'm not worried about anything, but it's just a pain in the rear end to have to go do all that poo poo. I'm glad they can't test for vodka.

Sickening posted:

Wait, a physical? You can't be serious.

AlternateAccount posted:

Really, I think a mistake a lot of people make is that we make very good and correct recommendations to execs based on industry info and technical expertise, etc, etc, etc.

The trick is that only dollars matter. Maybe if you took it a step further and explained, in very concrete terms(bust out that Excel), how much could be saved doing things the way you're suggesting without any additional risk, you'll get further.
Start small. Small things with easily recognized savings and work your way up.

Execs don't care about the "right way", they care about the $$$$$$.

edit: not saying Bob isn't doing this. I've just been to too many meetings with a DUH WHY WOULDN'T WE DO IT THE RIGHT WAY attitude and gotten stonewalled. Deliverable predicted savings are a much more reliable winner.

AlternateAccount posted:

Really, I think a mistake a lot of people make is that we make very good and correct recommendations to execs based on industry info and technical expertise, etc, etc, etc.

The trick is that only dollars matter. Maybe if you took it a step further and explained, in very concrete terms(bust out that Excel), how much could be saved doing things the way you're suggesting without any additional risk, you'll get further.
Start small. Small things with easily recognized savings and work your way up.

Execs don't care about the "right way", they care about the $$$$$$.

edit: not saying Bob isn't doing this. I've just been to too many meetings with a DUH WHY WOULDN'T WE DO IT THE RIGHT WAY attitude and gotten stonewalled. Deliverable predicted savings are a much more reliable winner.

Sickening posted:

Wait, a physical? You can't be serious.