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They fail open, so you can leave but not come back in. Default state of the door controllers is locked with authorized card access, which is apparently what all of them reverted to. Thousands of doors! Not all doors have card readers and I don't know what the status of those are. They might only work if your credentials were cached in the individual controller. It took central IT over 2 hours to communicate this problem out to the University.
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Dec 7, 2019 00:10
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Sirotan posted:They fail open, so you can leave but not come back in. Default state of the door controllers is locked with authorized card access, which is apparently what all of them reverted to. Thousands of doors! Not all doors have card readers and I don't know what the status of those are. They might only work if your credentials were cached in the individual controller. It took central IT over 2 hours to communicate this problem out to the University. Some poor sod is going to have to run round the entire campus, checking each door, aren't they?
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Dec 7, 2019 00:24
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Bonzo posted:so my work gives us 3k a year for education. Ontario has a program where you can sign up online classes at any college so I chose one that had a Cyber Security course. After signing up, I was emailed a username and password in plan text that I COULD NOT CHANGE to log into my student portal. When I told them how this went against every single theory in InfoSec, they just shrugged, so I dropped the class and got work to pay for a pluralsight subscription. Guarantee the people teaching that course have no control over this.
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Dec 7, 2019 00:30
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Shut up Meg posted:Some poor sod is going to have to run round the entire campus, checking each door, aren't they? That's just the kind of stupid I would expect from them. In my last job I was on a team that had to help support the team responsible for managing this system and it was an utter poo poo show that resulted in us writing up a "this is terribly managed and things must change or people could die" letter. I've learned today that nothing changed as the result of that, which makes me incredibly frustrated.
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Dec 7, 2019 00:48
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Osha still is relevant to state jobs such as universities, isn't it? Because uh... maybe start with the fire marshall?
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Dec 7, 2019 05:57
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Each door magnet should have a relay that is linked to the fire alarm so that if the alarm sounds then the doors open.
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Dec 7, 2019 13:36
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Thanks Ants posted:Each door magnet should have a relay that is linked to the fire alarm so that if the alarm sounds then the doors open. Shut up Meg posted:Some poor sod is going to have to run round the entire campus,
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Dec 7, 2019 13:54
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Tab8715 posted:As a follow-up, how did you all get into the industry? Degree, Certs, Self-Study? Going out on smoke breaks with influential people in IT. Not kidding, back at the hosed up little telemarketing company that got me moved from phones only; to half phones, half helpdesk; to systems administrator. I leveraged that role for years. At my current gig the smoking circle got me the chance to move from an excruciatingly siloed role to one where "it's a weird tech problem ? Give it to mllaneza." Don't actually start smoking kids! But do find a way to socialize with the people you want to work with, that can work wonders. edit. Self-study, if it wasn't obvious. Willingness to dig into non-standard stuff or things that are technically unsupported but important has been a big part of my success - and take ownership. Conversely, insisting on standardizing things and making the environment less of a Wild West situation helps. As an example, if a Finance app doesn't run on a standard server image, make the image it does run on a loving standard. Be flexible, read the docs, search Google, and for the love of god, Fix Finance First. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Dec 7, 2019 |
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Dec 7, 2019 14:06
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mllaneza posted:
This. I am putting in for a promo and I was told that I have one chance in three of it going through. It’s not because I’m not qualified or am not already doing the work it’s because, and this is important, no one who matters knows I am doing this work. I have failed to “build the brand of Agrikk” even though I have made a global impact in our org. So yeah, for all you aspiring ladder climbers out there, networking networking networking.
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Dec 7, 2019 19:15
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Tab8715 posted:I purposefully made the question vague - just trying to see what’s an acceptable range which is similar to have now if on the low end. Every job I had turned into IT once my employers found out I knew my rear end from a VGA cable. One of my current desktop techs started in our call center, was on friendly terms with me, and not too long after he started, asked me to tell him about working in IT. I took him to lunch, encouraged him to get his A+, and recommended him for the desktop position when it came up. I met our other desktop tech through a dead, gay, internet comedy forum, invited him to play D&D with my group. He was working retail at the time, and one of the other guys in the group got him a job as a desktop tech at his place. I then poached him about a year later (the other guy in the group got a different job a few weeks later, and I found him a new apartment and helped him move; definitely no hard feelings). My roommate was moving out of food service, so I recommended him for a job in our call center. He's an analyst in our operations department, now. This is all to say what everyone else is saying: network, network, network. And to the people already working in IT: help and encourage the kind of people you want to work with in the industry. Your life will be better for it. Mentor people, because they may move on to someplace you want to work.
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Dec 7, 2019 21:05
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Sirotan posted:Someone did an upgrade of the door access system at 1pm today and managed to gently caress up so bad that all electronically controlled locks and also some elevators on campus defaulted to a locked state. It's still not fixed lmao That is amazing! Our system has controllers in every building so if the lock system takes a dump, the last programmed instructions stay in place. But then again, a contractor decided to do a SQL query that deleted half of the entries in the system ( alphabetically ) and then pushed it out to all the doors. I was on vacation for that one. Backups, always more than one.
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Dec 7, 2019 23:36
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Thanks Ants posted:Each door magnet should have a relay that is linked to the fire alarm so that if the alarm sounds then the doors open. Should being the operative word. We may still have a situation where the alarm goes off and that causes the doors to lock not the reverse ...
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Dec 7, 2019 23:39
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Tab8715 posted:I purposefully made the question vague - just trying to see what’s an acceptable range which is similar to have now if on the low end. From my part I got my foot in the door at a company my brother worked for. He left about 8 months later and I stuck around. Worked my way up from helpdesk to Systems Admin by learning production software that nobody else wanted to gently caress with. I did pretty well for myself with a 2 year degree tbh.
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Dec 7, 2019 23:39
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I am the manager of a team of 3 (including myself) it is WAY not enough people to handle all the stacks that we handle. Some of this I a trying to fix by pouring systems together (everyone gets on VMWare, screw your lone server 8 years out of warranty) but also trying to automate the creation of servers and configuration standardization. One of my engineers came here from another country and came to the school I work at for his Undergrad and Grad degrees. He works really hard, and has the spark. By the spark I mean that he has the curiosity to solve problems and build systems. You give him a problem and he researches it and solves it. My other engineer does this too, but this is specifically about him. It had been coming up that we as an institution needed to sponsor his green card if we wanted to keep him in the country. But because he isn’t faculty about to bring in the big bucks, just a lowly engineer building the next generation systems that the god drat university will be living off of for years to come, they hemmed and hawed and slowed the process down so much that there is no way we could get him through before he has to leave the country. His H1B was similar, and this time around they didn’t even tell him WHEN the H1B would expire when he tried to start the process when he got it last time. So, my guy is working on ordering a shipping container so he can take his life back home where tech jobs are not REALLLY a thing. We get to lose out on a great employee who I know we will NOT be able to replace in this area for the pay and skill set we need. We weren’t paying poo poo, just not many Linux people with concentrations in ansible, automation and virtual computing. Bummed, but whatever. Gonna hit up all the tech associations soon and ensure we get a good pool to search from. I’ll post it in the jobs thread if anyone wants a job in Hampton Roads VA coming up in the next couple of months.
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Dec 7, 2019 23:53
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ptier posted:Bummed, but whatever. Gonna hit up all the tech associations soon and ensure we get a good pool to search from. I’ll post it in the jobs thread if anyone wants a job in Hampton Roads VA coming up in the next couple of months. You can't find linux people near a major population center in virginia?
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Dec 8, 2019 00:29
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Thanks Ants posted:Each door magnet should have a relay that is linked to the fire alarm so that if the alarm sounds then the doors open. I'm not up for a full effort post, but here's half of one. What happens to a door when the alarm goes off depends on the type of door. Any fire-rated door must close and latch (this is why you see those big double doors in hallways held open by magnets instead of door stops) to prevent the fire from spreading. Emergency exit doors must always be able to be opened from the inside (but are often allowed to unlock on a short timer) and other kinds of door need to do whatever the AHJ tells you they will do. Saying something like "cut power to all the doors so they open" isn't accurate. Also, there are locks that DON'T open when the power is cut. There are even mag locks that fail-secure (although they are rare). KillHour fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Dec 8, 2019 |
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Dec 8, 2019 00:29
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Methanar posted:You can't find linux people near a major population center in virginia? Well we aren’t Richmond or Northern VA (where honestly most IT related folks get vacuumed into in this state). A lot of people who realize they know their poo poo go north or west. (DAF being an outlier) It’s a little more complicated than just not being able to find people. It’s more like: - Higher Ed Public University Get paid less than private sector, REALLY good benefits, but increases in salary are few and far between. I’m trying to get the starting pay increased, not as much as I would like, but better than it was. - Glut of “Military IT” Two types, IT people who were in the military and did *one thing* for 20 years and now are out in the real world. We get a lot of these in interviews, and there is no curiosity in coloring outside the lines or learning. This also leads to weird pay issues in this area. They have a pension so they don’t give a crap about taking less pay because they already have a built in base pay, hurts private non-military much more than public. But does make this area difficult to stay in. If I wasn’t in higher ed, I would be looking in Richmond for my next gig. The other type is the IT person is the person who knows what is going on, works for a military contractor for $texas. OR is outsourced to somewhere for $minitexas - University Reputation Any of the news we tended to have gotten in the last 10 years has been bad. We have a new president and its going better, but you know how it goes with righting a large ship, one where lots of people are barnacled in. All of this comes together to make it difficult to get qualified applicants. I mean that people don’t apply. The people that do are just spamming for the most part. I am hoping to change that. Before I put this one out, I plan on really tweaking the description, and going around and visiting IT networking groups in the area to get the word out. KillHour posted:Also, there are locks that DON'T open when the power is cut. There are even mag locks that fail-secure (although they are rare). We have these on our suite main doors, side doors are still powered in an emergency but the main heavy can’t be powered by the battery backup and fail-secure. ptier fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Dec 8, 2019 |
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Dec 8, 2019 01:41
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ptier posted:- Glut of “Military IT” We had a guy who applied who had a TS clearance; I honestly didn't even want to interview him, because he could be cleaning toilets at Boeing for 80% more than we pay for desktop support; based on the interview, dude was capable of doing checklists, and that was it. We ask some pretty basic technical questions in our interviews, and he couldn't answer any of them, even though he'd been setting up and troubleshooting computers for the military for six years. Interesting to know that that isn't atypical; your tax dollars at work, I suppose.
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Dec 8, 2019 03:50
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Thanatosian posted:We had a guy who applied who had a TS clearance; I honestly didn't even want to interview him, because he could be cleaning toilets at Boeing for 80% more than we pay for desktop support; based on the interview, dude was capable of doing checklists, and that was it. We ask some pretty basic technical questions in our interviews, and he couldn't answer any of them, even though he'd been setting up and troubleshooting computers for the military for six years. Interesting to know that that isn't atypical; your tax dollars at work, I suppose. Yep, that is definitely how those interviews went. There is this idea about segregating tasks down to the bare minimum so that no one person can do something that would screw everything up. It makes automatons which I guess you want in the military? Why the gently caress question what you are doing. I have also seen it at a couple of Universities around my area, I think in an attempt to pay people less for doing less and the segregation thing. One thing I like about my org is that we get a bunch of different things to do, we can be full stack in some cases which is nice if you like that kind of thing (which I do). The bad part is that we have to do it because we don’t have the staff we need to do what we currently do and more. But as we add positions, we are trying to keep it so that team members won’t get shoehorned into a thing and then they do it forever.
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Dec 8, 2019 04:12
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Thanatosian posted:We had a guy who applied who had a TS clearance; I honestly didn't even want to interview him, because he could be cleaning toilets at Boeing for 80% more than we pay for desktop support; based on the interview, dude was capable of doing checklists, and that was it. We ask some pretty basic technical questions in our interviews, and he couldn't answer any of them, even though he'd been setting up and troubleshooting computers for the military for six years. Interesting to know that that isn't atypical; your tax dollars at work, I suppose. Military is a land of contrast. We have more than a handful of ex mil guys, some know their poo poo in and out and are a treat to work with. Others are effectively what you describe.
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Dec 8, 2019 15:22
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Our military guys are a mixed bag as well, but the common denominator just seems to be a lack of critical thinking. Give them a set of written instructions and they're great but they seem to be roundly terrible at independent action, which sounds like something that would actually be an asset for a bunch of (former) enlisted dudes.
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Dec 8, 2019 15:56
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Sheep posted:Our military guys are a mixed bag as well, but the common denominator just seems to be a lack of critical thinking. Give them a set of written instructions and they're great but they seem to be roundly terrible at independent action, which sounds like something that would actually be an asset for a bunch of (former) enlisted dudes. If you only ever care about the how and not the why, you'll only ever be able to fix already-solved problems you've hopefully memorized correctly. I don't get why people like that get into IT, they'll never rise above low-tier support. They've also got no error-correcting built in if they remember anything wrong, because they don't know or care why they're taking the steps they are.
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Dec 8, 2019 17:13
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I’m grateful nobody has found me out yet because having to talk to former military people is the last thing I want to do.
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Dec 8, 2019 18:27
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I had a boss who was former military (tank mechanic, not doing anything IT related). Maybe being an officer will teach you some sort of leadership skills that can be applied to civilian life, but being enlisted just seems to teach you that leadership is about giving orders and following leadership is about blindly following those orders, and that is not a healthy way to lead admins.
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Dec 8, 2019 19:37
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At this moment I’d kill to have one of my coworkers replace by an ex-military guy (m/f). Coworker constantly says he’ll pick up a user story and will either not completely finish it or does it in a way not compliant with the architecture and/or Our defined way of working. During our 3 month project he singlehandedly caused 5 weeks of tech dept we squashed during the project while introducing at least another 3-5 weeks we havent solved yet. When confronting him about it the anwser is always: 1) I don’t agree with the design 2) I didn’t know how to solve something so I did it thos way and we can do it properly later. Of course “we” means anyone but him. Later is measured in quarters, not in days/sprints. And to top it off he never asks for help unless deadlines are just a dot in the rear view mirror. Last time he asked for help was on a user story similar to what me and 2 co workers were doing. Replacing some application pipelines functions with a common library. All of us rewrite this stuff in a few hours. It took him 2 weeks before he asked for help. Instead of rewriting the pipeline to use the library, he rewrote the library and got stuck on that. His request for help was if I could figure out why his new (but obsolete) functions were not working. I pointed out that he should use the working/tested library but he insisted that he needs to understand the way it works so it was better to write his own function for it. I’ll take people who can (only) work with a checklist over this poo poo.
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Dec 8, 2019 21:59
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My boss is a former marine flight mechanic. Went into oil and gas afterwards because it was easy to make money off IT. Sharp dude and doesn’t at all fit the stereotype of dipshit enlisted type.
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Dec 9, 2019 03:34
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mllaneza posted:Don't actually start smoking kids! But do find a way to socialize with the people you want to work with, that can work wonders. Yep, the most significant step on my career came from going to a sauna (here in Finland that's like going for an afterwork beer) with a friend, and meeting his friends (all IT people). Some time later I got one of them to recommend me for a Service Desk position and things have been heading up ever since.
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Dec 9, 2019 08:50
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Since I have been where I am (Higher Ed Public) we have been able to schedule maintenance for when it works for my group. This is usually times like 10pm on a Tuesday or things of that nature. If it is a HUGE outage, I will totally do that stuff on a weekend, but for little things that have low risk and small windows of downtime, (like renewing the SSL cert for our ADFS, or doing a reboot of a campus facing system) I like to just do them overnight on a week day so I get to keep my weekends and planned family time intact. Hell for a normal IIS cert we will just do it live because no one will even notice. We are understaffed and forcing a group of two to use weekends for all maintenance seems like a faster way to make us burn out. Its part of the reason why I bailed from the MSP Crucible over into more stable land. EDIT: forgot to add: "And now I am starting to get push back about when we choose to do stuff (planned out weeks in advance with change management meeting), because of perceived problems with the time READ: politics" How does your org / group / department handle this kind of stuff? Have you found a way to get your point across without using "godamn" every other word like my first draft email would say? ptier fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 14:41
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So it turns out that me taking the rest of the week off last week probably wasn't the best idea. A vendor came in on Friday to work on setting up remote monitoring for our PBX. He hosed up the pbx and restored it to a backup from November 7th. YAY! Not only that, but he deleted all of the backups I had made up to this point. Not that it really matters because I backup monthly on the 7th so at least he used the most recent backup. But what the gently caress?
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Dec 9, 2019 17:24
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:So it turns out that me taking the rest of the week off last week probably wasn't the best idea. Why the hell didn't he take a backup of it before making changes ??
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Dec 9, 2019 17:39
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gently caress if I know. I don't even know why he was touching the PBX at all. The remote monitoring device is a separate piece of hardware entirely and I didn't know that there was any PBX configuration that was going to happen.
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Dec 9, 2019 18:05
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The gently caress. "We're missing files from May" ok "We don't know what they're called or when they went missing" ...ok "We need them back right now, it's urgent" ......ok "But we can't tell you what they are, when they were done, and we only have a rough idea of where they were kept. We need these TODAY" .............no? Plus poo poo back in May is in archive storage, which means rehydrating from Azure, which means $$$ How is it that no one noticed files were missing for 7 months? How is this urgent now? How do you know poo poo is missing when you don't know what it is? Is it just like, a gut feeling? It's too loving god damned early for this poo poo.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:35
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That's gonna be around $5000 and 2 days. Give me an account number to charge it to.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:37
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End of year accounting. Finance is way better than it used to be, but 90% of our restore requests come from them, and it's always files needed for monthly, quarterly, or annual finance reports. End of month, end of quarter and end of year restore request are common for us.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:38
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What is it with finance/accounting people deleting stuff randomly? I have a bank client and their accounting department does at least 1 restore request a week, generally 2-3; at least they know what they deleted, where it was and when it was deleted.
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Dec 9, 2019 19:48
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Glad I got out of Morgan Stanley when I did and didn't accept their offer of 100% WFH. Massive layoffs today and tomorrow, and the remote workers are being told to convert to office workers or leave
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Dec 9, 2019 19:54
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Booze question, is this whisky worth the price? http://www.melandrose.com/istar.asp?a=6&id=91749 Or is there a liqueur thread I should ask in.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:31
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terrenblade posted:Booze question, is this whisky worth the price? How much do you plan to drink? 1-2 glasses? Yes, you will want the quality stuff. The entire bottle? After the 2nd glass it's irrelevant if it's pure alcohol with some flavouring or the work of an whisky master, aged 10 years in a dark dungeon. You'll get smashed either way and you won't like it in the morning no matter what.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:36
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terrenblade posted:Booze question, is this whisky worth the price? I'd say depends what kind of whiskey you like. That pricetag doesn't really freak me out or make me think "expensive", but as above if you just plan to get smashed who cares what's in the bottle. e: I have never tried the linked bottle.
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Dec 9, 2019 21:19
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Volguus posted:How much do you plan to drink? 1-2 glasses? Yes, you will want the quality stuff. The entire bottle? After the 2nd glass it's irrelevant if it's pure alcohol with some flavouring or the work of an whisky master, aged 10 years in a dark dungeon. You'll get smashed either way and you won't like it in the morning no matter what. I should clarify it's for a gift.
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Dec 9, 2019 21:36
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