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 Oh yes it is that time of year.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:30
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Nerdrock posted:salute. That brewery's 10 minutes from my house, and I probably know a good bit of the team that produced that treat for you. Tell them thank you. My fiancée and I started dating because she threatened to steal my winter supply of it back when it was in super short supply seasonally. It is a matchmaker and is amazing. I've tried the warlock, so very delicious.
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Sep 21, 2015 11:57
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Daylen Drazzi posted:My mom finally sent me the picture of the wreck - hadn't realized the car had still been upside down. You can see the black car in the background that hit my uncle's car and forced him off the road. Holy crap! I hope he comes out without anything permanent from that. What's with all the dudes in fatigues? Was it some army bros that were all speed racer?
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Sep 21, 2015 12:48
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We used appriver before merging where the larger company used mxlogic. Rolling right back to secure tide and all that. Not to mention that any support is not complete poo poo because either the person is dealing with a poo poo ton of people fired last week or they know they have about a year before they are out of a job. Out of the two I still like appriver more. Mxlogic felt like pulling teeth even after I got used to it. Thanks Ants posted:If you just want spam filtering then the Exchange Online Protection that comes as part of O365 is more than adequate. You will get spam for the first couple of days after sending all your email into O365 until it can get used to the sorts of emails you handle, but after that point it's incredibly rare that an actual spammy message gets through. Thanks for this. We have a couple of clients that are going O365 in the future and we weren't too sure about spam filtering. ptier fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 03:13
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I work for an MSP that ate my MSP about a year ago. My co-workers and I got a promotion because we actually knew something, and there wasn't much growth potential in the 6 person company we came from. The new place was better than the previous mainly because the wife of the owner wasn't doing the books. Its been a slog to get processes and documentation going though. When we got there, documentation was shat into texts files per company, were severely incomplete and no one gave a poo poo. We got confluence up and running and its been a dream to work with. But that much pushing and fighting to even get basic poo poo going has just burnt us the gently caress out. My co-worker  'd recently and I am waiting on a reply to my counter-offer from a state school for a server admin / vmware / storage position. I am fully ready to retire to the state school pastures. Oh and did I mention another one of a 6 person senior team is moving and maybe working from home but its all up in the air. I love my supervisor but he can't control the amount of hellshit that comes in and goes out. And how much sales fucks with everything here. The new place might be kind of a poo poo show seeing as the IT group went from 30 to 14 and they are slowly building back. But honestly, one shitshow vs 100 shitshows is fine with me. Theres a budget and I can sit in a quiet room and nerd the gently caress out on servers and automating myself out of a job. TL:DR: lovely MSP, co-worker 'd and I'm about to 
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Apr 28, 2016 13:58
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BaseballPCHiker posted:I worked VERY briefly for a school in IT. Be prepared to have no money, no say in the budget, and have said budget be repeatedly slashed. That said everyone was super chill and the higher up IT guys had it made with a sweet retirement plan. H110Hawk posted:If you thought an MSP had horrible politics, just wait until you're in government. That said it's a largely steady paycheck, and the politics turns off at 5pm sharp. Oh I have worked in IT at State Colleges before, I missed the relaxed atmosphere and the culture of "figure it out, take your time and do it right". Unfortunately, I moved around a little after college and couldn't go back to the main Money was usually an issue yes, but we would usually get what we needed to keep going. Hey, off at 5pm, and no on call, and comp time instead of OT. I will take all of this. All of it!
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Apr 28, 2016 17:53
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uniball posted:My (new) boss recently forced me to take some hosed up hypercorporate cult-style sales training. Evidently it's very important for everyone in the company to "speak the same language" about "new opportunities". I'm a network engineer and I've been at a medium-sized MSP for three years without anything like this happening so far. I get that an MSP will be more sales-focused than most places, but don't loving offload your missed targets on your engineers. The MSP I'm jumping ship from is very very sales focused. The CEO is sales and until we merged didn't have a partner that was technical. Monday morning meetings where they are telling us about a contest of who can sell the most SSDs onsite ( which doesn't include me as I'm a senior in a hobbit hole getting real work done ) is just mind numbing. Never a thank you for pulling off a nice project which keeps the client happy and the recurring revenue coming in ( the check had already cleared ), but massive kudos for someone who sold some POS client on an SSD we made an extra $20 on. Cool story bro. On a side note I did and am moving on to a state college where I can actually get a vacation. 
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May 8, 2016 14:12
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Listening back the next day was bizarre.
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Update on the been on staycation since Monday from the old job and start the new one next Wednesday at the University. This is the first real vacation that I have had for more than 2 days in 5 years and I have done dick all except paint models, play video games, and clean and it is everything I thought it could be. I get to take my fiancée to the city tomorrow for fancy drinks and dinner. life is good right now. No more on call. Did I mention this? Higher Ed, I return to your loving bosom. Your benefits and free masters degree awaits.
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May 20, 2016 02:18
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Higher Ed trip report. I have entered a place where the people are nice, but out of a three person server team there is me, and then a contractor who is leaving the 15th of June who used to work there. When the entire team noped out, they contracted him back for a short time to keep poo poo running. He is trying to push all the documentation and buried bodies into my head as fast as he can. His documentation is a bunch of .docx files in his file share covering everything. It's very detailed and up to date, but in a bunch of places, with password protected xlsx files with other passwords. Again, he knows his poo poo and is doing a good job getting it all in my head and making poo poo run, just not as efficient as I would like. One of my first official acts is going to be getting confluence setup just for myself and 5 others (hence the $10 a year to cover it), and use AD to lock out passwords and other important poo poo. Gonna be a lot of work, but there is a lot of cool stuff to do and no more doing bullshit desktop support! It all seems doable, and I'm not going to be bored, I'm ready for the challenge but Im not going to kill myself because "Hey we need more people", not "well this guy can do it all!" Since the licensing and budget is something I am going to be handling, I might just apply for the manager position when / if it reopens soon since I'll be doing the job already just without the pay increase. I told my supervisor about my wedding in September and instead of being a dick and grumbling or wheezing about it, he congratulated me, and said we would talk about what we need to do to ensure I have the time off (with pay) when it comes up. Have I entered a brand new reality or are they just afraid I'll leave and then they will have no one again?
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May 29, 2016 16:06
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flosofl posted:So do you know the reason the entire server team up and quit? They had always been short staffed, the contractor said that they felt that no one cared ( where funding was concerned ). Without going into too much to Doxx myself, president left under some less that great circumstances, accreditation scares and the CIO bounced to a better school as well at some point. There was uncertainty in the air. We are getting a new perm CIO in the coming months and the new president seems competent though. And state doesn't pay great, so I think people took the opportunity to go to something that seemed more a sure, read:  thing. Some went to an MSP in the area, which I think they are going to regret having come from another MSP, but whatevs. They will learn on their own about that.Its kind of a rebuilding year. I've been in higher ed before, so I went in with my eyes open about politics, budget, glacial pace, etc. But after 5 years of MSP hell, I wanted something with a lot more home life balance and time off. I'm cool with the trade offs. ptier fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 29, 2016 |
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May 29, 2016 16:31
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Thanks Ants posted:"What's an SSD"  Well you see, adding an electrical device to the computer will add the just little bit of EM interference which I can hear through my speakers that connect to cables that have rocks around them suspended off the floor! Its excruciating to listen to my FLACs like that!
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May 29, 2016 16:38
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Higher Ed trip report Day 34: I kicked over a rock trying to figure out how (straight Decomm or migrate) to move stuff off of our out of support ESXi 4.1 system. Host: EOL Storage: EOL by 2 years OS: Server 2003 Application: SharePoint Server Portal 2003  SQL: 2000  <---- The absolute kicker. Made me start laughing.6 Sites that are still under some form of use. 1 Site that looks like a little civilization has been evolving there without any knowledge that there are other sharepoints in other times. It's now my job to either pop the data out into a shared folder (thats what most of the sites are, a glorified file dumpster) or .... actually migrate the drat thing to 2007 / 2013. There is a severe possibility that I will be pushing for some other platform than sharepoint for their personal Fiefdom needs. It is criminal we have let this poo poo go on for so long. MC Fruit Stripe posted:Ugh, god, you and me both buddy. Better than absolutely no control. We had our network guy decide on a lark to swap the core routers during a week night. On the day before class registration started, and the last day to put in purchases before the end of the budget cycle. Kicked our entire main portal over. There were workarounds, and we finally figured it out after much fumbling. (MS Virtual IP in multicast for a load balance needed its static mac added to the routers). But that was not a fun day. ptier fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jun 29, 2016 |
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Jun 29, 2016 21:48
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Colonial Air Force posted:I want more management responsibilities. Better than "Acting Team Manager" with no extra pay and no end in sight. And no subordinates but all responsibilities.  Edit: I'm not bitter.
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Jul 19, 2016 19:34
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Colonial Air Force posted:Well yes I mean actual management. 
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Jul 19, 2016 20:20
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BiohazrD posted:I work for a super small outfit, we have one IT guy. He's currently calling Symantec because anonymous emails using our domain are currently being blocked. That's right, he wants to allow our exchange server to relay non authenticated email that is using our domain name. If its for something like a printer, or some device I can see that. He can just lock it down to the IP of the device. If he is like "No I want all the phishing bullshit to go through my server." Then, I have no words. I hope the poor Symantec drone gives him a tongue lashing.
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Jul 19, 2016 20:23
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BiohazrD posted:no no no, not internal Oh. I made the leap to he needed assistance on some gateway virus protection or something. Ok. Well. Um, 
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Jul 19, 2016 20:41
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Sepist posted:Someone changed the proofpoint settings for our corporation and now all of my emails bounce because they think it has a social security number in it. I sent an email just telling a client to call me (no numbers in it) and it rejected saying it detected a social security number. pixaal posted:They likely reversed it. You have to put an SSN in the email for it to be accepted Try droping 111-22-3333 and see if the email goes through. That would be amazing. Edit: in white text.
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Jul 21, 2016 14:42
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ratbert90 posted:My commute is 15 minutes during rush hour. It's 5 seconds 4 days out of the week. More like poop hour!  In other news, new job is not so bad being on Salary. Stay late on a Thursday upgrading some storage et al. Go home at 2pm on Friday! Screw the previous job "as much OT as you can eat". Ill take the higher pay and getting to go home when you hit your 40. State employment rules!
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Jul 22, 2016 18:34
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alg posted:State employment does indeed rule. I'm at 30 days comp time right now from being on call. I'll retire 3 yrs early if I want. I work in the university system to. People don't expect poo poo to happen right then and there. And are generally less bitchy is something is busted. But thankful when it's fixed. There are some bad eggs but nowhere near where it was in MSP land.
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Jul 22, 2016 19:07
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Judge Schnoopy posted:ugh comp time is non-existent in MSP work, it's the loving worst. Super gently caress that noise. The last MSP I worked for was a little nicer about it. You got a stipend the week you were on call, and generally if you were out that late it would be expected you would use that sleep, or take the day off or whatever depending on time. Or use it as OT. But it was usually the senior ( I.e. The people you were burning the gently caress out faster) who would be overnight or after hours poo poo. Still sucks. Being on the other side, an MSP is good like being an ER doc in Chicago is good. You become an expert at the most gruesome poo poo imaginable and then you retire to the country you can solve almost anything because you can think and have a body of how poo poo breaks all the time knowledge. Example: explained to the it department guys about printing to fax on the copiers. No one knew. Admittedly it is not under their purview and I don't want to own that poo poo either, but I'm from the MSP world where if bitches actually had to get up to fax, we would get nuked from orbit for making their job to hard.
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Jul 22, 2016 22:32
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Sepist posted:Don't do that. I've always liked my coworkers and some of them including my old boss are coming to my wedding but I still gave the normal 2 weeks after I already have a signed offer at a new place. Also seconding this. Giving people that kind of notice will just freak them out and they will worry when the hammer will drop and feel anxiety about it that they will blame on you. Keep your own counsel and tell them when it becomes apparent that you have a job.
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Jul 22, 2016 22:50
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Speaking of job chat...  congrats man! You'll be ok. All the learning you did to get to where you are is exactly what you'll need to learn all the new stuff and get awesome at it.
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Jul 23, 2016 00:10
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CloFan posted:
Yea this isn't really "official" but my supervisor is cool with it as long as nothing is on fire / needs attention.
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Jul 23, 2016 03:16
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Arsten posted:Always apply. Craft your resume and say you are familiar with the technologies you are familiar with. And if they want a degree (even an associates) for a computer monkey job, they are out of their minds. The worse case, you never hear back - but you now have a resume the you can use for other gigs. Start taking courses like A+ at the community college to add to your resume and then get A+ certified. Move on to Network+ and any other certifications you can swing. My first jobs were pretty good, but they were interning with my county school system in highschool and college student helpdesk / vet school IT guy. After that though. My first small time MSP tech monkey blew goats for quarters. I think its a right of passage to get jerked around in at least one IT job in and around the beginning.
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Jul 25, 2016 13:40
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Still my go to if I need to check if a port is open, a thank ya very much
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Jul 26, 2016 16:47
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I non-ironically use most of those. Over the phone whack-whack is easier to get across to someone. I also use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet so there is no misunderstanding. I also use tack. It is a specific term for a specific key.
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Jul 26, 2016 21:33
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Virginia Tech - BS Computer Engineering It becomes a little depressing about half way through that they are all weed out classes. But hey, gotta start drinking sometime. I made the bad decisions after I graduated. Tried to start my own company doing "something with computers and coding" bounces around to the USPTO as an examiner and ran screaming. Did my own PC repair for a while. Got with an MSP because eating is cool, bounced back into higher Ed and feeling pretty good about it.
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Jul 29, 2016 00:47
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:
Yea I'll take my engineering degree from my highly ranked engineering school any day over those bow-tie wearing fools. Even if the physics department was in and out of accreditation when I was there. Edit: they are both really good and I would work for either one if I could move later in life in a heartbeat.
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Jul 29, 2016 11:30
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Tab8715 posted:Who uses mapped drives when you have SharePoint? You poor poor soul.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:47
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Currently 75K + State Benefits working in higher Ed. in Eastern VA. Infrastructure Manager handling almost everything other than the SIS. VMWare clusters, OSes, Integrations, Email, O365, Identity Management etc. been here about 3 years. However, PTO, Sick leave, baller ins. and we shutdown for almost two weeks at Christmas so, it could be worse, like the rat poo poo MSP I came from. On call for hundreds of clients once every five weeks... The issue for me is this, if this place was even remotely competent, I could be happy here. But literally everyone is afraid of pissing off the Faculty and Staff. And I don't mean the kinds of stuff that would put more burden on them, I mean the poo poo that would make their lives better?!?! Any time the meetings ends with "Once we get to this point we need to start communicating with the University that this change is happening and give them documentation on how to use X" everything stops. There is no forward motion. And projects just keep flowing in with no end because University. There is no planning, no setting of expectations, just we bought a thing and GOGOGOGOGOGOGO  . So I can automate anything I want UNLESS it affects Faculty / Staff / Students in any way. Things are slowly getting better, my boss is good, but is in the same boat as me, too much poo poo to do, not enough hands, and no one gives a gently caress about IT unless its to cover their rear end because they don't know how to do their jobs. Everyone else above him is probably gonna get fired when the new administration starts, been through two of those already (don't doxx me please!). I love working in higher ed, I love the mission and the work is always changing because of new fun things to learn about, but I am in a broken culture that has no idea what up even looks like anymore. And a place where IT is treated as a hot potatoe that has been rolled in poop. And if the new administration is good, it is going to take at least a decade to really get things back on track because state employees are barnacles for better or worse. I'm kinda done. I'm not here for this fight, I just wanna engineer the gently caress out of things for people that wants things engi-hosed.I just applied for a position at my alma mater that actually has their poo poo together and hires enough people to do the work they scope out. It would be building labs in the cloud for students all over the place to beat the gently caress out of. My networking seems to have paid off as my contact already spoke to the director of the area and they were very impressed with my resume. So here is hoping. It would be a big change and moving, and going back to the mountain land I learned at, compared to the land of bridges, tunnels, shipyards and lead poisoning. A little scary, but the place + getting a masters for free would be alright.
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Apr 22, 2019 20:29
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CloFan posted:Good luck! I am working for my alma mater, but it's basically as your current job is described-- too few hands, constant fires to be put out, lack of foresight/planning and politics everywhere. We're trying to change that and it's a lot better than it was a year ago. Currently 4400 or so, should be somewhere in the 7800's. Which explains the years upon years of mismanagement has caused decline which causes further crushed budgets, which caused flight, which caused positions to be eliminated due to fuckery... it didn't take a year to get here and it isn't gonna take a year to get out. When I say mismanagement I mean an admin that literally reaped this place for personal management. But yea fun! Who do you report to? Currently we report to finance. We have ping-ponged between them and the provost at least 3 times in the last 2 years. If we reported to the presidents office, we would probably get some of the ability to do things instead of being relegated to either neglect or used as a raid fund.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:42
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CLAM DOWN posted:Apparently flaming hot take for this thread: On-call should be paid. Not just for call outs, which should be overtime/double pay, but sitting on standby should be compensated. I'll never work anywhere again where it's not. Not disagreeing. The amount of stress created by knowing at any moment you have to stop what you are doing and assist a pissed off finance person get payroll done but they need this very important QuickBooks update applied RIGHT NOW (new years eve at 8pm) so they can pay a bunch of ship painters who will definitely set cars on fire if they don't get paid. Yea I wanna get paid for that. Not to mention not doing things or planning things because your time is not your own. I do not miss those days.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:46
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CloFan posted:drat, that's quite a dip. We declined nearly 1,000 students a couple years ago, but last fall had record enrollment so maybe things are turning around. Currently report to Finance, although yeah we were under the provost only a couple years ago. That sucked-- he saw the IT budget as a piñata to be used wherever he saw fit. Oh, and neglected to tell us about it-- we just found ~400k missing and had to ask wtf, he had decided Admissions needed it more than we needed lab computers. Whelp not too dissimilar then. Glad I’m not the only one?  We have just had really bad leadership in so many positions, it’s hard to see a real way forward. But then again, if all the asshats get fired ( the ones on contract) we could see some turn around. Either way, beats working in the MSP mines. I’ve done my time and slingshotted my skill set. Now to keep up the momentum moving to better!
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Apr 23, 2019 20:07
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Documentation! I'm curious how you all do documentation for your systems. We currently have a spreadsheet, which is something we want to get away from. I setup confluence about 2 years ago and use it for SOPs and application/integration stuff. But I'm tryin to figure out the "system" of documenting our infrastructure (hardware, VMs, special snowflakes etc). I went way overboard in planning for one system that used a lot of tags and dynamic lists within confluence, but I am thinking that it is probably too complicated (read: error prone and not useful if you don't manually do everything.) I would like to do it in such a way as to be able to see our lists from different perspectives, (by OS, SQL version for example). Anyone done something like this before and have any straightforward ways to do it. I just don't want to spin my wheels and build a rocket ship to the moon just to have a good inventory of what we have.
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May 7, 2019 14:19
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TheFace posted:Ours is a combination of things. We have a pretty decent Inventory/Asset management solution (Lansweeper). And we have the benefit of having a really robust Document Management System (cause Law Firm) with full text indexing and searching. Lastly our KB in Service Now is really fleshed out for all support type documentation. This is not a bad logical separation. Our ticket system is bad and we should feel bad. OTRS from about 4 years ago. Need to do updates but its just been so on the bottom of the list. Newer versions might actually be ok, need to test those out, Otherwise, I think we can work with something like that. Thanks!
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May 7, 2019 17:47
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Sirotan posted:Friday afternoon I received an unreasonably hostile reply to an email where I was looking to confirm specific details on a project. As this project has been a complete cluster since day one, and I'm now five business days out from leaving this position, I had literally zero fucks to give and sent him back the most pedantic yet nauseatingly polite email I could muster, CC'd up the chain and signed with a "Thanks! I love those employees that just love to be jerks to the IT staff about things. Or at least that is how it is here. Accounts Payable... they love to just go “it not work, can’t job, IT did it!” Hands off keyboard. I always respond with the most “I am so sorry I missed your calls with no voicemail, I’ll be happy to fix this please give me X time and we should blah blah blah. Especially because they start calling only after their supervisor calls them on the fact they haven’t done poo poo for 2 days so now it’s an emergency 
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May 18, 2019 17:46
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Dr. Yinz Ljubljana posted:I'm in a bad way, pushing 40 with zero certs to show and a 3rd shift job doing Security admin stuff - SIEM offenses, DDoS mitigation (mostly automated), AV provisioning, HIDs card admin/physical security I agree with BaseballPCHicker about the Comptia certs if you want to get certs. A secondary question to your original post is “what do you want to do in IT or anything else?”. What have you found interesting? Is there a direction you want to go? Development, infrastructure, security? There are pathways for all of those, some more technical than others, but first you need to know what you want, then you can build a path to get there.
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May 23, 2019 23:33
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Vulture Culture posted:Only ever make PDFs available to people Not empty quoting.
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May 25, 2019 17:27
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So, just did a code assessment as part of the interview process for the job at another University. It's some infrastructure for the unit and assisting in the creation of VMs for certain kinds of courseware. It feels like a real sidestep of the things I would rather not be doing, and focusing on newer and more fun things. Things I won't have to deal with: - Printers (campus copiers) - Users (all Faculty / Staff and Students if they have an issue that goes to our group, which is often due to lack to googling) - Windows (eh, not that I care either way) Things I will have to deal with: - Cloud services through programmatic methods - Issue tracking - Inner workings of *nix environments (more interested) - internal team to define projects Its a win-win from how I see it. Currently, I run the group that handles soup to nuts for servers, applications running on those servers and almost all campus wide services for a small University. We are stretched extra thin, and can barely keep up with Server OSes going EoL and trying as hard as we can to bring new features and systems online for the University as a whole. Oh and no one wants to spend money on hardware, big surprise. The new position has a tighter focus on really neat stuff (the courseware), and I get to move more into cloud services and infrastructure as code. I'm a little worried about money though. I'm in higher ed already, so I know that the economics are different.  But I would like to get somewhere in the 10-15% increase range to go, if it happens. From the publicly accessible databases (go transparency laws), it appears it would be "possible" it just depends on factors, like it being a tight labor market, CoL increases to move, and I'm looking at a 5% raise from the state July 1 if I stay. So I have some real number leverage other than "I want more LOL". The other side is, it appears at this school, people seem to get very nice CoL increases every year as an attempt to keep talent where as where I am, its whenever the state Legislature decides all state employees get a CoL increase and leadership doesn't seem inclined to do the work for it. In the long run, it looks like even if I didn't get a huge increase it would get much greater over time. Especially because my wife would have to leave her job, and it might be a while before she can find something commensurate with what she is making now.However, gently caress printers and email right?
ptier fucked around with this message at 00:01 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 25, 2019 23:56
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Methanar posted:general purpose resumes is fine. I do basically this. Swap items if I have stuff that isn’t asked for and go a little deeper into the stuff it does ask for. Also I save all my versions so I can go back and see what I have done in the past for certain kinds of jobs.
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May 26, 2019 02:29
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