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Orcs and Ostriches posted:So a local business wants me to help out with some projects as a consultant. Most of the time I do stuff like this it's quick, under the table type deals where the conversation starts of as "I'll give you $X to help out with this." As for this one, I have no idea how to price myself. Anyone have any pointers on the sort of things to consider when coming up with a number? Bidding piecemeal will gently caress you usually, don't bid an entire project. Bid part as static with a certain number of hours attached, like, 80 hours for $6,000 (this number is usually going rate in your area, complexity of the project, etc) and then hours over initial estimate billed at $100/hr If you finish under the bulk, good for you, extra time. If you don't, good for you, extra money.
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Nov 23, 2015 20:45
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Sheep posted:In my opinion IT is mostly a trade, much like plumbing. And similar to plumbing, I hire my plumbers based on whether they have the necessary credentials (not an unrelated 4-year degree), skills, and experience to do the job. The last thing I want to do is pay one plumber more than the other because he can wax philosophical about the impact of the Øresundstolden on post-liberation Sweden or what the hell ever and thus feels like he deserves more than the other guy with the exact same skill set. If he can't "demonstrate commitment to long term projects" or whatever a 4 year degree is supposed to represent then I'll just fire him and hire someone who can I'm with you here. I've been a hiring manager in IT for most of the last 20 years of my career and a degree has never mattered unless its something directly related to the job. TBH, most of my hiring hasn't been able what they're talking about here in the thread, about getting your foot in the door at tier 1, so a degree will help you get past HR roadblocks.
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Nov 30, 2015 18:34
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Zapf Dingbat posted:This was sent out by the owner over Thanksgiving. It's the end of a very, very long email about work ethic. I'm three months into this job and this pretty much ruined my weekend stressing out about it. Everything listed there is 100% illegal.
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Nov 30, 2015 18:36
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goobernoodles posted:Is Nagios still a good option for monitoring? Small/medium multi-office VMware/Microsoft environment. I like the idea of the customization of Nagios, and I previously hosed around with it but didn't have enough time to dedicate to it to get it where I needed it. I shut down that old VM since it's been like 4-6 months since I last tinkered with it and downloaded the NagiosXI OVF template not realizing that's actually the "pay for" version. I have no doubt I can get approval to spend ~2k on monitoring software, especially if it's just the upfront licensing costs the most money. Not sure if I'm less stupid than the last time I worked with Nagios or if NagiosXI is a lot easier to get running without reading a novel of documentation, but so far it seems fairly simple getting what I want monitored setup. From what I gather, I'd have to install one of probably various plugins in order to do any sort of bandwidth monitoring, but basically what I'm looking for is monitoring for our two offices networks consisting of: Look at OpenNMS, I'm still playing with it, but its so much better than Nagios with less of the nagios bullshit. PRTG is good if you have a budget of a few dollars, Solarwinds is good if you have a few dollars plus. Everything else in the monitoring space is complete poo poo.
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Dec 1, 2015 18:11
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goobernoodles posted:Yeah, I have a test PRTG server up and let it run through an auto-discover sequence. I think that's the problem with anything network scan based... waaaaaay too much noise initially. I'm systematically going through my list of servers/devices and setting each up the way I want. Even if I don't end up going with Nagios, I'll have a comprehensive list of services to monitor for each one in one location. I'll take a look at OpenNMS. PRTG just seems so expensive in comparison to Nagios and at this point I'm more comfortable with Nagios. I pretty much need to just pick something and run with it. I've been a Nagios user since it was Netsaint way back in the day. You'll like OpenNMS. Icinga2 seems like it'll be slick as hell in a year or so once they have some updated documentation and a more useful UI.
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Dec 1, 2015 18:31
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Vulture Culture posted:I wrote the Diamond collector for Nagios performance data, which is probably the most reliable way to get stuff over to Graphite (Graphios's parser is garbage and falls over a lot): You're one of my heroes for doing that.
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Dec 1, 2015 20:41
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ratbert90 posted:Commute chat? I literally just bought a house .5 miles from my work, because 
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Dec 2, 2015 20:28
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Alfajor posted:Anyone know if Sonicwalls have something like a "Fail 2 Ban"? Using a NSA2600 with all the Intrusion Prevention features turned on: I get 800 emails about IPS preventing attacks from one IP address. It'd be nice if after 50 prevented attacks, I could configure it to just block the IP address. Why do you get emails about IPS doing what IPS does? Once a week, review the logs in a log aggregator, done. gently caress getting individual emails about that poo poo.
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Dec 14, 2015 18:45
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Sheep posted:How far off list price are people normally able to negotiate? With the end of the year and budget money drying up I've been kind of blown away - get quotes from vendors for like $12000, say "welp we don't have the money for that", they come back with "we managed to get it down to $8500". How low does this stuff actually go? Depends. Software the cuts are amazing at the end of every quarter/year. A 20k quote should be purchased for no more than 8k or 9k towards the end of the year. Hardware varies a lot more. We made a switch to a new network vendor last year, original quote was 330k for new core/edge switches, final price was around 170k iirc, I waited for the end of their quarter to buy. I'm buying for our new building next week, I don't need the switches until May, but getting 50-60% off the original 'gold tier' pricing is worth having them sit in boxes in my data center.
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Dec 15, 2015 18:55
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ratbert90 posted:Rape, murder, arson, and rape. You said rape twice...
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Dec 16, 2015 16:19
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anthonypants posted:Charming. Sign right here.
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Dec 16, 2015 19:17
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theperminator posted:What does everyone use for graphing things like switches, system statistics etc? Depends on your budget, what gear you have and how much time you want to put into it. Graphite is great, if you have shitloads of time. Cacti works well without requiring too much work. Nagios with pnp4nagios/nagvis works for combination of graphing/alerting. OpenNMS is ok, but is missing some things when it comes to graphing/historicals without a lot of work. Check_MK is a nice nagios/nagvis skin and control option. If you have money, PRTG is nice. So is solarwinds Orion, everything else is poo poo. DigitalMocking fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 08:19
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Docjowles posted:Different topic: anyone tried out Dell's newish PowerEdge FX2 ~*converged infrastructure*~ gear? We're about to do a major data center refresh and were planning to go with a bunch of typical rackmount boxes. But our Dell rep pointed out this option and it looks pretty interesting. FX2 seems to sit someplace between a full-on blade system and traditional rackmount. Sort of like their VRTX product on steroids. Let me know how it goes for you, we're looking at the same thing for our new building installation in May
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Dec 21, 2015 20:34
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Despite my SIP trunks being down, I get to play my favorite game over the next few days: Pitting vendors against each other for my love(money).
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Dec 22, 2015 18:26
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Day 1 of my 5 day weekend. Why the hell are you looking at email or your phone on vacation? My last vacation I turned my phone off, it was glorious.
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Dec 24, 2015 05:51
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SaltLick posted:Boss needs certifications for the business and has offered 4x $1500 raises a year per exam passed in the past. Zero people have taken him up on it. This seems strange to me. Time to knock out the MCSA. I would have alphabet soup after my name if that was offered anywhere I worked.
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Dec 24, 2015 22:50
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PBS posted:No one uses a wiki or knowledge base? Does sharepoint count? Does sharepoint count if no one has uploaded a file since 2011?
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Dec 29, 2015 01:22
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Moey posted:I signed up about 2 weeks ago, have not had a chance to check it out yet though. I signed up and will never open that web site again. 
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Dec 30, 2015 19:27
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Kashuno posted:It's been a terrible week here. Anybody want to speculate why random ports on switches just start to fail to deliver PoE? Glad all these switches are getting replaced on Thursday. What's the power budget look like on the switch?
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Dec 30, 2015 23:44
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Kashuno posted:thanks guys! They are decently old, and we're replacing them with a bunch of meraki PoE switches on Thursday so hopefully that'll resolve this. If not it's going to be a real bitch. Oh my sweet summer child, why would anyone buy meraki switches? I mourn for you. 
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Dec 30, 2015 23:45
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Kashuno posted:I don't have buying authority so if it's really bad I can blame it on someone else! Boggles my mind that anyone would buy Meraki switches after the last couple of years worth of firmware they had. I've never wanted to take a sledgehammer to something so badly in my life.
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Dec 31, 2015 02:47
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Thanks Ants posted:Wait I've not heard about firmware problems, can you expand? Meraki stuff is normally the approved option around here for someone wanting to admin a network without being a network person, or with a bunch of branches to cope with. Oh man, where to start. This goes back farther than 2 years, my sense of time gets skewed. Most of this was pre-cisco buyout or right around when they did in 2012. Automatic firmware updates wiped switch configurations. Automatic firmware updates that were turned off got applied anyway. Switch lockups after firmware update. Had to RMA three MX switches after downgrade bricked them. Disconnects and reboots along the way with the APs Beta firmware being applied when we weren't in the Beta program. Huge and constant problems with 802.x Lack of support for CDP/eigrp et al after the purchase bothered me, but that wasn't really their problem, its not hard to re-write your OS. Lets not forget that at one point in time, if you stopped paying for the wireless configurator cloud thing, you couldn't make any changes to the APs that you owned. I'm not a fan of Meraki in any way, shape or form. DigitalMocking fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 02:57
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flosofl posted:802.1X? Port security? Yeah, sorry, missing the 1. There was an issue where the switches wouldn't clear the last VLAN state if they lost connectivity to the RADIUS server. Now to be honest, this was on beta firmware for the MAC based radius authentication, so we partly own that issue. edit: It was in Beta a LOOOONG time, they didn't release it until I had moved on and landed in HP ProCurve hell and stopped doing any kind of consulting. DigitalMocking fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 07:25
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Moey posted:I took over a Meraki setup a few years ago (access switches, access points and firewalls for VPNs) and have had 0 of these problems. I am running about 30 switchs, 50 APs and 10 or so firewalls (Z1 through MX80). You should go buy some lottery tickets then, you're the luckiest human I know of.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:00
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thebigcow posted:If someone were a sadomasochist and wanted to be a DBA, where would you start? You're 90% there with enjoying pain already. The rest is just learning to be bad at databases, but slightly less bad than 99.99% of everyone else.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:49
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ZteleME posted:Was wondering if I truly need a bachelor's degree to advance in the IT field? I'm already working in IT for awhile now, but only have an associates. Degrees help with two things: 1) getting your foot in the door with certain companies. 2) being promoted to management. For the most part, beyond that, degrees are more useless in the IT fields than most other professional fields.
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Jan 1, 2016 20:42
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Vulture Culture posted:At one of my prior engineering roles, I spent a lot of time having to prove that yes, issue X was the network. The network engineer would shrug off reports of problems with comments like "well, I can ping it" like a long-running string of 64-byte packets once a second must surely reveal issues with misconfigured Ethernet flow control or interface MTUs. I spend a lot of time proving that issue X isn't the network. The server/application/database administrator would shrug off reports of problems with comments like "well, I can reach the service" or "I can see the database structure in Manager" like opening an application in a web browser once must surely reveal issues with misconfigured services or databases that fail under load. A lot of application/server administrators just plain aren't good at that aspect of their jobs. it makes it hard to instill confidence in the infrastructure when the admins clearly have no idea what to even monitor to say the services are healthy.
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Jan 1, 2016 20:45
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abigserve posted:In my experience the network is always the first to be blamed because it guarantees at least one person will seriously investigate the problem. "the network has problems" is the sysadmin's way of saying "well everything else is probably broken as well so don't look at me" I don't disagree, just after 2 decades of hearing "it must be the network" I'm ready to stab a bitch some days.
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Jan 2, 2016 00:28
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CloFan posted:Welcome back to work, everything is broke! ShoreTel gently caress ShoreTel. gently caress ShoreTel. gently caress ShoreTel. In short, gently caress ShoreTel.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:29
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Tab8715 posted:IT exists not to spin up servers for fun but to meets the needs of the the company. Keeping the lights on doesn't necessarily add business value and it's quickly becoming one of biggest things I dislike about System Administration. If that's what your management believes then wherever you work is bad and you should not work there any more.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:53
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Kirios posted:Just got my CCNP....feels great man. 
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Jan 5, 2016 18:36
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psydude posted:This assumes that industry trends aren't observable and that people can't add to and improve their skillset. Right now, it's fairly obvious the way the industry is going with respect to things like virtualization and SDN. I work with customers whose network engineers are stuck in the 90s and have made themselves obsolete because they never bothered to learn about things like routing protocols and LACP. Do you think doctors and lawyers can just sit there with the same body of knowledge they learned in med school and law school? No, they have to keep up with their industry. Even union workers are required to learn new equipment, techniques, and technologies, and usually also become certified in them. I don't believe you. What exactly do you do if you're a network engineer and don't understand routing protocols? And LACP? Really? Port binding has been a thing since the 90s.
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Jan 6, 2016 16:23
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psydude posted:Configure static routing everywhere and don't bother with redundancy because who has time to manage STP anyway, right 
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Jan 6, 2016 20:07
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I really can't get into consulting again, my soul can't handle it, but I need to start making some extra money on the side. I know the answer is go back to doing some consulting again. 
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Jan 7, 2016 08:51
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Moey posted:You guys have separate elevated accounts? Everyone in the IT department here gets added to the Domain Admin group on day one..... 
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Jan 7, 2016 22:11
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CLAM DOWN posted:What does that have to do with IT.... Only IT people use slack, duh.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:32
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Kind of IT related, I had to reboot my rental car yesterday. Rented a BMW to drive up to Seattle, at one point had to get up on the gas to pass someone and the car started misfiring, threw an error on the display and was running like complete poo poo. Limped to the venue, turned the car off, restarted it, problem gone. I literally had to turn it off and back on again to fix it. 
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Jan 13, 2016 18:35
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Evidently its this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITSW9QTBAlw In other news, during my yearly interview I was given the goal of taking a 2 year management training course so I can run my own team. (granted, I've been in a director role before, but all my management has been OJT, I have 0 schooling at all past what I did in the Navy, so this is pretty sweet)
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Jan 14, 2016 18:56
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CLAM DOWN posted:New game just for this thread: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1567327150/server-tycoon that is a weirdly specific kickstarter goal amount.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:47
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Has anyone deployed Microsoft Direct Access in a pure IPV4 environment? I did some research into it 6 months ago and it seemed like it required IPV6 at some level, but that's not seeming like the case now reading some of the documents. In typical Microsoft fashion its hard to tell what features are needed/available for what builds of windows, so I'm curious if anyone has deployed it.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:04
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