Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron - The Something Awful Forums

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I'm honestly at a loss as where to ask this in 2017 and there doesn't seem to be a perfectly relevant thread.

I took over a small shop at the beginning of November. They had an older admin before (I'm not exactly young either, but like a guy in his late 50s), and while there are a few areas they're doing things a bit behind the time, there's either plans to upgrade in place or the stuff works well enough that it's not a pressing issue. Overall I'm really impressed. One big exception though is they have a program that everyone uses that uses Microsoft Access.

I was completely honest in my job interview that I didn't know how to do a ton in this software (like 10 years ago I made a little data entry form to add information into a DB and that's it) so expectations aren't high and there's talk of maybe eventually moving most of what lives in this DB to more modern solutions. There is one thing though that people would really like me to fix fast if I can, which is they need an item added to the employee reward system form.

I added the field to the .accdb, that was easy. But I can't figure out how to edit the form. I finally figured out how to open up the back end of the.accde but the form editing tools are greyed out (although it does show the field that I added in the linked table). I really just need to add a couple checkboxes that corespond to the backend and people will be happy.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 23:52

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:40

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I think the hesitation around that actually is because it's a fake token economy they actually want to keep it away from interacting with Quickbooks (which the accountants do use) or something of that nature. The real money is fine, the fake money is not.

I don't think I explained what the reward system is very well but basically employees award each other five "wow bucks" when they do good things and eventually when they get like, 30 dollars, they get a mug, all the way up to getting bonus PTO days and their names on plaques, stuff like that. Since the last IT guy left they added a couple new prizes that aren't in the DB.

Maybe I should just spin up a little internal php app for this, it would probably ultimately be less work if I can't make this go.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 01:16

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

The only caveat I'll add is that for non-profits sometimes it still works out to be cheaper to get station licenses than Office 365. Although then again 365 is worth slightly more (for me) if you have the budget.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2018 05:50

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Digital_Jesus posted:

If you're a smaller non-profit MS used to have a program that O365 was free up to X number of users then it was reduced cost similar to their NP/Edu discounts on OVL/Retail, but I don't know if its still a thing.

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

You can get 300 users free business essentials (which is all the standard online services but no installed apps)

I've definitely made use of those but people were really resistant to the web apps (for good reason I suppose). It was five dollars a license for users with installed apps which was still pretty good but not as good as when we were getting 100 station licenses for 5 dollars total.

Rick fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jan 11, 2018

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 22:31

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

So the thread was talking about managed switches earlier, what about smart or even un-managed switches? Normally just grabbing the cheapest one possible is fine for me but I'm in a situation where I actually need this one to be reliable even if I don't really need it to do a ton.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 08:36

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Get a printer contract but don�t get a Xerox printer contract because you still end up supporting it yourself anyway.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 09:17

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I can believe it, the tech isn't necessarily bad and I could see it being supported well under different management. For me it was more like same week or next week and if it needed a part, who knows. And "well I guess it's just not going to work" instead of helping to work through complications during a non-traditional but necessary deployment.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 17:51

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I'm incompetent and do not want to run SBS anymore.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 17:05

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Old Binsby posted:

Until I started reading this thread I wasn't even aware SBS was still a thing. Goondolences.

I'm lucky enough to not be using it now, and I did well enough at my last job (hiring the right team, finding good third party support . . . I'm really better with the administrative part of running an IT department rather than being the actual IT department) in growing the tech that I was able to move them past it.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 17:04

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I work for a non-profit so it's hard to convince people to spend on stuff like that unless you have someone at almost the highest level of the company who is an advocate for New Stuff. Y'all aren't wrong though, it probably does end up costing more in the long run to both store and hand out garbage.

Video cables though, hold them, forever.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 00:06

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Digital_Jesus posted:

If you allow users to touch computers, you're probably non-compliant.

Source: 6 years of being a medical IT consultant.

Pretty much. I mean I think Microsoft finally addressed HIPAA in Windows 10 in December 2017?

I just tried my best to control what I could realistically control and CYAed everything else as much as possible.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 18:22

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

if windows: take advantage of your ample free time to learn powershell for your next job

This is a page old but yeah, unless you have a serious problem a 20 user environment is gonna be super slow. If you do have serious problems, well, try and sell your company on how much more expensive it is to fix those problems when you're a 40 person company, and it just gets worse from there. I was apart of a company that had 10 and then as they grew to 50, then 100, then 200+ . . . and then back to 100 (which is right around when I was laid off). There are problems that started when I was the IT guy at 10, that no one wanted to pay to fix, that still existed when i went back to this role (after doing other various jobs, and going back to college and getting a completely non-IT related degree) when they had 70, and there started to be really tangible consequences for these problems, so expensive that I didn't really have the nerve to say "I told you so."

I work at a different company with around 80 people now and it's slow! Although this is partly because the guy who came before me wasn't a moron. He just was old, and all of his tech is old, but for the most part still working, so now so hopefully I don't ruin it as I bring stuff that is for sure going to break or age out in a few years into the modern era a bit for the next guy without breaking it too much.

The next pitch after we get new battery backups is that it might be time to move to office 365.

# ¿ May 19, 2018 04:42

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

In both my current and last job we deployed thin clients and it's mostly bad. At the first job, it made a little sense because the EHR we were using ultimately forced everyone who was outside of the main office to RDP into there anyway. The consultant we used for networking was always pushing thin clients and I finally went with it, because all of our machines pretty much had become terminals anyway. Unfortunately I let them talk me into this for our Yuma deployment. On top of being three or four hours away (depending on traffic), Yuma is not a place with very modern infrastructure. And we had just invested a ton of money into managed office with Century Link (not my idea! did not sign off on it!) so we wanted this office to be apart of it, which meant our only option was DSL, and unreliable DSL at that. It made the thin client experience so terrible for the people, and instead of not being able to work on the medical records when the internet had problems, they weren't able to work at all, and their nearest support was me, 3-4hours away. It is true that when individual machines had problems, the solution of being able to just swap the machine with another one was a reality, but the part where I was half a business day away was pretty bad. And if it was an internet problem, the Century Link support came out of Phoenix (every service in Yuma is managed by someone in Phoenix, Tucson, or San Diego). We were able to eventually get Time Warner there, which was also pretty bad as far as ISPs go, but once we had some decent bandwidth the machines magically started to work and staff actually liked them more than the laptops we had brought down there as backups for the thin clients. But of course shortly after that we were able to break the contract with the EHR and the need to connect to the main office became no longer necessary.

My current company also used this same third party consultant, and I can't poo poo on them too much because they vouched for me getting this job (possibly because they knew I'm an idiot who calls them and makes them money), and also pushed thin clients on them. I don't know why, they sold them to both companies at a steep discount and refuse to take money to support them so it's not like they make money off of them. There are a few employees who prefer them because of the small profile but they're still just a huge hassle, and take up the vast majority of my time even though they are a small percentage of our overall infrastructure (which is otherwise pretty good, albeit old).

# ¿ May 20, 2018 03:55

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Sheep posted:

Sounds like that one is on you guys for not having the proper infrastructure to support your critical business system.

It definitely is. I mean I kind of blindly trusted these guys, but blind trust of people who don't fully know your situation, or not fully knowing the situation either is my fault either way.

It seems the entire practice of IT for me is me blindly walking into extremely noticeable pits of spikes.

Potato Salad posted:

Failing to spec then test bandwidth requirements is ~~pretty appealing~~ par for the course on behalf of your consultants.

Definitely. Knowing that has helped me be a lot less likely to take their recommendations as gospel at least.

# ¿ May 23, 2018 18:29

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Defenestrategy posted:

So I've been at this job for a month and it's pretty rad, except this one printer. I dunno what to do about it. Some days, works great no problem. Other days there seems to be a communication issue where if you print to it, the printer won't print and the stupid printer status window thing says "spooling", and attempts to stop and delete the job will be met with silence. So you restart the computer and magically it starts working again until a day or two later when the whole dance starts again. It's hooked directly to the computer so I'm not even sure why this POS is acting up, at this point I'm thinking the owner of the computer is just loving with me.

Printers suck.

You can stop and restart the printer spooling service and this will usually fix the active problem without requiring a restart, although this won't solve it forever.

Is the printer shared? Sometimes this breaks things too for no discernible reason. Sometimes installing a different version of the driver works, too. Sometimes it's just as simple just removing and re-adding the printer will make it play nice Sometimes the best solution is "new printer."

I don't like printers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

# ¿ Jun 4, 2018 20:28

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Thanks Ants posted:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IELD1O4/

I almost talked work into buying this at the end of the fiscal year but we had to drop 20K on a server instead so that was the end of that.

I've been thinking lately I'm just going to buy one for myself, I could probably use it around the home.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 01:00

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

MDT and system imaging in general is a big blind spot to me. I absolutely get the point and see how it would be easier, but also I've generally been able to keep up with just doing this manually.

I read the blog and then on MDT and it all seems easy enough to install but they all seem to be missing the step of what you do next to actually get the clients to take the image.

I'm like a super terrible IT person.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2018 21:09

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

So we have some laptops at an offsite location we have limited control over the local internet. We used to have stable staff there but suddenly we don't. Is there a way to allow users to access these laptops without having been logged on to them at one of our main locations first?

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 18:42

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

pixaal posted:

Set your VPN connection to connect before they log into Windows. If they aren't connecting to any domain resources just make local user accounts and have them log in as .\localuser

You can also just have it not on the domain at all if it will never need to be and go solely on local admin (never give this out) and local user.

I think there's also a way with Windows 10 and an Azure Domain Controller but that's very likely outside the scope for small shop.

VPN might be the way to go. The issue is that people are just sent to this location as sort of desperation fill-ins , so it's been difficult for me to anticipate who will show up there. We wanted to break the habit of communal logins but that might in fact be the easiest given our infrastructure.

Thanks Ants posted:

Either look at running everything off Azure AD, or if this is a few clients and everything else is on a domain and you're happy with it, use DirectAccess.

I would be fine with Azure AD actually but for whatever reason it's a bit of a boggie man here. Also we're still running Server 2008 R2 (I actually deployed Azure connect at my last job and there weren't any problems although I never tried to sign anyone in that way either, that was for Office 365 purposes).

Direct Access seems to be not that hard.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 21:41

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I'd love to put Thin Clients in there but they move from courthouse to courthouse so we're stuck with latoptops. We have some tablets (that I was pretty skeptical about buying when they requested them but it ended up having worked) that connect to Horizon which works pretty good, but we have to get approval from the city every time an employee goes there to use the private city wifi, at each separate court site.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 21:55

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Thanks Ants posted:

Don't you have the same problem with laptops and Wi-Fi?

MDMd tablet with LTE, a keyboard cover and a VDI app could be a winner if there's also a need to keep the data secure in the event of the device being lost.

For laptops users are able to access our reporting software even if nothing else so they still end up being useful, the reporting software is unfortunately Internet Explorer only which makes the tablets unable to use it unless connected to VM. They are LTE but it gets poo poo reception in 2 of the 3 court rooms. Also boss is trying to cheap out on the data plans.

I guess we could get windows tablets though.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 22:34

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Have you guys had luck getting people to back off the "just use E-mail for all communication" train, or is it even worth bothering trying?

I got a surprising amount of resistance to implementing Slack so I'm kind of deciding on what to do next, if anything. We will eventually migrate to 365 so I'm not as worried about the storage aspect (although that might be the most immediate problem given the rate of some user's email) but I still think that email just sucks as a collaborative communication tool. I know Slack isn't perfect either but during my brief time in corporate, it was functional improvement to email at least.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 08:50

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I think I need to learn more advanced networking stuff but I can't seem to figure out which courses teach that. I have a pretty good grasp on the actual computers themselves but tend to get into real trouble once routers or switches beyond consumer level start having problems.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 23:19

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

dogstile posted:

I've been asked to look into CCTV for a shop that my boss owns the property of. It needs to be sharp enough to recognise faces and I need to be able to store/auto cycle the data without actually being there.

I've never done anything like this before, anyone got a good idea of where to start? UK suppliers would be handy if you can help, if not general advice is appreciated.

For what it's worth we've talked about this quite a bit in the Inspect your Gadgets Home Automation thread. If you can search it, smart people give me (dumb person) good feedback on the subject.

But everyone is right that outsourcing it is the best bet, but unfortunately at my job it's not going to happen.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2018 20:18

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

We currently have a helpdesk/building maintenance ticketing/incident reporting system that kind of sucks but if i'm honest, serves our needs, but the problem is that it's based Access . . . and Access 2010 to boot, and it doesn't seem to play nicely with anything newer than Access 2013 and we're going to probably go to office 365 within the next year.

So what internal help desks are you using? Just need a place to make a computer help desk, building repair tickets and incident reports, where the people who are assigned those tickets don't see each other's tickets. I'm not opposed to using three different solutions for this if necessary, but all of these I look at seem to take the shotgun approach of doing a bunch of things.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 01:00

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Matt Zerella posted:

Freshdesk is pretty great. We use Jira and it's horrible.

Freshdesk kind of looks like the closest to what I'm going for.

The Fool posted:

I'm using Spiceworks now and it is horrible.

I used it at my last job and yeah. Not great. Also the maintenance guys couldn't wrap their heads around also seeing computer problems so we ended up signing up for another free one somewhere for them only. The ones at the current job are a little more savvy but still.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 01:27

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

We have a situation where we need an easy way to display the feed from our cameras in areas where it is impractical to get the feed dropped directly from the DVR. The camera do display on a browser though in the local network.

I had planned on using stick PCs (probably Chromebit? Although I see they haven�t released an updated version in 4 years which is worrisome ) but is there an easier way?

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 10:46

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I guess should've asked this thread before deciding between Unifi and Tp-link APs, although I've had zero complaints about the tp-links at the other place I deployed them when budget was more of an issue, and they also were easy to set up.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 02:05

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

A while back here someone posted some Bomgar alternatives but I can't find the post for the life of me. Anyone still have other remote control software they're using?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2019 23:24

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Thanks Ants posted:

It's called Quick Assist and it's pretty great

This is cool!

E: Well it will be cool in 8-10 months when all of our Windows 7 machines are finally retired.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2019 18:44

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

The Fool posted:

Still doesn't do UAC

Ah, then way less cool.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2019 18:46

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I have a 24 port switch in our shelter that is starting to have ports die, so I imagine it's not much longer for this world.

I am fairly confident that it is not the actual switch that is dividing traffic between our VLANs (I didn't choose sys admin life, sys admin life chose me, so I am super weak at how the physical network works, so sorry if this sounds stupid, I'm the loving moron predecessor), because there is another managed switch before it physically in line from the network router, and this managed switch is where the ethernet cables that eventually end up in our member's rooms (whom we have on a separate lan than our main one), as well as the currently dying switch, are plugged into. However because I don't know a ton about this, I'm not sure. I'm calling our phone service provider to find out.

Basically I'm trying to decide if I should replace it with "Ubiquiti UniFi Switch - 24 Ports Managed (US-24-250W)" because I read a lot about it being pretty good, and the graphs of which port is doing what look like they'd be helpful, or if I should get a TP-Link T2600, which is a switch that I have bought for a couple other buildings that don't have to worry about Vlans and seems to work just fine. Reliability is the big thing, because while I"m not sure if this switch contains the VLAN, I know for sure it is switch that runs our cameras, the doorbell that rings the front desk phones, as well providing internet to most of the staff in the building.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 23:13

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Actuarial Fables posted:

Depending on how your network is set up, the dying switch may have some vlan configuration on it so you'll need to be very sure. If you don't have access to the dying switch's management interface at the moment, you can check the upstream switch and see if the port that connects the switches together has any "tagged" vlans or if it's configured as a "trunk" - if so, there are vlans configured on it and you'll need to document what vlans are assigned to what ports.

A few cautions with going into the UniFi line:
-You'll need to set up the UniFi network controller on a server or purchase a cloud key. If you want the pretty statistics then you'll need it running 24/7, and some of the graphs will be missing because you don't have a UniFi router. The Gen1 cloud key is bad and corrupts itself all the time, so either set something up on a local server/VM or get the gen2 key. The gen2 cloud key is an added cost of ~$180, setting the controller up yourself is "free" but it's yet another service you have to manage.
-UniFi support isn't very good. The products are cheap enough that, depending on the issue you have and how much you value your time, it'll be faster and more economical to just buy a replacement switch.
Anecdotally, the UniFi switches I've deployed have all worked great.

They're fine if you have spares to swap out if one starts acting up, but trying to figure out if it's a phone, switch, or cable issue is not something I enjoyed doing.

Thanks! That's a good thing you pointed out because I don't actually have a server at that location. I can install it on a machine there and hope no one messes with it, but, well, if it's on then people will usually find a way to mess with it at that building.

I was able to confirm with the ISP that the vlans are set up on the router not on the switch itself.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 20:39

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Actuarial Fables posted:

It's possible to set up the controller in a remote location, like another site connected through a VPN or a cloud-hosted VPS. Bit more extra work though, and for just managing a single switch it's all a bit excessive unless you're pining for a network infrastructure overhaul and are testing out the UniFi line.

You know more about your network than I do, but with a switch to have cameras, doorbells, and general internet access and no vlan config seems odd to me. It's possible that the upstream switch is configured to tag all traffic coming from the dying switch with the same vlan, but that's not a typical configuration (maybe I've been spoiled).

I don't know about your networking knowledge so I apologize if this is unneeded information - typically vlans are often set not only at the router (where the IP range is defined), but on all the switches as well. The switches need to know what ports are assigned to what vlans so that they can tag the traffic and switch it correctly to the appropriate ports, eventually reaching the router where it can route the traffic to other vlans/networks.

The tech at the ISP suggested that it was exactly that, everything was configured upstream by them; my predecessor was not a loving moron but he apparently knew as little about VLANs as I did so at some point the phone engineers just did it on their router for him. My guess is that despite what the ISP dude is saying though (he wouldn't know, if I could talk directly to the phone engineer he probably would but he's remote work right now) that switch just-upstream-of-dying switch has vlans configured on it to, because otherwise I can't tell why it exists or what its purpose is, it's a 24 port switch with 4 things plugged into it (well, 6 now until I replace the downstream switch). I absolutely appreciate your info here because I am a networking noob.

By cameras I should clarify that these are analog cameras (NOT MY CHOICE, I HATE THEM), it's just their connection to remote viewing software.

I would love to do an infrastructure overhaul but realistically it's the wrong place to test it, and I don't have the budget for it, and if I did there are several things I'd do at that building first (like digital cameras, or having the place re-cabled with cables actually in the wall instead of at best running through channels, but, at times just coming loose directly through holes in the wall). Next time the central office needs a switch I think I'll push for doing it there.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 22:48

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I've tried to explain to the CEO about 500 ways that as long as we only have a 2 mbps connection at the site where our file server is, we probably aren't going to be able to do automatic offsite backups. Kind of hard to convince him of this because the guy who was my supervisor when I started (not a tech guy, gone for about a year) got sold around $4,000 in NASes and who knows how much else in labor to do this; it is a beautiful one site backup, but for anything else, pretty useless. I've tried to break it down as a math equation where there are not enough minutes in the week for it to complete even the backup of our servers, let alone the files, I've tried using lots of different analogies (who says a lit degree is usless in IT), I've enlisted the ISP and a third party tech company to back me up.

Any ideas? Really isn't an option to improve the speed without switching ISPs, which is a tough sell because the ISP is a donor.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 19:32

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Internet Explorer posted:

2 mbps!?!

Yeah, that's kind of a problem when doing anything modern.

Yeah it sucks. We actually have a site where we get 20 up from the same provider but the main office is reliant on fixed wireless.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 22:01

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Kazinsal posted:

When was the last time you updated your resume?

Fairly recently, although that is less tech related and more related to company culture that kind of sucked but the people I really disliked have all quit or are quitting by the end of the month so I'm curious to see if it's better without them.

Gerdalti posted:

Just do the off-site backups. When your bandwidth is saturated 24/7 maybe you get to have a more fruitful conversation about it.

Did this! Very quickly got a "okay turn it off we'll evaluate our ISP or come up with another solution" but after a lot of work ultimately didn't make a change. It's not just the donation factor, we are not near fiber and we have had some really bad experiences with Cox cable that make them a difficult choice.

mewse posted:

Radio wireless is capable of way more bandwidth than that, maybe they've got bad distance to the tower or something

Yeah, we are basically in the worst spot possible, ISP says if we were a block closer or a block farther it would be much better.

Eikre posted:

When you ask for ideas, are you looking for a technical solution or a political one? Because if you've already done the math and had two other parties check your sanity and dug in your heels, you probably know there isn't a technical option.

If what you're saying is true, then the fact of the matter is that you yourself cannot make him understand or serve as the interlocutor for any other authorities to make him understand. Now, if he's periodically coming down to your office in an apparent fugue state, obliging you to explain the same loving thing again, and walking off with a frown, then maybe fifteen minutes of weekly vexation is just part of your job description. If he's periodically giving you an order to get the backups going, you try to make him understand why it's a bad call, and he relents in the face of your resistance, then your explanations are counterproductive; he's just walking away with the impression that there was something unsatisfying about how he understood the issue, and that's keeping the argument alive in his head - but if you can successfully remand him each time, then you've got at least some kind of authority with him. Could be time to just start being as concise as possible with "The bottom line is that I need a new ISP to do that. We've been through it before, but this is my expertise and I'm asking you to just trust me."

But frankly, you know what I would I do? I'd stop arguing and just spin up a loving backup system. I'd apply my own unilateral judgement about which assets are the most important, with a budget of, say, ten gigabytes per day, and I'd configure the system to back those files up in reliable increments. The very first thing getting this treatment would be my rear end-covering email records documenting my objections to the system. I'd come up with an expedient off-the-shelf solution to stage and transfer all the other poo poo with whatever bandwidth I had leftover, completely catch-as-catch-can. I would periodically bring up the situation as an ongoing issue and say things like "It has been two months of running backups at full speed, 24 hours a day, and we have only transferred 1.3% of the 100 terabytes on our file servers." I would feel no guilt about the inadequacy of the system or any other projects that were left undone in the meantime, and leave work at 5pm sharp every day. In the event of an emergency, I would have more material backed up than if I did nothing, I would have the warrant to indulge in a fight if somebody pegged me as the scapegoat, and I would have absolutely no angst because I did everything I could.

Just out of curiosity, how much data do you have on hand at a given time? Ballpark, here.

It's definitely the periodic fugue state thing, and if anything he thinks I'm way better at this than I am (I'm the moron predecessor to whoever next takes this job, and the guy I replaced was pretty good he just was stuck in 2005).

So I guess technical technical because I actually understand the politics of it. Me unilaterally doing something like that would make the point, but the poo poo that the company does is important (literal life and death), and if there is guilt, it is in impacting that. And while the ISP loving sucks at delivering internet to us, they are really good at delivering stable phone service and real 24/7, in town support and have bent heaven and earth at 3:00 AM to get our phones going again when they've hit disasters. And unfortunately my run at my last job (where I had the confidence and truly felt supported enough to just decide for everyone to switch the ISP [and the stakes were lower]) taught me that neither Cox or Century Link can provide that, at least for at the price point we pay (even if their service agreements say they provide this, been left dead in the water several times). So I think you are getting at the truth of the matter that my own indecisiveness on this issue probably is why it's actually an issue.

It's only about 1.5 TB backup now, I successfully sold them Office 365 which lowered what we needed to back up massively.

Internet Explorer posted:

I mean, if you can't do offsite backups, then do onsite backups with those NASes and/or tapes. It will cover a lot of failure modes. Just make sure the decision makers know that it isn't a best practice and won't cover all failure modes.

Eventually this is what I started doing until COVID hit, I was picking NAS #2 up on Tuesday from location #2 and driving it to location #1, cloning the backups from NAS #1 over night, then driving NAS #2 back to location #2 on Wednesday. An auditor dinged us for this though anyway and wants an offsite backup and I know they aren't exactly wrong. Post COVID I am only physically at work about two hours a week.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 05:45

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Internet Explorer posted:

I mean, look. You were doing the "right" thing for someone who has no bandwidth. If the auditors were still dinging you, as an engineer, sometimes you gotta let things go and be like "well, that's the best we can do with what we got. Anything else is a business decision" and let the cards fall as they may. I'd say that if you were driving NASes around, you've already gone further as an engineer as you probably should have been. Maybe the answer is to back up to tape and have Iron Mountain come pick it up every day. Maybe the answer is to throw money at an ISP to solve what sounds like a difficult ISP situation. But you've done what you can, and it's time for you to stick to your guns and force management to tackle the problem. At least that's my take on my understanding of what you've described.

Thank you for saying this because driving these NASes around felt crazy and was a pain in the rear end but I could think of nothing else, and yeah you are right about the auditor. I'm going to look into iron mountain just to see from a price situation. I did salvage a tape writer from storage so this is probably something that has at least been done in the past at some point.

Thanks Ants posted:

100% in agreement with Internet Explorer on this, you're being asked to find technical solutions to a political issue, and it doesn't exist

By all means get pricing from Iron Mountain but by the time you're pricing up a tape library, media, software and the actual offsite storage contract I'd be amazed if it wasn't cheaper after a couple of years to throw money at an ISP to run a fibre to you - with the advantage that you then don't have an unusably poor internet connection on your site.

The only other option could be to co-lo *everything* and access it via remote desktop, but again this will price out way ahead of just improving the connectivity at your site, and I still think 2Mbps might be pushing it.

Can you get Starlink where you are? It's not a perfect solution and I'm not some weird Musk fanboy, but it's probably the cheapest way to PoC something.

I have brought up running something to us with a phone engineer before and he says "oh we can but it's very expensive without having a price." Maybe I should just ask our sales rep who would probably be more motivated to complete such a thing.

We don't have Starlink access yet but from what I understand it will be in my town "very soon."

I've definitely toyed with the co-lo part but yeah it seems like such an overkill. It was also something the dude before me tried and abandoned

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 10:44

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

Collateral Damage posted:

How much does your data change? Would it be possible to only do incremental backups?

This is the goal, but it changes just enough that even if I establish a working backup in office and then move Nas #2 across town, after a week it starts failing again.

Eikre posted:

Technically speaking, having an additional but inadequate backup does not imperil you any more than just not having the backup at all. If you're holding out because you think this will close the issue and impair your efforts to enact better solutions, we're still playing politics.

The technical way to address this is to keep your terrific telephone service and also get an internet provider with better bandwidth. The political consideration may be that management is loath to pay two bills, but it is really not uncommon to split your VOIP off from the general TCP/IP line and use different service providers for them.

These are 1.5TB increments, right? 1.5TB isn't the total contents of the NAS, right? I mean, I can certainly believe that Microsoft's cloud could do some heavy lifting, but if all it did was pick up all your text documents and spreadsheets and this was a huge swipe at the amount of data you're working with, then... I don't want to come off as patronizing, but I'd like to be sure that we both understand that a robust off-the-shelf backup solution would usually be staging updates to the backup, not just transmitting the entire contents of the server every week.

It only increments a few hundred gigs a week but doesn't keep up. As I'm typing this out I wonder if the fact I am creating hourly/daily/monthly backups locally is causing it to see more data changing than actually is? I use Veam, and I even brought a consultant in to make sure I was configuring it right and he signed off on it but that doesn't mean it's actually right.

mewse posted:

You guys are adverse to cox but maybe you could sign up for the bandwidth and use a modern router like a meraki for redundant uplinks when cox goes down

There is definitely a hesitation to pay two bills. I think this is something at this point maybe I can sell a bit better, or sell cox as our primary internet and the local ISP as phones/backup internet. There is evidence in the main building that someone did this here before (a big unused cox modem hat had an ethernet cable going into the local ISP's router) although it was covered in dust so it had been a while since anyone did anything with it. I did dual ISPs at my last job and it didn't work that great initially (although after a lot of work, worked perfectly) and I'm wondering if guy before me abandoned the idea. This is on my list for something to try, too.

Thanks Ants posted:

If the objection is to getting a new "ISP" because the current one does good by you, could you get a link installed that is just a private fibre to the nearest data centre? Technically it's not a new internet provider but it achieves what you need it to.

What are the options that the cable companies are offering? Nobody is saying you have to get rid of the current provider, but if there's some business cable modem service available that is 50Mbps up and a few hundred down for a few each month then just get that installed and work around the downtime.

There are other parts of town they provide fiber in so there has to be some way to get it to us.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2021 00:11

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:40

Rick: Feb 23, 2004; When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

We got that eye camera at work and it works pretty good for like three people huddled around it, but the points about the drivers lagging behind are very true.

We tried really hard to get a grant to build out a media room but we didn't get any of them but I feel like the thing we are missing the most is the extension mic element. It sort of doesn't matter how good people look if you can't hear them.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 05:43

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron

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