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Fortis posted:Came in to 238 emails (I've been out since the 22nd), literally nothing from the COO about how he is going to replace IT's missing management. He's known about this, and has been in this office, since the 26th. It was the week-ish of Christmas and New Year's. I've never had a company that got anything worthwhile done in that time. Maybe you're right, but maybe everyone was out on vacation, or at least enough of them to make handling something like that impossible.
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Jan 2, 2018 16:44
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my cat is norris posted:Ty! Our solution thus far has been to send out instructions for disabling it in Office 365's settings. I'd disable it for the whole tenant if I had things my way but like three people in management LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE the feature so it stays. Disable it for everyone and then enable it for those three guys?
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Jan 4, 2018 17:52
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Monitor was upside down.
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Feb 6, 2018 20:18
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kensei posted:It was just given to me today. Apparently we purchased it and IT will own it going forward, and I own it in IT. Whee? I have very little SharePoint experience, but that's never stopped me before! Bless your little heart Translation from American Southern English: Holy poo poo, you're hosed
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Feb 6, 2018 23:13
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ponzicar posted:If I saw what looked like a new pair of boots in the trash, I would assume that they were there for a good reason, probably involving disgusting body fluids. I don't even LOOK in the trash. I just assume that if it's in there, it's, you know, trash.
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Feb 21, 2018 21:28
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Cloud computing refers to weight, right?
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Mar 2, 2018 17:10
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dogstile posted:I dunno if I can really agree with that, I don't assume the absolute loving morons in horror films are absolute loving morons in real life. Case in point, Chris Hemsworth in "Cabin in the Woods" (watch that) Cabin in the Woods is a really good movie, but that comment makes me think you should re-watch it. Hemsworth's character wasn't dumb, at all, and anything he did that was dumb was the result of outside influence.
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Mar 20, 2018 19:06
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goddamn it
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Mar 30, 2018 15:51
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ChubbyThePhat posted:I have a VM that is ballooning its thin provisioned vmdk to the maximum size (just over 2TB) when removing a snapshot taken by my backup software. Just this morning the vmdk was at 900GB (reasonable for what it is). I manually ran a backup and the software took a snapshot of the VM. So far so normal. When the software requests to remove the snapshot from ESXi, the vmdk goes crazy and grows to 2.144 TB and the snapshot removal takes a solid 3hrs. Is it a windows VM? If so, I'm curious what your max shadowstorage size is set to for each drive. To find out, in an elevated command prompt, type vssadmin list shadowstorage Are any disks set to UNBOUNDED? If so, you could set an upper bound on size with vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=X: /on=X: /MaxSize=20% If you do this, the snapshot will probably fail rather than balloon infinitely, but at least your VM won't choke. (You can use any %, or any size in MB like 1000MB to made it at a gig)
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Apr 19, 2018 20:39
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Does your backup product use application-aware backup processes that utilize VSS? Or interface with Exchange/SQL/Sharepoint to manage transaction logs? If either, I wonder if it's freaking out because there's no shadowstorage assigned at all. Does it behave better if you give a minimal amount of shadowstorage for each disk? Like 10%?
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Apr 19, 2018 21:16
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blackswordca posted:So a text came in from last job. "My hourly rate is $200, four-hour minimum. What's your fax number so I can send the contract?"
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Apr 30, 2018 16:57
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My experience with apartments is that most unreliability issues are due to interference from fifty other wifi networks using the same channel(s).
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May 29, 2018 18:03
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nexxai posted:Question time: I'm writing a script to automate the mounting and spot checking our full-system backups and I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a file that I can check that would change pretty frequently? I don't think something like this exists and so we might need to manually add something to our backup jobs to create some kind of text file with a timestamp in it that I can check for staleness (e.g. if the timestamp is older than one day, we know that the backup isn't grabbing the latest version of the file and so we should investigate), but if something like this already exists, I'd love to know about it. Run a script on the computer that writes the timestamp to C:\Somewhere\filename.txt, then check that. Way better than checking some file that *probably* updates every day.
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Jun 8, 2018 18:51
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The Claptain posted:This. I would just create a scheduled task which runs a script that writes to a file daily. This is how I test all my backup related stuff. The script creates the file if it doesn't exist and appends the timestamp and a newline to the end of the file. Script is scheduled to run X times per day. If I'm also testing databases, the script checks for a table, creates it if it doesn't exist, then adds the timestamp on a new row. Then when I restore, I check those things and always know if it's got the latest data.
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Jun 8, 2018 20:39
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PirateDentist posted:I thankfully don't have to deal with it, but we have one database that's old enough to drink. It's been migrated though a few versions of Access. http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/ And specifically: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/access/
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Jun 13, 2018 22:29
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Agrikk posted:Ive seen this a lot. Varchar(50) is the default datatype/size for some database engines, so when you build tables lots of fields end up as this because why bother actually analyzing your data ahead of time? My entire job is to find large problems in our company, and arrange for them to be fixed. It's an incredibly broad remit and lets me poke my nose into whatever I come across. Once upon a time, our Ops department was in hot water. See, for as long as anyone could remember, you had to reboot all of our servers ever 48 days, or they'd crash on the 49th. Given we had hundreds of servers, they were rebooting several servers a week, causing this low level downtime across internal tools and customer-facing outages. I found out about this at 1pm some day. I thought "oh, wow, that's an awfully specific time period," and started doing some math. How may hours is that? Seconds? Minute? Milliseconds? Oh, 49 days is about 4.2 billion milliseconds. Unsigned INT data types max out at approx 4.2 billion. Time it took me to figure that out: about 30 seconds. Time it took me to send an email to the VP of Ops: about 30 seconds. Time it took his team to figure out that they had this uptime counter/reporting service that counted in milliseconds and was overflowing after 49 days: about an hour Time saved by Ops in man hours for reboots: 3-4 hours per week. Time I'm still amazed that no one figured that out before I did: over a year and counting
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Jul 12, 2018 16:09
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Jaded Burnout posted:I would very much like a job like this It's both the best and the worst. It's the best because I get to make a meaningful difference at any level of the organization. It can be anything from "we lack proper documentation on problem X" to "oh poo poo this problem could bankrupt us". I've done presentations and roundtables with everyone from our L1 call center techs to C-Levels. It's the worst because, while I FIND problems all the time, I generally can't implement the solutions on my own. That requires working with other teams, and requires me to weasel my way into their schedules. I constantly have to prove that no, this really is an issue, and yes, it's costing us more than your current shiny project could every possibly earn, and no, this can't wait six months for you to finish that project, and no, jesus gently caress, have you ever heard the term "sunk cost fallacy"?
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Jul 12, 2018 16:58
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chin up everything sucks posted:I have dealt with the exact same thing Haha me too. I remember when we were switching some of our call center folks from laptops to VM-based workstations, and one of the bullets in favor was something like "reduced chance of agent downtime due to negative interaction between magnetic jewelry and laptop sensors"
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Jul 12, 2018 18:54
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Thanks Ants posted:This sounds like something that would be really interesting, but I'd be concerned that it limits your options to move onto another company when you're done. I actively try to avoid getting involved in certain things where I am now because I don't want to be involved in purchasing, sales etc. as time spent on that is less time that I can spend focusing on where I actually want to develop. Eh, I've got an easy stepping stone to Product Manager, Project Manager, or some kind of Analyst role. The thing keeping me from taking that step is that I work from home full time, drawing a coastal salary from Oklahoma. Hard to match that.
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Jul 12, 2018 19:31
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GreenBuckanneer posted:This place is like the wild west This your new job, or your old? Cuz if it's your old, you know I got your back. Send me the deetz at work. If it's your new, I can probably give you some pointers on how to start tackling this stuff.
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Jul 18, 2018 03:32
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others and/or management to come up with better processes. I have a feeling I'm probably going to have to spearhead that, based on everything I've seen though....
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The use of metrics to drive change really comes down to the priority of the organization. A good org will have multiple priorities, and drives towards industry standard metrics in those priorities. Common metrics include handle time, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, number of contacts per case, time-until-close per case, etc. The thing is that, for most orgs, the #1 priority is cost savings, with customer satisfaction coming second, and employee satisfaction dead last. They can and will cut costs any way they can, even if it pisses off everyone. Those people are, IMO, doing it wrong. Not to say there's never a case to change internal procedures, but thinking outside the box a bit can have even bigger returns. It's possible to make significant financial inroads with little impact on customer/employee satisfaction. There will always be those who are pissed about change, but steps can be taken to limit that. In some cases, you can even improve satisfaction. I mentioned before that my job is basically to find problems, and fix them, wherever they may lie. I work for my company's Support org, and we have three call centers in operation. Pretty much everything I do is targeted at reducing Support costs. I spend at least 3/4ths of my time working with Engineering, Product Management, etc to modify our products based on Support and/or customer (which in turn reduces the burden on support) needs. As a great example, I'm currently working on a project to improve log collection processes for one of our product lines. A rough estimate is that it takes 10-15 minutes to get the log gather tools to a customer, run the tools, and begin the transfer back to us. Transfer takes as long as it takes, and often it's long enough we have to end the call and have the customer email us (requiring another touch on the ticket to verify). We do this on roughly 20% of all incoming contacts, and when we need logs, we almost always have to get them multiple times (average is about 2.5 sets of logs per case that requires logs) for one reason or another. That's a huge waste of time on everyone's part. It's boring, and it's frustrating for both Support and the customer, especially if something goes wrong and you have to start the gather/send process again (a semi-frequent occurrence). We gather logs thousands of times per month, which costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It should be automated. When we need logs on a live contact, there should be a button to click. And if it's not a live contact, like an email case, we should be able to tell the customer "click the button and contact us again when it's done." By this time next quarter, I expect the automation will exist. It's costly enough to jump to the top of the priority list. Boom. Done. Saved 10-15 minutes on 20% of our cases. End result: We used metrics to find and isolate product-level issues, get fixes for them, metrics go up, customers and employees are happy, and I get to move on to the next big thing.
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Jul 18, 2018 17:57
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The Macaroni posted:Man, I wish we'd use some of the tools in ServiceNow for that kind of thing. They are apparently a pain in the rear end to implement--my last job was thinking about starting the process in 2019, and we'd been on SN since 2014. Current job's overall implementation of SN is already a clusterfuck, and nobody is making any moves to improve things. You'll never get what you want out of SN itself. My advice is to set up a separate reporting service. Create a SQL job to pull and (if necessary) massage the data from key tables SN, and place the results in a separate database. Have this happen daily-ish. If you can't do it, put together a project and pull in people who can. Then point a real data application, like PowerBI or Tableau, at this new source. Or hell, just have a job dump a .csv daily and use Excel (this sucks long term and is better used as a stopgap to refine the data source before you unleash a real data application.)
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Jul 18, 2018 18:41
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blackswordca posted:*at an analysis meeting to go over a major outage we had and resolved* Break up the backup job into multiple smaller pieces that don't impact performance?
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Jul 24, 2018 18:55
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devmd01 posted:A ticket came in yesterday: “all of the windows 7 machines in AP bluescreened simultaneously” Reminds me of this https://web.archive.org/web/20140518204308/http://it.emory.edu/windows7-incident/
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Jul 26, 2018 15:19
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D. Ebdrup posted:Are you kidding me? With that kind of holier-than-thou attitude, he's obviously a Mac user. Yeah, Vegeta is 100% a Mac dude from before Macs became mainstream. Piccolo is the Linux dude.
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Jul 26, 2018 20:02
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That's gotta be some weird driver conflict or something of that nature.
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Aug 23, 2018 20:27
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Corsair Pool Boy posted:This is a backup job for a site that loses power on the regular.... Someone needs to split that job up into multiple smaller jobs
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Aug 27, 2018 20:00
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rujasu posted:Yeah I'd love to know what that smiley is supposed to be. I always thought it was a little guy with a party hat and one of those blow-into-it-and-it-unrolls party favors.
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Aug 28, 2018 21:01
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:My office recently renamed meeting rooms after famous rock bands. Except for one, which was named after a famous female singer. Now we get to crack jokes about having a meeting "in Beyonce". Our meeting rooms all have Star Wars names. I usually just book whatever room is the appropriate size, but there's one exception. I always book Alderaan when I have to deliver bad news to a group.
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Aug 29, 2018 18:21
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Data Graham posted:Have they picked up on the pattern yet? I don't deliver bad news that often, so no one's picked up the pattern. But someone did catch the one-time correlation once. "You picked an...appropriate...room didn't you?"
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Aug 29, 2018 20:30
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Thanks Ants posted:At the possibility of sounding like captain hindsight - why do remote locations with no IT staff have infrastructure that needs backing up? Are they not a VDI candidate? There are several factors that limit cloud/virtualization of small businesses, including but not limited to -By not having an IT person, they may not even be aware it's an option. -If they know it's an option, they may be scared because it's new and different -If they're open to new and different, they may be cost-adverse. Why spend $xxx/month when that secondhand server my kid got from an estate sale for $300 still works? And so on.
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Sep 5, 2018 16:13
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I once helped nasa solve a backup issue with a system on the ISS. They were using a disk with 4K physical sectors on an OS that didn’t support it. It was causing VSS to freak out and fail randomly and intermittently. The astronauts swapped a few drives around between systems and requisitioned a new one. So there is a hard drive in space because of me. I’m already on the space force.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:06
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AlternateAccount posted:I will never close a ticket this cool. It wasn't even my ticket! It was for a product I didn't even work on. The ticket had been bouncing around for a while, and the head support guy said "let's ask ConfusedUs, he knows Windows backups, maybe he can figure it out." They sent me an email and some logs, I looked them over, found the issue, passed it back with some assorted Microsoft links to back up my findings, and went on my way. Seriously took me like ten minutes. I didn't think twice about it. I didn't know it was for the ISS until a week later when the head support dude came up to me and told me what had happened, and how a hard disk was gonna go to space because of me.
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Sep 12, 2018 18:04
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Methanar posted:How well does rotational media work in zero G? Apparently well enough? It was a drive I recognized, a WD drive IIRC.
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Sep 12, 2018 18:11
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freeedr posted:I'm a nurse. I think you, very much, have a "somebody else's problem" problem here. It is good, even admirable, that you care enough to want to help above and beyond your duties as a nurse. However, it is extremely unlikely that you'll be able to effect any sort of change by taking on IT-related duties when you're not in IT. All you're doing is picking up someone else's slack and hiding the problem from whatever metric may be used to identify said problem. That metric may a hard number somewhere, or something as soft as someone noticing IT is falling behind. But by doing their job, they're able to push off that day further. Plus every minute you spend doing their job is one you're not spending on yours. Furthermore, you're exposing yourself to risk. Ask yourself the question: what if you break something you were working on unofficially? What are the results of that? Could the cost of replacing that come down on you or your department? You work in the medical field: could someone die if you broke the last working laptop? I don't know the answers, but I sense a large penumbra of risk around this situation that I, personally, would hesitate to enter. You would almost certainly effect more change by taking your concerns, with evidence and preferably with a dollar sign attached, to your boss or your boss's boss, while exposing yourself to far less risk.
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Oct 15, 2018 21:31
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PirateDentist posted:Some spammer must have used my number for a series of calls. Got three random callbacks saying I just called them last week. Same area code and first 3 prefix as my own number. They just rotate through blocks of numbers for who to call and what number it comes from, the jerks. For the latter, they try to make the Area Code and Prefix match the number they're calling.
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Dec 3, 2018 23:40
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Haha I had exactly the same set of thoughts.
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Dec 20, 2018 19:54
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iospace posted:Or you could bike like I do. Bit more efficient It’s not worth the hassle to maneuver the bike through the bedroom, down the hall, and into my office.
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Dec 29, 2018 02:50
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It succeeded at doing nothing--it's like a dream come true!
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Jan 16, 2019 17:49
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At least they have Two-Factor Authentication now, right? Right?
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Jan 17, 2019 20:09
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