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Why not put both SSID's on one AP?
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Sep 13, 2013 16:44
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Sepist posted:Why not put both SSID's on one AP? Whoa whoa, slow down there. Doing things that make sense? My company's not really "about" that.
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Sep 13, 2013 16:46
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Or having the APs in a room that won't be empty most of the time.
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Sep 13, 2013 16:57
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So I just gave up a (low paying) cushy government job to go work for an observatory that has every system on its own, no centralized authentication, no policies regarding pretty much anything. Also they run a mix of  dos,osx, linux, unix, and windows (every version).So I'm coming in to a mess, which was made abundantly clear during interviews, but they pay is like 40% more than I was making. I'm fairly used to this in my it consultation side gig but it's never been on this scale. What do you guys think should be the list of priorities for this place. I'd like to start with centralized user accounts and authentication, along with storage. There's a lot of old timers here that are going to be resistant to change. My plan of attack is to find out what beer everyone likes and then get them that beer, then introduce some sort of plan whilst they are all under the influence.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:28
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Caged posted:Or having the APs in a room that won't be empty most of the time. Clearly you aren't thinking about the cost savings of putting the APs right next to the switch. Now they can both be connected with 6' patch cables instead of 
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Sep 13, 2013 17:29
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Spudalicious posted:So I just gave up a (low paying) cushy government job to go work for an observatory that has every system on its own, no centralized authentication, no policies regarding pretty much anything. Also they run a mix of Your first priority is to spend a month figuring out what all the systems do, and why things are the way they are. THEN you can worry about slowly implementing changes. Don't go in all Captain IT my way is better. You may find something that immediately seems dumb actually works out for their unique situation.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:35
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Pretty much. Spend the first month just documenting everything.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:36
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Spudalicious posted:I'd like to start with centralized user accounts and authentication, along with storage. These are only viable if complete system wide downtime is acceptable, there are many environments the cost of centralised services outweigh the benefits, especially in closed systems. Investigate how users are collaborating and sharing data, is the network infrastructure sufficient? Think about all the areas that will actually help users and show them the benefits. Central authentication is great when constantly adding a lot of new hardware, it will be difficult to demonstrate in a static environment as they will already have hacked up methods to manage that already.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:39
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Something I've learned with delicate research departments: always remember that the work they do is to priority. It actually applies to all of IT, we need to remember that we exist to enable people to do the work of the business. I accidently didn't properly convey that attitude to a department and it ended up with me essentially quitting because they treated me like poo poo, partly because they thought I wanted to rip everything out to meet my needs and ignore theirs. Which wasn't true, but I didn't do a good job conveying to them that it wasn't true.
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Sep 13, 2013 17:48
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After documentation, try a series of small fixes to build momentum and buy in. You're going to need an awful lot of political capital to change the way things are done. You're going to get that by paying very close attention to their needs, wants, and pain points during the documentation process. If you can spend a week or two tackling fixes from the top of the list in that discovery process that take two or three days at most, you should start getting them accustomed to the right way to do things and accumulate capital rapidly. Stop the bleeding, then rebuild it the right way. And don't forget to gird yourself for budget battles, it was almost certainly set by the last guy and won't be enough to make big changes this year.FISHMANPET posted:Something I've learned with delicate research departments: always remember that the work they do is to priority. It actually applies to all of IT, we need to remember that we exist to enable people to do the work of the business. I accidently didn't properly convey that attitude to a department and it ended up with me essentially quitting because they treated me like poo poo, partly because they thought I wanted to rip everything out to meet my needs and ignore theirs. Which wasn't true, but I didn't do a good job conveying to them that it wasn't true. A really wise friend of mine said to me once "It's really easy as a programmer to fall in love with writing code, but I wasn't hired to write code. I was hired to solve problems." and I think IT guys should have that tattooed on our foreheads. I fall in love with the best practices, elegant, feature rich, Ferrari solution a lot but sometimes, it's OK to do something or keep a system around that barely works if the business can't afford any better and you've warned them in writing about the downsides. Management with very little technical expertise is going to make these calls sometimes, and you're just going to have to live with it. It totally blows if you're the kind of guy who invests his self worth into his job performance, but it is what it is. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 17:53
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I am soooo glad I asked. That is all awesome advice. I think it'll be a matter of careful documentation of problems areas and attending to the small annoyances first and foremost to build credibility.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:06
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pram posted:That stuff is almost always tied to bonuses, so you're probably on some hit list now FYI Eh, they're all in Texas, so if they want to fly up to the California Bay Area, they're welcome to it.  Plus, our company is quite cheap, so they're probably getting the standard 2%, just like anyone else that's not Executive level.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:06
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Spudalicious posted:So I just gave up a (low paying) cushy government job to go work for an observatory that has every system on its own, no centralized authentication, no policies regarding pretty much anything. Also they run a mix of BACKUPS! Make sure they are running and do test restores. Don't change a single thing until you know you have all the data in a format that you can rebuild any of the boxes form bare metal.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:23
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Spudalicious posted:So I just gave up a (low paying) cushy government job to go work for an observatory that has every system on its own, no centralized authentication, no policies regarding pretty much anything. Also they run a mix of You were obviously hired for a reason. Find out if that reason is to maintain or to innovate. If it's maintain, don't change anything without making sure everyone (down to the janitor) is on board. If it's to innovate, find out exactly what direction they want to go, and plan based around that. Spend a good amount of time documenting everything, down to the config.sys and autoexec.bat of the dos box to fully understand its role and how it works before you start developing a plan. Motronic posted:BACKUPS! Make sure they are running and do test restores. Don't change a single thing until you know you have all the data in a format that you can rebuild any of the boxes form bare metal. And that.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:30
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FISHMANPET posted:we need to remember that we exist to enable people to do the work of the business. This should be in a big bold glittery font in the OP. I support a small office of software engineers in addition to the global infrastructure of my company. It's my job to make sure they have the IT support and resources so they can do their job. I view IT as a facilitator not a dictator. How can IT help If Engineering comes to IT with a demand, it's our job to figure out options, get pricing, and let management decide which way to go, not to dictate to engineering how they need to do something. Also remember inter office politics is a real thing. A co-worker recently was told by his boss that folks generally had a negative perception of him. He's a great IT guy, gets his work done, but he stays holed up in his area with the door closed all day. People thought he was short, and unapproachable when they had a problem. His boss asked him to just take a lap around the building a couple times a week and shoot the poo poo with folks, ask them if they need anything. After a couple months the perception of him changed. His work didn't change, just his perception from other folks. Now they see he's a friendly approachable guy and end users are happier with IT's support even though nothing really changed.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:41
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skipdogg posted:This should be in a big bold glittery font in the OP. I support a small office of software engineers in addition to the global infrastructure of my company. It's my job to make sure they have the IT support and resources so they can do their job. I view IT as a facilitator not a dictator. How can IT help Part of an issue is where does the money come from? An example for instance is we got a request that everyone in our field sales for gets an iPad. They wanted iPads because they think it makes them look smarter because in all the customer meetings they've gone to, the other people have iPads. Everyone was fine with this because it was coming out of the IT budget. Once the president of the company said that if they want this, then it comes out of marketing departments budget, it was taken off the table, even though the money all comes from the same place at the end. That happens quite often around here.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:47
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Budget issues are a nightmare. I get into this stuff all the time and it can suck. I work on the Infrastructure Team at my company, we cover the core infra that the entire company uses. Active Directory, Storage, Servers, Email, etc. End User hardware is always charged to the cost center of the employee. If they want a 3500 dollar MBP Retina, no problem but it's coming out of your budget, oh and it's not an IT approved machine so support is best effort and I'm not standing in line at the Fruit Stand when it needs to be fixed. I did that twice and wasted half a day each time. You want full IT support, you get a Dell where they come to us to fix machines. Infra hardware we pay for. We paid for the new VMware setup and VNXe SAN I recently brought up..but I have a feeling engineering will be asking for way more disk space than they originally asked for and I'm pretty sure we'll make them buy the extra shelf for it. We're pretty good at compromising on issues like that though. Business software team needed a new VMware cluster for a special application, they bought the server hardware and VMware licenses, we covered the SAN space and handle the VM/OS level support.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:00
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skipdogg posted:If Engineering comes to IT with a demand, it's our job to figure out options, get pricing, and let management decide which way to go, not to dictate to engineering how they need to do something. I tell my boss all the time "Our users are coming to us with solutions, they need to come to us with problems." We only took over support for this group 3 years ago, and they had pretty bad support before, so they're used to coming up with solutions on their own, and asking us to implement them. Every time they do this, I try and dig deeper and figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve. If we just become human admin passwords that prevent departments from doing what they want to do, we're not going to be around much longer. If we're a group of experts that solve technology problems that departments have so they can get back to what they're supposed to be doing, that's a win for us. Unfortunately my boss treats the entire organization like a call center in that customer satisfaction is doing what people ask and getting them off the line, future consequences be damned. I should be the manager.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:17
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One of my previous employers would buy servers 'just in case', because the budget wouldn't be there later. We'd do either 1 of 2 things with those 'extra' servers. Install some version of Linux and dick around with it, or put it in the rack and never power it on and see how long it takes for someone to notice it's not doing anything. I've had a Debian box running there for 4 years now (use it for an IRC shell and remote ping box).
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Sep 13, 2013 20:32
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Is there some piece of software I can use to easily track dependencies around infrastructure? For example when I configure some weird software that I have to point at a specific domain controller, I'd like to make a dependency between those two items, so if someone else wants to replace that domain controller, they can just check all its dependencies to know what's going to be effected?
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Sep 13, 2013 20:41
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skipdogg posted:This should be in a big bold glittery font in the OP. I support a small office of software engineers in addition to the global infrastructure of my company. It's my job to make sure they have the IT support and resources so they can do their job. I view IT as a facilitator not a dictator. How can IT help quote:Also remember inter office politics is a real thing. A co-worker recently was told by his boss that folks generally had a negative perception of him. He's a great IT guy, gets his work done, but he stays holed up in his area with the door closed all day. People thought he was short, and unapproachable when they had a problem. His boss asked him to just take a lap around the building a couple times a week and shoot the poo poo with folks, ask them if they need anything. After a couple months the perception of him changed. His work didn't change, just his perception from other folks. Now they see he's a friendly approachable guy and end users are happier with IT's support even though nothing really changed.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:48
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FISHMANPET posted:I tell my boss all the time "Our users are coming to us with solutions, they need to come to us with problems." We only took over support for this group 3 years ago, and they had pretty bad support before, so they're used to coming up with solutions on their own, and asking us to implement them. Every time they do this, I try and dig deeper and figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve. If we just become human admin passwords that prevent departments from doing what they want to do, we're not going to be around much longer. If we're a group of experts that solve technology problems that departments have so they can get back to what they're supposed to be doing, that's a win for us. A good IT director or CIO knows how to say no. My job at the State Department lacked this.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:52
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We had our IT Director walk out because our owner is a dick about July 7th, since then I've been the only dedicated IT, with our repair service manager helping since he's been here 10 years and knows the most because of it, with him worry about backups and me doing all of the other work. Owner wants to sign me under a 3 year contract since they want to train me, but don't want me to bolt in a year like the previous IT director. ...still no contract or pay raise, was just told that I shouldn't call this a "promotion", and they're looking for an IT Director on Monster. 
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Sep 13, 2013 20:54
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CDW posted:We had our IT Director walk out because our owner is a dick about July 7th, since then I've been the only dedicated IT, with our repair service manager helping since he's been here 10 years and knows the most because of it, with him worry about backups and me doing all of the other work. Ask your old IT Director if he found a better job and if you can come with.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:55
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TWBalls posted:Had they come to us, we would have said, "This ain't gonna work. Try this instead" and had them up and running long ago. This isn't the first time or department, that's pulled this poo poo. This is what pisses me off the most. My boss thinks I object to this stuff because I'm lazy and don't want to do my job. No fucker, I object because it's going to waste literally everybody's time, including the "customer" we're supposedly helping. Come to us first, let's work together on a solution that meets the business need and also isn't an immense drain on IT staff time. Bonus points if the end users can actually use it, rather than requiring daily tickets for us to turn on a tv or reboot a thing or some stupid poo poo like that because it's poo poo software that they never should have purchased. Also if you talk to me I might even save everybody money too! E: Best example of this Business problem: Want both front desk computers to be able to scan documents Their solution: Buy one scanner and get a USB hub Ticket: We've got one USB only scanner can you recommend us a hub? OK fine we're stuck, let's get them a hub. Well surprise, USB switcher hubs suck. I think we wasted about $50 and tons of time ("help it doesn't work!" "unplug the cable and plug it back in." "Oh thanks it works!" "help it's broken again!" "No it's not broken this is how it works just unplug the cable" Eventually they just break down and buy another $400 USB scanner. If they'd just come to us at the beginning and said "We have two computers and we'd like them both to be able to scan documents" the solution would have been a networked scanner which they already had at that desk. But instead they've spent $850 on a lovely solution and we could have saved them all of that money, and all of the time debugging the stupid USB hub, if they'd just talked to us first. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 20:58
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Oh and also, the financial guy told me I needed to "Finish your A+ cert, N+, and 2 industry certs for machines" so I can sign a contract so I won't cut and run with training... Also, they wanted to move up to 3 people to sell managed software solutions before he quit, so I'm 1 person in what they were about to make a 3 person department.
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Sep 13, 2013 21:13
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CDW posted:We had our IT Director walk out because our owner is a dick about July 7th, since then I've been the only dedicated IT, with our repair service manager helping since he's been here 10 years and knows the most because of it, with him worry about backups and me doing all of the other work. "Retention is best accomplished by making me happy not by making me a slave. If you're cruising monster for resumes to find a new IT director, don't act surprised when you cruise past mine."
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Sep 13, 2013 21:25
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All this recent talk of commutes - I just  'd and now am moving from a 15 minute bike ride to a 1hr+ public transport trip  Oh well, good for the career, eh
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Sep 13, 2013 21:28
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In that case, he'd probably just fire me, since I'm in a Right to Work state, and he is a dick.
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Sep 13, 2013 21:31
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FISHMANPET posted:This is what pisses me off the most. My boss thinks I object to this stuff because I'm lazy and don't want to do my job. No fucker, I object because it's going to waste literally everybody's time, including the "customer" we're supposedly helping. Come to us first, let's work together on a solution that meets the business need and also isn't an immense drain on IT staff time. Bonus points if the end users can actually use it, rather than requiring daily tickets for us to turn on a tv or reboot a thing or some stupid poo poo like that because it's poo poo software that they never should have purchased. Also if you talk to me I might even save everybody money too! Along with that crap software that still doesn't work right many months later, they also sold them (I poo poo you not) Dell Precision m6600, with a sweet i7 (don't remember the clock speed - I wanna say 2.4Ghz), either 4 or 8GB or RAM, ATi Firepro m8900 and a huge 240Watt power brick. They access the program using a web browser. 
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Sep 13, 2013 21:34
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Or just buy two $90 USB scanners and have redundancy when one breaks. File sharing anyone? http://www.amazon.com/Canon-CanoScan-LiDE-30-Scanner/dp/B00006AMSI/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_5
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Sep 13, 2013 21:50
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Or a manual USB A/B switch for $15. Of course that would require the user to have to push a button to use the scanner 
Geoj fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 21:59
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Geoj posted:Or a manual USB A/B switch for $15. We actually had that exact model, and it didn't work very well. Often times they'd have to unplug the cable between the switch and the computer to get it to work. The USB switch was their idea, but it was, as I predicted, a pretty terrible idea. And the scanners were nicer than those canoscans. They're Futitsu Scansnap S1500, which had an MSRP of $500.
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Sep 13, 2013 22:17
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I guess this isn't that bad, but... Started trying to fix the broken WSUS on our awful SBS box, it's been broken since before I started. Spent a day on that, installing, uninstalling, reading, nothing worked. We have a second server that does a few other things, so I said screw it, we'll just put it there instead. Installed it, set up group policy to point there instead, synced and approved a bunch of updates and tested a few clients. Yay! It all works. Except nope, the system that manages our inventory and tracking here also runs on this box, and for some reason it not only runs its website for placing orders and looking things up on IIS, but also the interface for their lovely handheld scanners that run Windows Mobile on IIS. And both break. We pay five figures a year for support from them, call them and they're useless. Typically they're sharp as razors, this time I get e-mailed some lovely KB articles with advice to basically TRY THIS, GOOD LUCK, WE DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN. ALso important to note that another site we run and the default internal site had no issues, it was just their poo poo. Uninstalling WSUS fixed the issue completely. So I guess we don't get automatic updates :[
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Sep 13, 2013 22:30
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Just had three rounds of phone interviews. Anyone YOTJ without a face-to-face? I'm interested in the position, which would be dedicated datacenter technical support for a couple of instructors that work for a large IT organization, and it's like a 15 minute drive from my (parent's) place. The only real caveat is that it's a 1099 position, which I might have a couple questions about for those that have done them before.
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Sep 13, 2013 22:45
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You're in healthcare IT? That's a special level of hell. I'm sorry Erkenntnis posted:The only real caveat is that it's a 1099 position, which I might have a couple questions about for those that have done them before. 1099? Why? 1099's can be good, but they're also commonly used to take advantage of people.
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Sep 13, 2013 23:02
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FISHMANPET posted:We actually had that exact model, and it didn't work very well. Often times they'd have to unplug the cable between the switch and the computer to get it to work. The USB switch was their idea, but it was, as I predicted, a pretty terrible idea. And the scanners were nicer than those canoscans. They're Futitsu Scansnap S1500, which had an MSRP of $500. We bought a snapscan (stupidly, without researching) only to find out that they don't support TWAIN (WTF, why?). We have some lovely java based scanning system that we're forced to use in order to scan stuff into AS400/EMR and if they hear that you're using anything other than Fujitsu, they won't help. When we asked them for a list of approved scanners, they sent us a list. The most recent being 4120c, which is what we're trying to replace as they were purchased in 2001. The rubber rollers tend to melt into a gelatinous blob, which eventually causes it to seize. So, we're stuck buying the Fujitsu fi series, which are $$$. Unfortunately, it sat here for quite a while before anyone (Me, since no one else could be bothered) tested it, so we have a rather expensive paperweight. I think we have a user that just scans stuff to jpg/pdf, so I may end up giving it to her once her 4120c finally gives up the ghost. On the subject of scanners, anyone know of a scanner that is small, (preferably about the size of the above mentioned scanners) connects to network (Wired or wireless is fine) that can scan to PDF and send to email? Currently we have some 4120c that is connected to this Axis 70u. They select a destination, then hit the scan button and off it goes. Unfortunately, Axis has discontinued those and don't have anything to replace them. The units use those to scan written orders to Pharmacy. I've seen them on Ebay and even Amazon, but we can't order from them.  Skippdogg posted:You're in healthcare IT? That's a special level of hell. I'm sorry Really need to stop being so complacent and get off my rear end and learn new poo poo so I can YOTJ outta here. TWBalls fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 23:03
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FISHMANPET posted:We actually had that exact model, and it didn't work very well. Often times they'd have to unplug the cable between the switch and the computer to get it to work. The USB switch was their idea, but it was, as I predicted, a pretty terrible idea. And the scanners were nicer than those canoscans. They're Futitsu Scansnap S1500, which had an MSRP of $500. Might have been defective, I use one at the office I'm a resident at to share a Logitech Unifying receiver between my two computers (both are on secure networks so I can't use software keyboard/mouse sharing solutions) and haven't had a problem with it other than a slight (3-4 seconds) delay when switching between channels. Erkenntnis posted:Just had three rounds of phone interviews. Anyone YOTJ without a face-to-face? I YOTJ'd this past January after a single 20m face-to-face interview with HP. If I had to guess I'd say its possible.
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Sep 13, 2013 23:05
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Erkenntnis posted:Just had three rounds of phone interviews. Anyone YOTJ without a face-to-face? Reverse has happened, I've hired people with only Skype calls. Worked out good so far.
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Sep 13, 2013 23:57
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skipdogg posted:1099? Why? 1099's can be good, but they're also commonly used to take advantage of people.
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