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McGlockenshire posted:Thank you for the reassuring words. For some reason I'd filed them in the "oh hell no, avoid!" category. Was probably thinking of another somethingtel. All phones suck, but ShoreTel at least seems reasonably competent. We had to pick between them and Avaya a few years ago and went Avaya, our telephony people liked the better control over phones and calling, but I guess the ShoreTels were ok for smaller setups then a full on enterprise deployment.
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Sep 13, 2014 06:21
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CitizenKain posted:All phones suck, but ShoreTel at least seems reasonably competent. We had to pick between them and Avaya a few years ago and went Avaya, our telephony people liked the better control over phones and calling, but I guess the ShoreTels were ok for smaller setups then a full on enterprise deployment. Phones are the second worst piece of poo poo ever (after printers of course). My office just had a ~problem~ with their poo poo Jive phones, and the support techs went in a loop of: Try replugging the phone. Try rebooting your router. Try resetting the phone to factory defaults. Try replugging the phone. Try restarting the router. They finally exited the loop by claiming that it was a router firewall issue and telling us they couldn't help any further and that we should contact Cisco, despite screenshot proof that the router firewall was off. Real problem: They're using UDP SIP and the connection was running over a microwave wireless link with delightfully high packet loss. gently caress phones.
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Sep 13, 2014 06:52
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McGlockenshire posted:Thank you for the reassuring words. For some reason I'd filed them in the "oh hell no, avoid!" category. Was probably thinking of another somethingtel. Mitel? I've heard nothing good about them.
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Sep 13, 2014 10:23
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ConfusedUs posted:Drive was plugged into an ancient server with USB1. One. Now just give them a new 8TB or 10TB helium disk. How long will that take to backup or restore?
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Sep 13, 2014 11:17
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My job is telephony and I loving love it. I do drink a lot though.
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Sep 13, 2014 13:17
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My job is telephony and I had to stop drinking so much. I hate it.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:24
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Westie posted:For me that'd be six hours of pleasure with 15 minutes of effort. It doesn't stay that way. I used to live this kind of schedule for several years, driving between sites and then fixing poo poo. It gets old fast, and it really fucks with your health. Ynglaur posted:A colleague once told me that he judges how companies treat their people by two things: free coffee, and decent toilet paper. I've found these to be pretty accurate indicators. Is it time to dust this one off and repost it already? 
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Sep 13, 2014 17:23
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McGlockenshire posted:Thank you for the reassuring words. For some reason I'd filed them in the "oh hell no, avoid!" category. Was probably thinking of another somethingtel. Want to get the Shoretel phone support team on your side ? Work with their script and their lives get a little sweeter. They have a set opening they have to do to collect your identifying information, but they just need the info, they aren't locked into the script. When they answer, say "This is $NAME, calling from $COMPANY, at $PHONE_NUMBER". This will get them out of their rote, script-reading robot mindset and turn their brains on. I won't say that the level of support I was receiving improved, but the quality of the conversations I had did improve; it's easier to talk to someone when they're off-script and properly engaged. They seemed to appreciate it too, and said so.
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Sep 13, 2014 17:43
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A lot of our clients use Shoretel's cloud VOIP stuff and they seem to have good uptime and whenever stuff breaks, their tech support is on the ball. EDIT: Also everybody just uses Cisco handsets, they're nothing weird. Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 18:12
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sfwarlock posted:Not sure which thread this goes in, but I just found out one of my minions has been "resolving" cannot-log-in tickets (in a domain environment) by creating the user a local account and relinking them to their network shares using domain admin creds. While grousing about "what stupid poo poo this domain nonsense is, it just makes my job harder." Jesus I remember my first time sorting out a domain and even I wasn't dumb enough to do that. What in the world?
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Sep 13, 2014 18:57
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I'm the sys admin, network admin, help desk manager, and now the "phone guy" at my job. I also do all of the vendor negotiation, purchasing, hiring, committee leading, and long term planning, but somehow report to the "Tech Director," who, when told by my tech that I was in the MDF, said "what's that?" Two 25% raises in the last year and they still can't pay me fast enough. Being the phone guy by far sucks the hardest, probably because I'm yet to get any extra money for taking it on. I'm doing so much now that it's starting to hurt the quality of my work  Putting together a monster resume at least
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Sep 13, 2014 19:09
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Be careful doing everything, it can come across as being a jack-of-all-trades. I'd be inclined to only list on your resume the areas that you'd like to develop further but that you can talk about enough so that it could have convincingly been your sole area of speciality at the current job. I missed a ton of stuff off when I was last looking to move because I wanted nothing to do with the A/V side of things and felt that even mentioning it was making the IT stuff look worse.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:11
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Thanks Ants posted:All phone systems are sold by phone vendors no matter how much they would like you to think that this is the new age of IP and they've changed. It's still a world of feature licenses, terrible support, and barely functional products. Oh, and paying through the nose for it. There's also still a big difference between the proprietary vendors and the standards-based vendors. Shoretel and the like know they have you by the short hairs once you've bought in to their ecosystem, where someone selling hosted SIP extensions or Asterisk appliances and generic Polycom/Grandstream/Snom phones knows you can change vendors without having to rip and replace the rest so they're more likely to be competitive. I am biased since I've been doing that for nearly ten years now, but it's not like "vendors without proprietary lock-in have to compete on a more level field" is a controversial position.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:47
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Are there any Asterisk virtual appliances with support that are particularly worth looking at?
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Sep 13, 2014 20:55
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Inspector_666 posted:EDIT: Also everybody just uses Cisco handsets, they're nothing weird. I want to bolt a steel plate over the handsets' control panel, or at the very least rip out the "Do not disturb" button. I'm always seeing calls bouncing around then getting stuck at phones with DnD on leading to a "Fault on line" error. Makes for fun times when any of the managers bitches about the phones ringing out and not being answered, compounded by users leaving their agent status as ready with their workstation auto-locking when idle.
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Sep 14, 2014 14:41
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Thanks Ants posted:Are there any Asterisk virtual appliances with support that are particularly worth looking at? Our private Asterisk instances are all basically FreePBX Distro right now. CentOS 6 running Asterisk LTS and FreePBX. We support them entirely in house and this gives us a sometimes badly laid out but very functional UI and a sufficiently standard configuration that any problem that hasn't had an obvious cause in the logs has been easily Googled. The FreePBX devs also offer paid support, but so far we've found the Asterisk-side documentation and logging to be sufficiently useful when combined with the popularity of FreePBX. We use Coredial for our shared multitenant servers and I am not a huge fan. It works as intended but is low on features and the support is terrible. We've found bugs where badly escaped input means a customer-level admin can cause dialplan generation to silently fail just by using common symbols in a group name or similar. The response? "Don't do that". Asterisk multitenant support is quirky at best anyways, so we'll probably be migrating those systems to FreeSwitch in the next year or so if our test system works out.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:01
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sfwarlock posted:Not sure which thread this goes in, but I just found out one of my minions has been "resolving" cannot-log-in tickets (in a domain environment) by creating the user a local account and relinking them to their network shares using domain admin creds. While grousing about "what stupid poo poo this domain nonsense is, it just makes my job harder." Hey at least your minion attempts to 'resolve' issues My minion escalates everything to me...I say look a ticket! Sounds like a job for you... So my minion usually tells me at this point I've not shown them how to do something, when really all I need is a go look at it, use your common sense and at least try restarting it or something (for 1 more brownie point that straight up immediate escalation!) But usually my minion will take the users word for it that the device has already been restarted (etc) and actually I need to look at it. The alternative scenario is I see a ticket first and say I need you to do this, do you want me to go through it with you? At which point I get my head bitten off for suggesting my minion may not be able to do something... However the amount of times I've said right off you go, at which point we revert to the point above where I've not shown my minion what to do...! Next step is end of probation appraisal, there will be some kind of justification of things my minion does do in a vain effort to extend their tenure as my minion but owing to their apparent refusal to use the ticketing system there is a lack of evidence to suggest why I should retain them which makes life easy for me It's gonna be a fun week!
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Sep 15, 2014 01:33
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I just don't get that attitude. I wish I could have had my helpdesk job three years earlier instead of spinning my wheels in a dead-end job. No need to keep deadweight in IT, there are a lot of smart people out there who can do the job if they get the opportunity.
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Sep 15, 2014 01:58
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64F in my office right now because the EVP thinks turning off all HVAC over the weekend will save us money. During the summer that means it's hot and humid as hell on a Monday. It was into the 40's last night so the server room is actually warmer than my office. I'm sure we are saving whole tens of dollars by doing this. Which will then be spent on people buying space heaters. Edit: yay I think someone turned the heat on Sirotan fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 14:09
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"Hey our VPS is getting on a bit now, the Linux distro it's using is end of life next year, how do we go about upgrading?" "Buy a new VPS as if you were a new customer, transfer everything, and cancel this one" Here was me quite happy to just continue renewing and maybe being upgraded before our web server becomes a giant security hole of doom... but hey, now it counts as a new purchase, congrats! You now get to compete against others for our custom!
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Sep 16, 2014 15:28
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GargleBlaster posted:"Hey our VPS is getting on a bit now, the Linux distro it's using is end of life next year, how do we go about upgrading?" Rebuilding your VPS is a good exercise to make sure you have all your backups in order
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Sep 16, 2014 17:16
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Sometimes this Sys admin lark is like being the Grim Reaper; the MD swaggers over to talk to me about some website stuff for the third time in the day (which I don't control) then takes my notepad and writes "Remove all access for (user)". Well gee whizz, looks like someone is getting shitcanned; and that someone is a stand-up guy who has likely gotten more and more fed up of management's crap. And then he wants me to capture and reroute any E-mails from the user's personal to go to the MD's inbox. 
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Sep 16, 2014 19:52
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It's 82F in my office now. I guess I shouldn't have complained.
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Sep 16, 2014 19:52
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Welp, just had a call that was a case review for open cases for our biggest customer. Myself and a coworker handle most of the cases from them, including all of the big nasty ones, in addition to handling other customers. We found out on the call that there should be 5 full time employees working only on this customer's cases. This explains stress level, missed lunches, unpaid overtime and my general feeling that once I started supporting the customer that the job changed from laid back tech support to stress factory. I'm freaking pissed, but I am not sure what I can do given mortgage, wife's job situation, childcare arrangements, etc. I can't see them hiring 3 more people, considering how hard it has been to hire more, and the fact that they are actively firing folks for non performance.
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Sep 16, 2014 20:40
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Sirotan posted:It's 82F in my office now. I guess I shouldn't have complained. Obviously this means it's tanktop and cutoff shorts weather!
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Sep 16, 2014 20:43
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The entire IT dept was invited to the unveiling of our intern's big project, a collaborative wall! which is basically a giant whiteboard + some Legos. Later that day, HR emailed us our quarterly bonus payout numbers, which continue to decline due to IT not being profitable, the same day I watched interns get paid to play with Legos
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Sep 16, 2014 20:50
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ZetsurinPower posted:Later that day, HR emailed us our quarterly bonus payout numbers, which continue to decline due to IT not being profitable, the same day I watched interns get paid to play with Legos Legos aside, my thoughts on this nonsense are always something like, "Let's get rid of the IT department entirely. Then come back in six months and tell me how profitable IT really is."
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Sep 16, 2014 21:13
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ZetsurinPower posted:The entire IT dept was invited to the unveiling of our intern's big project, a collaborative wall! which is basically a giant whiteboard + some Legos. To show productivity, you guys should just bill other departments.
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Sep 16, 2014 21:50
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Why does everyone think they need Acrobat and not just Reader? WHYYYYYYYY?
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Sep 16, 2014 23:35
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ZetsurinPower posted:The entire IT dept was invited to the unveiling of our intern's big project, a collaborative wall! which is basically a giant whiteboard + some Legos. Reminds me of our "Quality Boards" which were boards where we put up our department goals, things we wanted, upcoming notifications and so on. People found that writing stuff like "competitive wages" was erased. Another group had better coffee on their board, they were told to write a cost benefit plan to justify spending X more dollars on coffee. Someone did, but it was rejected. The only thing that really came out of all this was one group turned their board into a really nice looking pac-man board, with their text as the walls. Money well spent.
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Sep 16, 2014 23:44
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Dick Trauma posted:Why does everyone think they need Acrobat and not just Reader? WHYYYYYYYY? I think people just automatically associate it with PDF's. I seem to recall that up until somewhere around version 6 or so, it used to be called Acrobat reader, so they're not entirely off base. Hell, at least they're giving you that. Most of my users say "I need my Adobe updated". Which of course, I end up having to ask which Adobe product needs to be updated (technically, I'm sure they all could use updates with as lovely and buggy as their software is).
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Sep 16, 2014 23:55
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TWBalls posted:I think people just automatically associate it with PDF's. I seem to recall that up until somewhere around version 6 or so, it used to be called Acrobat reader, so they're not entirely off base. Hell, at least they're giving you that. Most of my users say "I need my Adobe updated". Which of course, I end up having to ask which Adobe product needs to be updated (technically, I'm sure they all could use updates with as lovely and buggy as their software is). Although they were once called Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader these people are saying "I need the full version of Adobe" or "I need Acrobat PRO" so they understand that they already have the basic functionality of Reader. Typically they want to "edit" someone else's PDFs which is a bad idea, especially when users think they can be manipulated like a Word doc with similar results.
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Sep 17, 2014 00:11
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See also: people who need Photoshop to resize images to put on eBay listings.
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Sep 17, 2014 00:25
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Dick Trauma posted:Why does everyone think they need Acrobat and not just Reader? WHYYYYYYYY? Round here everyone wants acrobat so they can convert PDF's to DOCs. Well the jokes on them, all the licenses are in use so if they want it they gotta fork over the cash, and people start getting second thoughts when they find out they're paying $300 for a PDF converter.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:33
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ZetsurinPower posted:Later that day, HR emailed us our quarterly bonus payout numbers, which continue to decline due to IT not being profitable, the same day I watched interns get paid to play with Legos One of the projects I attempted to float as an intern was buying a whole lot of Lego Technic to use as rapid prototyping, as sometimes it'd take a day or two to get some 3D printed parts and it's really handy to start prototyping hardware right now. Sadly other work got in the way it never went anywhere (despite a surprising amount of enthusiasm).
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Sep 17, 2014 01:48
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Dick Trauma posted:Although they were once called Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader these people are saying "I need the full version of Adobe" or "I need Acrobat PRO" so they understand that they already have the basic functionality of Reader. Typically they want to "edit" someone else's PDFs which is a bad idea, especially when users think they can be manipulated like a Word doc with similar results. Ah, okay. We've been using Nuance PDF Converter for these types of folks. Less expensive than Acrobat. Problem is, it can be buggy and I've yet to see these asswipes put out any patches. Want a feature to work properly? Gotta buy the new version. gently caress Nuance.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:07
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Dick Trauma posted:Why does everyone think they need Acrobat and not just Reader? WHYYYYYYYY?
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Sep 17, 2014 05:29
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Directory Sync is broken, again. Change AD attributes in AD, run DirSync, check in O365... No changes. Check on MIIS as it runs, it shows everything completed, shows it exported the attributes to O365... No changes. Change password in O365, log in using that password successfully, run DirSync again to force the AD password... No changes. Rerun the DirSync config wizard, let it run a full DirSync after it is finished, and it works. Only after rerunning the DirSync config wizard. What the gently caress
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Sep 17, 2014 06:41
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death .cab for qt posted:Directory Sync is broken, again. Change AD attributes in AD, run DirSync, check in O365... No changes. A wizard did it.
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Sep 17, 2014 07:10
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You mother fucker
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Sep 17, 2014 07:23
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