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evol262 posted:I think POWER8 is great. I've always liked power, just not what power kit cost (especially as it gets easier to scale out), and the way IBM has done terrible things with cheaper Tivoli on power/etc. I hope it is not too little too late. IBM has a knack for making cool stuff and ruining it with licensing ( "We are only enterprise, so be prepared to pay us ridiculous amounts of money" ) or some other boneheaded move. Lenovo bought their server division and in a couple of months I have seen more activity regarding former IBM servers on forums (Thinkserver TS140) than all the other years combined. I get that it is not fashionable to be on the low end, but if people buy your stuff and it leaves a good impression it will work its way up. Mindshare is pretty important.
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 10:37 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 15:23 |
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What are some useful programs I should have on a USB for general windows desktop support?
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 15:44 |
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Drunk Orc posted:What are some useful programs I should have on a USB for general windows desktop support? I create a multiboot USB using Xboot and then add in my own ISOs and customize the menu. I normally have Acronis (imaging/backups), Seatools (check drive), SpinRite (fix drive), Memtest (check memory), DaRT (Windows utility, can be used for automatic repair/cmd line access), Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor (easily reset passwords), and Ultimate Boot CD/Hirens Boot CD (a combined ISO with plenty of tools). Normally within Windows I go directly to bleepingcomputer/filehippo and download the normal AV kit I use (rkill, TDSS Killer, MalwareBytes, Combofix) and cleanup utilities (CCleaner). Anything more within Windows is probably worth a re-image.
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 16:56 |
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Wow, Thank you for the replies Docjowles and evol262. I've already been using VMware player for testing out distros, currently installing Scientific Linux 7 which from what I understand is pretty much RHEL7 minus Redhat support. At some point I might setup ESXi again just for the experience. Once I can pickup a spare SSD I will use it for a daily os. I have a secondary computer that's been running Mint for some time. Mainly for irc/media backup. I skimmed a bunch of Python tutorials and basic scripts last night, lot of it is coming back and, at least starting out, I think will be easier for me than Ruby.
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 16:56 |
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Since redhat is now officially sponsoring CentOS, is there really any reason to use Scientific Linux?
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 17:16 |
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Just the same reason people used it before; if you need sub-millisecond near-real-time control over processes.
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 18:15 |
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Bhodi posted:Just the same reason people used it before; if you need sub-millisecond near-real-time control over processes. This use case will never go away (though you can use MRG/realtime on CentOS), but SL got a ton of users because CentOS dropped the ball when el6 came out. They're all fixed up now. In that sense, SL as an alternative with a ton of users is slowly going away again I have no idea how the CentOS/RH "firewall" is supposed to work (our internal infrastructure isn't set up that way), but I wouldn't call CentOS "officially supported" as much as sponsored. Many of the CentOS people were already at Redhat anyway, and they've had their own bugzilla for a long time, but we're very particular in how we mean "support"
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 18:41 |
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So speaking of RH, how much fun do you guys make of the cloudforms team? It's a pretty awful product and even our RH contractor can't get the thing to work well. RH can't / won't guarantee data integrity with a 3.0 -> 3.1 upgrade and every test upgrade we've tried has mangled the database. It's seriously half baked. We find bugs in the thing constantly and have currently open tickets where it's escalated up to the devs who are just sort of like "uhhhhh well it was never designed to work at that scale, we'll see what we can do". The internal thread/messaging model makes errors a total bitch to track down, and it just seems like it's got way more than a normal slew of problems for a product of that complexity. I get that it's less than 2 years old, but I'm having flashbacks to the old spacewalk satellite server. I only assume you threaten people with "Be good on your next review, or you get sent to the cloudforms team!". Even my boss reconciles his cogitative dissonance with "Well, we've paid more for worse!". Edit: Some of the stuff about it is just comical; because of how the caching / presentation was coded, you can't have more than one window open with the same login or it gets all confused. In TYOL 2015. Seriously. It even warns you about this when you log in, even they know it's dumb. It seems to be getting better, especially with the newfangled REST API (new in latest version!), but it feels like it really needed a bit more cooking time before you start selling it as an enterprise product. Bhodi fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jan 4, 2015 |
# ? Jan 4, 2015 20:22 |
Drunk Orc posted:What are some useful programs I should have on a USB for general windows desktop support? http://www.reddit.com/r/tronscript Give that a shot, at least for anti-malware stuff.
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 20:53 |
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Bhodi posted:So speaking of RH, how much fun do you guys make of the cloudforms team? It's a pretty awful product and even our RH contractor can't get the thing to work well. RH can't / won't guarantee data integrity with a 3.0 -> 3.1 upgrade and every test upgrade we've tried has mangled the database. It's seriously half baked. We find bugs in the thing constantly and have currently open tickets where it's escalated up to the devs who are just sort of like "uhhhhh well it was never designed to work at that scale, we'll see what we can do". The internal thread/messaging model makes errors a total bitch to track down, and it just seems like it's got way more than a normal slew of problems for a product of that complexity. I get that it's less than 2 years old, but I'm having flashbacks to the old spacewalk satellite server. Basic gist is that it's no better or worse than other acquisitions. Satellite was the team nobody really wanted to be on (they're better now), because it was essentially an internal tool never meant to be made public, and a wipe/restore from rhn internally with LAN throughput wasn't a big deal. ManageIQ/Cloudforms now is in the same state as rhev was at acquisition and satellite at release. It's ok, and we need to get people to start using it to find problems so we can fix them. It sounds like there are a lot. It's likely that as an acquired codebase, there's a lot of internal churn and parts that the team doesn't know really well (much as we try to retain people after acquisitions, it doesn't always happen, and sometimes principal engineers walk). I don't work on or with manageiq, since the cloud stuff I do doesn't present APIs it consumes (if I were on the rhevm or touched api bits on nova, maybe). I'd expect it to get better rapidly, especially since they finally cleaned up manageiq enough to open source it, but check out upstream and see how it looks. Turning another company's code into an enterprise product is hard. It's harder when you're in an engineering driven company with no real standards, except where feature owners say "using config management would be nice, and the rest of our products talk puppet, so maybe that would be nice for users". But it's not fixed. We use puppet, chef, ansible, and salt internally, depending on the whims of who built it. There are internal docs/complaints for a greenfield deployment of our products. It's ugly. Ever tried to install rhel, then get satellite, rhev, rhos, and cloudforms working together so you can deploy a new VM, register it to satellite, and enforce a package set? It's ugly, and we know it. We're working on it, but it needs time. We're fortunate that there aren't a lot of players in hybrid cloud management yet, but if you find a better one, use it. Just watch upstream so you know when it'll suck less (downstream is usually ~6 months after up, so expect a suckless version of cloudforms 6mo after a promising version of manageiq)
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# ? Jan 4, 2015 22:13 |
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Yes, but, as someone who lives in Texas, the drawback is that you live in Texas. What's the worst part about Texas? As far as I know, it's get hot, it's a bit of sub-urban nightmare and you don't talk about politics. EDIT - I'd probably fit in any enjoy the Pacific Northwest a hell of a lot more but being employed is a priority. keseph posted:You spend 2-3 years of your career looking for entry level, you spend 30 years looking for senior level. I suppose that makes me feel a little better Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Jan 4, 2015 |
# ? Jan 4, 2015 22:25 |
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Tab8715 posted:I suppose that makes me feel a little better Job titles are so silly. I have "Sr." attached to mine, despite having nowhere near the experience for it. That's not going to stop me from milking the poo poo out of it down the line, though.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 14:21 |
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Agreed on the title bullshit, I've gone through: Helpdesk Analyst (2009) Systems Administrator (2012) Systems Analyst (2013) Senior Technical Engineer (2014) Apart from the Sys admin role, they are almost exactly the same jobs. Working as 3rd line support/projects in MSP's. The Systems Analyst to Senior Technical Engineer change was actually at the same company, in exactly the same role, doing the same poo poo at the same money. Just one day my boss walked over to my desk and told me I have a new job title. Ahdinko fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jan 5, 2015 |
# ? Jan 5, 2015 15:33 |
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I've mentioned this before: Ignore your official job title. Pick a title to use on your resume that encompasses the majority of what you do and that is common and instantly recognizable. I've had titles like ".NET Developer" and "Staff Programmer" and what I put on my resume is "Software Engineer." All the bullet points under each job title give an accurate description of what I've done in that job and what technologies I've used. Edit: I've had the thing where I got a new job title and nothing else (neither compensation nor responsibilities changed) because of a re-organization. There's no reason I need to list that poo poo on my resume. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Jan 5, 2015 |
# ? Jan 5, 2015 17:53 |
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So last week I was sitting around doing things and my boss came up and said our remaining AIX system is now my baby, here's the root password, and the AIX admin has been let go. Uhh.. so just being thrown in there, my current role being more of a computer operator/dabbling in a bunch of other things position, any tips on what I should look at on the system? I took an initial look and the previous admin had deleted his 2 directories that held all his scripts, cron looks clean except for a call to a now non-existent monitoring script (reported swap usage, space available, processes) which I think I can recreate pretty easily. Thankfully it's been a pretty trouble free box. Unfortunately we don't have a AIX test box anymore so I can't try things :|
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 17:58 |
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Danith posted:So last week I was sitting around doing things and my boss came up and said our remaining AIX system is now my baby, here's the root password, and the AIX admin has been let go. Did say anything other than "You're now admin. Do admin stuff"? Like, job expectations or anything?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:01 |
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One helpdesk worker fired for being incompetent, one PT tech fired for pulling a final exam off a professor's PC and cheating, one FT tech put in his notice. It has been an interesting day so far!
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:15 |
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flosofl posted:Did say anything other than "You're now admin. Do admin stuff"? Like, job expectations or anything? No, just that it is now my baby. It also hosts our oracle database
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:17 |
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CloFan posted:one PT tech fired for pulling a final exam off a professor's PC and cheating I thought this kind of mischief died in the 80s
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:28 |
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Danith posted:No, just that it is now my baby. So they literally just dumped responsibility for two extremely complicated (and probably critical to the business, given their cost) services on you with no notice or training? And you're totally unfamiliar with them? before something inevitably goes wrong and you have to take the fall for it.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:29 |
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mewse posted:I thought this kind of mischief died in the 80s I thing I find to be a head scratcher is how you even get caught doing it?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:30 |
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mewse posted:I thought this kind of mischief died in the 80s Three people in my class got expelled during our senior year of high school for doing this, and that was in 2005.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:32 |
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Sickening posted:I thing I find to be a head scratcher is how you even get caught doing it? In hindsight, posting an ad on the student bulletin boards with his own phone number was a bad idea
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:36 |
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Docjowles posted:So they literally just dumped responsibility for two extremely complicated (and probably critical to the business, given their cost) services on you with no notice or training? And you're totally unfamiliar with them? I'm not totally unfamiliar with them. When we had a test server I had played around with it, installed AIX, broke it and things. Also pretty familiar with linux. But without a test server, I am kinda nervous... I suppose I'll just recreate the monitoring script and do some cleanup on it (the root mailbox has 14000 unread messages) and just keep an eye on the process usage. It could be a good opportunity to get some official experience I can put on my resume.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:42 |
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Danith posted:No, just that it is now my baby. Sweet Baby Jesus.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:48 |
CloFan posted:One helpdesk worker fired for being incompetent That can actually happen in reality?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 18:59 |
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Danith posted:the previous admin had deleted his 2 directories that held all his scripts
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 19:49 |
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So I work for a small non-profit (office of 50-60) that uses SharePoint, and the IT guy who was the SP guru left. Someone higher-up suggested I might take that over (and get a raise, etc.) - and that the company would pay for training, etc. I have no background in javascript/coding, but would like to do this, but don't feel like I necessarily need to get certified in anything. Is that possible? Is this a good idea? (Is this the place to ask this?)
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 19:58 |
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Final 5 days of work at my current job. Documentation is looking pretty good at this point, not much going on to do. How do you all spend your last week?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:36 |
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Does anyone have a plan/proposal format for long term IT projects that they have used and would recommend? I'm trying to clean up a bit and getting a working plan together for the next two years would help make my boss happy, haha.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:38 |
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flosofl posted:Sweet Baby Jesus. Bhodi posted:The reddest of red flags. Ahhhahaha.. Welp, going to have a conversation with the boss in the next couple days about what he expects me to do with the system because now it does seem I'm set up to be the fall guy if something breaks on it.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:40 |
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Red posted:So I work for a small non-profit (office of 50-60) that uses SharePoint, and the IT guy who was the SP guru left. Someone higher-up suggested I might take that over (and get a raise, etc.) - and that the company would pay for training, etc. There was a SP thread but Sharepoint isn't necessarily coding, it's a content/document management platform. You'll need to know or learn SharePoint things and it's tightly integrated into Active Directory and SQL Server. It can be a huge undertaking but it depends on the size and utilization of your deployment.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:52 |
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TeMpLaR posted:Final 5 days of work at my current job. Documentation is looking pretty good at this point, not much going on to do. How do you all spend your last week?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:57 |
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I have never seen a workable SharePoint installation that had been through a version upgrade.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 20:57 |
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Tab8715 posted:There was a SP thread but Sharepoint isn't necessarily coding, it's a content/document management platform. You'll need to know or learn SharePoint things and it's tightly integrated into Active Directory and SQL Server. I only bring up coding because certification testing/classes talk about it a lot. What might someone in IT recommend for someone in my position?
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 21:31 |
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mewse posted:I thought this kind of mischief died in the 80s
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 21:37 |
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Danith posted:So last week I was sitting around doing things and my boss came up and said our remaining AIX system is now my baby, here's the root password, and the AIX admin has been let go. Check that it doesn't have telnet and ftp enabled by default in inetd in TYOL 2014 like the one I just set up a few months ago did
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 21:39 |
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flosofl posted:And Executive Summaries. "Can you please make a one page summary for our senior management? Just take those 20 pages of data and put them in a couple bullet points. And don't use any of those made-up words you geeks like to use." All caught up on 5 pages of posts and this one stuck out to me the most. Holy poo poo this is accurate. Was asked to cram my 40 page ppt into 15 pages into 3 pages into 1 page with 6pt font. And SmartArt. Lots of SmartArt. So loving stupid.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 21:46 |
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:All caught up on 5 pages of posts and this one stuck out to me the most. Holy poo poo this is accurate. Was asked to cram my 40 page ppt into 15 pages into 3 pages into 1 page with 6pt font. And SmartArt. Lots of SmartArt. I never trusted those swoopy clip art presenters. I always felt they were trying to pull a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" move. Just a nice tasteful, neutral gradient with a company approved logo in corner. Maybe bullet points that appear one at time if you're feeling fancy. And label the graph axes and put them on their own slide. I don't want to need a goddamn telescope to read it, when it's buried on page cluttered with bullet points and clip art.
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# ? Jan 5, 2015 22:04 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 15:23 |
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:All caught up on 5 pages of posts and this one stuck out to me the most. Holy poo poo this is accurate. Was asked to cram my 40 page ppt into 15 pages into 3 pages into 1 page with 6pt font. And SmartArt. Lots of SmartArt. Being able to distill down information is a useful skill, don't dismiss it. Your boss may need to understand all 40 pages of technical details for the project, but his boss probably doesn't and that guy's boss almost certainly doesn't. They need just enough details to make an informed decision and it sounds like they trust you enough to determine what those details are. Provide your conclusions and explain the risks - full due diligence certainly needs to be done and that's why you've crafted your analysis to that level of detail, but most of it is likely irrelevant to the decision being made. If it turns out that one of those bullet points from one of those one page documents is a sticking point, they can always go back down the chain for more information. Or think of it another way - how many departments at your level does the executive who's asking for the 1 page ppt oversee? Can they practically and cogently go through 40 page ppts from each of those departments? Chances are even after condensing everything to executive summaries, these guys are reading a lot more than the people under them. You're (probably) a smart person and it took you some effort to gain the level of understanding you have of the topic you're writing about. It would take superhuman abilities to reach that same level of understanding of however many disparate departments are putting out work, hence executive summaries. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jan 5, 2015 |
# ? Jan 5, 2015 22:15 |