|
BrainWeasel posted:Hey all. I am not in IT, but I love this thread and I wanted to contribute a story about my new favorite sysadmin. I agree wholeheartedly with this exercise. That sinking moment where you think you might've just utterly ruined something big is like an anchor in your mind that tells you to never ever do it again, and I bet it works well for convincing people to make proactive decisions too. Like the moment when I decided to move a set of Access queries into a macro but then didn't check to make sure they were in order before running said macro. In a production database. Luckily I was paying attention and when the first number that came up for a record change didn't make any sense I pulled it to a halt, but I learned two valuable things immediately that I won't forget: always check your macros, and always run in test first. Even if you're confident it'll work as intended, test first. A valuable learning experience, courtesy of the pit of my stomach cramping up immediately when I realized how much worse it could've been.
|
# ? May 9, 2015 23:14 |
|
|
# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:25 |
|
Volmarias posted:Yes, although if you're at the exec level you're possibly better off just not traveling to China. Sometimes you can't avoid it - China is a big market, sometimes you have to go. Burner phones/iPads are the way to go.
|
# ? May 10, 2015 01:37 |
|
BrainWeasel posted:Shine on, you crazy BOFH I want to be this guys apprentice. Seriously, I'll live on the loving streets if I have to.
|
# ? May 10, 2015 03:20 |
|
spog posted:I've heard that some companies have a policy that when their execs travel to China, they are issued burner phones and laptops since not only do you have the usual hackers, but also sophisticated state-sponsored attacks. Confirming the presence of malware on travel machines.
|
# ? May 10, 2015 13:43 |
|
Potato Salad posted:Confirming the presence of malware on travel machines. The off site dudes always seem to be the most annoying when it comes to this, since they don't want to ship their poo poo back and in the land before security all have local admin. They'll straight up lie about installing poo poo until you send them the screen shot of the service running and the exe present on their machine.
|
# ? May 10, 2015 17:30 |
|
Migishu posted:I want to be this guys apprentice. That guy could start a frigging dojo for BOFH-fu.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 15:25 |
|
Dillbag posted:This made my butthole clench up a bit. The last time I rebooted an ISIS during production two blades refused to mount. Fortunately they were on separate chassis and we were mirrored, but I white knuckled it for two days waiting for the replacement drives to come in. We did both in the same day! And we're a production house so we told all the editors to go home early or wait it out. It came back up quick enough, it's a 5500 so it's all integrated, if we were running a 7000 I would be hesitant to reboot the thing. As to the upgrades we're going from 6.5.4.5 to to 7.0.4 which has been a fun process since 7.0.4 comes with its own set of bugs. Just don't go to 7.0.4.3 since that will seg fault on boot. loving Avid. Spankmeister: I can't speak to the 7000 as I've only used that during the class but the 5500 is "made" by Avid as it's a server and storage slapped together. Avid says they play well with others but they're full of poo poo. pr0digal fucked around with this message at 16:46 on May 11, 2015 |
# ? May 11, 2015 16:42 |
|
Anyone ever run into a problem where numerous (like 25) instances of Internet Explorer open up in the task manager and just drag the system down? Clearly it's an infection of some sort but I haven't been able to isolate it yet. Once the user is gone for the day I'll be running Combofix, TSDD Killer and whatever else I have in my arsenal to see what's going on. If it doesn't catch anything I'll just flatten the machine. Only reason why I'm hesitant is we don't have any images for these systems so it'll be a manually restore and reload of applications. Just seeing if I can avoid a few hours of mindless clicking.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 16:45 |
|
m.hache posted:Anyone ever run into a problem where numerous (like 25) instances of Internet Explorer open up in the task manager and just drag the system down? Clearly it's an infection of some sort but I haven't been able to isolate it yet. Definitely an infection. You can also try adwcleaner and jrt. If you had a good image, you could have had it reloaded before your second scan finished.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 16:54 |
|
m.hache posted:Anyone ever run into a problem where numerous (like 25) instances of Internet Explorer open up in the task manager and just drag the system down? Clearly it's an infection of some sort but I haven't been able to isolate it yet. If you're not in an "every user is a local admin" environment, you can probably get away with deleting and recreating their user profile. That's what I generally do instead of spending time trying to fight the infection.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 17:51 |
|
Sirotan posted:If you're not in an "every user is a local admin" environment, you can probably get away with deleting and recreating their user profile. That's what I generally do instead of spending time trying to fight the infection. I am. At this point though if the scans don't pull anything up I gotta wipe the system. I only have 3 hours to get all of his apps up and running before I go home and it's gotta work first thing in the morning when he get's in.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 17:53 |
|
Anyone have any experience with setting up multiple displays off of one computer? Had a request to get a quote for a computer that can run 8-10 displays by itself. The only thing I can think of/find to run this is something like this: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/display_wall/mura_mpx_series/mpx44/?productTabs=0 Maybe a couple of those and then some USB to VGA/DVI adapters?
|
# ? May 11, 2015 17:55 |
|
BaseballPCHiker posted:Anyone have any experience with setting up multiple displays off of one computer? Had a request to get a quote for a computer that can run 8-10 displays by itself. The only thing I can think of/find to run this is something like this: I'd love to hear more about this as well. Just had a request come in to run 4, possibly 5 displays....on a laptop.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 18:02 |
|
J posted:I'd love to hear more about this as well. Just had a request come in to run 4, possibly 5 displays....on a laptop. I think anything with display port can do it, if I understand display port correctly.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 18:17 |
|
RFC2324 posted:I think anything with display port can do it, if I understand display port correctly. DisplayPort 1.2 to be specific, upto 4 1920x1080 displays at 60Hz but the video card has to be able to crank out all the pixels and the monitors need to be daisy-chainable. And you need to sacrifice a goat to the compatibility gods.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 18:29 |
Newer cards with DisplayPort output should support connecting multiple displays to one port, with some sort of splitter or chaining. Of course you might be bandwidth-limited on that so high resolutions/fast refresh might not be possible. Apart from perhaps an ExpressCard graphics adapter that's probably your only option for laptops that doesn't involved USB-VGA things. For desktop computers, just add more graphics cards. Even if you can't find a motherboard with enough PCI-E x16 slots you can probably find graphics cards for x4 or x1 slots. And even if you can't find that, it's actually possible to mod graphics cards with a saw. Simply saw off the excess PCI-E lanes from the card, if you can do it without damaging unrelated traces. My own success story (I was a fraction of a mm from hitting unrelated traces.)
|
|
# ? May 11, 2015 18:30 |
|
J posted:I'd love to hear more about this as well. Just had a request come in to run 4, possibly 5 displays....on a laptop. All the workstations in my department consist of laptops with 4 displays each. All the laptops are attached to docking stations. Two of the displays are connected to VGA parts on the docking stations, and the other two are on USB-to-VGA adapters.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 18:32 |
|
BaseballPCHiker posted:Anyone have any experience with setting up multiple displays off of one computer? Had a request to get a quote for a computer that can run 8-10 displays by itself. The only thing I can think of/find to run this is something like this: So long as the machine has enough PCI-e slots on the motherboard, there's a few AMD cards with 6 displayport outputs (Usually called Eyefinity editions). For single slot/low performance needs there's a Quadro NVS 510 which features 4 mini-DP outputs: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvs-510-graphics-card.html. Importantly, they can run multiple 4k displays. Almost anything should be able to run two of those Quadro cards no problem. They don't need external PCIe power connections. Even if the only slot is a x4 or x8 slot, so long as you're not actually doing any 3d stuff, it should be OK.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 19:17 |
|
Mo_Steel posted:I agree wholeheartedly with this exercise. That sinking moment where you think you might've just utterly ruined something big is like an anchor in your mind that tells you to never ever do it again, and I bet it works well for convincing people to make proactive decisions too. If I'm reading that correctly, this wasn't an exercise. It was a brush with death averted only because he caught it in time.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 19:18 |
|
So a videocard doesnt have to support crossfire or SLI to have two connected to one motherboard? The setup is for a professional day trader so high resolution isnt really necessary.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 19:26 |
|
guppy posted:If I'm reading that correctly, this wasn't an exercise. It was a brush with death averted only because he caught it in time. I think the "exercise" was the collective pants-making GBS threads in the conference room after the fact. Also, I really hope someone is going to have words with the security team that decided to ignore the alert. BaseballPCHiker posted:So a videocard doesnt have to support crossfire or SLI to have two connected to one motherboard? The setup is for a professional day trader so high resolution isnt really necessary. Nope. Windows will handle multiple video cards like a champ. I'd recommend staying in the same brand (NVIDIA vs ATi), just to avoid driver conflicts, but otherwise just start throwing video cards in there. USB devices will work too, but the USB 2 video adaptors were slow and a little janky, but they work in a pinch. Wizard of the Deep fucked around with this message at 19:39 on May 11, 2015 |
# ? May 11, 2015 19:28 |
|
BaseballPCHiker posted:So a videocard doesnt have to support crossfire or SLI to have two connected to one motherboard? The setup is for a professional day trader so high resolution isnt really necessary. Nope, I have many piece of poo poo HP/Compaq DC8300 desktops that have dual 2d quadro NVS 300s in them. No SLI needed at all, you just pop the card in and plug stuff up. The only caveat is that dragging windows around from the monitors on one card to monitors on the second card will be laggy. Same card monitor dragging windows around is fine, it's just when you're going over the PCIe bus to the other card that you'll see a slowdown. This doesn't matter if it's just always going to be displaying the same stuff though. I would definitely stay away from USB video anything. (Why does the quadro NVS300 even loving exist? I have no idea. But that's a separate matter).
|
# ? May 11, 2015 20:01 |
|
Inspector_666 posted:I think a tie without a jacket looks less professional than a tucked in dress shirt and nice pants, and I think that "sartorial professionals" would agree with me. There are situations that would make sense to wear a tie without a jacket. If you want to present yourself as a position of authority while still being approachable like a teacher or social worker. Otherwise a jacket without a tie is just a stopgap and should not be part of a dress code. If the situation warrants the formality a well fitting jacket comes first and then the tie. In a location where a jacket is too warm, a linen jacket is more suitable.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 20:59 |
|
So I am tasked with an encryption issue... We are migrating a client off of McAfee to bitlocker on laptops with a TPM, but what options are viable for non-tpm systems without using a flash drive, and tie in to ad for user management?
|
# ? May 11, 2015 21:19 |
|
nothingtrend posted:So I am tasked with an encryption issue... We are migrating a client off of McAfee to bitlocker on laptops with a TPM, but what options are viable for non-tpm systems without using a flash drive, and tie in to ad for user management? Do you have to type in a password now with the McAfee encryption? Could you do bitlocker and just type a password in every time it boots.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 21:34 |
|
nothingtrend posted:So I am tasked with an encryption issue... We are migrating a client off of McAfee to bitlocker on laptops with a TPM, but what options are viable for non-tpm systems without using a flash drive, and tie in to ad for user management? Sophos SafeGuard relies on a synchronized AD structure for policy assignments and uses AD authentication for all modules. The only user management done outside of AD would entail manual assignment of encryption keys if that user had need of one not automatically assigned to them. It also integrates with bitlocker.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 22:10 |
|
A ticket didn't come in, because somehow in the span of about two hours since my boss sent me a ticket, the Spiceworks install my boss and I had been testing was uninstalled and wiped from one of our auxiliary servers. I think the MSP who we're in the process of transitioning away from is to blame, but I don't know who to blame for having a server with no backups and Volume Shadow Service turned off, even if it's just a secondary domain controller serving virtually no function. Thank god file recovery software still works on a VM. Now I get to spend Tuesday trying to unfuck this whole mess.
|
# ? May 11, 2015 22:35 |
|
You should probably drop your MSP a line and say 'hey we're doing things to XXX don't worry about it'
|
# ? May 11, 2015 23:30 |
|
BaseballPCHiker posted:So a videocard doesnt have to support crossfire or SLI to have two connected to one motherboard? The setup is for a professional day trader so high resolution isnt really necessary. Yeah, SLI/Crossfire are specifically for using multiple cards to run a single monitor (or for some specs, multiple cards combining to run 2), splitting some of the processing load among them. When you want to run multiple monitors, you do not need the simultaneous processing for the independent monitors, so SLI/Crossfire is unneeded.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 00:32 |
|
Gwaihir posted:(Why does the quadro NVS300 even loving exist? I have no idea. But that's a separate matter). Because IT departments are notoriously cheap rear end bastards and OEMs saw a way to make a few extra bucks by exploiting that.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 00:32 |
|
go3 posted:You should probably drop your MSP a line and say 'hey we're doing things to XXX don't worry about it' We're about to drop them a line that their services aren't needed because we have actual staff(me) for desktop IT now, and we want someone who's better suited to handle our server-side stuff.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 01:30 |
|
In zendesk, how do I tell it to stop loving sending satisfactions surveys to me as an agent that can't rate the satisfaction because I'm an agent?
|
# ? May 12, 2015 02:34 |
|
The Muffinlord posted:We're about to drop them a line that their services aren't needed because we have actual staff(me) for desktop IT now, and we want someone who's better suited to handle our server-side stuff. Well good luck with that then, you seem to be doing a stellar job so far!
|
# ? May 12, 2015 03:20 |
|
go3 posted:Well good luck with that then, you seem to be doing a stellar job so far! We're trying to really make poo poo better for everyone. Having a ticketing system that isn't their busted-rear end Autotask will make a big difference. Having servers that make some goddamn sense will help, too. What's really been the biggest thing is just having people around whose doors can be knocked on, rather than e-mailing an automated inbox that may or may not even work at all. Everyone at our MSP is capable, but they support organizations way smaller than ours, with much less dynamic demands than ours, and they're just outclassed, and having to run everything we change past them isn't going to let us get anything done. It's just a matter of acquiring all the knowledge they had about our systems from the time before we came on-board.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 03:39 |
|
Let's hope they documented your stuff
|
# ? May 12, 2015 07:42 |
A colleague of mine visited a potential new client...ticket resolution posted:Travel to [company]
|
|
# ? May 12, 2015 14:52 |
The Muffinlord posted:We're trying to really make poo poo better for everyone. Having a ticketing system that isn't their busted-rear end Autotask will make a big difference. Having servers that make some goddamn sense will help, too. What's really been the biggest thing is just having people around whose doors can be knocked on, rather than e-mailing an automated inbox that may or may not even work at all. Everyone at our MSP is capable, but they support organizations way smaller than ours, with much less dynamic demands than ours, and they're just outclassed, and having to run everything we change past them isn't going to let us get anything done. It's just a matter of acquiring all the knowledge they had about our systems from the time before we came on-board. lovely MSP? Autotask? You don't happen to be in the NYC area, do you?
|
|
# ? May 12, 2015 14:58 |
|
One of the projects (that I got roped into) in my last few days is a panic button for the front desk. The operations manager is like "well we can just call 911 like this" and proceeds to dial 911 on the front desk phone and then hangs up. I of course go "oh poo poo" and call dispatch back and tell them we're doing testing so I don't have cops knocking on my door.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 15:00 |
|
"Why haven't we downloaded ourselves to the cloud yet?" In the conversation that followed, I established that the speaker doesn't know what the cloud is or does, other than it's that thing that all the successful companies are using doesn't know what problems it solves (or creates) doesn't know why we might need it or what we would use it for doesn't know how much work will be required to implement it. but really really wants it. So much so that it's apparently one of my Director's goals to pilot a cloud system this month and have it in production exclusive of all old systems "by the beginning of the summer buying season." ("Can't we develop this Chaos Monkey thing before we online the cloud?")
|
# ? May 12, 2015 15:05 |
|
|
# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:25 |
|
Ask for a fuckton of money and say that's how much it costs.
|
# ? May 12, 2015 15:06 |