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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Working in a smaller company, dude bought a Linksys from the store and plugged it in, it started serving IP addresses, that was a fun one. Our service manager (Not IT at all) does regular visits to all of our branches. One of the more annoying things he started doing was he'd haul a loving wireless router around with him, and when he hit the next branch he'd abandon it there plugged in before moving to the next branch. This naturally irritated the gently caress out of me because the wireless routers he'd buy were non standard, and all setup to serve DHCP. So about a week after he'd visit each site their network would randomly go tits up with nothing communicating properly. Took me a while to figure out what was going on because I assumed these were just undocumented devices installed by our old IT guy (And we had a ton of undocumented poo poo like that) that had dropped config. Lo and behold one of our VP's is causing the issue by dragging landmines along for his car trips.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 19:17 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 03:14 |
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Working in a smaller company, dude bought a Linksys from the store and plugged it in, it started serving IP addresses, that was a fun one. One of our clients did this and had pretty much the same reaction. The account manager pretty much told them "You need to either tell us before you plug stuff in or stop calling us when you break stuff."
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 19:22 |
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Inspector_666 posted:One of our clients did this and had pretty much the same reaction. The account manager pretty much told them "You need to either tell us before you plug stuff in or stop calling us when you break stuff." The reaction I got last time I dealt with someone "empowered" to go grab a consumer-grade router and plug it in and leave all the defaults wide open was something like "This is the fault of your lovely network."
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 19:29 |
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Christ, today has been nothing but little niggly poo poo breaking which turns into a much larger problem; - Zero day warning about new starter, scrounge a computer and set up user account, user account folder re-directions don't take and it can't find the Exchange certificate, then told person won't be here until Friday - Salesforce for Outlook add-in acts up for user, update it since she was running an old version anyway, gets completely stuck listed as inactive after a round of reinstall, local admin, regedit fuckery - Dickhead telesales dude wastes mine and MSP time recovering a deleted file which for some reason needed Administrator privileges to restore, after fagging around and the guy being a moron behind me I try to get it emptied instead, must've been some kind of temp file fuckery as even that was difficult - Once again Direct Debit software buggers up and needs services restarting, user made an mistake and cancels job submission, finance manager is on holiday so we both blunder through it, have to wait on support line to call back as they'll only speak to me to then conduct SQL magic I always joke that people wouldn't have jobs if technology worked every time, but gently caress why can't things just work sometimes.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 19:36 |
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sfwarlock posted:The reaction I got last time I dealt with someone "empowered" to go grab a consumer-grade router and plug it in and leave all the defaults wide open was something like "This is the fault of your lovely network." I had a bunch of reality offices that I did consulting for, and those places were like wack-a-mole for finding peoples routers. I'd find them stacked four or five deep, with printers plugged in way behind the stacked firewalls. You could only print if you were on a network behind it, but since they all did 192.168.1.0 for DHCP and all the printers were dynamically assigned you'd get printers with the same IP, so depending on which wireless network you joined the same IP would print to different printers. it was a nightmare. I used to just go around with a box and just gather them all up, and then come back a month later and find them all replaced. The client finally agreed to wire the office. They also had this amazing senior agent that was just an awful terrible lady. We setup a Switchvox system there, and she hated it. When I was training a class of about 40 people on how to use it, she stood up and started talking about how great Skype was, and why don't we just use a Skype phone system. She kept interrupting me asking how the system compared to Skype () eventually I told her that I had an hour to teach these 40 people, and if she wanted to instead teach a class about Skype, I'd happy concede and let her come up and run the class, but then when they can't use the phone system, I'd refer the managers to her for an explanation. She called my boss right there in front of me to complain about me. Out loud right in the middle of the session. It almost got me fired. EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot. So they bought a second office a few blocks away, and wanted to link the networks. My boss purchased this crazy LOS based antenna system to bridge the LAN. He purchased it, and then gave me the box and said "figure out how this works". I opened it up, and start to toy with it. I asked him a day later "what client is this for?" Boss: "Reality Agency X". Me: "Oh? For their new office? You know this requires LOS right?" Boss: "Yeah, it's just around the corner, should be good" Me: "Uh, no, it's about 2 miles away, on the other side of a bunch of buildings with hills and trees in the way. And besides that, it requires me to scale a building, mount this on the roof, and run a coax to the basement. None of those things are we equipped for." Boss: "WHAT THE #(*&@(*@#$ JONY IVES, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THAT IT WOULDN'T WORK BEFORE YOU OPENED IT? NOW I CAN'T RETURN IT." Me: "Uh....why didn't you check if it'd work before you purchased it for a client that hasn't paid us for it yet?" Boss: "It's not my job to spec out client purchases, you want to be a sales engineer so badly, start acting like one" When I quit, two years later it was still sitting on the floor where I left it. Super-NintendoUser fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Aug 18, 2015 |
# ? Aug 18, 2015 20:05 |
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poo poo like that is what site to site VPN is for. Why the gently caress you'd buy some expensive idiot directional antenna I have no clue. Also I return opened equipment like that all the time.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 20:17 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:poo poo like that is what site to site VPN is for. Why the gently caress you'd buy some expensive idiot directional antenna I have no clue. Also I return opened equipment like that all the time. Preaching the choir here. Every couple weeks he'd drop something off on my desk "figure out how this works, I bought it for X client." Sure, I'm working 60 hours a week to keep our clients in business, and I have time to lab test new gear. If I managed to find the time 99% of them didn't work for the client, but since he already bought it from a vendor we'd be stuck with it. (no idea why we couldn't return it, but I figure "vendor" meant ebay liquidation sale). I'd stick them in our storage rack in the basement and hope he didn't remember it. One time a PBX vendor gave us a sample system for us to lab up and mess with and he sold it to a customer. When we attempted to purchase support and get licenses for it, the vendor said "lol no, that was a free test for you to play with, you weren't supposed to sell it". Thanks!
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:19 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:poo poo like that is what site to site VPN is for. Why the gently caress you'd buy some expensive idiot directional antenna I have no clue. Also I return opened equipment like that all the time. There is an actual term for what he just did, where you shift the blame for your own stupid decision by picking something trivial and tangentially related to the original issue, then framing the entire problem around that tiny, insignificant detail. It's like the unholy lovechild of victim blaming, strawmen, and reducto ad absurdium.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:22 |
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:There is an actual term for what he just did, where you shift the blame for your own stupid decision by picking something trivial and tangentially related to the original issue, then framing the entire problem around that tiny, insignificant detail. It's like the unholy lovechild of victim blaming, strawmen, and reducto ad absurdium. My favorite time this happened was when he bought 4 or 5 48 port switches for a largish voip phone installation. They were dump switches, and didn't do any vlans or vlan tagging. The job required a separate vlan tag for the IP Phones, and then the PCs would be a different tag/default vlan. I was given the task of unboxing, racking the switches, and giving them IPs and that was it. No information about the rest of the project. The client starts messing with the switches and then realizes they are cheap, and don't work right. The boss bought cheaper ones, since if he stepped down from the layer2 to layer3 switches it a was a lot cheaper, but one of the features removed in the cheaper ones were vlan tagging. Of course they would not work. When it was revealed, he yelled at me for not explaining to him what a vlan was ahead of time. He said "DO I LOOK LIKE I KNOW WHAT VLAN IS? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?" I didn't even know what to say. The switches were returned from the client and a year late when I quit were sitting in a pile on the floor near my desk.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:34 |
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I'm angry on your behalf for "the man who can do no wrong"
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:41 |
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:When it was revealed, he yelled at me for not explaining to him what a vlan was ahead of time. He said "DO I LOOK LIKE I KNOW WHAT VLAN IS? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?" Holy poo poo. How did that guy even get involved in the business if his knowledge was that limited? I mean I can understand like some idiot sales guy making that mistake while pitching a customer and not getting the correct site requirements but even most MSP salesman (maybe) sort of know what a VLAN is. Was this just a dude who did mom and pop small business and got to big to fast? I can't fathom how he could get to the size you presumably were at with that limited of knowledge. How did this job end? Did it involve sweet sweet schadenfreude?
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:50 |
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Was feeling particularly chipper today and having fun with it. A guy told me he was going to call me "later" to work on something, so I sent him this handy graph which I will also share with you. This is how much I care about your problem at a particular point in the day - all times PST (I work in CST, hence the times shifting a bit). Sounds about right. If someone calls at 1am, I can't be that annoyed because that means something is broken otherwise no one would be alert enough to place a call, but if you call me at 7:30pm so help me god we better have misplaced a datacenter and not just "hey Stripe I just thought of a thing oh sorry is that your dinner in the background?"
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 22:24 |
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Holy poo poo. How did that guy even get involved in the business if his knowledge was that limited? I mean I can understand like some idiot sales guy making that mistake while pitching a customer and not getting the correct site requirements but even most MSP salesman (maybe) sort of know what a VLAN is. Was this just a dude who did mom and pop small business and got to big to fast? I can't fathom how he could get to the size you presumably were at with that limited of knowledge. No real sweet schadenfreude, when I quit. The company was my first IT job. I maintained aircraft instruments beforehand, and needed a new job, so I ended up getting a job with this guy. He was a friend of friend and had a small IT Consulting company. It was only about 6 people. In the case I posted, the salesman was the owner, and he for certain new what a VLAN was, but he just couldn't every do anything wrong. The company never really grew because every few months they’d change their focus. First it was home automation, then voip systems, then telepresence, then network services, then managed services, then voip again. It was awful. At the time, I dealt with it, since I thought I was being paid well and I had no experience. I started off just doing windows computer janitor stuff, but then all of a sudden I was building networks and managing linux servers. We did everything for any customer that would pay. I’ve posted plenty of stories, so I won’t repeat, but really it was just complete madness. The owners (two guys that did the sales) were just all over the place with OCD and couldn’t really focus on anything. It was just breakneck pace madness for seven years. Every project was going to be one that would finally put us on the map. We did some cool stuff, but it was just sell first, figure it out later, but to a ridiculous degree. A couple times I flew across country to a new client with no idea what I was doing until I got there and opened up the box that we shipped there. I’ve flown to Florida to just plug in a router, drove to CT and then to Virginia in the same day to configure two different phone systems at two different clients, I flew to a customer in Seattle knowing that what we purchased and was sitting there waiting for me to install was the wrong item, and I’d have to pretend it was a vendor mistake and we had no idea, and plenty of other insane nonsense. I finally quit over a project that I can’t talk about, but it was just way too big for the six of us to handle, especially since we had almost zero documentation on what it was supposed to do, and would have required months of overnights and weekends to successfully deploy. When I gave notice the boss yelled at me for an hour. It was horrible. After I quit I got a few calls from customers that they immediately dropped my company when I quit because they didn't want my company, they only stuck around because of me being there. I told manager/owner/salesman several times that customers would tell me they hated us but liked how hard I worked to keep them going, and he'd laugh and say they customers were idiots and didn't know what they were talking about. The other couple engineers I worked with were brilliant guys, but didn't document anything and made everything 10000% difficult since at 2am when the clients mail was down I couldn't find a password anywhere or even an IP of their mail server. My favorite was one guy that setup and designed a 4 site network with eight PBX servers, about ten PRIs distributed around, and a couple other servers for call management, and our KB page for them was one IP and a password (no username). When I asked him what the deal was he said "I don't bother documenting because if it has a problem you won't understand it anyways". I just started screaming at him about how dumb that was. Anyways, my exposure was incredible, and if I list everything I did on my resume it's like 10 pages. I cut it down a lot but when I interview now, the guys typically don't believe me. My stress tolerance levels are through the roof, since it was basically for seven years, if I don't get this working, it's not only there's no one I could call for help, but if it's not working we will likely be out of business if the client doesn't pay.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 22:39 |
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Was feeling particularly chipper today and having fun with it. A guy told me he was going to call me "later" to work on something, so I sent him this handy graph which I will also share with you. This is how much I care about your problem at a particular point in the day - all times PST (I work in CST, hence the times shifting a bit). As I spent three hours tonight from 5-8 pm trying to get someone else to unfuck their stuff, all the while having my 3-year old loudly inquiring why daddy wasn't eating, I wholeheartely concur. Except for that green bit from 8 to 11, gently caress that. And what exactly did I do those 3 hours? Tried to get a vendor to take ownership of a problem that's obviously theirs of course. Application A subscribes to a large set of messages trough a vendors sonic ESB. The content of one of the messages originates in another of our own systems (application B) but they're transmitted trough this ESB for reasons (the data in this message is needed in a lot of other systems too, and we needed their ESB anyway, might as well slurp this message from there as well). I see the source data being transmitted from application B to their ESB, and application A recieves all other messsages but this one. Yes I've restarted the services on my side. Both of them. Twice. They're up and purring, happliy logging successes everywhere. I checked, and your own application C isn't getting these messages eighter. Check your drat message queues! Wouldn't you know, after 2 hours they found a queue with 50k unprocessed messages in it, but flushing the queue and restarting the service (and all the others, thereby taking the whole ESB down for 10 minutes) didn't even help. So now they want to wait for some experts to get in tomorrow morning so those three hours were basically wasted anyway. Oh and then the ticketing system is down for maintenance so I have to log everything that happened in a mail to the rest of the team like some luddite and eat an SLA breach because I can't change status to Pending Vendor. At least I racked up another 3 hours of overtime. And I can bank them too. Taking tomorrow off with banked hours, someone else can continue this poo poo in the morning.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:10 |
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:When I gave notice the boss yelled at me for an hour. It was horrible. How did you put up with that for more than a minute?
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:12 |
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Dick Trauma posted:I had a copier at one place that was doing that. Was an interesting morning figuring it out. "Well, poo poo. The MAC from the DHCP server answering requests matches table on this switch port, but that can't be it, it's a god drat copier." This would have probably been my reaction when I first started out in networking.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:23 |
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That would have been my response as well, until earlier today.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:44 |
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flosofl posted:"Well, poo poo. The MAC from the DHCP server answering requests matches table on this switch port, but that can't be it, it's a god drat copier." We had two big high volume copiers, one at either end of the floor and what happened was sort of like that. I actually had the ports backward in my head so I went to the wrong one first and digging through the settings found that it had a DHCP server, but it was disabled. I stood there scratching my head for a little while before the light bulb lit up and I checked out the other one and sure enough somehow the DHCP server had been enabled and was happily dishing out worthless IP info. NO YOU ARE NOT THE GATEWAY GODDAMMIT YOU ARE A COPIER.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:50 |
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gently caress printers man.
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# ? Aug 18, 2015 23:51 |
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I've been having some trouble with a trying to get a cabler onsite to a location and to actually do the work we want them too. Its been a mess because they are usually on the ball. I believe they are busy with tons of other sites and are trying to fit our project in. The usual cabling company in the region is busy on another of our projects that is having some trouble. Anyway, the project manager is calling me constantly, or talking to my boss or complaining to someone that I'm not up holding the hands of this company. At that point I realized that I'm doing their job. At some point, the project managers went from managing projects to just whatever the hell it is they do all day. It used to be we'd work out what we need, they'd make arrangements and schedule things. For some reason I'm doing that.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 02:53 |
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Cactus Jack posted:
The guy was a personal friend and was venting. I can deal with it.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 03:42 |
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:The guy was a personal friend and was venting. I can deal with it. haha no thats retarded
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 04:01 |
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go3 posted:haha no thats retarded I know it was. At the time the best option was to not burn bridges since they owed me nearly $1500 in expenses from a last business trip I had put on my own card. Yes I know. I was an idiot.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 04:58 |
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Dispatch closed 3 hard drive failure tickets as informational. now I get to go out tomorrow morning and deploy a new PC at a site we have no documentation for.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 05:38 |
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I sent out a wordy email yesterday detailing the proper support process, the necessity of contacting helpdesk before ringing the department head, etc., so of course it makes sense that when I sat down at 8am today there was a voicemail from someone an hour earlier going "why can't my computer get on the internet? call me back!" I had a brief email conversation with them where I suggested a few things, through the course of which they kept ending every email with "please call". Some days it's hard to care anymore.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 13:32 |
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sfwarlock posted:The reaction I got last time I dealt with someone "empowered" to go grab a consumer-grade router and plug it in and leave all the defaults wide open was something like "This is the fault of your lovely network." "What do you mean it started smoking? Well see this is why you can't plug stuff in without permission, it could be a fire hazard!"
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 13:42 |
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:The guy was a personal friend and was venting. I can deal with it. Friends don't talk to you that way. Hope that helps.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 13:43 |
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Inspector_666 posted:One of our clients did this and had pretty much the same reaction. The account manager pretty much told them "You need to either tell us before you plug stuff in or stop calling us when you break stuff." Last place I worked, I had to drive about five hours to fix a nursing home's network that went down. Beyond the bricked central router, some idiot plugged in a cheap router they got from Walmart and it was handing out DHCP addresses to half the building so they couldn't even get local connectivity. I had to hunt around the damned nursing home in the middle of the night because no points on their switch were labeled or documented in any way. They did it because they wanted to bring their own printers from home or something. We didn't say a word and despite removing it, basically let customers do whatever they want then yell at me to go fix it. I was also the tier 1 guy with no experience and making $12/hr. high six fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Aug 19, 2015 |
# ? Aug 19, 2015 13:58 |
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Sefal posted:I made a powershell script that did exactly what you are asking. my script checks if the ad account hasn't been modified for 90 days. If yes it checks each user in the disabled account OU. and then deletes the home directory and account. Let me know if you are intrested in this. Ill post the script tomorrow then. Sorry, I forgot I posted that here (too many threads). I'd be interested. You can PM it if you don't want to post it, that's fine. Thanks!
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 14:18 |
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Bob Morales posted:Co-workers with a 3rd grade writing level. I changed Category to 2 from 1 and run the catalog update for controllers. Than run new part update. The part show update tonight
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 14:24 |
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sfwarlock posted:The reaction I got last time I dealt with someone "empowered" to go grab a consumer-grade router and plug it in and leave all the defaults wide open was something like "This is the fault of your lovely network." Any layer 2/3 switch should have an option to block rogue DHCP specifically to fix problems like these.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 15:06 |
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Cactus Jack posted:
Yeah, I mean you just put in notice, if he wanted to yell I'd have just tapped dance out of the room and threw jazz hands in his office doorway. Once notice is given, the amount of shits given that someone is "Angry" is pretty much non existent.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 15:41 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:Yeah, I mean you just put in notice, if he wanted to yell I'd have just tapped dance out of the room and threw jazz hands in his office doorway. Once notice is given, the amount of shits given that someone is "Angry" is pretty much non existent. That's a fair point, but like I mentioned, I had to eat it for a few more minutes since flipping a table and moonwalking out would have likely meant that I'd end up losing the $1500 in expenses that they owed me. I also don't believe in burning any bridges. It was also hysterical listening to him just tirade, I wanted to see what all he'd end up saying. The other thing was that the guy and I had worked together pretty closely for years, and before I took the job we were pretty good friends, it all got sour near the end there, but I still didn't want to completely burn the friendship. I had dealt with a lot worse at the job, so sitting there and listening while he went off the deep end was nothing.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 16:02 |
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MrMoo posted:Any layer 2/3 switch should have an option to block rogue DHCP specifically to fix problems like these. This. DHCP Snooping should be enabled on any user facing interface for any switch that supports it. User facing interfaces get port-fast, bpduguard, and dhcp snoop and no err-disable recovery.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 16:11 |
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I kind of basically understand the "No burnt bridges" thing, but that place was so awful you should have soaked the bridge in pitch and chucked a torch over your shoulder.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 16:26 |
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:That's a fair point, but like I mentioned, I had to eat it for a few more minutes since flipping a table and moonwalking out would have likely meant that I'd end up losing the $1500 in expenses that they owed me. I also don't believe in burning any bridges. It was also hysterical listening to him just tirade, I wanted to see what all he'd end up saying. I'm curious to know what they did when they lost so many clients because you left.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 17:31 |
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At the place I last worked, we had winkwinknudgenudge permission to brick any wireless routers plugged into our network. We did this all the time it was great. Essentially plugging in a wireless router would bypass 802.1x authentication that existed for wireless access and also allow the wireless devices to be on a more trusted subnet. This was a huge no-no given the nature of the business. If anyone complained they could be fired/disciplined so nobody ever complained. Mostly it was people who worked in research laboratories who would gently caress around.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 17:54 |
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We're migrating from locally hosted Exchange 2010 to 2013 right now and it seems to go 1GB an hour per mailbox if we run 5 concurrent batches. Good old 2TB 7.2k rpm drives on raid 5's. 2000 mailboxes and a limit of 5GB. We might be done by Christmas. Bonus: we discovered (and microsoft confirmed after testing) a bug with our specific setup and for migrated users to get to their stuff again, we have to re-cycle the IIS app pool manually or else they're in limbo for 1-16 hours until it happens automatically.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 18:06 |
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Is "gently caress email" second on the "gently caress this" hierarchy after "gently caress printers?" Is there an official list somewhere?
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 18:11 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 03:14 |
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I'm okay with email. I mean I've had some unhappy times with it over the years (Ex: migrating everyone from Outlook to Entourage in one night) but it doesn't cause me the same repeated annoyance as other systems. I don't know how people can happily have over 30,000 goddamn items in their inbox.
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# ? Aug 19, 2015 18:20 |