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Happiness Commando posted:I work for an MSP that hired a printer salesman to be the primary helpdesk / first response guy. He didn't know how to do poo poo, wouldn't google, and escalated balls easy tickets every day. But I am explicitly forbidden from professional development on company time, because "thats something that goes with you" Does that mean that if you don't know how to fix an issue you can't work it? I mean, you could google it and figure it out probably, but if you learned something that would be professional development, right?
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Jul 5, 2016 17:37
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I guess you can't have testicles, either, as those go with you when you leave.
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Jul 5, 2016 17:58
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Oh man, as the senior, I'll take responsibility for this one.  My guys were like, it looks like these servers aren't really used any more, can we shut any of them down? To which I was like yeah this and this one can go. They thanked me and I thought nothing more of it, until an hour later when the NOC is like hey where'd those servers go? Oh crap they meant NOW? I thought they meant decommissioned! Well uh, those two servers are gone, please adjust your monitoring I suppose!
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Jul 5, 2016 22:21
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I was up all night because my predecessor, and pretty much everyone else on the systems team, does not understand Active Directory and DNS. Turns out that our "production" only forest domain controllers were using the NYC office 'corporate' forest DCs for DNS Forwarding. I found this out because the NYC office server room hit 110 degrees F last night, and the ESXi hosts when into thermal shutdown, which broke our internal tools that relied on external DNS and AWS to work at 3am resulting in a Sev 1 outage. I was asked do an audit of DNS configuration across the entire AD environment (4 separate domains) first thing this morning. I was expecting the worst, and I ended being surprised that it was worse than I thought. I also found out today that the w32tm configuration for the 'standard' domain was less than optimal, and probably not in line with PCI requirements The mountain of technical debt here keeps climbing regardless of how much I chip away at it. 
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Jul 5, 2016 23:17
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mayodreams posted:The mountain of technical debt here keeps climbing regardless of how much I chip away at it. 
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Jul 6, 2016 01:04
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Vulture Culture posted:I have a project with a deadline 2 weeks ago that increased from 72 unfinished line items to 90 unfinished line items today!
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Jul 6, 2016 01:33
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adorai posted:We use the phrase "barring the unforeseen" when making commitments here. the un
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Jul 6, 2016 04:33
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So all that poo poo I was worried about turned out to be not so bad. 2% raise turned out to be 8% I got a new job title. (I'm SEÑIOR poo poo Sucker, now  )And the guy we hired instead of promoting me is actually really good. We're making him comb through every single GPO so we can sort out all the legacy bullshit and clean up our domain. (I do not envy him) So far he's identified a few hundred policies that we can clear out without affecting anything. The real trouble is when we get around to fixing the 'Default' domain policy, and raising the functional domain level.
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Jul 6, 2016 13:26
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:The real trouble is when we get around to fixing the 'Default' domain policy, and raising the functional domain level. dcgpofix /target:Domain
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Jul 6, 2016 16:26
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lol that's not the problem. The problem is what things that we don't know about that will get buggered by loving with the default domain policy. Oh, some traffic software that I've never heard of, used in some county 40 miles away stopped working because it can't ping our traffic server? Oh... the license plate readers stopped working? oh... etc, etc, etc. As many policies that we've already easily identified for removal, we've got twice as many just dumped into the default gpo and have no idea what the gently caress they're for.
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Jul 6, 2016 16:44
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Whoever is responsible for that GPO hell should be publicly shamed and flogged.
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Jul 6, 2016 16:52
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skipdogg posted:Whoever is responsible for that GPO hell should be publicly shamed and flogged.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:03
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:lol that's not the problem. The problem is what things that we don't know about that will get buggered by loving with the default domain policy. My predecessor at least had the idea of naming a GPO "default policy for finance" and didn't put anything in any of the "Default" Department policies after making them. The guy had no idea what he was doing with GPOs. He brought the company from workgroup to AD and then he never used any of the features of a domain beyond centrally managed user logins. GPOs are so easy to horribly mess up. Rather than remove the GPOs why not take parts of if out name them "Legacy - Unknown function 1" then disable it. See what breaks. Keep doing this until you figure out what each piece does and rename accordingly. This is probably going to be a very long project.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:13
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pixaal posted:My predecessor at least had the idea of naming a GPO "default policy for finance" and didn't put anything in any of the "Default" Department policies after making them. The guy had no idea what he was doing with GPOs. He brought the company from workgroup to AD and then he never used any of the features of a domain beyond centrally managed user logins. Don't complain, I took over a AD with L1 support having access, but because no one had any idea about any of this, no one hosed up GPOs. The few that were created from tutorials are fine.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:30
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https://github.com/joshnewlan/say_what
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Jul 6, 2016 17:40
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GPO reports are your friend if you want to see what's changed from defaults, too.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:40
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Vulture Culture posted:$20 says it was CONTOSO\Administrator loving triggered.
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Jul 6, 2016 18:07
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Arsten posted:I hear this all the time, especially from consultants. I'm convinced that "Industry Standard" and "Industry Standard Practice" is short hand for "I know how to do it my way but not in the way you asked about, so we should ignore you without discussing the options at all." While I understand where you're coming from, typically when I'm brought in by a customer to do something it's because they don't know how. So it's a little amusing to hear them ranting about the way something should be done when they've never actually done it, nor seen it done themselves.
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Jul 6, 2016 18:17
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I have a retarded question about Windows Deployment Services. Is this the best thread to ask in?
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Jul 6, 2016 20:22
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Coredump posted:I have a retarded question about Windows Deployment Services. Is this the best thread to ask in? You should be able to get help here, or maybe the Windows thread. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3327309
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Jul 6, 2016 20:28
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Moey posted:You should be able to get help here, or maybe the Windows thread. drat I always forget about that thread. Thanks!
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Jul 6, 2016 20:29
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pixaal posted:GPOs are so easy to horribly mess up. Rather than remove the GPOs why not take parts of if out name them "Legacy - Unknown function 1" then disable it. See what breaks. Keep doing this until you figure out what each piece does and rename accordingly. This is probably going to be a very long project. That's exactly what we are doing. Then once we're sure they're okay, we're going to kill them. Then once it's all clean we're going to bump up the functional level, retire our old DC's and start prepping for Windows 10  Edit: oh yeah, they want this all done by September.
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Jul 6, 2016 20:58
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pixaal posted:GPOs are so easy to horribly mess up. Rather than remove the GPOs why not take parts of if out name them "Legacy - Unknown function 1" then disable it. See what breaks. Keep doing this until you figure out what each piece does and rename accordingly. This is probably going to be a very long project. GPOs are a terrible tightrope walk between having a billion of them each doing one thing, or 5 of them each doing a billion things. 
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Jul 6, 2016 21:14
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psydude posted:While I understand where you're coming from, typically when I'm brought in by a customer to do something it's because they don't know how. So it's a little amusing to hear them ranting about the way something should be done when they've never actually done it, nor seen it done themselves. While I have worked with consultants in the past that were fantastic, my company doesn't seem to hire any of those. I work with business process systems. Not so much "We need AD!" but more "We have our organization organized this way and we need the software to reflect that business process for many reasons - a lot of them regulatory." The last consultant had assigned a developer to us that had deployed our software package exactly once before and did so to a municipality. She recommended that we have someone sit and manually handle a process at each location nationwide. The total person count was ~45 new people and it would have made the "cost saving process" about 300x more expensive. When I made this cost observation, her reasoning was that "At this municipality, they found a 78 year old lady who could do nothing but this process all day every day. It gave her a purpose." This was in a down market for the industry and we had just spent a year trimming almost 500 people from the workforce. I'm sure I could convince the C-levels to hire me 45 new people. Her response was "Well, this is industry-accepted practice!  "
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Jul 6, 2016 22:36
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Man I'm not really sure how to feel about a situation at the new job. The position that was sold to me as mostly presales with some support while we backfill a support engineer position has become a support position, no presales and now they are making room for a new C-level person so they kicked us out of our room and are putting me in the NOC, everyone else has a cubicle or office because seniority. Keep in mind I am a senior network engineer, and the only network engineer not working on a single remote client at that. I turned down a position making 200k for this because it seemed like the right move and it's quickly becoming a dumpster fire. Thinking about seeing if that other position was ever filled. Ugh.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:16
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Sepist posted:Man I'm not really sure how to feel about a situation at the new job. The position that was sold to me as mostly presales with some support while we backfill a support engineer position has become a support position, no presales and now they are making room for a new C-level person so they kicked us out of our room and are putting me in the NOC, everyone else has a cubicle or office because seniority. Keep in mind I am a senior network engineer, and the only network engineer not working on a single remote client at that. I turned down a position making 200k for this because it seemed like the right move and it's quickly becoming a dumpster fire. Thinking about seeing if that other position was ever filled. Ugh.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:27
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Yea that's what I'm thinking. The other job told me to let them know if this job doesn't work out as they would take me in a heartbeat so here's hoping they respond to me. Edit: wow the position is still open after a month. Hooray for industry norm to have high level jobs open for long periods of time Sepist fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 23:32
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Arsten posted:While I have worked with consultants in the past that were fantastic, my company doesn't seem to hire any of those. Just talked to a coworker who had 10% of their project's budget spent on consultants who recommended a plan that cost 10x the project's budget. Whoops.
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Jul 7, 2016 00:22
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PCjr sidecar posted:Just talked to a coworker who had 10% of their project's budget spent on consultants who recommended a plan that cost 10x the project's budget. Did he use the terms "Money is no object"? Because usually the actual budget (-spent-15%) is useful to give to consultants to work within.
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Jul 7, 2016 00:33
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The last consultant we brought in literally printed 400 pages of the IBM knowledge base on how to install the product. He had never used any UNIX system. Also he took like 3 5 hour energy drinks a day.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:13
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alg posted:Also he took like 3 5 hour energy drinks a day. At any given time, our QA lead's desk is a graveyard of like 12 empty Dr. Pepper cans. And at a past job, one of my coworkers would start every single day with two giant Mountain Dews. Somehow they're both in great shape outwardly, although I can't speak to the condition of their hearts. I drink way too much coffee, but that didn't spiral out of control until I had a kid and suddenly had to live on 3 hours of sleep a night. gently caress, this is how it starts, isn't it 
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Jul 7, 2016 03:34
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alg posted:The last consultant we brought in literally printed 400 pages of the IBM knowledge base on how to install the product. He had never used any UNIX system.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:37
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Sounds like you guys are hiring some lovely consultants.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:23
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NippleFloss posted:Sounds like you guys are hiring some lovely consultants. As a consultant some of my assignments have literally involved nothing more than going to page 327, reading a paragraphs and at best writing a few lines or Powershell or several clicks. The client could have certainly done it themselves but for whatever reason chose not to do so. 
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Jul 7, 2016 04:43
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NippleFloss posted:Sounds like you guys are hiring some lovely consultants. Again, these aren't guys from Big Gay Al's consulting shop in downtown BFE, they are from large VARs and nationally recognized consulting firms. It feels like hiring labor from the union hall, sometimes you get awesome people who want to work hard, and sometimes you get poo poo. If you complain, I am sure they are able to successfully defend themselves to their management in a manner similar to what was seen earlier in this thread -- claim the customer doesn't want to use best practices or something and then they go on to the next customer. And in case someone thinks maybe that was the case, in one example, for years after our Call Manager deployment (done by a big name VAR) any time I called into TAC with a problem they would be unfucking something that was done in the initial setup. It was a constant stream of me being on the defensive after being asked, "why would you have set this to that?" and other variations of that question. Actually the best part about our initial CUCM install (again, done by a major VAR with a national presence) was the guy (who was a CCIE) didn't believe in using VLANs on a router interface or between switches. So the router to switch 1 used two ethernet ports on each device, one for the data VLAN and one for the voice, and each switch used two switchports to go to the other switch, one for data and one for voice. This was 2010ish and I guess it's lucky that our data network wasn't very segregated back then, because I am not sure how the guy would have handled 5-10 VLANs like we use at our branches now. Sorry, I'll stop ranting about the lovely consultants we hire.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:47
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adorai posted:didn't believe in using VLANs on a router interface or between switches. So the router to switch 1 used two ethernet ports on each device, one for the data VLAN and one for the voice, and each switch used two switchports to go to the other switch, one for data and one for voice. This was 2010ish and I guess it's lucky that our data network wasn't very segregated back then, because I am not sure how the guy would have handled 5-10 VLANs like we use at our branches now. So you beat him with a router on a stick right? 
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Jul 7, 2016 04:54
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Oh, I mean, there are a lot of lovely consultants out there, certainly, and it sounds like all of you are finding them. But there are a lot of lovely IT workers out there generally, so that's not really anything unique to consulting. If you plan to use consultants then make sure you have enough pre-sales meetings to vet their comfort with the product, ask for references, and when you find someone good try to maintain that relationship rather than starting over new every time.
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Jul 7, 2016 05:01
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NippleFloss posted:Oh, I mean, there are a lot of lovely consultants out there, certainly, and it sounds like all of you are finding them. But there are a lot of lovely IT workers out there generally, so that's not really anything unique to consulting. If you plan to use consultants then make sure you have enough pre-sales meetings to vet their comfort with the product, ask for references, and when you find someone good try to maintain that relationship rather than starting over new every time. I have done all of this so many times that it seems pointless. Every consultant can find someone, somewhere to tell you that it was like hot joy pumped into their rectum. Honestly, if they were employees, it's far easier to eject them from the building via catapult than it is to get rid of a bad consultant's internal guy. One time a consultant had a hard drive crash that ate her system. TEN MONTHS LATER, the excuse for everything was still "Well, I lost my hard drive in that crash....." whenever we'd bring up requirements they weren't meeting. We had to threaten to cut another million dollars of pending contracts just to get that person reassigned away from our company as well as getting a provision written into the new contracts that we can swap out people we don't want to deal with. And this wasn't some mom and pop, this was a massive company consulting for their own product.
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Jul 7, 2016 13:30
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I have had people come to service expensive medical equipment who needed a how to windows 101 from me to still not get things done.
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Jul 7, 2016 13:45
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Tab8715 posted:With Oracle losing both the HP Itanium and Google Java lawsuits how are they able to foreseeably exist?
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Jul 7, 2016 13:46
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