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Thank you guys, I'm going to take a little time to update my resume (and my git with some of my scripts I've been making for Debian) and start jobsearching again. At the very least this job probably isn't going away until that happens so I have stable ground but, yeah. Time to move on. Editing to add maybe the pettiest complaint of my job compared to the others, but we're not allowed to have our phones anywhere inside the facility, including the rest of the warehouse. Only supervisors can bring phones in, and the move to 2nd shift has been kind of a mental health blow in that regard because by the time I'm taking my lunch, most of my loved ones have gone to bed or are preparing for bed. So I don't get to talk to or see anyone until the weekend. Susat fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Dec 6, 2023 |
# ? Dec 6, 2023 20:22 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 09:58 |
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Second interview happened and man it was rough, but it also gave me hope. They asked me a bunch of extremely specific questions about routing and switching, stuff that I should have been able to answer easily but it was a bit of a struggle because I've been out of work for so long. (Stuff like asking me what was in the output of specific IOS commands and then drilling deeper once I covered the basics). It was pretty stressful, but on the non-technical portion my hopes got lifted pretty hard, I had asked them what metrics they used to tell a good tech from one who needs help, and the interviewer prefaced the answer by using a very specific phrase that I had said earlier in the interview in one of my responses and then said "like y- like techs who do that", accidentally admitting that I was the exact kind of tech they were looking for. I know I should never get my hopes up until I have a final offer in hand but it's really hard not to for this one.
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# ? Dec 6, 2023 23:26 |
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for year 2/2 my insurance is going to be more expensive and also worse
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# ? Dec 6, 2023 23:35 |
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Umbreon posted:Second interview happened and man it was rough, but it also gave me hope. They asked me a bunch of extremely specific questions about routing and switching, stuff that I should have been able to answer easily but it was a bit of a struggle because I've been out of work for so long. (Stuff like asking me what was in the output of specific IOS commands and then drilling deeper once I covered the basics). It was pretty stressful, but on the non-technical portion my hopes got lifted pretty hard, I had asked them what metrics they used to tell a good tech from one who needs help, and the interviewer prefaced the answer by using a very specific phrase that I had said earlier in the interview in one of my responses and then said "like y- like techs who do that", accidentally admitting that I was the exact kind of tech they were looking for. Also doing pop-quiz-hotshot on specific IOS commands is a bit lame tbh so i wouldn't beat yourself up over it
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 00:34 |
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Susat posted:Uh Hey thread, it's been a little bit. I need some advice. You do way more than I do, service more expensive equipment, and still make my same pay at a lovely MSP. You gotta get out of there man!
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 03:43 |
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Didn't see a good thread for this since it looks like this one is focused on careers but I didn't see anything IT A/V or other on here so figured this might have a good reach? Our current boardroom (~15x50) just has a Crestron camera bar at the far end. It's OK, just gives a sense of the scope of the room but you can't see past the first few participants. Our chairman has asked what we can do and that he's seen some interesting stuff from Owl Labs. It looks like they have a camera that also plops onto the table and can focus on folks. The current microphone and speaker distribution in the room is great. The idea would be can we get a better camera and have the ability to "hot shot" focus on the active speaker(s) during meetings (typically Teams or Zoom). I'll take a look at Owl, but are there any other systems I should be looking at? Hed fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Dec 7, 2023 |
# ? Dec 7, 2023 03:47 |
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Hed posted:Didn't see a good thread for this since it looks like this one is focused on careers but I didn't see anything IT A/V or other on here so figured this might have a good reach? We had a client that had a meeting room Owl. They REALLY liked it, huge fans of it. Downside is they don't really support the product after purchase; there's no repairing a broken one. They killed one and we ended up switching them to some other company that was like "Owl at home" but had better support for the product. [Edit] Nexvoo, that was the company. These are pretty good, but the AI isn't as smooth as the meeting room Owl. However, they will let you trial the product; at least they did for us. Long story short: If you want the best device, can't beat the Owl. If product support is important, though, try the Nexvoo, unless you want to drop a grand everytime an Owl fails. https://www.nexvoo.com/ Vile_Nihlist666 fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Dec 7, 2023 |
# ? Dec 7, 2023 04:00 |
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we have an Owl in our big conference room, it does the job fine i guess i remember an Owl sitting in the middle of the smallest "conference room" ever a couple of jobs ago, lmao if they dropped a grand to use it for that
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 04:43 |
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Hed posted:Didn't see a good thread for this since it looks like this one is focused on careers but I didn't see anything IT A/V or other on here so figured this might have a good reach? If money isn’t a huge concern, a Cisco Room system might work. We use anything from the small bars to the multi camera systems. We have to use a standalone system as we have to use Citrix on our desktops for everything and it’s always terrible. I’ve looked at an Owl, but wasn’t able to try it for that reason.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 07:06 |
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Owls are worth the price for its simplicity and functionality imo
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 15:29 |
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Had an Owl at one of my last jobs, stupid easy to setup and use and worked great.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 15:42 |
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$1k to make a conference room go seems like a bargain.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 16:43 |
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Conference room AV is one of those things where costs can get exorbitant super quickly. I can remember working at a startup about 10 years ago that was flush with cash that spent $100k on their primary boardroom for that early Cisco telepresence stuff with fancy cameras and ceiling mics.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 17:37 |
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Conference room AV is one of those things where costs can get exorbitant super quickly. I can remember working at a startup about 10 years ago that was flush with cash that spent $100k on their primary boardroom for that early Cisco telepresence stuff with fancy cameras and ceiling mics. I think we spent something close to 30k for five conference rooms, and none of them work perfectly.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 17:40 |
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I feel like point-to-point conferencing systems are going away thanks to Zoom, but that doesn't stop Executives from spending $100k on the hardware because some MSP sales rep sold them on it.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 17:43 |
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Vargatron posted:I feel like point-to-point conferencing systems are going away thanks to Zoom, but that doesn't stop Executives from spending $100k on the hardware because some MSP sales rep sold them on it. if that means some msp is also installing and supporting it: good.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 18:20 |
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Conference room AV is one of those things where costs can get exorbitant super quickly. I can remember working at a startup about 10 years ago that was flush with cash that spent $100k on their primary boardroom for that early Cisco telepresence stuff with fancy cameras and ceiling mics. I've helped design and install these sorts of rooms for 15+ years (from the Tandberg days) Vargatron posted:I feel like point-to-point conferencing systems are going away thanks to Zoom, but that doesn't stop Executives from spending $100k on the hardware because some MSP sales rep sold them on it. Plus the gear itself has gotten exponentially less expensive. The 2008 Tandberg C60 codec with all the bells and whistles IIRC was 50k by itself. Thats two displays, four inputs, and one four-port on-premise bridge at 1080p30fps. For 2008 that was flipping a tremendous amount of bits, for 2023 my Apple Watch could probably do most of it. Conferencing/bridging was really expensive, often 20k per port? so a 10 port bridge (i.e. up to 10 participants on a single call) was 200k? The Tandberg/Cisco MSE 8000 was the highest capacity bridge, with a potential for up to 60 participants on a call, and that duder could break 1m in configuration easy. Also the only piece of equipment thats ever physically scared me - getting enough power to all the DSPs in the conference cards was difficult, so the first versions used a 240v DC rectifier Lots of other things have driven down the cost - almost all AV equipment in a conference room natively supports control systems, so you don't have to jump through hoops with IR adapters and poo poo like that. Displays last way longer and are way cheaper. Also the introduction of dante helped with cabling/matrix switcher costs. There's been a bunch of minor improvements in each aspect of conference rooms that combined make them 1/10th what they cost before. EDIT also executives are school kids, so when they hear of their executive friends getting a baller rear end board room, they want the same thing.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 18:25 |
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post hole digger posted:if that means some msp is also installing and supporting it: good. that will be an extra charge thank you and good bye !
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 18:44 |
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Vampire Panties posted:I've helped design and install these sorts of rooms for 15+ years (from the Tandberg days) Its gotten a lot better, gear can do way more for less, but any of the systems that do room integration are expensive. We use Cisco Room Kit Pros in a few spots, and those 20k a system, then additional cameras are 3k+. Add in something fun like the dual camera speaker track. Execs are hilarious, we are demoing some Board Pro systems, which are 55" touchscreen + videoconference systems. They are $25k for a 55". I think the 75" is over $40k. The use case the group wants these for is they don't need a system in each room all the time. A smaller system is around $3k. Everything moving to Webex/GTM/Zoom was helpful, but Teams is loving everything up. They don't do a room code like everyone else, unless you pay extra to both them and Cisco for Interop licensing. Not to mention that Teams looks like poo poo on a system because its running the web version.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 18:53 |
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quote:Hello IT, Hey, user, can you use your keyboard instead of chatgpt to write an email?
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 19:02 |
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Slightly related to conference room stuff… I have a few locations that have crestron wall units. I get that they are capable of some complex programming and automation but the only thing we are using them for is to change the channel on a cable box and volume for the speakers built into the TV or at best a sound bar connected to arc. No lights, or sound system, or anything else being controlled by these panels. Is there really no other solution for what is effectively a glorified universal remote that requires a certified programmer to even touch? The original installer is wanting us to commit to an annual service contract to even be able to reach out to them for support when the general consensus is that it would be cheaper to replace lost or stolen remotes than pay for that.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 19:29 |
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The whole industry is a cartel like that. Q-Sys seems more open than most, they at least let you download the software. https://www.qsys.com/products-solutions/q-sys/control-io-controllers/q-sys-touch-screen-controllers/
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 19:43 |
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Anyone work with the Elastic stack day to day? What are your thoughts on it? I'm getting my first exposure to Kibana in an in-house bootcamp. Working with it isn't too bad. I'm more curious if there's money to be made on the engineering and administration side of the stack, and if I should try to delve deeper into all that.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 19:46 |
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Hughmoris posted:Anyone work with the Elastic stack day to day? What are your thoughts on it? Not for several years. Someone wanted to spin up a cluster for log dumping and I got picked to deploy it. Sucked butt, it was promising at the start when there was no data but once they started machine gunning logs into it my job turned into digging through endless java stack traces. There is no worse hell. I got lucky when the person that wanted the data volunteered to take ownership, so now all I have to do is keep the hardware running and make sure they can run docker commands.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 19:54 |
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Cyks posted:Slightly related to conference room stuff… My predecessor went all on it on crestron stuff, we have table units and they loving suck. 0/10 do not recommend.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 20:10 |
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Hughmoris posted:Anyone work with the Elastic stack day to day? What are your thoughts on it? Yep I do as a SOC Analyst. It's pretty similar to Splunk. And definitely you should do that on MSP side it's incredibly useful and tuning things is greatly appreciated.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 20:22 |
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xzzy posted:Not for several years. Someone wanted to spin up a cluster for log dumping and I got picked to deploy it. Sucked butt, it was promising at the start when there was no data but once they started machine gunning logs into it my job turned into digging through endless java stack traces. There is no worse hell. Jiro posted:Yep I do as a SOC Analyst. It's pretty similar to Splunk. And definitely you should do that on MSP side it's incredibly useful and tuning things is greatly appreciated. Thanks for the insights. I'm going to wrap up this training and take a breather and see if I have enough motivation to set up a homelab stack to play around with.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 21:52 |
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Hughmoris posted:Thanks for the insights. I'm going to wrap up this training and take a breather and see if I have enough motivation to set up a homelab stack to play around with. TryHackMe should have some modules on Kibana/ElasticSearch
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 22:31 |
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Hughmoris posted:Thanks for the insights. I'm going to wrap up this training and take a breather and see if I have enough motivation to set up a homelab stack to play around with. I did some consulting gigs for it. It’s come a long way since and the stack is becoming better and better. It’s incredibly powerful but requires a shitload of hardware and tlc to keep it running (properly). If you’re doing devopsy or msp stuff knowing how to search through the data swamp is a good skill to have. I’m calling it a swamp instead of lake as it always ends up with a lot of garbage in it.
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# ? Dec 7, 2023 23:37 |
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Hughmoris posted:Anyone work with the Elastic stack day to day? What are your thoughts on it? I self manage four elastic clusters in four kubernetes clusters in three clouds using the eck operator processing ~1TB ingest/hourly at peak. We primarily use it for logging and APM (using opentelemetry, gently caress vendor specific APM libraries), not so much for enterprise search. Managing it is a full time job, it took me a year to get remotely comfortable working with it, and you need to be ready to own every aspect of your data ingestion pipelines. You will also need to understand data structures to some degree so you can understand how things like the inverted index works and how text fields are stored differently then keywords. Understanding Java so you know how JVMs work is key. You need to understand kubernetes very well to understand how the components interact with one another. You’re going to learn more than you ever wanted to about data types. As a product it’s… decent, and the half million a year we spend on the enterprise license contract and compute combined is a lot less than what we’d spend on Datadog. You absolutely need a support contract. You need a team. You will learn a lot, but there will also be lots of after hours pages, people getting mad at you, and people making stupid demands because they don’t understand what schemas are. You should make your company spend the 2.5k on their proctored training sessions too.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 00:00 |
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can't tell if it's the end of the year, the last several weeks being especially annoying, being jerked around about the office move, or just this job getting to me but my gives_a_shit meter is at an all time low why yes i do love tracking all inventory using four excel spreadsheets most of whom are out of date and having four separate lists of staff phone numbers all with different formatting that nobody has ever used for any reason because we use teams for that
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 00:00 |
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It's definitely close enough to the end of the year to push every single problem into 2024 and hope that the world ends before you have to deal with them
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 00:11 |
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Vargatron posted:I feel like point-to-point conferencing systems are going away thanks to Zoom, but that doesn't stop Executives from spending $100k on the hardware because some MSP sales rep sold them on it. Don't look at me, I try to find bargains; I don't want to support a $100K nightmare for the pittance they pay me.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 03:24 |
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We are having a vendor refresh all our conference rooms and we went from Cisco Room Kits and Minis which were awesome to Jabra 4k Panacasts which look like poo poo paired with a Dell PC and Crestron touch panel running Teams Rooms. The Teams Rooms software is fine but god the Jabra cams look really poor and the tracking software or function or whatever is very bad at its job.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 03:58 |
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i loving hate the jabra headsets so that tracks
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 04:01 |
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Pretty sure my old Jabra headset I had severely sped along my tinitus, loving garbage pads that sat gave off high pitched tin sounding audio.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 04:28 |
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I really like the Logitech conference line for what it is. The hardware is more expensive than other brands but anyone who’s ever been able to successfully plug an hdmi cable into a TV before can set it up.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 04:31 |
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Conference room AV is one of those things where costs can get exorbitant super quickly. I can remember working at a startup about 10 years ago that was flush with cash that spent $100k on their primary boardroom for that early Cisco telepresence stuff with fancy cameras and ceiling mics. Lmao we redid our boardroom maybe 5 years ago, add a zero to that. Projectors bright enough to do the job cost a shitton Now we’re moving to a new building with a smaller new boardroom with a couple 90” displays instead of projo and paying some integrator $Texas to make all of it smooth
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 04:41 |
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LochNessMonster posted:I’m calling it a swamp instead of lake as it always ends up with a lot of garbage in it. This is brilliant and I'm stealing it
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 05:04 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 09:58 |
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Vargatron posted:I feel like point-to-point conferencing systems are going away thanks to Zoom, but that doesn't stop Executives from spending $100k on the hardware because some MSP sales rep sold them on it. Thank god too. We have this stupidly complex Teleconference system in one of our conference rooms that nobody learned how to use well, and the pandemic making everyone realize that we could just use teams at our desk has been a godsend. gently caress that thing and gently caress not being able to just browse the web during bits of the meetings that don’t involve me.
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# ? Dec 8, 2023 05:39 |