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Look at all these people working at companies where HR actually records information somewhere accessible when a new employee is hired.
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Aug 3, 2015 23:09
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J posted:Look at all these people working at companies where HR actually records information somewhere accessible when a new employee is hired.
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Aug 4, 2015 00:07
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I've been helping out a family member with their small technology startup for the past couple of months. We've only got eight employees and have until recently operated on a shoestring budget. We've never had a real networking guy, just a couple of software developers and some marketing guys, and therefore this is our current production environment: The servers are old rear end Dell 2650/2950s from like 10 years ago, and the networking equipment is all residential grade stuff straight from the nearest Office Depot. Network A is used to service most of our smaller customers, while Network B is entirely for one large customer that we've recently partnered with - and it's thanks to that partnership that we finally have some money to invest into our infrastructure. We've recently had issues with Network B's router, which has caused a lot of concern due to the importance of that customer to our business, and so I've been tasked with purchasing a 'serious' replacement that can give us better reliability, security, and monitoring so that we can better troubleshoot issues with the network when they arise. The guy who hosts our hardware recommended the Sonicwall TZ205, and I've also been looking at the Sophos SG105 - which should give you an idea of the budget I have to work with, but honestly I don't really know what I'm looking for, as once you start looking at commercial devices they're no longer just a router, but instead a 'Network Security Appliance', or 'Unified Security Management Device', etc., and require the purchasing of annual licenses to unlock many of their features. If I could purchase one commercial grade device that could replace both residential routers that'd be ideal, but due to the two networks using different external IP addresses I'm not sure that's possible. In addition to the router/firewall/security appliance/unified management device/and what have you advice, I'd also welcome any thoughts on how to improve our network topology. For example, from what I understand, having your database on your web server isn't considered the best idea - due to both performance and security concerns. Once we purchase some more modern hardware I was thinking about virtualizing the Web Server, the Database, and the Asterisk server and having them all on the same host, but as separate virtual machines, so as to better isolate them for security purposes while also consolidating everything onto one machine to make things easier to manage - but perhaps hosting them on completely separate devices is preferable for some reason? I'd love to hear some thoughts on this as well.
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Aug 4, 2015 03:44
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:If they're calling you, go for it. What's the worst that could happen, you don't get the job? Fair enough, but all the jobs these morons are sending me and calling me about have descriptions of "8+ years in an engineering role/CCNP/Juniper certified/etc" that I clearly don't have and that my resume doesn't list. I'd rather be able to do a good job at something I am actually qualified for than go to something I am off the deep end for and drown because I have no idea/experience in that role. Dark Helmut posted:If you truly want to stay in VoIP, I might try adding a title ("VoIP Engineer" or something) or even an objective/summary to the top of your resume or you could always just field the calls after listening to their voicemails. You don't want to dumb your resume down too much though? What's your long term goal? I can't tell if your first sentence refers to the VoIP world as a whole or just telecom companies like Windstream. heh I worked for Level 3 and have never come closer to thinking "maybe if I wreck my car on the way to work I can call in" I loved doing VoIP, I loved knowing I was responsible for setting up {large company's} entire voice network and IP setups but so little of my job was actually getting poo poo done and more "metrics, emails, blah blah blah" that I burned out and probably sound jaded as gently caress.
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Aug 4, 2015 04:09
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DEO3 posted:In addition to the router/firewall/security appliance/unified management device/and what have you advice, I'd also welcome any thoughts on how to improve our network topology. For example, from what I understand, having your database on your web server isn't considered the best idea - due to both performance and security concerns. Once we purchase some more modern hardware I was thinking about virtualizing the Web Server, the Database, and the Asterisk server and having them all on the same host, but as separate virtual machines, so as to better isolate them for security purposes while also consolidating everything onto one machine to make things easier to manage - but perhaps hosting them on completely separate devices is preferable for some reason? I'd love to hear some thoughts on this as well. Get at least two hosts in case one dies. You don't want all your eggs in one basket. That means shared storage at each site. On your budget, anything you can get that does iscsi/NFS is probably fine. If you have the bandwidth and the servers are idle enough (they probably are), seriously consider site resiliency. Shipping filesystem snapshots, transaction logs, fronting your webservers with haproxy (or some other proxy/balancing mechanism), etc so you can lose the link to an entire site and stay up. This may mean you need ipsec between sites
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Aug 4, 2015 04:16
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Has anyone tried the Amazon Storage Gateway appliance? I'm thinking about pushing that for archival purposes in our environment. Waiting on them to get me information on Government/Enterprise agreements, but it seems like a pretty good solution for long term archiving and backup.
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Aug 4, 2015 13:17
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DEO3 posted:I've been helping out a family member with their small technology startup for the past couple of months. We've only got eight employees and have until recently operated on a shoestring budget. We've never had a real networking guy, just a couple of software developers and some marketing guys, and therefore this is our current production environment: Think about adding a second switch in there for redundancy.
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Aug 4, 2015 14:52
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CloFan posted:Hey cool, I did the same thing a couple weeks back. Just FYI, I found a post on TechNet about how doing autologon via the registry results in a a plaintext password, if an enterprising user decides to look. If you use the AutoLogon.exe that Microsoft provides, it basically does the same thing but hashes the password. This is a situation where there'd be a label on the monitor with the username and password if it wasn't set to auto-login, so I wasn't worried about the password being exposed. Thanks for the tip on AutoLogon.exe though, I think I'll switch it to that anyway just to get in the practice of using it.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:22
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DEO3 posted:The guy who hosts our hardware recommended the Sonicwall TZ205 The Sonicwall TZ205 is a discontinued model and it's also pretty anaemic with regards to throughput - 40Mbps worst-case. I'd get something that can deal with a quicker connection.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:27
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Old Man Pants posted:Fair enough, but all the jobs these morons are sending me and calling me about have descriptions of "8+ years in an engineering role/CCNP/Juniper certified/etc" that I clearly don't have and that my resume doesn't list. I'd rather be able to do a good job at something I am actually qualified for than go to something I am off the deep end for and drown because I have no idea/experience in that role. Most job requirements are wishlists rather than a hard floor. I mean, if the recruiter contact is obviously just spam don't give it a second thought, but even if the position seems out of reach it's not going to hurt to get back to the recruiter at least to talk about the job. Be honest but positive about what you bring to the table, explain your reservations, and send over a tailored resume if they want to see it. If you still get submitted by a recruiter at that point, it looks bad on the recruiter rather than you if it's a laughably bad fit. On the other hand, maybe they've had a tough time filling the role and you bring something to the table that's actually what they're looking for like specific VoIP experience. Maybe the job posting has an analogous junior role that you do meet the requirements for. Or maybe the recruiter realizes you're a bad fit, but now knows more about you and has your resume on file for when a role that's a better fit comes along.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:34
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Or maybe he just works for one of the many agencies that are metrics-driven and are required to make 50 calls per day just to keep their jobs. If the description is that far off, there is really no point in moving forward. You don't have to meet every requirement, people seldom do. But ask the recruiter to articulate WHY he/she thinks you're a good fit. Make them show you that they have some sort of buy-in, some reason they are going to stake their reputation on you. Chances are if it's that far off, they will never submit you to the client and are wasting your time.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:42
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I'm back on the market after a short contract job as a BA for application support. I'm primarily suited for sysadmin jobs, but all of the ones I've looked at require a moderately heavy VMware experience level. I do have some vsphere experience, but that was in a lab environment at a community college and not actually managing VMs. So I'm looking at taking a VMware cert exam, which ones should I be looking at? Also, should I try taking any of the free classes they have on their website (are they useful and/or informative?).
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Aug 4, 2015 16:22
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Tytanium posted:I'm back on the market after a short contract job as a BA for application support. I'm primarily suited for sysadmin jobs, but all of the ones I've looked at require a moderately heavy VMware experience level. I do have some vsphere experience, but that was in a lab environment at a community college and not actually managing VMs. So I'm looking at taking a VMware cert exam, which ones should I be looking at? Also, should I try taking any of the free classes they have on their website (are they useful and/or informative?). The VCP6-DVP, probably. But really, if you think you're "suited for sysadmin jobs", just set up a lab at home and play with it. Having a cert is not going to make or break it, and being able to competently talk about virtualization is something you can do at home without spending a lot of money on a class (VMware requires a class, and the Stanley class is available, but with a long waitlist) and cert. You'll be able to get interviews for a sysadmin without a cert without any problems if you're "suited for it".
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Aug 4, 2015 16:38
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How do you make automated personnel changes SOX compliant? And does zendesk have a way to work through powershell?
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Aug 4, 2015 17:23
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So I am in kind of a weird spot. The real question is: How do I get into higher level IT management? My technical ability is fine, but I don't really have any deep specializations. And I am not qualified today to CIO any decent sized company. What comes in between?
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Aug 4, 2015 17:33
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Project management? There are certs for that too.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:36
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GreenNight posted:Project management? There are certs for that too. Yeah, except I kind if hate project management. I can do it if that's what's needed, but ugh.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:43
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AlternateAccount posted:So I am in kind of a weird spot. The real question is: I was saying this BEFORE Capital One laid off ~400 IT managers/sr managers/directors in my town last week, but I'm saying it even more so now: if you enjoy working with the tech hands-on, don't stray too far from that if you can help it. That middle management layer always seems to be the first cut. What do you do now? How many direct reports do you have and in what size company? Or are you still hands-on and looking for your first management position? vvv and yeah, that... vvv
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Aug 4, 2015 17:46
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AlternateAccount posted:Yeah, except I kind if hate project management. I can do it if that's what's needed, but ugh. If you hate project management, why are you looking to move into management?
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Aug 4, 2015 17:46
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Yeah, at this point it's project management all the way down. If I weren't at smaller places (70-300 people) I wouldn't be doing any hands on stuff at all, just project management and handling staff.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:50
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CLAM DOWN posted:If you hate project management, why are you looking to move into management? 
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Aug 4, 2015 18:04
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Dark Helmut posted:I was saying this BEFORE Capital One laid off ~400 IT managers/sr managers/directors in my town last week, but I'm saying it even more so now: if you enjoy working with the tech hands-on, don't stray too far from that if you can help it. That middle management layer always seems to be the first cut. I run part of an IT department now for a ~700 person company and have 4 direct reports. CLAM DOWN posted:If you hate project management, why are you looking to move into management? Well, I see proper and official "project management" as a job that basically just involves meetings and calling people and doing reports, but not having any actual authority. That's what I would say most of the people who work for us in PM role do, their only leverage comes from their reports going up to someone important who will then come down and as hard questions. I am perfectly fine managing projects from a position of direct responsibility.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:08
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Just did about 24 hours of work in about 24 minutes. Haven't beat Mega Man 3 since I was a kid, let's see here.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:09
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What I've learned from working in IT for a few months: its fun but nobody will follow directions and the IT execs actively like ruining performance in departments Right now we are getting a new ticketing system that is worse and if our time logged isn't 7 to 8 hours a day we hear about it never mind the fact that there are calls walkups just looking over tickets etc that don't necessarily have a ticket to file time to
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Aug 4, 2015 18:28
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Just did about 24 hours of work in about 24 minutes. Go on.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:53
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Just did about 24 hours of work in about 24 minutes.
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Aug 4, 2015 19:11
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Just did about 24 hours of work in about 24 minutes. I occasionally have what I refer to as "time traveling" days, where due to having a minimum charge, I bill more hours than I work in a given day.
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Aug 4, 2015 19:21
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Interesting day so far today... I started new job yesterday, last week was my last at old job. This morning I got woken up by a flurry of txts from co-workers at old job. They cut the entire department this morning. The entire sysadmin department is just gone other than the guys over in India(maybe them too, they obviously don't have my personal cell)  Now people seem to think I knew something was coming, and are freaking out.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:40
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RFC2324 posted:They cut the entire department this morning. The entire sysadmin department is just gone other than the guys over in India(maybe them too, they obviously don't have my personal cell) Are they farming it out to an MSP or something or just going without? I've always been interested in seeing how drastic cuts in IT can effect an organization. I'd like to think that they would suffer major consequences but a lot of times they seem to just trudge along for a good long while until something bad happens and poo poo hits the fan.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:59
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Are they farming it out to an MSP or something or just going without? I've always been interested in seeing how drastic cuts in IT can effect an organization. I'd like to think that they would suffer major consequences but a lot of times they seem to just trudge along for a good long while until something bad happens and poo poo hits the fan. They did that at my current place about 7 years ago. Cut all the engineering staff and out sourced it for contractors. Unsurprisingly, they hosed everything up, the CIO got fired, and they ended up having to staff up again. I am still dealing with the remnants of systems those chucklefucks implemented.
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Aug 4, 2015 21:03
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But the cost savings will be amazing!
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Aug 4, 2015 21:21
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If your technology challenges are operational instead of strategic, your IT organization has already lost you the war anyway
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Aug 4, 2015 21:24
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mayodreams posted:They did that at my current place about 7 years ago. Cut all the engineering staff and out sourced it for contractors. Unsurprisingly, they hosed everything up, the CIO got fired, and they ended up having to staff up again. I am still dealing with the remnants of systems those chucklefucks implemented. Can you go into any further detail on this? In the couple of instances I've seen it's been the company cuts the IT budget and staff and things run fine for a while 2-3 months and the business owners feel vindicated in their decisions. Then something goes horribly wrong and they start emptying the pocket books to get it fixed. I mean I guess in the long run it may be cheaper but it seems like such a lovely way to run a business.
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Aug 4, 2015 21:37
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Vulture Culture posted:If your technology challenges are operational instead of strategic, your IT organization has already lost you the war anyway If my UPSes aren't given Lysine every month, they literally explode.
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Aug 4, 2015 22:04
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Eonwe posted:What I've learned from working in IT for a few months: its fun but nobody will follow directions and the IT execs actively like ruining performance in departments Ideally you'd get all the calls and walkups to file tickets themselves, but that requires backing from management. If you can't say "No ticket no fixit" then create tickets for all the calls and walkups yourself so that time gets logged. Now if management complains about that then 
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Aug 4, 2015 23:16
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DEO3 posted:I've been helping out a family member with their small technology startup for the past couple of months. We've only got eight employees and have until recently operated on a shoestring budget. We've never had a real networking guy, just a couple of software developers and some marketing guys, and therefore this is our current production environment: Check out the Palo Alto PA-200. They're a couple grand and will beat the poo poo out of the Sonicwall and the Sophos, while still allowing you to segment both of your environments. Maybe buy a couple of cheap Ubiquiti managed switches for your VLAN trunking and network segmentation needs, too. As someone suggested, redundancy should also be a thing you consider if your applications are that critical. It shouldn't be hard to paint a (very possible) picture to whoever holds the purse strings of a piece of your infrastructure going up and your customer's environment being unreachable for 2 days while you overnight a replacement. Full-on high availability may not be as important at this point since you're so small, but keeping spares on hand definitely is.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:22
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Can you go into any further detail on this? In the couple of instances I've seen it's been the company cuts the IT budget and staff and things run fine for a while 2-3 months and the business owners feel vindicated in their decisions. Then something goes horribly wrong and they start emptying the pocket books to get it fixed. I mean I guess in the long run it may be cheaper but it seems like such a lovely way to run a business. I don't have a ton of details to share because one was really around before and after. The tl;dr is that contractors don't really have a vested interest or sense of ownership in the company, and half assed all the work to extend the number of hours they could bill. The worst was a guy named Kahn (no seriously) that was one of the worst sysadmins known to man. Best practices and OEM supported configurations were a joke to him, and he just did things until they 'worked' and left it. He would also routinely 'break' things to make it seem like he was super busy all the time. The same idiot CIO also had a boner for IBM hardware in the mid 00's which everyone was against because we had been an HP/Compaq shop with really good standing. The rumor is that she got kick backs from the vendor, but we STILL have some of these loving xSeries servers running Netburst Xeons at some insane TDP. After she got poo poo canned, thankfully we went back to HP servers. I HATE those loving IBM servers. 22 Eargesplitten posted:If my UPSes aren't given Lysine every month, they literally explode. I love you for this.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:51
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This is a weird question, and possibly one I could find the answer for elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask here anyway. I'm studying subnetting for the CCNA (and networking knowledge in general), and it's got me wondering. Was the technique whereby you subnet out a given address range - increasing the subnet mask value to split up the pool of addresses - something that was designed as part of IPv4's original creation, or was it "discovered" later in IPv4's life? The technique obviously makes sense within the protocol, but I guess I'm wondering if the people who thought IPv4 had the foresight to see that this would be necessary back in the 80s when it was being drawn up and people thought several billion IP addresses would be plenty for a really long time. Hoping this makes sense?
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Aug 5, 2015 02:02
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DEO3 posted:
I keep looking at this and don't understand why it just isn't in AWS or some other cloud platform instead of running on a bunch of janky ancient kit and soho crap from office depot.
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Aug 5, 2015 02:03
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skipdogg posted:I keep looking at this and don't understand why it just isn't in AWS or some other cloud platform instead of running on a bunch of janky ancient kit and soho crap from office depot.
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Aug 5, 2015 02:04
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