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Yeah definitely. I don't think we allow spinning disks at all - everyone gets minimum a 256 gig SSD, newer machines we start at 512. Does anyone else work in an AD/Google Apps integrated environment and have any "best practices" suggestions? We use GADS to sync users and groups and etc but it's messy at best and causes a bunch of issues. Then there's the problem with expiring passwords set in AD - sure, it expires their laptop, but doesn't do a thing to Google, and users will happily keep using email and everything on their mobile devices or a computer they haven't logged out of. The best part is when GADS for some reason doesn't read the members of mailing lists and decides to remove everyone from every mailing list on Google. They have a setting to stop the sync if a percentage of groups are deleted, but *not* for changes for members within a group. Goodbye all approvers for moderated lists! I'm just curious if all companies do the GADS thing or if there is some other great way to manage our environment that would make life easier. I miss the days when I had a complete Microsoft environment and everything just worked!
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Aug 28, 2015 16:10
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For SSDs, maybe try to get 10 of them for a small scale effectiveness study. In as many different departments as you can, find the newest/lowest ranking person and upgrade their workstations. Ask them to try it out for a month and see if they notice improvements. This strategy should also work if you're trying to roll out double monitors.
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Aug 28, 2015 16:20
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bull3964 posted:gently caress spinney disks forever, FLASH FOR EVERYTHING. The director of my team has this weird problem with SSDs. He won't get them for any of our laptops because he wants to get laptops with like 1TB HDs. I can figure out what he expects us to need a 1TB HD on our work laptops for. No one needs that much, even if you have to run a couple VMs, you don't need that. You'd be much better off, and probably cheaper, to just get a 512SSD, but he just won't do it.
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Aug 28, 2015 16:24
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:For SSDs, maybe try to get 10 of them for a small scale effectiveness study. I was able to get approval to use them in a machine that was running some R program that I'm not very familiar with and running scripts that would take days. I replaced the drive with an SSD and they were blown away by how much quicker it was. I think they were seeing at least a %15 reduction in completion time. They definitely know the benefits now and have been trumpeting how great they are around the office. Thankfully double monitors are accepted here. I guess I'm just going to have to wait for CTO magazine or one of the other million other freebie periodicals to come out with a cover story on why all the smart IT directors are buying SSDs now. That seems to be the authoritative source for everything.
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Aug 28, 2015 16:27
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We migrated from one internet connection to a faster one with the same ISP recently. A few issues cropped up, but we managed to get them taken care of, aside from two: We couldn't RDP to one of our servers from outside of the building. We were working with the company we are using to manage our connection and firewall. They couldn't figure it out and were blaming a bunch of dumb poo poo. Me and another tech decided to try and hit our Firewall and see if we could look at the settings. We tried using the credentials "admin" "admin", assuming it wouldn't work. And it loving did. We saw that the TCP port for the RDP connection to the server was set to go to our WAN ip instead of the loving server, so we changed that and it worked. We sent an email letting them know we fixed the problem and changed the password, call us if you want it. After that we had a problem with EDI going from our servers to someone elses, and this was ten times more frustrating. There were a bunch of engineers arguing back and forth through email for a day and a half with a bunch of stupid ideas. DNS - it can't be dns, dns names are resolving fine. Are the ports open? Yes the ports are open. We have no problems with them contacting our servers, it's us getting to them. They just kept grasping at straws. At some point I attempted to ping their servers from inside our building, couldn't hit them. Did a tracert, it dropped out our ISP's WAN IP. Tried to hit their servers from our Cell network, that works just fine. I sent my results, they seemed to be ignored. There was more back and forth about things that weren't problems throughout the day. Then, 9 hours after I send what I find out, someone brings up that they tried to tracert from the firewall and it died at the ISP WAN IP, so they are submitting a ticket to the ISP. If they were in the room with me I probably would have loving strangled them. It turned out to be an interesting problem, though. We put in a disconnect order for our old line, which went through. Our ISP maintenance team had a planned upgrade to the router that our connection goes through at the central office. The maintenance team was unaware of the disconnect order, which had already went through. They installed the new router, which had been configured months earlier, and caused a conflict. siggy2021 fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Aug 28, 2015 |
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Aug 28, 2015 17:12
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Sorry a bit cranky, just got done with a 30 minute conversation with my boss on why we should be ordering SSD's for all of our new laptops and desktops for employees. He's concerned about their longevity and thinks that they are more prone to failure. Despite all of the evidence and performance improvement I show him he just keeps ordering physical drives. This was maybe true of the very first and cheapest SSD's. Nowadays their write endurance might as well be infinity. You have to be writing like 100GB a day, every day, nonstop, to wear one out inside of a decade. Meanwhile the failure rate of spinning disk is just as awful as ever unless you're talking about enterprise SAS drives. Which are not going into employee laptops so it's a moot point. I'm sure you know all this. Just agreeing that he's a moron.
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Aug 28, 2015 17:33
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This is why I made my suggestion. The technical side of this is settled, you need to create institutional pressure now.
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Aug 28, 2015 17:45
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CloFan posted:I've got a couple monitors in a window outside my datacenter; they haven't been used for years, but I'm wanting to get some sort of dashboard / stats display up on it. I'm not exactly sure what I want, it doesn't have to be useful, but pretty numbers and charts could be cool. Maybe like logins per DC, overall bandwidth usage, local weather/radar, etc. Are there any (free) prebuilt Dashbord Interaces out there that are worth a drat, or is it something I'd have to build myself? Similar boat here; still researching but dashing.io looks like the nicest solution; but a lot of it requires rolling your own widgets for your needs. It's on my "to-do when bored" list.
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Aug 28, 2015 18:02
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Walked posted:Similar boat here; still researching but dashing.io looks like the nicest solution; but a lot of it requires rolling your own widgets for your needs. Dashing works fairly well. I set it up here and have it displaying Nagios critical alerts/warnings, server room temperature, wireless user counts, server loads, etc. Takes a bit to get it all set up, and I had to write the scripts to pull nagios data myself, but it is pretty clean and now runs on a TV hanging over the IT group.
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Aug 28, 2015 18:09
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aaronp posted:Dashing works fairly well. I set it up here and have it displaying Nagios critical alerts/warnings, server room temperature, wireless user counts, server loads, etc. Takes a bit to get it all set up, and I had to write the scripts to pull nagios data myself, but it is pretty clean and now runs on a TV hanging over the IT group. Would you mind sharing any scripts you have? Obviously scrubbed. Just curious as to how you approached it! Edit: related - I'm looking for a small profile method to run dashing. Chromecast? Intel compute stick? What's my best play?
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Aug 28, 2015 18:13
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Docjowles posted:At our data center at my last job, every year these giant wild turkeys* would come to roost and lay eggs in the planters out front. Some poor bastard had to go out and place a big sign that said "DO NOT APPROACH. THEY WILL gently caress YOU UP" nearby. It was kinda cool. Thankfully this was in Denver, and not more rural CO, cause yeah. Those things would have been shot in a hot minute elsewhere. We have big-rear end turkeys that roam the hospital grounds every so often. Kinda cool, but a bit of a hazard when they decide to dart in front of you when you're driving. I occasionally see rabbits and deer as well. Almost hit a doe when I was descending the hill. Glad I stopped in time, 'cause after she scampered off to the side, I saw a fawn standing there waiting for her.
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Aug 28, 2015 18:21
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rafikki posted:I see "do the needful" the most from our Philippines employees I like to tell people that doing the needful is a euphemism for masturbation in the US. That little moment of awkward silence while they think about what they just said is golden.
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Aug 28, 2015 18:25
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Walked posted:Edit: related - I'm looking for a small profile method to run dashing. Chromecast? Intel compute stick? What's my best play?
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Aug 28, 2015 18:34
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Walked posted:Edit: related - I'm looking for a small profile method to run dashing. Chromecast? Intel compute stick? What's my best play? Chromecast would need something doing the casting. The Intel stick is pretty much perfect. I think Asus are making a Chromestick as well, but no idea when that's going to be available.
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Aug 28, 2015 18:35
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Thanks Ants posted:Chromecast would need something doing the casting. The Intel stick is pretty much perfect. I think Asus are making a Chromestick as well, but no idea when that's going to be available. Yeah; there's a digital signage solution for Chromecast that's pretty neat looking, but Intel Stick seems simpler to me. I'll put it on my purchase request list and see if/when I get it 
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Aug 28, 2015 18:38
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Walked posted:Would you mind sharing any scripts you have? Obviously scrubbed. Sure. Embarrassed to admit they are written in PHP - we really need to restart our "learn to code Python" group we had here at work before. But whatever your language, easily convertable to whatever you prefer. Dashing uses CURL to update the data on the page without requiring refreshes, so the scripts basically either parse Nagios data, execute NRPE checks themselves and push the data to the dash, or go out and grab data from APIs for the dashboard. One of the scripts I included goes out and asks Zendesk for our open & unsolved ticket counts and displays them for the team to see. A few other widgets update from Ruby scripts that sit in Dashing's "jobs" directory as well, but I grabbed those from the official dashing script list. ZIP with a couple scripts and screenshots of the output in dashing: http://1drv.ms/1KqE8Gw As for the dashboard, it was running on a Mac Mini and now we moved it to a raspberry pi 2. aaronp fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Aug 28, 2015 |
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Aug 28, 2015 18:44
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The new environment I got in to loves SSDs so much, they got a nimble SAN with integrated flash storage for the blade server. They "get" the need for speed and it's so refreshing to see a company splurge to increase performance and satisfaction.
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Aug 29, 2015 01:31
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Well I just finished my last day at my first garbageman-with-domain-admin job. So I won't be spamming the thread as much as I have been for a while. There was some evaluation sheets that were made up for me. Good to know I'm a solid 2/5 on all rubrics. Some of the comments were along the lines of "short attention span". I feel extremely stubbed and cheated because I can't get a good reference out of this job.  You'll notice this job description does not mention doing any of the following: Migration and upgrade of Lotus Notes from 7.0, on machines so old they have 500mb of ram and the plastic has yellowed (probably from all the smoking in the server room), to 8.5.3. Setup of an ESXi cluster and vCenter. Migration and upgrade of the DC and file server to said ESXi cluster. Setting up the first backups since they broke in like, February. Determining why mill measurement equipment didn't work properly for 6 months (your devices weren't responding to gratuitous arp and were sharing IPs with cell phones, also no DHCP reservations) Learning how to use firewalls on the fly and migrate a horrifically configured 5505 to a 5506 and handling all the associated nat rule changes, vlans, etc problems that came with it. I definitely couldn't have done this without a ton of help from the Cisco thread. Thanks. Dealing with the two times a rogue dhcp server flattened the network. Learned how to use powershell to automate a few features of user creation as well as part of the file server migration. Setting up WSUS so our 110 machines aren't destroying the 4mbps wan connection every time there is an update. Setting up WDS with a gold image so an hour isn't spent removing bloatware and installing basic things like SAP, office 2007, lotus notes client every time a new employee starts. Picking garbage in the freezing rain for 5 days. Methanar fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Aug 29, 2015 |
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Aug 29, 2015 03:05
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You can (and should) put all of that on your CV. And general employment checks are pretty bland. Is your relationship with any of your coworkers solid enough to use as a reference?
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Aug 29, 2015 03:16
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Methanar posted:There was some evaluation sheets that were made up for me. Good to know I'm a solid 2/5 on all rubrics. Some of the comments were along the lines of "short attention span". I feel extremely stubbed and cheated because I can't get a good reference out of this job. Any job that doesn't want you to leave will gently caress you on exit evaluations out of spite. A lot of IT departments know this and will take references with a grain of salt. I'd put your favorite person to work for down anyway because the balls it would take for them to sink a job opportunity for you in the future rarely exist. I don't think anybody I've interviewed with has actually made a reference call, they just cared I was able to provide two names of people I know.
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Aug 29, 2015 03:26
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evol262 posted:You can (and should) put all of that on your CV. And general employment checks are pretty bland. Is your relationship with any of your coworkers solid enough to use as a reference? A ton of people would be willing to say great things about me, but they're all mechanical/power engineers and not my boss; who wouldn't be able to speak about any of my major accomplishments.
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Aug 29, 2015 03:27
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Methanar posted:Well I just finished my last day at my first garbageman-with-domain-admin job. So I won't be spamming the thread as much as I have been for a while. Where do you live and when will you be done with school? I may be hiring soon and just going by the thread I'd love to have you. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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Aug 29, 2015 03:28
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Any job that doesn't want you to leave will gently caress you on exit evaluations out of spite. A lot of IT departments know this and will take references with a grain of salt. I'd put your favorite person to work for down anyway because the balls it would take for them to sink a job opportunity for you in the future rarely exist. My current job is the first one I have ever had that actually checked references, and I was surprised as hell when those people mentioned that they had been contacted. I always make sure the people I ask will give me a good one on the off chance they do check, tho, and, again, this was the first time I had ever provided my current manager as a reference for a new job(I had an extremely good relationship with her, and was always up front with her that I don't see any job as forever. She encouraged me to move on when I could no longer grow in that position from day one)
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Aug 29, 2015 03:33
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Methanar posted:A ton of people would be willing to say great things about me, but they're all mechanical/power engineers and not my boss; who wouldn't be able to speak about any of my major accomplishments. Meh. They can suss out whether you know your poo poo from technical interviews. You call references to get an idea of "how is this guy to work with? is he being straight with us in general?", not "does he have technical skill X"
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Aug 29, 2015 03:37
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Methanar posted:A ton of people would be willing to say great things about me, but they're all mechanical/power engineers and not my boss; who wouldn't be able to speak about any of my major accomplishments. Those are the people you list. I've never listed former supervisors as references unless the form specifically asked for the name of my supervisor at such-and-such position. I think it goes to show that even though you didn't work with those people you interacted with them in a professional capacity and they thought highly enough of you to agree to be a reference for you.
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Aug 29, 2015 03:44
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Internet Explorer posted:Where do you live and when will you be done with school? I may be hiring soon and just going by the thread I'd love to have you. I'm sure I'm not the only one.  Done school at the end of April 2016.
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Aug 29, 2015 04:00
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Methanar posted:A ton of people would be willing to say great things about me, but they're all mechanical/power engineers and not my boss; who wouldn't be able to speak about any of my major accomplishments. Customer service is a critical part of being a not-poo poo admin. Those are customer service references who will give an impression of what the rest of the business/customer base will feel like having you on staff. They are not a curriculum vitae.
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Aug 29, 2015 04:28
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In fairness we're also only getting one subjective side of things here in this thread.
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Aug 29, 2015 04:31
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aaronp posted:Yeah definitely. I don't think we allow spinning disks at all - everyone gets minimum a 256 gig SSD, newer machines we start at 512. I don't know if this is at all helpful, but I work on a campus with 75k-100k users, all in Google Apps. Our identity source of truth is an LDAP infrastructure, which is the source for our Shibboleth setup. Google is properly shibbolized, so any requests to login to Google go through our Shibboleth system, which, since it goes directly against the source of truth, is always correct. We have a one way sync from LDAP > AD, AD "users" are not allowed to change their passwords, they do it against the LDAP and that gets synced to AD. So I don't know exactly how it all works, but is there some way that instead of syncing AD to Google if you can get some kind of web authentication (Shibboleth or otherwise) where Google just passes off all authentication requests directly to that?
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Aug 29, 2015 04:39
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Methanar posted:
drat it. Oh well, if you ever make it down Chicago way, PM me and I'll see if I can hook you up. If not me, I can cast a net with some of the people I know in the area who have hiring ability.
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Aug 29, 2015 05:36
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Methanar posted:
If you ever find yourself 2.5 hours west, I'll buy you a beer for having to put up with that town.
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Aug 29, 2015 06:18
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Methanar posted:
I don't actually believe you that they have computers there. But yeah, that's too far away in distance and in time. Your resume is going to look great and you'll do fine in a technical interview. References don't mean much these days. A lot of places don't even ask for them anymore.
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Aug 29, 2015 07:11
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Methanar posted:Well I just finished my last day at my first garbageman-with-domain-admin job. So I won't be spamming the thread as much as I have been for a while. A glowing reference would certainly be nice. But you can put all of that stuff on your resume now, which is what really matters. You have relevant on-the-job experience which is the key to landing your next, not-poo poo IT job. You did your time in entry level hell; time to move on up! Well, assuming you're willing and able to GTFO of Middle of Nowhere, Canada. I have to imagine the job prospects in any field, let alone tech, are kinda limited up there 
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Aug 29, 2015 14:22
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Those are the people you list. I've never listed former supervisors as references unless the form specifically asked for the name of my supervisor at such-and-such position. I think it goes to show that even though you didn't work with those people you interacted with them in a professional capacity and they thought highly enough of you to agree to be a reference for you. Given normal circumstances (i.e. not insane vindictive boss or something), I think supervisory references are the ones that really matter. If I'm hiring for a position, the primary responsibility for the role is never "make some coworkers happy," it's "focus and support the goals of the business that matter by nailing the right projects and adding value." I have no idea if that thing you did for Brenda in Marketing was really what you were supposed to be working on at that moment in time. Your supervisor hopefully does. If your reference is from a director in another department or something, that's just as good. I've worked with more than enough people in IT who want to do the fun projects instead of focusing on what they were hired to do. That said, Methanar: you don't need a reference. You have more than enough accomplishments and more than enough enthusiasm to communicate your ability to do great junior admin work without them. And you have some really great stories for future interviews.
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Aug 29, 2015 16:39
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Think about this, many people move into sysadmin work after coming out of helpdesk. At some point in the interview, they're going to be asked "Tell me about an accomplishment that you're proud of" On helpdesk, there are certainly some great opportunities but you are going to have some killer answers. I'd bet that many Windows admins have never raised the domain functional level, their company probably hired an expert to come in for that.
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Aug 29, 2015 17:44
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Raising a domain functional level is one of the easiest things. It's like two clicks. We had an expert migrate our domain from win2k to 2k8 r2 and he didn't raise it saying it was no point. Which is dumb as gently caress but he was pretty good otherwise. I raised it in less than 30 seconds.
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Aug 29, 2015 18:02
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FISHMANPET posted:I don't know if this is at all helpful, but I work on a campus with 75k-100k users, all in Google Apps. Our identity source of truth is an LDAP infrastructure, which is the source for our Shibboleth setup. Google is properly shibbolized, so any requests to login to Google go through our Shibboleth system, which, since it goes directly against the source of truth, is always correct. We have a one way sync from LDAP > AD, AD "users" are not allowed to change their passwords, they do it against the LDAP and that gets synced to AD. Hmm...had not heard of Shibboleth, thanks for the heads up. We've been investigating SSO providers, sounds like this is another one, but I didn't consider Google itself would pass auth to the SSO provider for login, that's a good thing to look into. Thanks!
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Aug 29, 2015 18:17
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Yeah Shibboleth is big in academia but I don't know how much it's used outside of that. But generally yeah, if you can get an SSO provider you should be able to have Google auth against that.
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Aug 29, 2015 21:40
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Do you guys apply for new jobs that look very interesting even if you are super happy where you are? I don't want to waste the time of the company posting the job, but they don't give any idea the pay scale so the only way to find out is to apply I guess. I'm in an architect role at a large private company now making good money for my city (small) and now there's another technical architect role at a large MSP here being posted. These jobs never seem to open up so it's tempting to apply, but it would be very unlikely that I would leave where I am. I'm in the middle of several major multi-year projects here of my own design and leaving would be a super dick move. But they have replaced some top brass and are looking to cut costs all over the company which makes me a bit nervous.
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Aug 31, 2015 12:40
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Apply for sure; be up front on the call when they ask what you'd need to consider moving. I was once in a similar position, didn't really want to leave, was interviewed and offered a job I was planning to decline. Sure enough, very next day I ended up finding out our contract was lost. Rolled into the new position with zero stress between them. Point is, don't lead anyone on but there's only things to be gained by showing interest (so long as you're honest and up front)
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Aug 31, 2015 12:46
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