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crunk dork posted:That makes sense, kind of what I was thinking too. I was at my last job for 4 months and have been where I am now for 3 so far. I'm not really dying to jump ship or actively looking, in fact it's really laid back and I have time to study while at work. I don't think it would hurt to throw a few resume's out there, make some contacts, and see what bites. If anything you can start making connections with recruiters and let them know what your goals are, and if you're active then they'll keep you in mind when something comes up. You have a 50/50 chance of a new employer wanting you to have more time on your resume. Some employers (IE: The ones you probably don't want to work for) may want you to spend more time in the trenches of helldesk / desktop support (hinting that they are looking for mindless deskwarmers imo). Others (probably the ones you do want to work for) will admire your aspiration to move up and not settle for mediocrity. The worst that could happen: you get a 'no'. The best: you get a better job with a raise. Don't let your dreams be dreams! Just do it! regarding your cert stuff: crunk dork posted:I feel dumb that I worked so hard to get my CCNA and I don't even get an opportunity to touch network stuff at work. You will never be fully prepared just from studying for cert stuff, but you will know what to look for and where to look.
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Sep 9, 2015 20:13
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Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? I'm getting more and more vendors e-mailing me long diatribes complaining about how I don't e-mail or call back. Terms like "hurts my personal feelings", "we're all busy", and "I don't understand why you don't just call me" have popped up. Three different vendors, but the e-mails smack of copypasta.
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Sep 9, 2015 21:19
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? Didn't someone here have one of their vendors send them a cake or some poo poo after they stopped responding?
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Sep 9, 2015 21:23
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crunk dork posted:Also, my knowledge is basically all from labs and studying, so I worry that when I actual have a problem presented to me I'll freeze up or not recognize what's going on I was worried this would happen to me, especially having come from a similar place. Lots of work experience in non-IT, lab and self studied a CCNA and got dropped into a jr sysadmin role. Didn't have to touch anything network related for ~7 months except to fix rancid, which is more linux than networking, and then we lost our normal "network guy" and a bunch of weird network poo poo started happening. It'll be fine as long as you chill out and remember stuff. A lot of what you learned for the CCNA is not going to be especially relevant to any problem you're likely to encounter in an internal IT/ops networking issue. I don't normally like touting "start at the bottom" because if you really, truly start at the bottom you're probably wasting a lot of time. Start somewhere between what is most likely to be the problem and what is the quickest and easiest to check. The switch/router will tell you if a cable is bad. Go ahead and ping, I've never found traceroute to be especially useful but go for it if you like. Check arp tables from the most relevant layer 3 device. Check mac address tables on associated switches. If you have mac to mac connectivity and all the network devices can ping each other and the destination you pretty much just proved it isn't the network. A lot of your time is going to be spent proving or strongly suggesting that it isn't the network. Naturally one of the first things you should do is familiarize yourself with the syntax for packet capture sessions on whatever hardware you are using. If you're working SaaS or a place that potentially rolls out a lot of new servers (aws, private cloud, or otherwise), read the wiki article for Hairpin NAT and familiarize yourself with the concept. If you work at a place that utilizes a load balancer or is doing inappropriate things to their firewall you should read up about Source NAT. It's probably "technically" CCNP:RS level material but definitely read up on Policy-Based Routing as well. Most likely (in my experience) you will find that most networking issues turn out to be server issues that stem from configuration typos or poor decision making skills. Being able to identify the most common of these (such as "intentional" hairpin NAT, misconfigured subnet masks, poorly configured load balancers) will save you a lot of time and build some credibility with whatever server team you might be working with. In my opinion the CCNA also tends to gloss over DNS, or at least, not really go deep enough to prepare you for being "the network guy" and dns being "a network thing". Probably a good idea to spin up an example bind server or something whenever you have the time to at least familiarize yourself with it. e: also, please realize that if you end up being a network guy for an environment with a bunch of Cisco devices, it's generally going to end up being your responsibility to configure SSH and install SSL certificates when appropriate. The syntax for that is kinda funky and, again IMO, it's really important that you understand how SSL works in general so brush up on that if you haven't already. Pretty much all of this stuff is staple interview material anyway so it can only help. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 21:31
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:Didn't someone here have one of their vendors send them a cake or some poo poo after they stopped responding? Someone got some really weird stuffed animals from a vendor. There's nothing wrong with a stuffed animal wearing a branded T-Shirt that looks like it got pulled out of a giant swag crate of mousepads, coffee mugs, pens and foam footballs; but these stuffed bears looked sorta expensive.
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Sep 9, 2015 21:48
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Reiz posted:, it's really important that you understand how SSL works in general so brush up on that if you haven't already. It's really frustrating how there is such a lack of SSL/certificate knowledge, from sysadmins to developers. SSL/certs seem like an afterthought in the majority of 3rd party software, and thorough knowledge of PKIs seems rare as gently caress.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:06
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CLAM DOWN posted:It's really frustrating how there is such a lack of SSL/certificate knowledge, from sysadmins to developers. SSL/certs seem like an afterthought in the majority of 3rd party software, and thorough knowledge of PKIs seems rare as gently caress. This is one of the only major benefits to spending time in the public sector: you'll gain lots of exposure to PKIs.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:08
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psydude posted:This is one of the only major benefits to spending time in the public sector: you'll gain lots of exposure to PKIs. I feel like I'm set because I thoroughly taught myself SSL/certs/PKIs, and so few others seems to give a poo poo or realize why they're important.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:10
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? I got one of those from a blog-spammer.  I don't understand why you haven't responded to my offer to write a tailored post promoting one of my clients. Have I offended you in some way? Well, yes. Your continued existence offends me. I would rather cut off my genitals, pan-fry them with rosemary and juniper, then eat them with a balsamic reduction than ever have anything to do with you or your spam farm. You are a stain upon the internet and a blight upon the human race. I sincerely hope that your company goes tits-up and the owners are reduced to penniless hobos who have to wank off dogs for Quavers; meanwhile, the employees wander off into the hills, to be found months later, their carcasses stripped by homeless dogs, their exposed skulls a perch for the quartering crows.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:16
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? Veeam likes to leave me vague, kinda cold voicemails: "Hi <name>, this is <name with Veeam>; it's urgent we talk. Please call me back ASAP so we can get this sorted out" (me:  )And then a followup email with almost what you have: "I know we're all busy, but it's urgent I talk with you" For the record; we have zero Veeam licenses or products, nor are we buying any anytime soon, so the urgency level needs to be toned down a bit, buddy. No, it is not urgent we talk. But you get a gold star for trying.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:18
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When you guys talk about a thorough understanding of SSL, DNS, etc, is there any good source of info to learn these from or is it just experience? I know my knowledge of DNS is especially lacking and its a little embarrassing; I've tried reading about it independently but the articles or entries I read were confusing. I know what an mx record is versus an A record but after that my understanding kind of falters. I have a little bit better grasp of how SSL works but definitely am not an expert by any means. A lot of the explanations for both of these seem to be purely conceptual and lacking any real technical information.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:26
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crunk dork posted:When you guys talk about a thorough understanding of SSL, DNS, etc, is there any good source of info to learn these from or is it just experience? Mine comes deploying something, that thing not working, and then me having to frantically Google how to fix it while not letting the customer know what I'm doing.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:29
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psydude posted:Mine comes deploying something, that thing not working, and then me having to frantically Google how to fix it while not letting the customer know what I'm doing. I already do this a lot so it sounds like I'm on the right track. 
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Sep 9, 2015 22:30
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crunk dork posted:I already do this a lot so it sounds like I'm on the right track. You have discovered the secret of IT. If Google goes down, everyone is hosed.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:36
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crunk dork posted:When you guys talk about a thorough understanding of SSL, DNS, etc, is there any good source of info to learn these from or is it just experience? Mine comes mainly from experience as others said, but I've done a lot of research and selflearning via Google and the Mastering book series for Windows topics.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:40
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:You have discovered the secret of IT. I routinely do layer 3 health checks for dual-homed gateways using SLA tracking with split host routes to each of Google's public DNS server addresses. Customers usually ask me how reliable that is, to which I reply that if both of Google's public DNS server addresses stop responding to ping, then we all have more pressing issues to worry about than our jobs.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:43
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Reiz posted:Hairpin NAT I just googled this because I wasn't sure what this was. I wish I had known about it a month ago because It's exactly what I would have needed to fix an issue I had. I knew that I had something that didn't work but I didn't know why until just now.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:02
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? Yeah, I got one of those from some company called Infinio - I signed up for a software trial that looked interesting but never got around to actually using. Dude sent me several emails but I ignored him. His last was that "why don't you get hold of me" type. I would have assumed that when he read the company name as Cash Flow Unlimited that he would have gotten the hint that it wasn't a real company (or maybe he did and just saw the dollar signs).
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Sep 10, 2015 00:35
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Can you  at your current job? I go from contractor to FTE on Monday, with a 10ish% salary increase and a nice retention bonus. Benefits are pretty good too--the health insurance is like $140 which will be nice compared to the $400 I'm paying for my exchange-bought plan (which also sucks). There's even a pension. I'm not crazy about having an HSA but it doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world and there's an employer contribution too (is that how they always work?)
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Sep 10, 2015 00:53
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You can definitely at your current job, congrats!
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Sep 10, 2015 02:35
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crunk dork posted:When you guys talk about a thorough understanding of SSL, DNS, etc, is there any good source of info to learn these from or is it just experience? Haha you managed to hit my two big sysadmin pet peeves. Especially DNS. Most of the time you're hired into an environment where someone else set up DNS ages ago and it Just Works so you can get by without really knowing much about it. But if something related to DNS breaks, suddenly absolutely everything is down, and god help you if you don't know how to fix it. My boss likes to ask DNS questions as part of his phone screens. Nothing scary, I'm talking like "name all of the types of DNS records you can think of off the top of your head and what they're used for" or "describe in as much depth as you can the process that happens when you perform a DNS lookup for lolwut.com" or "what is the difference between a forward and reverse lookup?". The number of Senior Sysadmin candidates who respond with "uhhhh well you give it a name and it like, returns an IP, or something... I think there are like, A records? uh huh huh huh   " is pretty horrifying. As for resources, it's something you can easily lab up in a VM at home. In Linux land BIND is the gold standard, but there's also PowerDNS which is kinda nice because you can back it with a database which is automation friendly. There are innumerable tutorials online for setting up a small BIND server for a private domain. Windows Server can obviously be its own DNS server if you prefer. Set up a VM for caching/recursive DNS and another for authoritative. Configure the authoritative server to host int.crunkdork.com or whatever. Configure the recursor to forward all queries for int.crunkdork.com to the authoritative VM and everything else out to the internet. Configure your home PC to use the recursor as its default DNS server. Set up A records for xbox.int.crunkdork.com pointing at your Xbox's IP and see if you can ping it. Congrats, you now have more DNS experience than a troubling number of IT workers! Extrapolate from there to understand how other types of records work. When troubleshooting why poo poo doesn't work, the dig command is your friend. Simply doing a code:Docjowles fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Sep 10, 2015 |
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Sep 10, 2015 02:36
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You can always spot a guy way too used to working in a Windows shop with Active Directory when they don't understand why the new Linux virtual appliance isn't pingable by hostname.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:38
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Man I don't know poo poo about DNS, maybe I should learn. And here I am hovering over the button to turn on DNS Scavenging...
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Sep 10, 2015 02:46
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Docjowles posted:Haha you managed to hit my two big sysadmin pet peeves. Especially DNS. Most of the time you're hired into an environment where someone else set up DNS ages ago and it Just Works so you can get by without really knowing much about it. But if something related to DNS breaks, suddenly absolutely everything is down, and god help you if you don't know how to fix it. My boss likes to ask DNS questions as part of his phone screens. Nothing scary, I'm talking like "name all of the types of DNS records you can think of off the top of your head and what they're used for" or "describe in as much depth as you can the process that happens when you perform a DNS lookup for lolwut.com" or "what is the difference between a forward and reverse lookup?". The number of Senior Sysadmin candidates who respond with "uhhhh well you give it a name and it like, returns an IP, or something... I think there are like, A records? uh huh huh huh There's a saying I read, possibly here, that "everyone is a network engineer until something breaks." I believe it.
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Sep 10, 2015 03:04
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That was a badass write up and I'll definitely look into setting up something like you said. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing but it really bothers me to just know that something is working but not understand how it functions fundamentally.
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Sep 10, 2015 03:07
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Has anyone started getting some rather... emotionally aggressive cold calls? I've been getting that from one from a vendor I met at a conference; voice mails and emails, "Following up on what we discussed at Ignite, let me know how we can proceed with your project." a) I don't have a project & b) if you can't figure out that was just small talk so I could grab a pen or a USB drive or whatever crap you were giving away then you are bad at this. On a related note the best give-away at that conference was Godiva. Apparently they are big Microsoft clients and were part of the customer success pavilion. Handfuls of chocolate truffles every time you walked by 
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Sep 10, 2015 03:43
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myron cope posted:Can you Congratulations. I myself was asked if I wanted to work for the client directly, big NOPE there: the client wasn't willing to make an offer and wanted me to tell them what salary range I was looking for. Can't tell them because I have a higher base salary than my "boss" (the client's manager of the area I work at). That would have made for an uncomfortable experience to keep working for them. Also their oncall pay is poo poo, mine is considerably higher and is why they generally don't ask for outsourcers to do oncall shifts, the last time they had one of the other outsourced engineers a straight month of oncall shifts and they shat a brick when the $10K bill came later on. It doesn't help their case that I KNOW they are known for underpaying their employees.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:13
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CloFan posted:Man I don't know poo poo about DNS, maybe I should learn. And here I am hovering over the button to turn on DNS Scavenging... Turn it in and fix anything that breaks. It should be on for a healthy network anyways.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:18
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Contingency posted:There's a saying I read, possibly here, that "everyone is a network engineer until something breaks." I believe it. quote:I don't know if it's a good or bad thing but it really bothers me to just know that something is working but not understand how it functions fundamentally. I feel like (anecdotally) you only get to experience the fun/interesting networking problems at consulting firms, service providers, or large orgs with a distributed presence. I guess that shouldn't be too surpising, though.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:52
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:How long were you at your last place, and how long have you been where you are now? One or two short stays at an employer is fine. Several in a row would be an issue if I were looking at resumes (I say as someone who's only ever hired one person). I'm curious: If you had fixed-length contract positions that you left after the contract ended, how would you note that on the resume to not seem like you were bouncing around constantly? Hopefully it's a moot point for me, but it depends on how negotiation turns out.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:36
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I'm curious: If you had fixed-length contract positions that you left after the contract ended, how would you note that on the resume to not seem like you were bouncing around constantly? I think putting "Fixed-Term Contract" in brackets or parentheses after the dates of employment would pretty much keep you in the clear
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Sep 10, 2015 06:45
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:Didn't someone here have one of their vendors send them a cake or some poo poo after they stopped responding? Balloons and stuffed animals. I seriously sat there and stared for like 20 minutes. Dr. Arbitrary posted:Someone got some really weird stuffed animals from a vendor. There's nothing wrong with a stuffed animal wearing a branded T-Shirt that looks like it got pulled out of a giant swag crate of mousepads, coffee mugs, pens and foam footballs; but these stuffed bears looked sorta expensive. The guy called a local florist shop and ordered it., and yeah they seemed expensive.
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Sep 10, 2015 13:01
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While we're on the topic of DNS (or at least it being in recent memory). Can anyone confirm for me that if DNS scavenging is not enabled, then the DNS timestamp should not replicate between sites? (AD integrated DNS) For example, DNS Server at Site A shows: DNS Entris Site A Server 1, 10.0.0.10, Timestamp: 9/9/2015 4pm Site B Server 1, 10.2.0.10, Timestamp: 3/5/2015 4pm (waay old, but right IP) the inverse is true at site B! DNS Server at Site B DNS Entris Site A Server 1, 10.0.0.10, Timestamp 4/1/2015 6pm Site B Server 1, 10.2.0.10, Timestamp 9/8/15, 4pm Is this correct behavior? Will this begin to replicate timestamps properly once I enable scavenging? Tons of information about scavenging abound; but I've only found a forum reference to the timestamp replication, from 2012, and there was never a confirmation about this behavior.
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Sep 10, 2015 13:11
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With Scavenging disabled, AD doesn't bother syncing the timestamps http://social.technet.microsoft.com...rated_DNS_zones quote:If DNS aging and scavenging is not enabled on an AD-integrated DNS zone, there is no need to replicate DNS resource records’ timestamps. This is because this information is needed only for aging and scavenging mechanism and there is no requirement for this replication if it is not enabled. That is why, when DNS aging and scavenging is disabled on an AD-integrated DNS zone, the timestamps of resource records on your DC/DNS servers are not consistent (The resource record timestamp is updated on the DNS server that refreshed the record and not replicated to other DC/DNS servers).
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Sep 10, 2015 13:18
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So I'm in a weird situation here, and hoping some of you could provide some advice. I'm relatively fresh out of grad school with a master's in Information Science. I got hired in June by a small software company in Boston that is currently transitioning from a startup into something a bit larger (currently we have around 40 employees, plans are to hit 90 by December 2016). We currently have no process whatsoever for setting up new hires with computers, and getting up and running with our software and required programs is outlined in a couple of wiki articles but not formalized at all. I've taken it upon myself to take over hardware provisioning, and I'd also like to have deployable images for OS X and Windows so new people can skip the trial and error process of getting set up. Is there an industry standard way of doing this? Creating an image from one master Mac is easy enough, but that approach can get really labor-intensive when you start to add more and more users. Any advice? This is pretty much baby's first IT job outside of help desk work in college, but I landed in a weird, undefined spot due to my background (BA in English, MS in Info Science).
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Sep 10, 2015 13:53
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theperminator posted:With Scavenging disabled, AD doesn't bother syncing the timestamps Cool; thanks for the confirmation.
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Sep 10, 2015 13:57
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E: forget it.
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Sep 10, 2015 14:03
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Necronomicon posted:So I'm in a weird situation here, and hoping some of you could provide some advice. For Windows, you should be using MS Deployment Toolkit, or something based on it. The machines should obviously also be on a Windows Server domain so you can use Group Policy to manage the machines, and have a common user account database. For something more ambitious, look at the full MS System Center package.
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Sep 10, 2015 14:08
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Don't look at the whole System Center suite, just Configuration Manager specifically. It's a huge suite and it can easily overwhelm you. I was at a brunch with some people and someone had to leave (at noon on a Saturday) so he could do server patching, so I told him about SCCM. A few months later I get a message from him "hey I installed SCOM (Operations Manager, for monitoring) how do I use this to patch?" So yeah don't look at the whole suite at once.
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Sep 10, 2015 14:53
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WDS or MDT is more than enough for 40 to 90 people, especially of half are Macs. I wouldn't worry about SCCM unless you are planning to grow a ton very quickly and you have lots of free time now. It will hold you over until you hire a dedicated IT guy. Or just go the old school imaging route and do things local. Anything that will boot and take an image with handle Windows or Mac. Or am I misreading and you are going to grow into the dedicated IT guy? Or do you have other responsibilities and don't want to waste time on IT?
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Sep 10, 2015 15:01
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