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One of my projects is closing in on completion and management is getting a tad nervous. A couple of the requirements were to have a PBX setup, but apparently the security folks failed to do some due diligence and had no idea what version is approved, so they looked up the latest version of it and everything else and said that's what we need. One little problem - we're using RHEL7, and they want the most recent version of Docker and Firefox, Postgresql, Asterisk and several other applications. Management was a bit taken back in the meeting when I asked them if they wanted Fedora as the OS or RedHat. I had to explain that RHEL7 doesn't use the most current release version of applications and packages, and while I could kludge together something to get the latest packages, it might also cause some issues with broken dependencies and such. Customer is pushing for the current releases of applications and packages but still wants RedHat. I reiterated that they could have what RedHat considers the current version of applications and packages, or what is current for Fedora, but not both without quite a bit of work and no guarantee that something wouldn't break. Management and the customer are still going round about it, and I was supposed to have everything done yesterday without knowing what they really want. It's going to be fun on Monday when I have to report in the sprint that my block is management and the customers getting their heads out of their asses.
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Feb 2, 2019 17:24
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 14:53 |
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Hey guys, long time no post (you probably enjoyed it, so gently caress you). Nearing the home stretch on the project I've been working on for a year - in fact, I just celebrated my 1-yr anniversary with the company a little over 2 weeks ago, and I started working on the project pretty much on Day One. I've learned so much working on it, and it's actually been fun as hell. Big change from my previous positions. Still waiting on my TS w/SCI - pretty sure that still 9-12 months away as well. Got a new supervisor a few weeks ago (my 3rd), and he's pretty cool. Knows his stuff and has no issue with stepping up to help. One of our team members last day was today, and another team member is leaving next Friday. Leaves us with five folks doing the work of eight. And both the members leaving were 100% assigned to a rather huge project. I have this fear that my rear end is about to get punted to the project they left, and in the words of one person "It's a poo poo storm, with no documentation. Have fun getting up to speed." Fortunately next week is jam-packed with interviews for my boss and our Sr Engineer, and they've got a few good candidates lined up, and since they don't hate me I may get a reprieve since I've already got so drat many irons in the fire that dropping them is not an option. Next week should be fun.
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Mar 23, 2019 00:32
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For a bit over a year now I've been working on a major project that I finally handed over to my co-worker on Friday. Since he has the clearances and I don't, he's the one who's going to be deploying all my systems and fine-tuning everything. I has a sad, because I really had a lot of fun with this project and learned a ton. Kind of depressing to go back to re-imaging laptops and resetting passwords, although I do still have some work trying to get the IM feature in FreePBX working correctly. Company has a huge backlog of work, so I expect my laptop and password work will move to the backburner soon enough. If anyone remembers, I got poo poo-canned from my last job back in January 2018 and I've been contemplating revenge for some time now. Didn't really have anything feasible, until now. My former co-worker, pretty much responsible for building and implementing everything that runs the services for the program, contacted me out of the blue to tell me he'd had enough. I let my supervisor know and handed off his resume, and on Tuesday he had an informal interview with my former co-worker. We're supposed to have a more formal interview and meet-and-greet this coming Friday. The guy is no slouch in technical skills, otherwise I would never had recommended him. Screwing over my old employer is just a bonus. But after he spoke with my supervisor he indicated to me that it sounded like there was a lot of multi-tasking involved, perhaps too much. I know what he was saying, but I never really thought about it much since I was having so much fun. And in reality, his current job involves a lot of multi-tasking, not to mention being solely responsible for the servers, the Operating Systems, the domain, security, storage, networking, backups, user accounts, passwords, updates, and maintaining the websites, in addition to developing and implementing new services and features. It's a lot like what I do in my new job, however I'm not the only person here, so he'd have a lot of backup. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but it's generally a team effort. I want my former co-worker to become a co-worker again because I firmly believe that place is killing him, but breaking him out of his Stockholm Syndrome might be drat near impossible. Plus we could really use his skills. And loving over the company and the project would be icing on the cake.
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May 19, 2019 18:56
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Thanks Ants posted:I got a new label printer and it owns, it does nice little cable wrap labels and has built in templates for various types of network cable so it knows how long the labels need to be for the circumference of the cable. It will also do flags for thin stuff like fibre, and I can use an app on my phone or print a batch of stuff out of Excel PM me a link to it - sounds like something my boss was wanting to get. In other news my former boss, who was finally able to loose the shackles of management and get back to being a Solutions Architect, was awarded the honor of being Mentor of the Quarter. With over 4000 employees it's quite the win for him. I actually got a thank you from our division director for being the one to nominate him as he rarely gets noticed for everything he does. Just to add on to things I then nominated him for our company-wide Award for Excellence. He definitely deserves all this and more, but the betting line is evenly split on whether he tries to throw me out a window or pushes me down the stairs once he finds out it was me. He's very much a guy who just loves to work and doesn't care too much about the accolades. eonwe posted:Thanks to both of you. Luckily, I get along really well with their team and two people have approached me and said that they are excited for me to apply. I'm probably more nervous about the linux admin stuff than windows. In any case, I'll try to come up with some selling points for myself, be confident in the interview, and dress nice. This is actually a great opportunity for you, and there's nothing like diving into the deep end to learn. I felt very uncertain about my Linux skills, despite having spent 20 years toying around with it from time to time, and about six to eight months getting more and more knowledgeable with the OS before my current position. I got thrown into the deep water from day one, and after an intense year I am far far more confident in my Linux skills. Still lots to learn, but I'm no longer afraid to dive right in or try and figure out why something isn't working. Had someone asked me a year ago to make a local repo I would have given them a blank look and full-on freaked out the moment they walked away. Now I can do that poo poo in my sleep. This is a great opportunity, and it will be what you make of it. No one is going to think you're a Linux superstar right off the bat. You're going to make mistakes. Document what you do, figure out where things went wrong. Give yourself an hour to try and figure something out, and if you're still blocked after that go to someone who can help and have them mentor you. Build a positive relationship with that mentor, but don't lean on them all the time. It's okay for the first couple months until you get your feet under you, but after that keep stretching yourself. Volunteer for projects. Learn scripting, and try to automate everything you can. If you have some time, work on a special project that interests you and can save the company time and money, or performs a task that doesn't currently exist. Tons of opportunity, and as I said, it will only be as good as what you make of it. Daylen Drazzi fucked around with this message at 01:58 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 01:34
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A bit late, but decided to post and state that my current employer is awesome. About two weeks ago, late on Memorial Day, tornadoes touched down in our area. Beavercreek, OH, between New Germany-Trebein Rd and Kemp Rd, got positively ripped to loving shreds. I lived just a little north of that and we got pummeled with hail, heavy rains, and 60-70mph winds. First thing my boss asks is if my house is okay and how my mom is doing, and whether I need some time off to get repairs done. Since nothing was damaged I was good, but the fact that my boss actually cared was touching. My best friend's parent's house was hit pretty hard (he also works for the company), and the Director was on the phone with him checking to see if he needed assistance and was preparing to mobilize the entire building to go out. Fortunately the most severe part of the damage was the trees getting snapped in half and taking down the electric. Some houses were damaged far worse, and in a couple cases the houses were not even standing. The company set aside a bunch of hours for anyone who needed them so they didn't have to use their own PTO. It truly seems that the whole "we care about our people" isn't just a phrase thrown to stockholders to get some positive PR. Even funnier was a couple days later someone starts pounding on my front door. I open it up and there are three Fairborn police officers. "Does <mother's name> live here?" I say yes, then ask "what the hell did she do? Rob a bank?" "Can we speak with her?" "Regarding....?" Turns out my mom had called her brother in Mississippi to let him know we were okay, but left the call on voicemail. He tried calling her later and it went to voicemail. In a panic he called the police and requested they do a welfare check. It's nice that someone in my family cared - my sister didn't even bother calling to check on us for a week, and only then because she needed my mom to babysit. Sometimes I wish I was an only child.
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Jun 15, 2019 20:08
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A few weeks ago my most recent supervisor resigned - he was just my third in the 18 months I've been here, but he was my co-workers 4th or 5th. We've got an interim team lead from another program, but he's just there to sign our timecards and provide a sense of stability while we try to staunch the bleeding of our network and servers (by we, I mean me). Our senior engineer, who was responsible for the infrastructure, was mandated to spend 100% of his time on one of major projects. My co-worker was likewise ordered, leaving just me. First thing I did was download RVTools and scan our virtualization environment to get a good picture of where things stood. The first report came back with almost 700 issues - zombie VMs, zombie VMDKs, mis-matched folder names, etc, etc. Located all the zombie VMs first and just purged the motherfuckers. That got me 7.5TB freed up on our SANs, and I've got about 30 or so VMs that belong to defunct programs that need to get deleted, which will add another TB or two of reclaimed space. Once I cleaned up a good chunk of the VM issues (down to about 300 or so now, with about 100 of them being out of date VMTools) I figured it was time to start patching our systems. They haven't been updated in two years, primarily because our certs were hosed up and no one had enough time available to address the issue. It's taken some time, but I've now got about 2/3rds of our hosts patched, plus vCenter. Once they're done it's on to our VDI cluster, which is currently running on an old-rear end SuperMicro chassis with four equally-as-old blades, one of which has lost connectivity and won't come back no matter what we try. So we're running about 120 or so virtual desktops in a cluster that's lost 25% of its resources. All three remaining hosts are pegged out on memory. We've got another cluster almost ready to go, but I need to build a Win10 and a CentOS image. Only issue is I've never done anything in Horizon before, so things are not going very quickly. I've got an intern also working for me, and I've put him to cleaning up our AD environment and taking a complete hardware inventory so we can begin tracking what we've got. He found accounts that have been around since 2012 and never deactivated. Next on the list is deactivating accounts that haven't been logged into or passwords changed in the last 180 days. We actually got a user account that hadn't changed its password in 25 months, but the user claims he was using Gitlab just last week. We forced him to change his password after we reactivated his account, and I'll be watching him since he belongs to one of our third party groups who contract for us. Lots of work still ahead, but it's nice to be able to address issues that have been lingering around for several months.
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Sep 1, 2019 03:04
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I was actually surprised that our director and leadership actually realized things were dire for our development infrastructure. We'd been scrimping and scrounging so successfully for all the years that what few tidbits they would dole out would allow us to scratch out another 3-6 months of service. It finally came to a head when my (former) team lead threatened to quit after being in the job for 6 months or so. And then our building lost power and hosed everything up and reinforced his points with almost prescient accuracy. I only know he didn't do it because he was standing in my office when everything went to poo poo and told me he'd submitted his 2 week notice. That week there was a meeting involving all the project manager and leadership and the hammer was dropped on PMs who re-assigned infrastructure personnel (i.e. myself and my co-worker) without actually informing our supervisor. This affected my co-worker most of all because he is young and, while super-experienced and knowledgeable, didn't know how to push back when confronted with an impossible timeline and diametrically opposing tasking and goals. And it was sending him into a really deep funk. So that got a lot of pressure off him, but then the director basically dropped all responsibility for our development infrastructure on me and told me to run with it. I spoke with our Sr Engineer and he gave me some things he wanted to implement but never could because of time, and now he has zero time due to a big project he's trying to pull out of a nosedive. Made me realize once again that I really do work for a rather good company. They believe firmly in work-life balance, hire some really smart people, listen to them, and don't have the attitude that "we did it differently before". And with leadership's backing, we're finally getting the chance to fix a number of lingering issues and replacing old equipment long past it's EOL. I'm getting to learn some new tricks and technologies that I've been interested in but never had the time to learn, and I'm putting things into place that I think will be good for my record when advancement comes available.
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Oct 6, 2019 23:58
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In the last couple months my team has been working on filling out a comprehensive security document for corporate due to changing contractual requirements with the DoD, and as such we're locking down poo poo like never before. This, of course, is triggering developers and PMs because our development infrastructure used to be a lot more relaxed, and now "you're acting like a bunch of hard asses." Not my choice, and some of the security decisions made by Supervisor #3 have come back to bite us in the rear end, and now Supervisor #6 is having us scramble to come up with solutions. I was finally so annoyed that I asked why the gently caress we were always trying to invent the wheel, and that's when it seemed like a lightbulb came on for all of us. Our previous team leads were all IT researchers - they loved tinkering and trying new things out to see how they ticked. Which is all fine and dandy until everyone who knew how things were set up had left, and now poo poo is breaking left and right and leadership is cussing you out for the downtime. So now we're going back and basically trying to implement best practices, tinkering be damned. We also had a metric poo poo-ton of diverse equipment, and the accounting department got all pissy with the costs associated with maintaining it. Prior supervisors were really good about getting leadership to part with money for hardware purchases, but they were getting a little salty about the "unexpected" expenses that popped up a year or two later for support contracts. And since there's a big push to move things into GovCloud and AWS we've been able to reduce our hardware needs and support requests, which has made leadership happy that we're being so pro-active. My only concern is that I don't know poo poo about AWS. I want to learn CloudFormation or Terraform, and IaC, but I keep getting warned about how AWS rear end-rapes you if you make a mistake on your setup, and next thing you know you've got a $1000 bill for the month from Amazon. Sort of makes me leery about trying to play around in AWS on a personal account. I've checked out a couple books, but since I don't know poo poo I have no idea which ones are absolutely garbage (although the ones with grammatical and spelling errors tend to stand out as poo poo). So if any of you Cloud pioneers have some sites, books, PDFs, tutorials/exercises you could recommend that would be great. I'm also looking at improving my bash and Python scripting skills, as I am sadly deficient in those areas as well.
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Aug 29, 2020 06:09
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 14:53 |
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I had one of the most hilarious things happen today near the end of the work day. We received brand new office furniture this morning, which is about 9 months after they'd promised to get it. I spent most of the rest of the first half of the day setting up my work systems and getting settled in. Second half of the day was meetings, and in the first one my co-worker and I had been warned by our boss that the project manager and the program manager had been twisting the director's ear about getting more of our undivided attention, despite there not being much work. As our boss explained it, they wanted us to come to them and ask if there was anything they needed. We already have 5 loving meetings a week - they can just task us with something if it's so drat important because I'm dividing my time based on my task list, not because someone feels ignored. Anyways I was supposed to go into our classified area to do some updates and remediation, but the second meeting of the day went on and on, so when 4pm rolls around there's a knock on the office door. I open it and it's our Information Assurance guy and he's not happy that I didn't come upstairs to take the disk I gave him to carry into the classified area and do my thing. I tell him I'll come in tomorrow and we can transfer the files then, at which point he tells me that the customer for the project has come down hard and that they have decided that no one who hasn't had a polygraph can have a privileged account (i.e. administrator account). Neither my co-worker nor I have had a poly. My co-worker and I are responsible for about 90% of the work being done to maintain the systems. Now we can't do anything. We all started laughing our asses off on the conference call (team meeting to discuss tasks and change requests) at the big ole' smackdown Karma just handed the program and project managers. The email I read from them is asking how fast IA and Security can get my co-worker and I in to get our poly's done. Unless the Secretary of Defense orders it, no polygraph operators are sent to sites to test. Instead the candidates have to go to D.C. to test, and there's a mandatory two week self-quarantine period required for all visitors from our state. I volunteered immediately to go sit in a hotel room for two weeks and get paid. Sometimes the astounding foolishness of the leadership of my company keeps me wondering how the hell the company survived, let alone thrived, with these people in charge.
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Sep 9, 2020 04:37
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