Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

FISHMANPET posted:

So how would an architect be different from an administrator?

Here's how an architect works at my company:

1) Design a project and get a proof of concept up and running with beta software
2) Leave the company without handing anything off. Another architect picks up where you left off but since there's no documentation he redesigns everything.
3) Spend the next months trying to make sense of the new architecture because it was poorly conceived.
4) The new architect realizes he hosed up the new design so he calls everyone dumb and stops answering emails on the subject.

Here's how an engineer works at my company:

1) I realize the entire design is a steaming pile of poo poo so I implement it in a non-lovely, maintainable, and easy to understand manner. I also document it because apparently the only diagrams the architects here know how to produce are on whiteboards.

So basically Architects don't actually do anything except come up with ill-conceived ideas and either leave the company or start calling people names when you realize how hosed the project is.

Actual email from yesterday:

quote:

This entire conversation is ridiculous.

Please follow the design, anyone who does not know the design needs to call me.

Notice the "call me" because no documentation was ever produced.

Thanks for letting me vent, thread. It's been a long two months.

PS - This project somehow made it into QA with no stable architecture and a non-functioning development environment.

deedee megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Aug 6, 2014

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 13:49

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 09:48

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

Speaking of ICMP outages

Please tell me that's a real thing. I want to believe that somewhere out there someone accidentally cut some CAT6 and "fixed" it by tying the severed ends together.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2014 16:56

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Banana hammock and pasties.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2014 20:32

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I went a little crazy earlier and called out a bunch of people in email for doing a bunch of stupid poo poo. It was one of those spur of the moment things that I immediately regretted. Even moreso when I realized that a bunch of directors were copied on the message.

Cue 5 minutes of me worrying about getting bitched at until the head of my department emails me this:

quote:

Haha, nice note. Thanks for taking care of things.

A bigger sigh of relief has never been sighed.

He stopped by my desk about an hour later and thanked me for being "the only person on this project who knows what's going on and putting up with all the other people who don't."

# ¿ Aug 9, 2014 00:26

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I've been helping migrate non-production environments for an older version of one of our applications to a new data center. This application was built more than a decade ago, has very little documentation, lovely error logging, and a ton of moving parts. It's a mess to configure even when you know what all the environmental variables are. So we're trying to move things and hitting all sorts of snags and the one thing that keeps me going is documenting my progress in group chat messages as if I was some sort of sci-fi explorer:

quote:

i have delved deep. too deep it seems. i have lost my way in a twisted maze. turning back now would be folly. i have no other choice than to press on and look for a light leading me out of this cursed darkness.

quote:

i thought i saw a light marking the way out of this cursed place, but as i approached it seemed to never get any closer. the goal i seek is constantly shifting. am I making any progress at all? i can not be sure. but i will continue searching for answers.

quote:

what I thought was a light was just my mind playing tricks on me. the bright side is that i have now gone over my own footsteps so many countless times that i know my path to freedom can't be much further away.

quote:

there is no bright side. the sun has exploded. and in a cruel twist of fate we are somehow still alive, alone on a desolate husk of a dying planet. that planet's name: version9

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 17:56

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

NippleFloss posted:

This is probably because they have no idea how to do any of that stuff.

And that shouldn't imply anything bad about them. I've spent nearly my entire career in the large enterprise. Every company I've worked for has had a team of people who deal with the money and handle getting quotes and actually paying for things. The architects and senior engineers in these companies only spec out new systems and then hand it off to procurement to get quotes. I haven't had to actually talk to a salesperson in the past decade.

If someone asked me to buy hardware I'd give them a deer-in-the-headlights stare because I wouldn't even know where to begin.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 22:44

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Misogynist posted:

In the places I've worked, procurement doesn't usually get involved in technology purchases from reseller channels or VARs. The reasons for this are two-fold. One, the cost of error can easily outweigh the potential savings if the people in procurement don't understand what it is that they're buying. A trivial error in a specification delivered to them in a quote can slip a project's completion date by months. Two, most computing hardware vendors don't let their channel partners bid against each other anyway. If the request comes in directly, or if it comes in to one specific reseller, that reseller gets the vendor's preferred pricing for the project. If you submit that same quote to another vendor, that vendor will give you higher pricing, because they aren't counted as having generated the lead, and they don't have access to the vendor's preferred pricing.

I've worked for three very large companies over the past decade and in all three instances it's been this way. An architect specs out systems but procurement is handled by someone else. I don't know who they're buying from, but I know that when we make requests for new hardware it goes through an internal buyer. We have a budget that procurement is aware of, but they handle all of the actual money. I haven't thought about how much hardware costs in a long time.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 00:16

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Dark Helmut posted:

I'm sure I'm not the first to have commented on this, but your job and your user name appear to cause similar amounts of pain/discomfort.

It used to be worse. Check his post history.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 17:04

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

"Every time I have to stop working to check my email and send you a status report it delays the actual work being done. If you're not hearing from us it's because we are working on your issue. We will give you a status when we have one. Now kindly gently caress off."

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 01:19

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

If most good engineers are alcoholics then it follows logically that drinking more will increase your chance of becoming a good engineer. Instead of wasting time with going to user groups and conferences you should just drink more.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2014 14:30

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

My guess is that the passwords were most likely hacked from other places, not from gmail directly. The password that they had for the gmail account in the spreadsheet was never my gmail password, but it was another password I've used for other things. So I went through and changed the password associated with that gmail account as well as every site where I used that password, even if my login wasn't my gmail.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2014 21:46

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Hughmoris posted:

Is it outlandish for me to request this access? Can I really screw up that much with read-only access in a testing environment?

No. It's not outlandish at all. Someone is just a dick.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 18:52

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

When you say "unmarketable skills" are you referring to the fact that 20 years is a long time to spend in one place and you probably know more about the quirks of your current position rather than broadly applicable things? Because I read "UNIX SA/manager/architect" and there's nothing that makes me think it's unmarketable. There would be growing pains transitioning into another senior engineer/architect role, but it would totally be doable. And unless you're making some next level money it shouldn't be a problem to find something comparable.

Unless of course your goal really is to start over and do something different.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2014 21:23

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Just disable SElinux. It's such a pain to get things running with it enabled.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2014 19:06

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

For the past few months I've been part of a data center migration project. One of the few remaining original employees sent this out about a half hour ago

quote:

On 8/6/2003 we took our first test order into the Secaucus NJ data center. It has lived a good long life. Steps are being taken now that will make the site unrecoverable.

RIP SEC 8/3/2003 - 9/30/2014

It almost makes me sad.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2014 21:28

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I started my current job last May and was immediately thrust into support work that had nothing to do with the Automation work I was hired for. I understood at the time. The department was short staffed and I've worked for the company before so I was familiar with the product. It was easier for me to support it on the short term than it was to train one of the new hires and deal with their growing pains. Cut to over a year later and I'm still working on those same support tasks. Small things related to the Automation work I was hired for would creep in on occasion but for the most part I was still doing the job I left 3 years ago. I'd point out areas where we could fix a system permanently instead of applying another band-aid but there was always some reason we couldn't move forward with it. A few months ago the company hired another ex-employee to be an Operations Architect and he starts rolling out Puppet and Rundeck and converting some of our bad manual processes to jobs that can be executed from self-service tools... effectively taking the roll I was originally hired for. Now I remember one of the reasons I left this company originally.

So I guess it's YoTJ time. I've got a third round interview on Friday. Wish me luck.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 13:22

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

What do you consider to be a reasonable number of interviews for a position? I'm of the mind that

pre-interview with HR -> phone screen with hiring manager -> face-to-face interview with staff

should be enough, but I'm currently going through

pre-interview phone screen with HR -> semi-technical pre-interview phone screen -> technical phone screen with hiring manager -> 1st face-to-face interview with staff -> 2nd face-to-face interview with staff

and I'm told there will potentially be an informal follow up with the department head.

I really want the job, but I feel like at some point you're just getting jerked around right? Does anyone else ever feel that way? If I spent the past few weeks going through all the motions only to not get the position it's going to suck.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 20:58

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Wow, 80 new posts. The thread was busy over the weekend....

God drat it.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 19:07

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

DrBouvenstein posted:

Just had my first night of being on-call...already hate it.

I'm only secondary/back-up on-call (still too new to go on primary,) but I might as well have been primary because the actual primary guy didn't answer a single page after midnight (which was four, about one an hour from 1:30 to 4:30.)

Only one of the pages was a legit issue, the rest was just our drat monitoring agent not being able to communicate and the getting reported as offline. It's a repeat problem at this one customer, and we're reluctant to throw up a maintenance/no-paging window because of how our drat paging/alert system is coded/cobbled together, it's all done on a whole-server basis, so what if a REAL PROBLEM GETS MISSED? (this customer also had three separate, yet totally unrelated, internet outages last month, so we are already on the cusp of being kicked to the curb, so we have to be super vigilant to any problems they have.)

How do your employers handle on-call pay? Because I get the feeling we get shafted...we only get paid if we do actual work, i.e. open a ticket (though it is a min. of 1 hour if we do that.) But if it's a nuisance page and all we do is clear it out, or maybe put up a maintenance window, we don't get any extra money. I think that's BS. If I have to get up to do anything, I should get compensated for it. I also believe that merely being on-call, even if I don't get a single page all week, is deserving of a small pay increase for that week since I am forced to be strapped to my phone, pager, and laptop all week long.

I have strong feelings on lots of things here. Docjowles summed up a lot of what I was going to write because it basically boils down to the problems with your lovely paging system. If it's generating noise on non-issues or things you don't actively identify as problems then it's wasting everyone's time. And that leads into... if you are getting paged and not being compensated to investigate those pages then you are being shafted. Obviously the former exacerbates the latter.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2014 14:25

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Working from home crew represent. My plan supposed to be finishing up some database changes I was working on yesterday and writing up a spec for some new functionality in one of our tools. Instead I spent the last hour fixing a bunch of servers in our nonprod environment that some chucklefuck broke.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 17:54

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

My title is Configuration/Release Engineer and I do devops/automation/system administration/warding of demons. There's no reason for me to be in the office other than it's easier to attend meetings in person. I work from home two days a week. I would do more because my commute sucks, but company policy is 2 days. I get the same amount of work done in either place. The only difference is whether people interrupt me via IM or walking up to my desk.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 18:53

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Tab8715 posted:

When I was at ATT it wasn't that development couldn't do basic administration it was that they simply didn't have any time - that's when I (or operations) came into play.

It does seem that most DevOps positions are literally everything but with a specific focus on Linux,PostGre or MySQL,Python and Chef or Puppet.

Which sounds like a lot to know...

Software I work with on a daily basis: Rundeck, Jenkins, Git, Subversion, Bamboo, Puppet, Mysql
Code I need to be able to read and write: Python, Bash, Java, PHP
Other stuff: RedHat systems administration, general application configuration and support

My job is pretty much everything that the system engineers and software developers don't do.
I am a generalist. I make things work that other people don't have time to figure out.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2014 16:17

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

I've never done scrum and I'm guessing that it rarely gets implemented properly but since you're the only person who showed up on time, I'd say you're already done.

The first agile shop I ever worked at was also the best one. The entire company operated on the same 2 weeks sprint schedule complete with kanban and a daily stand up. Sprint planning was heavenly. Everyone was on the same page and project deliveries were incredibly smooth. I miss that.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 17:00

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Docjowles posted:

And some hilarious (but quite tasty) Verizon-branded chocolate lol.

A few years ago when I was contracting for Comcast they gave out chocolate bars with wrappers that said something like "Thanks for helping us beat our goals by $2 Billion this quarter!"

Biggest slap in the face ever. It may as well have said "Yes, we made a lot of extra money, but your bonus is just going to be this lovely chocolate bar."

# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 16:55

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Everyone needs to know that you've obtained the rank of Powerful Genius in DevOps League. It's an important title.

# ¿ May 20, 2016 15:51

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Had an interview for a new job yesterday. Got the offer just now but I just turned it down even though it would've been a 28% pay increase. The interview process left me feeling not great about the company culture and structure of the department. Basically, at this point in my career wearing a t-shirt and jeans to work is more important to me than being forced to wear khakis and a tie and deal with all of the corporate hoopla that goes along with that. I also wasn't thrilled about having to do on-call rotation, something I haven't done in years and have no desire to go back to. I value my work-life balance and I got the impression that they don't. C'est la vie.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2016 18:07

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

WampaLord posted:

Odds that by "local" lampey means "San Francisco" = 99%

Any big city tbqh. It's not difficult to find that money in the city. That money is kinda crap for SF or NYC. The cost of living in those cities is so high.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 01:34

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

air- posted:

So I already own AWS training material from A Cloud Guru, but noticed that Cloud Academy is giving out codes for a month free. Anyone here used Cloud Academy? I'm mostly wondering about what gaps (if any) would be filled in. I don't think A Cloud Guru has labs included.

I work for a AWS Premier Partner and based on the feedback I've heard from people at my company they're about equal. It's just personal preference.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 16:49

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Inspector_666 posted:

The Powershell solution was a single line, the cmd one was several steps, it seems like a pretty clear point in favor of Powershell there.

I get what you're saying but be careful with this line of thinking because this is how you end up with perl everywhere.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2016 17:28

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Does anyone else here not have any certifications because you're just not good at taking tests? I won't spend money on certifications because I know I'm going to do terrible on the test. But it's not an issue with the application itself because I know how it works and can demonstrate competency with it. My current employer wants me to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exams so I thought I could probably pass the aAssociate test easily since I work with AWS on a daily basis. But I just took a practice exam and the way some of the questions are worded completely threw me off. I nearly ran out of time because I had to reread questions 5 or 6 times. I took a look at the Professional exam and it's 170 minutes with no break. Even if I don't run out of time, my ADD is going to kick in around the 60 minute mark and I'm going to fail. How the hell do you people deal with this? Is test taking just easy for some people?

# ¿ Jun 28, 2016 19:27

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

alg posted:

Yup this is basically me at work

In my shop developing would mostly be small projects and supporting code developed by lovely contractors in Bangalore. At least as a sysadmin I get to design systems.

Wizard does all that cool poo poo but then pipes the output into null. The image checks out.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 15:17

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

How many hoops are you guys willing to jump through at the pre interview stage?

A recruiter sent me a position that looks good but before the interview there's an hour long prescreen exam as well as a coding project. This seems excessive just to get in the door.

Thoughts?

# ¿ Oct 20, 2016 13:35

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

One interview I had included a section where the interviewer went through my resume asking me small questions about various things until he finally got what he wanted: he asked me a simple question about dealing with some piece of software and I sighed and said I hated working with it. Then we got really in detail while I broke down all of the different reasons that particular piece of software was a failure and what the better alternatives are and why. Apparently he wanted me to have some strong opinions about technical aspects of something. I ended up getting the job even though it was one of he weirdest interviews I've ever had.

Cut to the first week and I'm in orientation. I'm meeting a bunch if new people that were hired for the same project and one of the guys on my team goes "I had the weirdest interview ever...."

Turns out he spent his entire interview railing against Oracle.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 14:48

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

My current employer uses Confluence, Jira, and HipChat. My previous job used Confluence, Jira, Bamboo, and Bitbucket.

In my opinion Jira and Confluence are good and work well together. Stay away from Bamboo, Bitbucket, and HipChat.

Of course opinions are like assholes so ymmv.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2017 22:08

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

Holy poo poo that article.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 18:45

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I don't think he's autistic. I do think he has some serious paranoia going on though.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 18:59

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

I'm sitting here minding my own business, head down, making good progress on a ticket. I look up at an announcement just made in company chat, "we'd like to announce the availability of our new mobile app on the iTunes app store..."

Look back at ticket productionize mobile api

Stand up from desk. Curse.

Ask PM what the hell is going on.

Seems the business team was so pleased with the app that they decided to launch early. Here's hoping the manually built Dev server with no backup or scaling capabilities lasts long enough.

I will be drinking tonight. Oh yes, I will be.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 17:57

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

There was no data loss. It was just a service interruption.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2017 21:18

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

skipdogg posted:

Yes and it was awesome. We had the initial seed done by filling up appliances and shipping them to the provider and since then its been disk to cloud for the backups.

I'm phone posting I can give more info if you want when I get to a computer

The AWS version of this is called Snowball. You connect an appliance they send you to your network and do your initial seed there. Then ship it back and you can start uploading deltas.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2017 01:49

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 09:48

deedee megadoodoo: Sep 28, 2000; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.

If you need snowmobile you should just build your own cloud.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2017 02:29

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