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No idea where I should post this. Does anyone know how to script the refreshing of an excel query then saving AS to .csv (and overwrite the previous file)? There's an option within Data -> Connections -> Usage tab for refreshing data on a schedule. Not sure if that refreshes when the file isn't open or not. Doubt it.  If not, if someone knew how to script fixing the format of dates in a csv, that would work too. Basically, I have a script that exports email addresses and two date fields in MM/DD/YY format in a CSV. Problem is, it doesn't include the leading 0 for January-September and the software I'm importing this csv into requires it. A find/replace script would work too I suppose. goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 19:52
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What do you guys look for when comparing SLA's of potential ISP's? We currently use Integra and getting reamed. We're paying a ridiculous $6400/mo for Hosted Firewall, VPN, 20Mb EoC to Seattle HQ, 12Mb bonded T1's to Portland office, MPLS, PRI's for in house PBX's as well as long distance, DID's, etc. I've gotten quotes from Comcast, Windstream, CenturyLink and a handfull of other smaller ISP's but it's looking like Comcast and Windstream are the only viable options from a price perspective. Haven't sat down and drudged through SLA's yet, but I'm planning on doing that this week. On a side note, anyone recommend or not recommend Fortinet Fortigate UTM's? I'm going to kick the hosted firewall to the curb soon. Didn't see a networking thread. Looking for an intuitive GUI, easy site-to-site VPN setups with cheap models for construction job sites, and the ability to have 2nd WAN connection as well as a potential for having two in HA.
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Nov 17, 2014 21:04
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Anyone have any experience with reliant technology for hardware support? I assume it's poo poo, but they claim to offer the "same level of support for 40-70% less than what you currently pay." Anyone have any experience with them?
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Nov 19, 2014 17:27
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Are there any free or relatively cheap, ticketing systems that would be good for a one-man IT department? I've been using OneNote for a while to keep track of requests and to-do's, but it would be nice to have more of a history of what I've worked on, and to be able to quantify not only how much I do, but be able to identify high-problem areas. I tried Spiceworks previously and wasn't too big of a fan of the ads. It also just felt cluttered. I might have not spend enough time getting it properly configured though. -Auto ticket generation from email -Simple, clean layout -Basic reports. x amount of y tickets in a date range. Bonus points if I can create a 2nd completely different department/helpdesk for another non-IT team that could use a email to ticket system. Is Spiceworks still the best option or what are some others I should peek at? Inventory is another tough thing. Any sort of network-scan based inventory system is next to worthless because people are constantly coming and going into the field for months at a time. Recently deployed Kaspersky, so I guess I just need to combine info I can pull with that, with some manual effort into one area. Preferably within a ticketing system.
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Feb 7, 2015 19:05
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I’ve been looking for a solution to take the place of a cloud hosted firewall and VPN solution through our ISP for several months now. Made a post a while back. The main factor was simply getting away from this ISP since we’re paying entirely way too much (~6500/mo) for the service we receive, however other factors like the how long it took to do routine tasks on the hosted Palo Alto as well as the clunky VPN client were factors as well. Main office is in Seattle, second office in Portland. 200 employees and roughly 125 actual computer users. Roughly 50/20 desks at SEA/PDX. Exchange is hosted internally, but our website is externally hosted. We don’t have high throughput at this point (20Mb SEA & 12Mb PDX), but I’m looking to improve on that with either changes to our main connection, implementation of additional, cheaper, higher bandwidth connections, as well as potentially a dedicated fiber connection between our two offices. Main goal is to improve the end user experience working in and more importantly outside of the office. Paired with new firewalls, I’m working on a new RDS server, and will be testing Egnyte as a “dropbox” like service to tie into our existing file servers. The main things I’m looking for are: • Good performance – or… good enough that it isn’t a bottleneck. End result is that I want to be able to more effectively improve end-user perception of “speed”. • Good enough security for our needs, which aren’t super high • Site-to-site VPN – ideally cost effective. • Client VPN with no per user licensing • Ability to have 1+ connections for failover as well as active/active. • Traffic Shaping/QoS so that I can divert high bandwidth traffic that doesn’t need to be on the primary connection such as web traffic and backup replications over those. I’ve looked at Juniper SRX240 and 220, Fortinet 200D and 100D, Barracuda NG380 and NG280, and Sophos SG230 and SG210. After comparing costs, specs, pro’s and cons specific to my specific one-man operation working for a construction company, it looks like Sophos is the clear winner. The price is right in line with everyone else, the performance numbers blow everything else out of the water, the hardware appears to be better (ie. Bigger ssd, 8gb ram) to back up those numbers, the reporting out of the box looks much better, and lots of other things like being able to embed a how-to video on the VPN portal page. The biggest single advantage for me over what my initial bias was for – Fortinet – was that the Sophos site-to-site VPN option is insanely easy. The Red 10 setup takes a few minutes – punch in the serial, give it a subnet and a few other things, hand it to someone to take out to a site, and it will set itself up and create a tunnel back home. Not having to travel to sites alone is probably worth it. I should add that I tested the Fortinet and Sophos options in-house. I preferred the Fortinet GUI as it seemed more logical to me, but perhaps it’s just because that’s the one I tested first and got used to it. On that subject, we used Sonicwalls in the past and I always disliked their GUI. That’s why I didn't mention them. Anyway, my main questions are… is there anything I haven’t mentioned that I should be taking into account? Does anyone have experience with Sophos? Any reason not to pull the trigger?
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Feb 24, 2015 03:54
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Richard Noggin posted:I'd ask in the Cisco short questions thread. Don't let the title mislead you, it's general networking too.
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Feb 24, 2015 05:00
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CLAM DOWN posted:Yup, IT people need to be not doing IT stuff in their downtime! It's essential to destressing and not burning out Nearly my entire time at my current job has been pretty stressful. I moved out to Seattle on a whim in 2010 with no job lined up and managed to get a job within two weeks as the 2nd IT guy for a construction company. I have no college degree, no certifications, and while I was extremely confident, and had always been much better than most of my colleagues at most jobs in my career, I wasn't mentally prepared for what came next. Within 4 months, my boss had quit to go off for some other job. I got called into the CFO's office and was told that they were promoting me to IT manager in part due to my then boss’ recommendation. I asked for, and got a 50% raise. I was left with an infrastructure that I'm still trying to iron out. The SAN was nearly full and was thrashing constantly leading to massive OMFG EVERYTHING IS BURNING 911 scenarios, ESX hosts were massively out of date, the Exchange server weren't being truncated and crashing constantly, DC and GPO issues, a goddamn blackberry server and various other hosts had massive issues. I tried my best to fix the biggest problems out there – added more disks to increase the SAN capacity, upgraded hosts to much newer ESXi versions (which was a nightmare due to IBM bricking a couple motherboards due to bad firmware update instructions), blah blah blah. I don’t really feel like going too much further down explaining my entire work history at this job, so I’ll get to the bigger stuff. The CFO that was my boss for several years got poo poo-canned a few years back, and the 7-8 people that reported to him got called into a meeting with the president of the company and we were all told why he was fired and that the new “All Star” CFO they were looking for would have the final say in who worked for them. He looked around the room and said “I don’t know what you do, I don’t know what you do, I sort of know what you do…” and proceeded to tell us that we could all easily be gone within 6 months. We had an awesome, laid back, temp CFO (yes this is a thing) for a while. Miss that guy. Then came my current boss. She’s scared of eye contact, prone to all of the stress-induced rear end in a top hat behavior that I exhibit, and has been generally a very unpleasant experience working for her. I got to the point late last year where almost every day, I would get to the point sometime during the day, where I would feel mentally done. Anything beyond mindless tasks that I’ve done a million times was seemingly impossible. My temples hurt from clenching and grinding my teeth and I just wanted to take a nap. I was angry as gently caress, all the time. I was conscious of the fact that I become intense and terse when I’m busy as gently caress with the massive problems of my infrastructure, and I was making a conscious effort to try and be less of an rear end in a top hat. Apparently people noticed, but I still felt angry as hell all the time. I made a few posts at the time, but my coworker buddy who I hung out with occasionally outside of work killed himself after a bad break-up this past summer and I ended up having to clean his blood out of our server rack the next day. Months later I ended up talking to a shrink due to my constant “burn out” feeling I was running into every day, and was diagnosed with ADHD and got a prescription for Adderall. I was able to tackle things that I previously started numerous times and gave up, actually listen to users when they talked rather than starting the likely fix and telling them to let me know if they ran into issues before running off to get back to other more important things, and generally just approaching things in a more logical manner. I’m still a bit of an rear end in a top hat when I’m trying to set up something or fix something that has huge implications (and then get repeatedly interrupted with comparatively dumb poo poo), but most of it is just the fact that my current workload is ridiculous. Part of it is the fact that I got thrown into a situation which in reality, I wasn’t qualified for. Anyway, I’ve found that most of my stress is self-imposed, and that if I just accept that sometimes, staying longer to make sure things that will help me in the long run are done, it lowers my stress level. I strongly dislike my boss, this job has been pretty unhealthy for me, but due to my situation where I have no degree or certs, I don’t want to jump ship on this. I found some non-reseller consultants that have been pretty good as a support system, and I’m making a lot of progress on big-ticket items. I’m really hoping that within this year, I can get on top of the biggest things that cause the most problems for my users and my mental health. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been dealing with the latest in an ongoing saga of SAN issues, and finally believe we found the root of the problem. An HBA poo poo out last week on a host, and a controller that I’ve noticed some flakiness up and died yesterday. Replaced both and just got everything reconfigured and going over their preferred paths. Latencies look better than they ever have. Between that, tweaking the WDS/MDT server I created a few weeks ago, and the tons of other items on the “make this better to save you time” list, I’m hoping to get to the point where stress is low. This is poorly written, but I'm tired, so, the end. goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 05:23
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Tab8715 posted:...but it looks like all my time spent with IBM Hardware wasn't the best investment.
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Mar 21, 2015 16:31
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Got approval to hire a temp. Found a cool old dude with 20 years of experience that seems good enough for what I need. Maybe I'll get my sanity back. Probs not.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:44
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captkirk posted:What does that tool gain you that a flat head screw driver doesn't.
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Jun 23, 2015 15:02
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Anyone have a go-to source for used/refurb enterprise SAS drives? Looking for a good source for building cheap-rear end storage servers for job sites and/or FreeNAS storage servers for secondary backup repositories and/or DFS replication targets. E: I have a local store that sells 450gb 15k sas drives for like 60-80 bucks I iirc. It would be nice to have a more reliable/consistent source for larger quantities. goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 21:56
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Walked posted:Any suggestions for how to approach asking for your job to hire a junior admin type role? Now I need to work on creating, consolidating, support/config info, processes and documentation in confluence and get this dude to the point where he can act on his own without too much hand holding and still get some things done. The CFO only wants to keep this guy around for 1-3 months, but I'm hoping it prove the need for another hand, if for nothing else just to deflect sales calls.
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Jul 8, 2015 22:53
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Reiz posted:I'm actually not a huge fan of Jira, especially for ops tasks because it tends to be pretty (really) dense. Well, at least, our implementation of it at my current employer is really unnecessarily dense and there are a lot of buttons to click, text boxes to fill, and then "submit changes" processes to wait for. It was used at a dev job that I had, and I thought it was actually pretty loving great there because we were using cloud jira with hooks to our bitbucket repo and the "denseness" of it works well when you are dealing with requests from multiple people, correspondence with non-technical people, suggested changes, code review, and then actual changes.
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Jul 9, 2015 07:01
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I'm looking into options for replacing our main switches at our main Seattle office with about ~50 desks or so. It's going to become the internet gateway for our Portland office, which is growing to about 40 desks. I use desks because a lot of users come and go so the number of people in the office can vary fairly significantly from those numbers up and down. Currently we have 20Mbps EoC in Seattle and 12Mbps bonded T1's in Portland connected over a MPLS and network behind a ~*~cloud firewall~*~. We have just shy of 200 employees and about 130 computer users. Everyone else will be getting email addresses within the year. Just got 50Mbps Comcast fiber turned up and we'll be shifting to that as our "primary" connection in Seattle. More importantly, we now have a 1Gbps L2 connection between the offices. I'm waiting on Microwave wireless to be installed but have no idea when, if ever it's going to actually happen. It's going on 4 months since ordering and it sounds like they're running into a bureaucracy of trying to change out equipment on a building they need to bounce their signal off of to get to us. We're supposed to be getting 100Mbps burstable to 1Gbps. My plan is to use our Sophos firewall to route all non-business critical, or high bandwidth traffic over the Microwave, leaving things like VPN traffic to the fiber. Portland internet will go over the L2 fiber to Seattle, then out over the Microwave. Anyway, I'm hoping to replace our core switches, which are old and lovely: * Netgear GSM7248 - Internet, Servers) * HP Procurve 2530-48G - iSCSI and vMotion * 2x Netgear GS748TS - data drops CDW quoted me a HP 5406R v3 switch, with dual PSU’s and four 24 port expansion cards, shipping and tax, it comes in at 15.5K. I want the layer 3 routing capabilities so that I can route between vlans and subnets that I will be creating to take the processing load off of the firewall. Is this switch overkill, or right around the ballpark I should be looking at?
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Jul 22, 2015 18:41
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Thanks Ants posted:Your connections back to your provider aren't internet - you essentially extend your LAN into the MPLS cloud of your provider, and then provision internet at that point. It was great if you have a bunch of sites and need low bandwidth but low latency connections to each one, and for it to be part of your corporate network for VoIP or RDS etc. In a lot of instances a 'good' broadband connection (VDSL etc.) with a decent way of managing site-to-site VPN tunnels will do just as good a job.
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Jul 22, 2015 21:52
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kensei posted:Yikes, I sit by our networking guys and they get irritated when it takes 5 minutes. I can't imagine what that is like for you.
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Jul 23, 2015 00:06
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PCjr sidecar posted:Overkill. You don't need the 5406's backplane. I'd consider a pair of Juniper EX3300-48Ts (on sale for $3K each at CDW right now) in a virtual chassis configuration unless you really like the HP UI. goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 23, 2015 |
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Jul 23, 2015 16:54
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If anyone in the Oregon or Washington area needs a job, a position might be opening up at a company I currently have to provide support for that I don't have the time for. You'd have to move out to a crappy podunk town in west-central Washington, but it could be a good option for someone who is either out of a job or is looking for more experience. Really basic Microsoft environment built with literally no budget on used servers. They're starting to open up the purse strings now though. You'd definitely get free weed though. 
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Sep 18, 2015 22:14
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Holy poo poo, Trello looks loving amazing. I've was super excited about the seemingly endless possibilities of Jira/confluence before, but once things got busy, I just found it too clunky and time consuming to interact with. Not to mention, there's so many settings and interdependent pieces that it looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Just started playing with Trello and it's blatantly obvious this is a better solution for my situation. Trello is usable out of the box and incredibly simple, which is huge for me if I ever think I'll get buy-in from anyone. Just realized I can create "templates" for existing processes (cards), add members ahead of time, and copy them to other boards, not to mention e-mail to board functionality... It looks like I can probably do the things I was hoping to do with Jira in who knows what year in a matter of hours/days/weeks as opposed to who the gently caress knows with Jira. If anyone is using it, I'd love to pick your brain. Also, got a fat raise yesterday, acknowledgement that the temp we're searching for to help me out could turn into a permanent position is a possibility, and that I can work from home whenever I want without asking anymore among other things. Woooooooo
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Sep 25, 2015 20:28
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:What process are you currently using (scrum, agile, lean, kanban)? 
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Sep 25, 2015 22:30
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I was looking for something quick and effective for entering, categorizing and prioritizing requests, to-do items and projects. I'm hoping to also be able to use the same system for repeat processes that involve other departments, that always get screwed up, namely on-boarding of new employees and terminations. If I can get that working well, I would think it could potentially be of use elsewhere in the company. My company basically has a paper operations manual that no one really reads unless they're not sure if they'd get fired for doing something, with few real "business processes." The way people, departments and entire offices operate varies wildly which ends up with tons of bullshit. I'd like to try help solve some of those issues if at all possible. To me it appears something like Jira/Confluence or... Trello + Confluence/Other Wiki, etc might be exactly what we need. I'm also the only IT dude here with little exposure to seeing how other companies in my position handle those issues, so maybe I'm trying to use the wrong tool for the job. It's 32 minutes past beer time. TIME TO PLAY SOME LADDER GOLF.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:33
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Is Nagios still a good option for monitoring? Small/medium multi-office VMware/Microsoft environment. I like the idea of the customization of Nagios, and I previously hosed around with it but didn't have enough time to dedicate to it to get it where I needed it. I shut down that old VM since it's been like 4-6 months since I last tinkered with it and downloaded the NagiosXI OVF template not realizing that's actually the "pay for" version. I have no doubt I can get approval to spend ~2k on monitoring software, especially if it's just the upfront licensing costs the most money. Not sure if I'm less stupid than the last time I worked with Nagios or if NagiosXI is a lot easier to get running without reading a novel of documentation, but so far it seems fairly simple getting what I want monitored setup. From what I gather, I'd have to install one of probably various plugins in order to do any sort of bandwidth monitoring, but basically what I'm looking for is monitoring for our two offices networks consisting of: Seattle:[list] 2 Internet connections L2 P2P fiber connection to Portland Switches, access points, copiers VMware hosts VMware guests - mainly server 2012 r2 Handful of physical servers (vCenter, Email archiver, FreeNAS) Veeam backups Portland is similar, except in a smaller scale and one ISP connection aside from the L2 fiber to Seattle which provides their primary internet for the time being. I'm looking to be able to monitor windows services, bandwidth, and anything that may be an indicator of a potential problem or performance killer. On another note... If anyone has any experience with inter-state Comcast Fiber EPL connections, I'd like to chat.
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Dec 1, 2015 17:29
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Yeah, I have a test PRTG server up and let it run through an auto-discover sequence. I think that's the problem with anything network scan based... waaaaaay too much noise initially. I'm systematically going through my list of servers/devices and setting each up the way I want. Even if I don't end up going with Nagios, I'll have a comprehensive list of services to monitor for each one in one location. I'll take a look at OpenNMS. PRTG just seems so expensive in comparison to Nagios and at this point I'm more comfortable with Nagios. I pretty much need to just pick something and run with it.
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Dec 1, 2015 18:20
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Anyone care to share the way you lay out IT documentation hierarchy? Either that or a folder structure of the IT section of your network share. Could have sworn someone posted something a while back, but I can't seem to find it using the search.
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Dec 28, 2015 22:39
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Why haven't I used AutoIt before? Good lord. Easy and awesome.
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Feb 24, 2016 04:10
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Anyone know of a service that would transcribe voicemail into text, then email that to a per-determined email address or distribution list? In the event of an emergency, we're looking to have a phone number the person at the site could call for a quick, verbal run-down of the situation, and have that transcribed and texted to a certain group of people. We have verizon, so sending SMS by email works fine. Our phone system is an ancient piece of poo poo, not sure if newer systems do voicemail transcribing or not. This could be nice for a ticketing system as well.
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Jun 21, 2016 22:24
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Anyone know how to have diskpart use a 32k block size allocation during OS installs within an MDT OS deployment task sequence? Mainly concerned with 2012 R2 installations and the purpose is to align our OS disks with our SAN's block size allocation. Having just now looked, looks like ZTIDiskpart.wsf is the script to edit...  Has anyone hosed around with this before?If I run into any issues, I suppose I could just create a OVF template of a server I set up the way I want, but an MDT/WDS task sequence is preferred.
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Jul 29, 2016 21:19
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Anyone have any IT related audiobooks that they would recommend? I need some stuff to listen to on my way to Portland. Anything related to VMware, general IT and employee management stuff, business intelligence & data visualization, automation, etc.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:00
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OSI bean dip posted:A lot of these "next-gen" firewalls have severe performance problems once you start to enable a lot of features. If your UTM does endpoint management, packet inspection, SSL decoding, et cetera, it all bogs down. Most of them rollercoaster the data coming in which means it repeats tasks for each function. I've been fairly happy with our Sophos UTM's, although I haven't really enabled a ton of features yet.
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Aug 10, 2016 06:14
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I've managed to bitch enough to management about my need to be able to close a door at some point during the week that I'm now working on setting up a work area in an office in a hangar where the CEO keeps his plane. There are virtually no internet options which surprised me considering I'm surrounded by Boeing buildings. I guess fiber goes down the other side of the airfield. Good news is that I can get 35mbps or so using a Verizon router, however I'd really prefer something a little more reliable/stable. Considering I'm 5 minutes from the main office, it's not a big deal but... meeehhhhh... It'd be nice to be able to replicate backups there and have a test lab, but I suppose I can do the whole sneakernet thing. I can't believe I just used that word. Has anyone ever dealt with point to point wireless connections
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Dec 10, 2016 17:23
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Anyone loving around with PowerApps yet?
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Jul 30, 2017 21:52
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Kashuno posted:what's the weirdest advertising ploy you've received from a company? I think I just got our first really bizarre one since I've been here Also, this thread is hilarious. 
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Sep 15, 2017 02:55
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Anyone have any experience with smart deploy as an imaging platform?
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Aug 27, 2020 18:52
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