Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

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

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Dark Helmut posted:

I totally get where you guys get pissed off at recruiters, either because you're:
A) a highly specialized and talented individual who gets blown up constantly by recruiters across the country
or
B) an industry newbie that gets submitted to one job and then forgotten about because there are 1000 others in the market with the same skill

I do in fact regularly get contacted by ashit and venkatesan about opportunities for an sccm administrator or active directory admin with powershell experience in new York or LA. I am in Illinois.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 04:22

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 11:34

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

whaam posted:

Do most of you guys have a plan to move into management or project management as you get closer to 40? You don't see many systems engineers, administrators, etc in the 40-55 age range.

Team lead and senior tech at a 750 person company chiming in. My career can take one of two places really, either into management or to another company. My boss (CIO and Executive Vice President) has made it clear that he wants me to succeed him, though probably not as the CIO. He oversees a LOT more than I have expertise in, but I am hoping to get promoted to a real management position in the next year or so. Luckily, it's a small enough organization that I will still be working for a living at least part of the time. To answer your question, I am 34 and it definitely seems that the move to management is the best place to go. I hope to retire as CTO of my organization.

Dark Helmut posted:

The hardest person for me to place is an IT infrastructure manager. Those roles are often filled internally by someone who moves into a role, so when these people get fired often they are up poo poo creek.

Here's hoping I never get fired.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 02:00

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Che Delilas posted:

If I were a manager my whole day would be smacking people upside the head and telling them to grow up, stop acting like they're in high school, and stop treating other people like poo poo. My whole day. I mean, with what I do now I can generally put my head down and turn up the music and ignore the bullshit, but if I were in charge of overseeing it, I would probably off myself inside a month.

That's not what a manager does, that's what a douche does. A manager develops business and people, and good ones do it with coaching and imagination rather than discipline.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 04:05

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Aunt Beth posted:

For all the sysadmin types out there, about what percentage of your CPU processor is x86 compatible and what's proprietary (like POWER, SPARC, zEnterprise, etc)? I work for a certain blue behemoth so my picture of what people run is kind of skewed.

Probably >95% of our clock cycles in the data center are x86. We have one power7 as/400, no idea how many CPUs it is licensed for because I don't have to support it.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 04:11

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

three posted:

You still have plenty of roles between Lead Sysadmin and Manager, including Engineer and Architect titles. Unless you're making 150k+ as a Lead Sysadmin, you're not capped in internal IT.

That's an interesting blanket statement, having not qualified it with any location information. In my metropolitan area the number of internal IT jobs (working as a tech of some kind) that pay that wage would be extremely limited. Probably only a handful of CCIEs. I am the highest level member of IT at the 11th largest fdic insured bank in my state and I don't make anywhere near $150k/year.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 01:09

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

myron cope posted:

So the guy who just got promoted to sysadmin just got the actual offer today. $34k.

drat. I live in a pretty average cost of living area and we are thinking starting our next level 1 helpdesk guy at $35k/year.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 03:15

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

we use otrs for my 750 person org. We don't just use it for the helpdesk, groups outside of IT use it too.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2014 05:50

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

Isn't it borderline illegal to have patient information on a legacy O/S? I know it is for banks, unless you have an extended-extended support contract with Microsoft like JPMorgan has...

It's not illegal for a bank to be running an outdated or unsupported OS. Don't confuse the law for regulatory compliance. As long as there are controls in place to mitigate the risk, I assume most bank examiners will give a pass. We have a few windows 2000 machines (and even one NT 4.0 one!) in place but have controls to reduce the risk. More or less we either turn them off when not actively being used, or else they are firewalled off into their own private network and we just RDP through the firewall. We also have many XP embedded thin clients in place still, and those are not end of support until next year.

Think about this: we have one application written by a company that closed shop in the 90s. It uses a proprietary database of some kind, and was originally installed on NT4.0. The data has to remain accessible until 2027. We have three options: run the NT4.0 machine as a VM until then, print every record and rescan them into our current document imaging system, or find a vendor to perform an expensive data conversion. The choice is easy, we just firewall the machine off with a windows 7 VM and RDP into the windows 7 machine. It works well, is perfectly secure, and satisfies our regulators.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 22:27

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alfajor posted:

Are you still using the application, or just using it for historical purposes/reference? I think that makes a big difference...

Historical data. However, read the post I quoted. "To have ... information on a legacy O/S"

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 23:39

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Japanese Dating Sim posted:

No problem, I doubt many of these things are circulating? It's such a weird design.

I agree it's weird, but when you look into it, it actually makes sense. The biggest problem is stacking them up in a recycle pile 5 years from now.

lol who am I kidding, the kind of person who buys one of these will probably replace it with next years model.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 17:52

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Race Realists posted:

I want to start off as a help desk and work my way up to Network/server Admin, but a majority of those jobs require a Bachelors. Now here's the thing: A great majority of the Network Admin jobs I see out there ask for a Bachelors in CS instead of C I S.

Those jobs list the bachelors, most of them outside of very large corporations don't actually require them. We list them on every job and on our team only the lowest level guy on the helpdesk has a 4 year degree. 3 admins, 5 helpdesk, and one team lead, and only one bachelors.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 04:15

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

What's the difference between internal IT and Ops?

Sounds the same to me...

In most organizations it is.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 17:16

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Erwin posted:

If there's anyone who could help you wrap your head around something, it's a neurosurgeon

They would be more suited to unwrapping your head from around something.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 23:08

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

My employer pays $709/mo toward my PPO. Total cost is $1200 or so, leaving $500 pretax from myself. Before you poo poo yourselves, that's the family plan.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 04:28

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Che Delilas posted:

I'm not trying to get you down, but when I hear a phrase like, "we pay up to $X," alarm bells start going off in my head and I start digging for details. Because "up to" doesn't mean anything at all.

Probably depends on whether it is employee, employee plus one, or family.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 04:45

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

lampey posted:

Wages are going up mostly because there is a tech bubble. You don't need a degree to have soft skills, and many people with and without degrees have terrible soft skills. It is a stereotype in general that many people in IT have poor soft skills.

Wages are going up across the board for employed people because the long term unemployed become (or are perceived to become) uncompetitive for even entry level jobs. It's not limited to IT. Both hard and soft skills deteriorate over even 1 year of unemployment. It is much more desirable to hire someone who you are confident will be able to produce immediately (read: someone who is already employed elsewhere), even if they cost quite a bit more. This drives up salaries for those who are and have been employed, without helping the currently unemployed. It's not worth it to hire Joe for half of what it would cost to hire Ted if Joe won't even be able to produce half of what Ted does.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 22:59

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I'm taking another look at our monitoring tools, and we really have a disparate jumble of stuff. The main thing we use is cacti for our network gear, but then lots of vendor specific tools as well. I am looking at finally setting up nagios to try to get an all in one monitoring solution for nearly everything. Since I am starting from scratch, I might as well do it right from the beginning. Do you guys monitor bandwidth utilization of each individual switchport, or just WAN links and switch uplinks?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2014 19:45

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

jim truds posted:

What sort of info is out there for staffing levels on a helpdesk? I'm currently working on a helpdsk that handles about 300 tickets a day split between phones and emails. We support 10,000 users with about 16,000 devices. I was curious what sort of numbers we should have for staff compared to how many we do have.

I expect my staff to handle around 20-25 tickets a day, give or take depending on volume and difficulty.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 18:24

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I am not sure what I would do if I wasn't handling the procurement of our (datacenter) hardware. It's so important to get exactly right and extremely technical. I just wouldn't trust a purchasing agent to get it right. Of course, they probably don't trust me to get the best deal, but I probably do get the best deal because of the way partner and var purchasing works.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 00:41

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Gothmog1065 posted:

If I could just get my hands on a current setup so I can see and learn, but meh.

Any ideas?

Here's the thing: production networks aren't for learning on, test ones are. Get a copy of esxi and a cheapo esxi capable PC, and start building a lab. You can run pretty much any Microsoft or VMware product for free for 60 days, more than enough time to build a nice lab.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 04:01

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Gothmog1065 posted:

Do you have any examples of a cheap esxi compatible computer? Most everything I've seen so far has been a basic i5 CPU with some other stuff going for 800+ (with the RAM upgrades).

I run one of these for my home lab.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-dc5850-SFF-Desktop-AMD-Athlon-2-30GHz-2GB-RAM-DVD-CD-Rom-4942-/301295706146?pt=Desktop_PCs&hash=item46269fa022

I have a dual core version and upped it to 6GB of RAM, but the fact is that that machine will run esxi 5.1 with no modifications required. 5.5 if you modify some install files.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 03:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

evol262 posted:

Why do people assume salary means "get hosed and work a ton of hours for no extra pay?" By all means, stay late when you need to. Go in when you need to. But also leave early when it's slow and you've worked a lot. But a planned issue shouldn't mean an extra, uncomped 20 hours.

Some employers take advantage of salaried employees. I'm lucky, I am only expected to work 40 hours on a normal week. I do feel compelled to put in for PT if I need to leave for an hour on Monday, even if I work two extra hours on Thursday, but as a general rule I work less than 45 hours per week, which is pretty reasonable.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 04:06

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Hughmoris posted:

Yeah, I'm new to the team, been here about 3 months now. I have no problem putting in the work. However, once this project is finished, we won't have anything big on our plate for a while. I plan on getting in a little late, leaving a little early to balance things out. I'm not the type to break my back only to get shat on.

like sleep, extra hours when salaried are not something you can catch up on.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 04:18

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Misogynist posted:

Don't leave another country to come to Boise fuckin' Idaho.

Maybe he's in a shittier city in wherever he's at now.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 23:31

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

What's the correct way to return an entire table?

What's the purpose of selecting an entire LARGE table? Personally, I put a limit statement at the end of every query, just in case.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 03:24

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

So we're looking at downgrading our helpdesk software because our current setup is more expensive and more overkill than we really require. We have some vendors showing us there poo poo, and I was going to suggest throwing Spiceworks into the mix and compare them all.

I'm under the impression that for basic helpdesk software, they're pretty well regarded. Is that the case?

We use OTRS pretty successfully. 100k articles per year.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 00:24

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

This is why we don't even gently caress around with this poo poo and tablets and phones are byod. If your supervisor wants to give you a raise to cover the cost, cool. We'll help you as best we can to get your email on it, beyond that, we give no fucks.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2014 01:51

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Reiz posted:

Anyone have any experience in automating SSH to talk to Cisco equipment?

I've been using Net::Perl, Net::Open-SSH, and a little bit of Powershell-SSHSessions but they're all kind of crap. Well, Net::Open-SSH is pretty decent but unfortunately none of the RSA keys on our networking devices are 768 bit so OpenSSH refuses to connect to them. Recompiling OpenSSH or re-generating RSA keys are not available to me at the moment (I'm the junior).

I would look at RANCID to see what they did.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2014 21:53

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

BooDaa posted:

So my question is am I right to think that I am basically starting over here? The nearly 12 years of work and trust that I've built up is meaningless now since this new guy doesn't know me or my skills? I'm not at all afraid he will just walk in and start firing people but I'm sure he will want to put his stamp on things so it looks like he is doing something.

I am not trying to scare you, but you should at least consider this is possible. He knows you are loyal to your old director and he knows that you are probably going to be resistant to change (the change being doing things his way from now on). I'm not saying it's likely, but you should at least be considering the possibility.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2014 00:30

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

FISHMANPET posted:

Now imagine the chef comes out and tells you this instead.

And he stops at every other table to tell them as well.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 04:09

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

high six posted:

HUrray. I got an actual IT job. Help desk, yeah, but it is certainly better than delivering pizzas. Gonna start the Monday after next. At least this time I didn't rip the rear end of my pants at the interview.

Kinda nervous, too, since this will be my first "adult" job.

1) spelling and capitalization is important, so watch it (see your first word)
2) I've wanted an opportunity to post this before, and now I have it. There are 4 phases to IT team building.
a) form
b) storm
c) conform
d) perform

just remember your team in now in phase a), and remind them of the fact when there are inevitably some personality issues early on.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2014 02:08

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

software defined networking still requires networking knowledge.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 00:52

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

hanyolo posted:

You just can't create a few VNICs and get the network guy to plug them into a switch in the future. A decent knowledge of MPLS, BGP, NAT, Filter based forwarding, etc. is going to be mandatory to get any SDN setup working.

It will be the opposite: the network guy will provision a port on the dvswitch and the VMware guy will connect it to his VM. Realistically, I would say the silos will continue breaking down and you'll end up with a WAN team and a datacenter team. The datacenter team will be a bunch of guys that specialized in all three disciplines important to virtualization: servers, switching, and storage.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 01:31

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Misogynist posted:

Do you see virtualization-focused datacenter teams continuing to exist as SDN continues to break down many of the barriers between physical DCs and cloud networks on EC2, GCE, DigitalOcean, etc.? With each round of pricing cuts to the major providers, running your own virtual infrastructure for these little app servers seems more and more like a losing proposition. Lots of shops are using cloud for DR already, so we're already seeing virtualization infrastructures for DR sites being outsourced.

I think the in house datacenter is dead for small organizations, but once you hit medium sized organizations the argument is not as easy to make. It's really the age old question -- will internal IT resources still be needed as outsourcing costs continue to drop? The answer, as it always has been, will be that it depends. Some businesses can tolerate the added risks with an outsourced infrastructure, some benefit from the agility it provides, and others simply aren't. For an organization that already has an infrastructure, it will take significant additional discounts to make the cost argument for a production site. DR sites will be easier to build in the cloud, but with most DR strategies you at least need similar storage hardware.

edit: also, building a datacenter and bringing in fiber is expensive. Even with an in house team, a lot of times it will be cheaper to rent Rackspace until you are of a certain size.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:31

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Misogynist posted:

While SDN on commodity boxes certainly doesn't perform as well as close-to-the-metal networking gear with finely tuned ASICs, I also don't know anyone who's very concerned about datacenter latency and still buying Cisco gear either.

We don't buy any of the top of the line cisco stuff. lower end layer two 10gbe switches, entry level poe switches for the access layer, etc.. We use ubiquity edgerouters and vyos (formally vyatta) heavily, putting cisco at layer 3 only where we already bought a branch router for voice.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:56

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

psydude posted:

I'm looking for a generic Powershell script to SSH into multiple *nix devices with multiple passwords and execute multiple bash commands. Anyone got one?

does it have to be powershell? putty has a scripting engine and can use keys.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 02:45

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

psydude posted:

I knew you could pass commands to plink from PS, but I didn't know that putty actually had a scripting engine of its own. I'll check it out.

I was pretty much referencing plink. I didn't mean to imply it was a powerful engine that could make decisions.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 02:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Old Man Pants posted:

You could get your company to move all this data from a stupid spreadsheet in 2014 to a real system, ticketing or otherwise?? this costs money they won't do it

I think he's looking for more specific suggestions here.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2014 13:46

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Ever tried dameware? I have found it to be between sccm and vnc in terms of usefulness.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2014 19:26

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 11:34

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

GreenNight posted:

I think Dameware is internal only, so basically worthless for outside workers unless they are connected to VPN.

He said he only has a handful of those laptops, it would be much cheaper to get an alternative software just for those devices with say, one concurrent license, and use something much less expensive for the bulk of the PCs connected to his LAN.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2014 20:15

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