Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

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Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Your debt-to-income ratio is going to look hilarious if you go to apply for a mortgage in the next few years.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 18:44

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 19:09

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

In reference to the initial question, you should never "count on" a bonus for the purposes of long-term financial planning. The company isn't contractually obligated to pay you anything at the end of the year. It's good to have, and spend it or invest it as you see fit, but don't stick the bonus into your mortgage budget unless it's for paying down extra principal.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2014 02:28

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Zero VGS posted:

Called back on that job offer and insisted on $70k base. They balked, I walked. They took the time to give me a lecture on how anyone who comes to work at a startup needs to prove themselves and I'm all like nigga please, do you think I'm fresh out of college? They just secured $25m in funding and work in Class A office space in the middle of Boston.

But I can't pretend I'm hot poo poo when I'm still making what I make here. Back to the job search I suppose. I'm gonna carve out a few hours each day for getting my CCNA, I can nail most questions except those loving subnetting calculations are the bane of my existence, I sucked at them 9 years ago when I was in the military's IT school and I still suck at them.

Like a startup with a $25m funding round is small enough to even have decent equity to give away to new hires. What do they have, 80-100 employees?

# ¿ Sep 4, 2014 15:50

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Does anyone have experience in human cloning, DNA replication, etc? I've got a new sys admin on my team, he's been here probably 3 months. I wish I could plant a whole field of him.

I'm thinking of holding a team meeting in which I scream "why aren't you Aaron" in everyone's face in turn.

DNA replication is a naturally-occurring process. It happens in all living things, in fact. To accomplish your specific objective, I think you just want to complete the breeding pair.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 05:11

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

A visual system like a board is neat because it forces you to limit the number of things that are in progress at a single time. I used to keep mine as a physical board in my office, so people could see everything that my team had to work on and were much more restrained when asking me for stupid poo poo.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2014 05:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Since I don't run a team anymore, mine is 36"x48", oriented vertically, and covered in masking tape and index cards. I use these insanely awesome magnets:

http://www.amazon.com/totalElement-Large-Magnetic-Push-Pins/dp/B00JU70360/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1410075803&sr=8-6&keywords=push+pin+magnets

Unlike those stupid push pin magnets that ThinkGeek or whoever sells, these will comfortably hold five or six index cards in a stack. The bottoms are also de-burred and slightly offset from the plastic so they remove easily and won't scratch the poo poo out of your board if you drag them around (though I still recommend lifting and placing, generally).

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Sep 7, 2014

# ¿ Sep 7, 2014 08:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Super Slash posted:

I live on a cramped bank of desks against a glass wall, so a whiteboard is out of the question. I sorta used Outlook tasks but it's way quicker to jot stuff down using windows sticky notes.

Can't you just use the glass wall?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2014 13:52

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Jeez, BGP whack-a-mole in the southeast US tonight.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 07:18

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

CLAM DOWN posted:

I was wondering what was going on.

From our own logs, it looks like Level3 was having major transit issues up and down the East Coast. Our server communications between datacenters in FL and GA and Amazon's us-east-1 were principally affected, but our user analytics suggest that we had a good amount of direct user impact as well.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 07:27

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

My hours over 40 are basically folded into my annual salary. *StArTuP LiFe*

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 17:38

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

myron cope posted:

Is there a difference between "CIO" and "CTO" or are they basically the same thing?

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-sanity-check/sanity-check-whats-the-difference-between-cio-and-cto/

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 00:16

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

HatfulOfHollow posted:

"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."

Constant updates are a waste of time, but if I've got a P1 incident open I expect an update every 2 hours on the outside.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 01:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sepist posted:

I was just in a meeting about traffic engineering that was spinning wheels so bad that I whiteboarded a spinning wheel

I'd be more concerned about non-moving wheels in traffic

# ¿ Sep 12, 2014 00:34

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

meanieface posted:

Edited to add content:
What do you goons do to stay in shape while you're sitting all day? Smash the gym before work? Get up and walk every so often? I'm exhausted when I get home now so my after work plan isn't working. I'd like some advice.

I work from home, so I bike around during lunch and use the elliptical when I can fit it in. Running's good if you have the knees for it.

I knew a guy who had bike pedals under his desk. That was kinda weird. Don't be him.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2014 18:06

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

dogstile posted:

Not got a location decided yet, either California somewhere or Boise in Idaho I think. This wouldn't be happening for around a year mind, but its exciting stuff. Especially as i'm one of five people who can do it. Right now i'm just getting buddy buddy with the VP, which is really cool. Spent a good three hours chatting to him today.

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

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 23:21

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hughmoris posted:

As an SQL novice, what are the chances that I'd accidentally write a query using READ-ONLY access and bring down the database? That was the reasoning I received today when I denied by our application manager, even when I told him it was the training database and not production. So, I've asked three different parties and have been stone-walled. Which sucks because I really want to become proficient in SQL to pick up a new skill, plus be more marketable. PLUS our entire team depends on two people for anything involving databases, HOSPITAL WIDE, and one of them is out for 2 weeks due to a medical issue.

At this point, I'm not going to push it. I realize this is a minor issue and I enjoy the people I work with but it is a bit annoying. I feel like they are stifling my professional growth. And at a certain point, that might become an incentive to look elsewhere.

What is a "training database," exactly?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 01:09

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Hughmoris posted:

My hospital has two environments, the live production environment with actual patients that all of the clinical staff works from. Then we have a testing/training database where we create patients and perform various testing. The test/train database is a mirror copy of the production environment, except its loaded with dummy patients. Feels like the perfect ground to learn how to write queries and reports that can be used in the production environment and be beneficial to the team.

I'm assuming you're American. If this is the case, it doesn't matter who's out sick or on vacation, you will never directly touch a database with patient data in it until you have the word "database" in your job title. The hospital is under extremely strict HIPAA regulations to restrict access to this data and audit that access regularly. It sucks, but there's good reasons for this.

Your description helps me understand the situation with the test database. The key part is that, even though this DB isn't in production, people need this up to get their job done. It sounds like if it needs to be restored from backup from any reason, people also lose work. These are the two situations that make DBAs paranoid. This is doubly true for the people who manage them.

It's not likely that you'll "bring down" the database, but you can cause some pretty serious performance problems if you don't know what you're doing and inadvertently trigger some full table scans or whatever. Even well-written queries can bring underpowered machines to their knees.

There's a couple of things you can do. The first is, if the database is something you can run on your own like SQL Server Express or whatever, see if you can get a dump of the dev database to import into your own SQL Server Express/Oracle Express instance, running on your own personal computer, in exchange for buying a DBA lunch or something. That won't screw anything up, and you'll have all the write access you want. You can also try to make nice with the DBAs at a personal level, and approach them from a mentor/pupil perspective, rather than being all gung-ho about "give me access for no reason."

You seem really excited about learning this stuff, and that's awesome, but you're doing it in an environment where people's lives literally depend on system availability, even for test systems. That's going to impact the ways that you're going to be exposed to new technology. You'll need to either make up the difference on your own, or find something else to become invested in that the hospital system is okay with letting you have access to (say, their HIPAA information security guidelines).

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Sep 17, 2014

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 01:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Ideally, I think this would work however don't you have to have extremely low latency for authentication? < 30ms?

LAN -> WAN -> Hardware VPN -> Internet -> Cloud Service

It's going to depend on your application, but as a general rule, no. The network is the network. Your clocks need to be synchronized within ~5m or cryptography doesn't work.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 19:58

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Ah, so you'd have to have your on-prem environment sync'd to whatever your cloud service timing is set to.

which is usually "the time it is"

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 20:37

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

I thought it had to be literally exact, the slightest amount of clock drift will potentially break everything. Or is there a little leeway?

Any distributed system that relies on event ordering shouldn't be using system clocks, which drift and can't be trusted to be accurate. Instead, they should be using something like Lamport timestamps or vector clocks, where causality and ordering are built into the system instead of being an incidental property of the environment they run in.

Cryptographically speaking, you could certainly build a system that requires less than five minutes of accuracy between two hosts; five minutes is a sane default and there's very little reason to change it.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Sep 17, 2014

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 23:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

hackedaccount posted:

Gonna ask here too: How do you guys keep up on cutting-edge'ish technologies? Not learning them, but just hearing about them. I got into OpenStack in early 2012 so it wasn't exactly ground floor but it was fairly early. Right now I'm getting into Mesos and evidently it's been around for several years, I had no idea.

Are there specific news sites that cover stuff like this? Certain people on Twitter? How do you guys hear about new up and coming open source projects?

Most of the really bleeding-edge stuff (and Mesos definitely counts) is covered exhaustively at conferences and not many other places. Check the itineraries for Velocity, LISA, SCALE, Monitorama, PuppetConf, ChefConf, DockerCon, etc. and try to grab slide decks and video afterwards.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 16:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

I still read slashdot, and hackernews (though hackernews is a cesspool full of garbage projects, self-aggrandizing, and people who've never worked on major projects, some good stuff and general industry trends floats up out of there every once in a while), r/python, conferences, user groups. I also unironically learn about a lot of things when people file RFEs requesting support for them or messages to mailing lists announcing that they've added support for openstack/ovirt to ${some_project} I've never heard of.

Large projects are just startups that didn't exit fast enough :smug:

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 18:07

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Does anyone know of any Pastebin/Gist-type sites which allow you to annotate or mark up lines of text like a code review tool (or like RapGenius or Medium or whatever)? I need to mark up some JSON, but JSON doesn't support comments and I'm also completely anal-retentive.

First person to suggest Google Docs gets a free punch in the mouth.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 20:19

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

demonicon posted:

If you want to tell someone his json doesn't fit what you told him to do, best is to shoot an email.

It's my own JSON, for consumption by others. Email's not the best medium, sadly.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 22:25

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Zero VGS posted:

Hey, my old boss is fine having me on as a contractor, but neither he nor I know what's involved for me to properly work out a contract and invoice the company. Is there a good primer you guys would recommend for that?

Talk to a tax attorney about your obligations, because there are very specific IRS requirements regarding quarterly tax estimation as a 1099 contractor. The contract can say whatever you want and you might want it reviewed by a lawyer either way; just remember when writing that a good contract is supposed to be equitable and fair for all parties involved. Invoicing is super-easy with the right software; FreshBooks is free if you have three or fewer saved clients.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2014 21:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Speaking of IT Stereotypes has seen a coming occurrence of no helmets or seat-belt use?

Another thing that has boggled my mind from day one...

I don't wear a helmet in my car or a seatbelt on my bike. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2014 06:10

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

Honestly since my job is at a desk staring at a screen all day, the last thing I want to do when I get home is sit at another desk in front of another screen.

I've been thinking about getting a clone

Edit: haha xbone autocorrected to clone. I'll take one of those too.

Edit 2: case in point - I don't even browse the forums on my home computer.

Try working from home. I switched out video games for books because there is no escaping that radiant glow.

e: last night I spent 30 minutes on the elliptical while watching conference videos though

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Sep 26, 2014

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 02:02

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Methanar posted:

If everybody is rich, nobody is.

lol if you actually believe this is true

# ¿ Sep 27, 2014 00:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FISHMANPET posted:

Looking at it another way, if I need to make a warranty claim, I chat with Dell rather than calling, because it's easier for me and gets a resolution faster. I could call and get that personal contact but it would be a longer process for me and it would interrupt the rest of my work. And I would think that when choosing between a fast resolution and human contact, most people would choose fast resolution, but maybe not.

Regardless of technical acumen, the person on the other end of the issue doesn't see or doesn't internalize the relationship between the human contact and the time to resolution. They see that someone appears to be working on their issue, or that nobody appears to be working on their issue.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2014 19:07

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

skipdogg posted:

There is a lot to be said about positive face time in the corporate world. I know it's hard for some people to wrap their head around, but it is important and does have it's place.

A co-worker of mine, a very smart and capable person was asked by his manager to take some time every morning and just walk around the building and see how people were doing. He's a great employee but he sits in the office with his door closed and does his work. He had a perception of being very standoffish and unfriendly to many folks in the building. The fact is he is not standoffish or unfriendly, he just likes to get his work done in quiet without interruption when possible.

This book really needs to be on the mandatory reading list for the American business world.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2014 23:22

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:

Our director, though, I thought it was just me...she is actually very qualified to do what she does, holds at least a couple masters. She's acted as the companies interim CIO several times in the past, and also was considered for the position once but lost it to another person. When she was moved out of her role, our new CIO presented her to the unified organization. The first thing out of his mouth was that she is a nice person, and because she is personable she has been placed as director of technical support. Prior to all this she was infrastructure, network, and support. Anyway, it seems sexist. Everyone else that was introduced was a man, and they went over their technical qualifications and past experience. I thought it was sort of just me, but I mentioned it in passing to a few people, and a lot of people feel the same way.

This is frighteningly common in the business world. Men receive critical feedback about the presence or absence of certain skills, while women are reprimanded for "personality flaws". Then, 92% of people Ashe Dryden surveyed who reported sexual harassment or assault in the workplace were fired within 90 days.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Oct 3, 2014

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 03:06

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FISHMANPET posted:

I have no doubt they would love it. They'd also love it if their meal was free, but that doesn't mean they should do it. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. And I'm sure at least one person would say "hey why aren't you cooking my meal instead of telling me it's going to take longer?"

It's quite likely a political play. This is a great thing to do when you're trying to jockey for more headcount. It makes your department look good, builds rapport across the organization and slows things down just enough to justify bringing more people in the door.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 04:30

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tell him you only use Energy Star-certified printers and be done with it.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2014 14:58

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

psydude posted:

Interesting. I knew that making decisions based upon marital status/kids was illegal, but I didn't know it was illegal to ask about.

The law presumes that anything you ask about in an interview is for the purposes of making a decision on whether to hire a candidate, so conduct your interviews appropriately.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2014 19:39

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

adorai posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 01:35

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

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.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:51

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Eh, how are you going to prove the a company did whatever?

He said this! No we didn't!

The accuser subpoenas the company for information on their interview training programs, and the interviewer's involvement in them. If there's insufficient proof that the interviewer has proper legal grounding in the matter, the accuser has a good chance of winning in court. It's a major reason we have those stupid quiz based programs in so many companies.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 21:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Che Delilas posted:

"Updates help prevent things like Shellshock."

Judging by some of the panic reactions of executives that some people in here wrote about, that might be all you have to say.

Cryptolocker.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2014 03:08

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

If you have a decent imaging infrastructure, you don't have to worry about breakages from patching right away because rolback becomes trivial. :eng101:

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 15:21

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 19:09

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Dark Helmut posted:

A CtH is just a different way for companies to onboard a full time resource, similar to buying a car with cash up front or making payments (6 month contract to hire).

I'd love to know which companies you work with that pay their FTEs' entire annual salary up front :yum:

# ¿ Oct 17, 2014 22:56

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

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