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Particularly as they've waited until a few hours before the event to line this up. Planning, what's that?
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May 7, 2018 17:48
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Thanks Ants posted:I like "The No rear end in a top hat Rule" I read this book and I was really disappointed by it. It's a few pieces of advice that I can almost guarantee you already know, wrapped in 200 pages of "I'm saying 'rear end in a top hat' in a business book! Look how transgressive and funny I am." Here, let me help you skip reading it by dispensing the advice myself: 1. You're probably a dick at work sometimes, and you should stop. Monitor your own behavior to make sure you're not the one being a dick. 2. When someone else is a dick at work, try to tune it out until you leave for a new job. There! I saved you $15, which is the price that Amazon has the nerve to charge for this piece of poo poo. This and Throwing The Elephant by Stanley Bing come up as recommendations now and again, and they are both garbage containing virtually no actionable advice, I wish I hadn't bought them and you shouldn't either.
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May 21, 2018 12:02
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Vulture Culture posted:Hey, let's cement all our career cynicism in eponymous laws! Examples: My big one, which I guess is Guppy's Law: All temporary fixes become permanent installations. I refuse to do horrible temporary Band-Aids unless my boss insists, because they never, ever get corrected to the un-horrible thing they should have been in the first place.
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May 21, 2018 21:31
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DropsySufferer posted:I'll assume there must be a few experts here on microwave relays. My company has them in use in one of our sites. Due to due legal reasons ( a former employee fell off the roof). I'm not allowed to personally go up and deal with them. Nothing about this post suggests your company will blame you or give you a hard time about this. Do you have some other reason that you think you will be blamed, or is this simple paranoia?
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Jun 3, 2018 11:24
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone able to explain outsourcing? And explain it well? With the caveat that I'm not a management expert, I see three main reasons to do it: 1. The thing you're outsourcing is simple and it's cheaper to hire someone else to do it. This is the one organizations usually screw up: the task isn't that simple, or they cheap out so much that they don't have competent people doing that work. Outsourced phone support is the classic example. I've also seen absolutely terrible outsourced internal helpdesks, where end user support is handled by an outside firm even though everything else is in-house. 2. The organization is too small to have full-time staff doing the thing you're outsourcing. An old friend works for a small family accounting firm. They outsource any IT more complicated than "install a printer" or "add a user," which is just done by one specific employee who also has other duties, because they don't need much and they can't really afford dedicated IT staff. 3. You need subject matter expertise in a specific thing, quickly, and no one in-house has it, and you don't expect to need the expertise going forward. We brought in a consulting engineer to design our VoIP system from the ground up, because no one on staff had the expertise to do it. The engineer is fantastic, but after roll-out completion, they're off to their next project. I agree that usually it's a terrible decision done as a cost-savings measure. The outsourced staff don't have any investment in the mission of the organization, their management will make them do the bare minimum to satisfy the contract because it means more money in their pocket personally, and because you don't control them directly, making changes or fixing problems becomes a pain in the rear end. Outsourcing also often winds up being more expensive overall, not less.
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Jun 4, 2018 11:05
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Already holding a clearance is really valuable, getting someone cleared is extremely expensive and takes forever. I don't work in that sector but IIRC Sec+ is mandatory for DoD stuff so hopefully you shouldn't have too much difficulty. Good luck
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Jul 2, 2018 21:39
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dogstile posted:"I can't send anything out! It must be the network" - App guy I'm a network guy and this kind of interaction drives me insane. Nobody else understands networks at even the most rudimentary level but rushes to blame the network for anything and everything. No we didn't try replacing the patch cable ugh why are you network guys always trying to avoid doing any work??
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Jul 4, 2018 00:34
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adorai posted:I am no longer "a network guy" but I am still pretty adept at the art of proving it's not the network. Just accept you gotta do it every time there is a problem, life becomes less frustrating. We do our best. But it's hard to prove that to people who don't understand the proof.
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Jul 4, 2018 16:31
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LochNessMonster posted:It also leads to people dodging difficult tickets, or closing them quickly and tell users it’s solved and if it occurs again to open a new ticket. Yeah I think tickets as performance metric are way too easy to game. I get that ticketing is necessary for issue tracking, but it's a poor metric for performance. There is really no substitute for a manager who is actually close enough to the work to know what's going on. It's even more fun when they want to use tickets as a metric to compare groups that work very differently. This happened to me once because the helpdesk insisted, and we absolutely buried them because we had a ton of tiny little things we did all the time and, since they insisted, we started making tickets for all of them. When ticket count is the only metric it doesn't matter if the ticket takes 15 seconds to complete, it gets counted just like any other. It's not that we were better or more hardworking, it's that it's much too crude a method to measure what people always try to use it for.
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Jul 12, 2018 19:01
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Thanatosian posted:Now that I'm in a job that uses a ticketing system, I never want to go back. I can't count the number of times I've saved my own rear end because I had an issue six months ago that I didn't remember, but went back and looked through my own tickets, discovered I'd already fixed it, and written down exactly what I needed to do to do so. It's also really good for keeping me from letting things fall through the cracks. I have never really had any kind of knowledge base or ticket database that had a useful way to search for old solutions. Maybe if you happen to remember who the contact was you could locate it. No one ever maintains actual knowledge base products. To be honest the most effective knowledge base I've ever used is the the ol' "bunch of .txt or .doc files with descriptive names in well-organized folders."
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Jul 12, 2018 20:52
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Krispy Wafer posted:No. You assume it's the network and then require them to prove a negative. We have this problem too. It's even worse when wireless enters the picture. Just try convincing other groups that the wireless network itself isn't the cause of their wireless connectivity problem.
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Jul 13, 2018 21:28
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LionYeti posted:Anyone here work in an HP shop specifically one where its mostly laptops and docks? I'm looking to try to convince people to switch because Dells been really lovely besides the overcharge monitor thing. I've worked with both and I preferred Dell's build quality and serviceability.
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Jul 19, 2018 01:13
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Super Soaker Party! posted:Hey has anyone said DON'T DATE ROBOTS yet? Oops, I mean DON'T USE UNIFI! I have never used Ubiquiti anything -- and I don't plan to as we have heavy-duty wireless needs -- but I have seen a ton of people talking about how great they are and then, like, three people who say their products are garbage and the company is a house of cards on the verge of collapse. None of the latter ever really get into why. What is it about their kit that people have problems with?
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Jul 19, 2018 21:38
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Rexxed posted:All of these practical solutions are terrible. That developer needs a Tesla power wall. The real solution is probably automatic generator failover and a small UPS to make sure it doesn't lose power when the generator trips. I don't think that's happening but off the top of my head that's my first thought.
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Aug 3, 2018 10:49
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Sepist posted:Lmbo We have lots of wireless complaints as well. It's a software issue on specific devices, not the wireless network, but it is very hard to convince people of that because it's hard to get meaningful numbers for wifi that people understand. How's the signal strength? Well, it depends. I can give you the RSSI but it's not going to tell you the whole story. I can show you that this laptop has a full signal meter but that's definitely not going to tell you the whole story.
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Aug 9, 2018 11:18
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It's also infuriating because even though you know the vendor is lying, calling them liars to their faces is unprofessional. They know this and rely on it. We have similar issues with some internal departments.
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Aug 11, 2018 12:59
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SamDabbers posted:vi is worth learning because it's part of every single *nix implementation out there. My day job is to support a unix app running on mainframes, and the z/OS unix subsystem only implements XPG4 UNIX 95, so vi is the best unix-native editor on the platform without installing a 3rd party port of something newer. I'm sure other commercial unixes are similar. Yeah, this is why Van Vugt teaches it as well. It's the only thing you're absolutely guaranteed to have so you'd better know the basics at least, in case you have to use it.
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Aug 12, 2018 22:07
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Am I about to get fired for not working on my day off? Do you report to this guy?
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Aug 18, 2018 11:27
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Zapf Dingbat posted:So what do you guys do if a customer wants a fax ITYOOL 2018? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something but would an ATA not solve your problem, assuming I'm understanding correctly that you are in a VoIP environment? Cisco makes them and I assume others do. EDIT: On a reread it sounds like you're aware but they don't work reliably? That sounds like it might be a cabling issue, I know ours (Cisco) do not like Cat5 and do not like lines that don't meet spec even if they function on less sensitive devices. If the lines are 5e or better and pass certification you shouldn't have a problem. guppy fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Aug 21, 2018 |
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Aug 21, 2018 22:00
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Zapf Dingbat posted:Pass certification? How does one do that. Yeah I get it there's no way that company has a cable certifier. (Although maybe yours should.) But our ATAs work reliably enough that I would almost be comfortable enough just based on their failure to tell the customer that the issue is the physical plant for their network. Anyway my point isn't so much that you should test their cabling as that ATAs are reliable devices. guppy fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 10:26
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Can anyone recommend some resources for learning more about wireless troubleshooting? I don't actually have a wireless issue, I have a helpdesk and helpdesk management issue where the helpdesk refuses to admit that the wireless network is fine and they have a software problem. My approach so far has been "Look, I put six devices on the wifi network and they've been streaming video for an hour without a hiccup," but I really need something more concrete and RSSI/SNR isn't a full enough picture. I think the best approach would be to demonstrate the specific reason why a user station loses connectivity; I'm open to books on the subject, software tools, hardware tools, whatever. I looked at Wireshark, but I will mostly be able to use Windows machines for this and the documentation suggests that I probably won't be able to put the wireless adapter on my laptop into promiscuous mode, and I don't know if packet analysis is even the way to go. The wireless vendor control panel does include a client monitor but its results are in what I would describe as broken English and I find it very hard to interpret; for example, does "(user station) is de-authenticated because of notification of driver" actually point to a client driver issue, or is it just written poorly?
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Aug 28, 2018 12:08
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Definitely enterprise level, and we do not share space with anyone. All devices experiencing issues are laptops -- desktops are wired -- and are mostly the same model, and they do not need to be moving to experience this issue. I have full access to the infrastructure so that's not a problem. The specific issue is that these devices will associate with the AP, everything will work for a while, and then the client will stop sending and receiving data. Visually it doesn't appear to dissociate from the AP, just goes to "limited connectivity." I'm usually not there when it happens so it's hard for me to get additional data from the client machine. I'll take a look at that link and follow up on the other suggestions, thanks. There's no on-site controller, it's an Aerohive solution and they report back to a central server that's not on site. (They don't actually need to be able to communicate with the server to work, although they should always be able to if there's not a network problem preventing it, it's just how you monitor them and apply configurations and updates.)
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Aug 28, 2018 13:04
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I am Communist posted:This isn't all inclusive but depending on what tools you have you can provide multiple data points to prove "its not my poo poo". In my environment I have office space, stores, warehouses, and manufacturing as well as hospitality with both indoor and outdoor wireless. So you know I have to hammer poo poo down. I always look at the weakest device as well as their capabilities. A hand scanner might not have as much TX power as say a laptop or other device. 2.4Ghz vs 5GHz capability and what devices prefer also has hosed me in the past. In any case I have to treat all issues equally as wireless is treated like a god-given right. In any case, I've seen odd things and its not all true in all cases. Thanks, this is very thorough. I think I have already done most of this (and some of it doesn't apply, like there's no WLC) but I'll dig in and make sure I haven't missed anything.
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Aug 28, 2018 20:27
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I don't know what the job market is like there but to me that looks like a job that should pay at least double what you were being paid.
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Aug 31, 2018 11:39
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I don't really have a problem with normal coarse-thread rack screws, but -- and I'm surprised this hasn't come up already this go-round -- for those quick racks with cage nuts, take a look at RackStuds instead: https://rackstuds.com/ Besides not hurting your thumbs when installing, it makes it way easier to install when it's just you installing by yourself because you can put them in and then just hang the gear on it before putting the caps on.
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Sep 11, 2018 11:49
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Matt Zerella posted:Being unemployed does not make you a bad person. I understand taking a bad fit for yourself if you need the money but don't guilt yourself into a bad situation because of ridiculous capitalist talking points meant to shame you into selling your labor at a reduced price. I agree that being unemployed doesn't make you a bad person, but at some point I do think a sufficiently long stretch of unemployment can affect your hireability.
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Sep 15, 2018 15:08
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uhhhhahhhhohahhh posted:You wouldn't believe the amount of CCNAs i've interviewed who don't know how to make a serial connection in Putty Are these people who claim to have experience? Not being able to make a serial connection in PuTTY is a bit odd, since it consists entirely of clicking "Serial." CCNA students are often using something like Packet Tracer though, where they don't use a "real" terminal emulator at all, they just double-click on the device they want to access. If you put them in front of a PuTTY window I'd hope they could figure it out. The lack of real-world stuff in the CCNA is its biggest problem. If you put someone with perfect knowledge of the CCNA curriculum and zero experience in a room with boxes of gear and told them to build the site's network they'd be completely lost at even the physical side of things, like racking gear or stacking switches. I don't know if any networking vendor offers a certification that covers that stuff, it's all stuff I was taught on the job.
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Sep 16, 2018 02:23
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Agrikk posted:Serious question: what would you use instead? There are plenty of options. I don't really care for PuTTY but I've still used it plenty. For quick one-off stuff I've used PuTTY, TeraTerm, and built-in Windows telnet/ssh clients on Windows, and screen on OS X and Linux. I used minicom once on Linux too. On Windows I actually prefer TeraTerm. For heavier-weight stuff it's nice to have something that lets you store all your hosts and manage credentials. I've used Royal for that, it's nice in a lot of ways and lets you store connections besides plain terminals, like RDP. I hate its PuTTY plugin, because it doesn't give the certificate warning window focus, which is infuriating because I have to click it with a mouse, taking my hands off the keyboard. Royal is janky in other ways too but overall it's a nice thing to have. It supports tabs etc. as well. I've seen people here rave about SecureCRT but it seems awfully expensive for what it is. I haven't tried it myself. Friends of mine speak highly of terminator and cmder.
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Sep 16, 2018 11:28
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dox posted:even the netengs can push everything through ansible This is absolute nonsense. I like automation as much as the next guy but sometimes you need to dig into a switch and find out why something is happening. You can't automate troubleshooting.
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Sep 17, 2018 11:38
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Assuming you don't want to do side work, the best way to handle coworkers hitting you up for free tech support for personal stuff is to have someone else specific to refer them to. "Oh, I don't really do side work, but there's this guy Mike who works at XYZ Computers in (nearby neighborhood), he's who I refer people to." Often it's less about not wanting to pay for it and more about not knowing a trustworthy repair shop; in all my desktop support time I don't think I ever had anyone come back to me after that because they wanted me to do it for free instead. I generally didn't do side work then and I don't know, but there were a few people who were super nice and I didn't mind helping them now and then.
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Sep 18, 2018 02:41
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Taking something down by accident is going to happen once in a while. People will rib you about it but everyone knows people make mistakes. We would much rather you just immediately own up to it than waste everyone's time trying to figure out what happened. Nothing to be ashamed of in a healthy work culture as long as you're not breaking stuff all the time.
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Sep 20, 2018 22:00
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Certainly you can dig through forum posts or whatever and probably find your solution but often you have other things to do that require attention, and that time would be better spent doing those things while the support you pay for figures out what caused the weird thing you ran into. It's not a substitute for someone who knows what they're doing but it's not without value. You could try to pull this "you don't need support!" crap with literally any vendor but sometimes it's nice to be able to just ask the people who eat, sleep, and breathe the product.
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Sep 26, 2018 03:02
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GreenNight posted:There are books that can help with that. It's tough not to be condescending sometimes and it's a skill that can be harder to learn for some. I find it easier to just keep my mouth shut. I have never seen a book on this that was any help whatsoever because to implement any advice from the book the necessary "took a deep breath, thought about what to do" must be done already, and if you did that you've already calmed yourself down. I don't scream at people or anything but I also find it exasperating when someone else in IT who doesn't feel like doing their job creates work for me, which is happening a lot right now. I am handling it by: - Doing everything about a sensitive subject in writing, so there is a paper trail - Never writing anything in an email that I would be uncomfortable with getting out - CC'ing management (this is only helpful if your management is good) - Forcing myself to consider the political ramifications of these emails and re-reading them a few times before sending them - When I think "maybe I shouldn't send this," always, ALWAYS choosing not to send it - Accepting that sometimes my time is going to be wasted and that's just life in IT I am going to be making a site visit this morning for a very stupid issue where the person escalating it to me did zero thinking and should have been able to solve it on their own. I drafted a couple of emails to him asking for information that he should have provided upfront (pro tip: draft your emails without anything in the To: field so that you can't accidentally hit Send on something you shouldn't), but couldn't get the tone right and ultimately decided that this ticket is for a VIP user and it will be better if I just go deal with it rather than taking the time for a Teachable Moment. I should not have to make this visit and frankly don't really have the time this morning, but it's the smart move. I will talk to his supervisor later so that he can be taught how to handle this properly. In general, satisfying as it is to go the other way on this stuff, as you said, it does you zero favors. Being nice to people generally pays better dividends and you can trade on your reputation as a level-headed person later.
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Oct 16, 2018 11:20
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I know we had a similar talk not too long ago, either in this thread or one of the other ones, but I have some slight differences in what I'm looking for. I mostly work in Windows, but I'm also occasionally working out of an Ubuntu environment (18.04, Gnome) and don't know the available tools as well. I deal mostly with switches and am looking for suggestions for a decent ssh/telnet client. I am fully aware of the standard CLI ones and I can use them fine and they'll do in a pinch, but I am after something at least a little more feature-rich. The biggest thing I want is host history that persists past the end of a Terminal session or a reboot. It would also be nice to have color customization independent of Terminal. I would like it to be free and I don't care for PuTTY. I've asked a few people for recommendations and they mostly recommended just using stock ssh with some shell modifications, like bash-completion, which I don't think is going to work for me. For one thing, I am very mobile and am generally on a laptop and not in the same place all day. If exiting terminal or shutting down my computer kills my host history then a lot of the utility is gone. For another, I don't want my host history mixed in with my other terminal commands. Even better would be something like Royal TS, where I could maintain a list of hosts permanently and just organize them by folder and choose them from a list. But that's probably too much to ask for something free. (There is no Linux port of Royal, and Royal itself is not free past a few hosts.) I have been pointed to terminator, and that may well be the answer, but I would be interested to know if anyone has anything else to recommend.
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Oct 19, 2018 00:41
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We are having some truly insane connectivity issues and they are almost certainly not the same but I am very interested to know what the cause of his were.
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Oct 25, 2018 10:28
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If I remember correctly Cisco's Call Manager (VoIP) runs on CentOS.
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Oct 30, 2018 11:37
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Tetramin posted:Do Cisco cordless phones usually need local DHCP to connect properly to wireless? Spent like 6 hours with TAC wondering why DHCP requests were stuck sending requests over and over until I changed it to local instead of our centralized server. The centralized configuration works at a bunch of other sites so I’m at a complete loss. I am very tired just now and maybe this is a stupid question but do you have the DHCP options (Option 150, e.g.) for this subnet properly set on the central scope? I'm assuming the scope was actually created there. guppy fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 03:15
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I'm having a little trouble parsing that, but am I understanding correctly that you're worried about hitting underground utilities while burying fiber? Yeah, uh, you should be. You really want to get a private locate service to mark them out. I think one might be legally required, not sure if that's jurisdictional, but it would also just be insane not to. You do not want to hit a gas main. Your facilities people may also have maps showing existing services but you should still have it checked and marked out.
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Dec 10, 2018 12:52
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angry armadillo posted:The real question is: Maybe it's because I'm American but I am having a ton of trouble parsing these posts. What exactly is going on and what do you mean by duct? Did you bury some kind of non-rigid conduit? What caused it to collapse? Typically we would pay a contractor for new fiber to be run and we would pay for (metal) conduit to be buried. We would manage the contractor and make sure that everything is up to code and done properly. If your facilities people have the expertise to bury conduit and run and terminate fiber, great, they can do it, but my experience has been that a specialized contractor is better suited to that kind of work. And if I'm paying for it I want to be the one handling the contract, because I don't think people in other fields are likely to have the expertise required to know best practices. This is of course assuming that you do have that expertise, otherwise it doesn't much matter. If I had some kind of failure with that conduit or that fiber, I would expect to pay for it to be replaced, unless the facilities people caused it to fail, either by performing the original work poorly or by doing something unrelated that caused the failure, in which case I would expect them to pay for it. The cost of a private locate is part of the cost of installation and I would expect to pay for that too. Your organization may be different from mine but we generally manage structured data cabling from end to end. If data cabling is the province of facilities in your organization then of course they'd be responsible for it.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:16
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Awful CompSloth posted:Anyone have any advice any sort of experience or training outside of college? I've tried some classes but they're not very hands on and I feel like I haven't learned much at all from them. Any sort of program, class or internship where I could anything even slightly better than these classes. I go to the local community college and it just seems overall pretty low quality, but I'm not sure there's much else nearby that I can afford and get in to. Can you elaborate on what sort of experience or training you're looking for? Desktop support, networking, security, etc.? What don't you like about the classes that you're taking? What classes are you taking? Volunteering (at a school, at a nonprofit, etc.) can be a helpful way to get some experience. Unfortunately being able to afford to work for free is a pretty sharp class divide. There are non-matriculated certification classes, like for A+, Network+, CCNA, etc. They aren't all 5-day bootcamps or whatever, sometimes they're once or twice a week or whatever. They are, however, often expensive. Getting more detailed will depend on some more information on what exactly you're trying to accomplish.
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Dec 15, 2018 12:31
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