Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

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

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

I'm getting a new teammember. His title is sysadmin, his role is the same as mine, sysadmin and desktop support.

I've never onboarded a new IT guy, I don't really know what to do with him when he arrives. I thought about giving him a list of projects that I haven't gotten around to starting, for him to have a whack at to help him learn our systems, give him something meaningful straight up, and tell me if he's any good.

I figure this would be a better start than what I got when I started, which was nothing at all.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 09:13

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 06:35

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Guys who listen to podcasts as they drive- any recommendations? Sysadmin focus?

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 12:13

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

You raised our hopes and dashed them quite expertly, sir!

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 08:25

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

So here's a different spin on the whole degree / certification thing: With the advent of free MOOC's like on Coursera, how valuable do you think certified specializations are, or will be?

There's a big idea* going around these days that coding is more of a trade than it is a profession, and these courses that teach you to code are the new tradeschool. (I'm simplifying a lot here).

How much cred will you get for a Coursera speciliasation or Udacity 'Nanodegree'? Depends on the employer. There would only be a very small percentage of employers who even know what a MOOC is. However it does demonstrate learning, which people look for.

I reckon MOOCs might take off. However I also think that the MOOCs of the future will be nothing like they are today.

For the record I am one week into the Coursera course "Web Application Architectures". So far I am not super impressed but it is early days.

*It rolls around on the silicon valley focused twitter feeds and blogs that I read. I never hear it mentioned in the *real world* that I actually live in.

Swink fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Aug 18, 2014

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 04:15

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

I'm being harsh. He seems to have a handle on the theory (which is the whole reason I'm taking it).

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 13:08

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

contract extended with 50% raise!

Starting to think you are a robot generated by the forum to offset all the negativity in these threads.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 23:30

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Chalets the Baka posted:

Right now we do patches manually after hours, which means RDP'ing into each machine and running Windows update.

Lol holy god.

Set up wsus and keep logging the extra hours.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 06:13

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

A longshot but does anyone have an recommendations for recruiters in Melbourne and surrounds?

# ¿ Oct 23, 2014 12:10

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Paladine_PSoT posted:

Is this the year we make "gently caress printers"?

What about just "gently caress you" and we can give them out to people who need to receive such a message.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 08:16

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Imagine how much more effective Google could be with people's medical record than your average hospital. Privacy concerns aside, there's data to be crunched in them thar hills.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 07:01

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

My printer issues are software related most of the time. Driver crashed, PDF doesnt print correctly, this webpage doesnt print like it looks on screen etc.

The hardware itself its tough as nails.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2015 23:14

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

'Paperless office' is on my bosses agenda for this year.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 00:29

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Tab8715 posted:

Eh,

Welcome to SharePoint

I wish our DMS was as usable as sharepoint.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 01:01

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Everyone will still print poo poo. What we're aiming for is no paper filing.

We have warehouses of documents in storage. People would still rather request from there and wait a week for arrival than just look at the electronic file in 5 seconds.

/Lawyers

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 01:22

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Lord Dudeguy posted:

Get multi-function printers (even better with print control/budgeting per dept), replace all fax machines and lines with eFax, and install Foxit Reader on every workstation you can see.

Double your file server and backup capacity. Get yourself document management that isn't Sharepoint.

They'll still print, but they'll print less when it becomes more of a hassle than going paperless.

done done and done. The big issue is our DMS which is not super user-friendly and requires good and ongoing training ("This is how and why you label and tag and categorise files").

Training is the answer to every problem in this place. We're just not good at delivering it.

adorai posted:

Our "paperless office" is really just not storing paper. Lots of people print, write on the paper, then scan it in and import it back into our document management system.

Obviously this is not the perfect Zero-Paper scenario, but it IS the scenario most likely to work. poo poo, even I still print things out and draw all over them.

Swink fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Feb 6, 2015

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 02:30

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Not having a laptop for a new hire is one of my biggest fears.

I always have two in reserve just in case HR decided to spring a new employee on me. It happens.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2015 22:09

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Does anyone work with Oneplace CRM? Can you tell me anything about it?

# ¿ Mar 7, 2015 08:41

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Voicemail is the worst.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2015 22:12

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

This is a ridiculous question in that I dont know what I'm asking, but here goes -

What is an API or RESTful API, when talking about web-based applications. Say for example, an app like Asana.com or even AWS. "API-Driven Cloud Services"

Is there somewhere I can learn to use them? I understand the concept of using curl to send json to a service, but not much more. How do I receive data?

Take this snippit from the Asana docs:

code:

# Request
curl -u <api_key>: [url]https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/users/me[/url]

# Response
HTTP/1.1 200
{"data":{"email":"sanchez@...","id":999,"name":"Greg Sanchez"}}

How do I capture the response?

edit - http://www.sitepoint.com/ruby-net-http-library/ this helped me a lot. I think I'm on track now.

Swink fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Mar 11, 2015

# ¿ Mar 11, 2015 07:40

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Methanar posted:

gently caress email jesus christ

Ask me how many blackilsts I've been on this year! :doh:

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 08:28

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

I've just spun up my first LAMP machine and I need to put it on the internet. Where can I get a good crash course in Apache/linux admin so I can be sure it is secure?

It's Ubuntu if that matters.

# ¿ May 1, 2015 09:45

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

They're renaming the IT Dept to 'devops'? Was that a serious post?

# ¿ May 6, 2015 11:27

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

How do you make a switch like that? All the AWS jobs around here want someone with demonstrated experience in ~-devops-~

# ¿ May 7, 2015 22:44

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Do you put your GitHub account on LinkedIn? Your resume?

...should I remove all the VBS from my account? :V

Ok so I should push my administration + scripting capabilities. Which are moderate. Cool.

# ¿ May 8, 2015 00:37

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Perhaps stack ranking in a viable alternative to having a perfect, competent middle management in a company of tens of thousands. That's a bit of a utopia.

# ¿ May 11, 2015 07:53

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

How do recruiting companies work? There are so many of them around here, how do I pick one? What if I pick Company A but my dream job is with Company B? Do I sign up with all of them or is that bad form?

# ¿ May 15, 2015 12:21

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

So should I just pick the biggest/most recognizable firm? There's a national one that has an office in my area. I guess I just need to walk in the door.

# ¿ May 15, 2015 13:25

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

NZAmoeba posted:

I'm interviewing candidates currently, and I can't help but feel bad for the people that want to have the kind of role we're hiring for (Ops team for a SaaS company), but only have experience in more traditional enterprise type environments.

You are describing and confirming the exact fear that keeps me up nights. The longer it takes me to break into that area, the harder it will be. And the less my current experience will matter.

Hire me in Melbourne NZAmoeba. I'll work first line, I dont care, I just gotta get in the door of that sweet Cloud Ops action.

Edit - oh god I checked your careers page and there's customer billing jobs with debt collection elements. I'm not sure I'm that desperate yet.

Swink fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Jun 1, 2015

# ¿ Jun 1, 2015 09:20

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Ages ago I posted how my request for a ticketing system and some semblance of order was denied.

Well, low and behold, the service quality of this department has gotten so poo poo that $manager has decided that a proper ticketing system is the way to go. Happy days.

I'm trialling Zendesk, which I like. Does anyone have advice for succesfully running a ticketing system for the IT department only. The default settings are very much slanted towards a million emails to customers for every update. At this stage we want to run it silently. Is it just going to be a lot of copying email bodies into the ticket body?

The workflow for issues right now is ten emails go back and forth between me and the user, once completed I either paste or write a summary of what occurred into the ticket comment and close it.

Is there a smarter way to do it?

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 08:25

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

My workplace has 150 staff in various locations. Our IT Support is completely unstructured. What are some tips to creating a highly effective support team?

Step 1 - Get Ticketing System.

Step 2 - ???

I have myself and one other guy to utilise. Should I just read that ITIL book?

Edit - I realise the answers can be unique to each workplace, I'm really looking for broad ideas that I can fit to apply to us.

Swink fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jun 22, 2015

# ¿ Jun 22, 2015 01:54

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Re ITIL. Thanks for the input. We've been 'support by email' forever so it'll be a bit of a process to transition to something structured.

Convincing management that it should be done is another hurdle, but luckily my colleague 'gets it' and we'll be able to run things how we like for the most part.

Those books look good. The high level plus the practical is exactly what I'll need.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2015 22:12

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Anyone else run Jive? God help me.

Also, Windows 10 on a Surface Pro makes the Surface Pro worth having.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2015 02:48

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

We plan to switch very (too) soon. Once all our software becomes supported.

We're currently on a 7/8.1 mix.

Obviously I want to wait 6+ months for patches and bugs to surface but my boss is fairly gung-ho about it.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2015 22:42

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

I'm not sure where else to ask this:

Is it normal practice to use Excel to query data straight from SQL tables for the purpose of analysis?

This is a situation where the application that creates the data has inadequate reporting features and I'm going in manually.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2015 09:01

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Toshimo posted:

Which is IT's greatest foe:

Sales

Marketing

HR

This is one of those great, unanswerable questions. Like a tree falling in the woods

# ¿ Dec 15, 2015 09:45

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

CLAM DOWN posted:

I'm on vacation until like Jan 6th, get owned

11th.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2015 23:48

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

Giant gently caress-off document. Ctrl-F to the topic you need

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 03:28

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

The other day a receptionist knowingly gave out of date information on making conference calls. The person came to me to decipher the instructions as they were for an entirely different phone system.

The receptionist knew they were out of date and the jury is out on whether she was too lazy to care or too dumb to think it would matter.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 11:38

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

6 months free pluralsite: http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/12/get-more-awesome-pluralsight-content.html?m=1

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 23:43

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 06:35

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

I'm a sysadmin with a static workload environment. My day to day job is to look after the Windows servers. Definitely pets, not cattle.

What skills would I need to hone to land a more interesting (to me) admin role in a DevOps environment? I'm aware of all the big name technologies like Chef, DSC, Vagrant etc and the big cloud vendors, the "configuration as code" idea. But I have very little practical experience with them, as zero experience in in production.

If I'm sitting across from a hiring manager, what do I need to do to convince him that I'm hireable?

Bonus question: What would I ask them about their workplace to ensure I wasn't walking into a "Devops" role that was really just another CJ role?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 03:20

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