Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron - The Something Awful Forums

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

I want a thread where I can complain about all my small-time problems without people laughing at me for not having a 3par in my data center. How about a thread for IT people in environments of under 100 users / under 5 IT staff?

You really shouldn't be sad that you don't have any 3par equipment :smuggo:

:smuggo:

# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 22:50

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:35

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Swink posted:

Turn your phone off. gently caress me.

Shouldn't I at least buy you dinner first?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 05:45

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

skipdogg posted:

Dell, HP, Lenovo and other business orientated hardware sellers offer onsite support for their products. We buy ProSupport and Accident coverage. If a screen breaks, a motherboard dies, a hard drive fails they will either ship me the replacement part, or send a local technician to replace the part for me. If a 2 year old Dell battery dies, I just order a new one and plop it right in.

IBM provides onsite repair services for macs now that it's best friends with Apple.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 15:56

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

do you have more info on this pls

I know it's called Apple Care for Enterprise, and that's about it. Whatever IBM business partner you work with knows all about it I'm sure.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 16:59

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

redeyes posted:

In any case I HATE new apple stuff because of all the loving glue/tape they use instead of screws. Makes doing stuff a million times harder than it needs to be. I suppose the upside is you get to be an expert with a heat gun.

If you're using a heat gun, you're doing it wrong... what components are you heat gunning?

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 16:57

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Crowley posted:

probably broken iPad displays. Personally I stuff them in the oven instead.

Ah, I was thinking more iMac display issues. I (luckily?) don't have to take apart any of the mobile devices.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 18:25

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

redeyes posted:

Upgrade from Windows 7/8 which is activated and done.

Seriously, this.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2016 16:07

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

GigaFuzz posted:

I feel like I could use a sanity check, and this seems an appropriate place to ask.

We're a small office of ~10 people. We have one physical server: a pretty basic Dell T320 (Xeon E5 2407, 8GB RAM, PERC S110 software RAID controller with 2x 1TB 7.2k SATA drives in RAID1) running Server 2012 R2 Essentials (on bare metal, not a VM). It's serving as a DC, DHCP, file server, print server (2 printers), WSUS and occasionally MDT. It's mostly ticking along just fine, apart from 2 problems: we're running out of space, and the performance of the OS is slow as hell (using Remote Desktop and the various admin tools feels worse than an old slow laptop drive), though accessing shared files from client computers seems fine. I know that the software RAID is no good, but I didn't expect it to bog down so much with a simple RAID1.

At the very least we need new some hard drives, but we have some downtime coming up during an office move and I figured it would be worth upgrading to a proper RAID controller and reconfigure the server, possibly virtualising it. Does the following seem sensible?

Backup (and test!) current server

Buy and install a PERC H710 RAID controller

Create RAID1 of current 2x 1TB drives [OS]

Create a second RAID1 of 2x 4TB WD Red drives [Storage]

Install Hyper-V Server on the OS array

Create a VM on the OS array, and restore backup to it

Create virtual disk on the Storage array and then move the file server data to that

This would then allow the option of running additional VMs as necessary down the line, migrating to Server Standard rather than Essentials for example (we're a charity and have access to cheap copies of Windows Server and related CALs).

I'm new to virtualising servers, and am trying not to do anything dumb and stick to best practices (without spending too much on hardware). Am I on the right track?

I'd be more inclined to blame the fact that system only has 8GB of memory. Also I'm not super savvy on Dell's RAID controller offerings, but you'll notice a world of difference if you can get a controller with read/write caching. Aside from that your list looks pretty fair.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 15:55

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

I want a rock solid, Just Works solution that I can sell to clients that doesn't involve relying on anything premise based. Oh and it still needs to look like a file system they're used to.

I've worked for An Enterprise that used Box to great success. They're aggressively courting business users. I'm also currently demoing Citrix Sharefile, which also looks very slick. Sharefile in particular gives you incredible control over where data can and cannot live (on prem, in the cloud, on local machines, etc).

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 18:22

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

Did Your Enterprise really use Box as a full file server replacement?

I do need to look at Box and ShareFile, two things I've heard a lot and haven't investigated

It was a highly distributed division of the company and there was no file sharing infrastructure to begin with. So it wasn't so much a file server replacement as a rollout. But yes, national company you have definitely, definitely heard of. Box Enterprise worked really well.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 23:52

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

Oh hey I figure I should share here. I've collected various powershell scripts for password notification management.

Do people pay attention to password change notification emails any more than they do to the two weeks of tooltip notifications?

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 18:43

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

- MFA solution. Duo.
- SSO. Otka?
- Password management. I feel like Dashlane is the new darling these days. Something to let all your marketing people share the twitter password. I use the non-subscription 1password personally.

We just priced Okta and HOLY BALLS is it expensive to scale. We're around 5k users and it would have been US$135k annually. That's why small shops don't have it.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2017 00:54

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

Says on the web site it's $2/user/mo for SSO? Throw in MFA and it's $5/user/mo? So for a 40 person org it's $2400/yr not too bad.

We also quoted support and some partner integrations, I can't remember what the price per seat wound up being, I just remember it was high enough that we basically had to stop right there.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2017 04:08

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

sneakyfrog posted:

even hitler wouldnt deploy sharepoint.

We all know Hitler is an IBM customer. He'd use Notes databases and Connections.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 15:52

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Happiness Commando posted:

I think you'd have more luck convincing them to standardize on one standard desktop experience (taskbar, icons, whatever) and couple that with folder redirection. The only other alternative I can think of that is remotely (ha!) feasible is a terminal server serving up remote desktop sessions

It sounds like they�re a pretty small shop. Do they run a lot of terrible or old (or both) software? If their activities are all fairly standard roaming profiles might work. Test them out with your own environment before throwing away the idea entirely. We use them in our Citrix VDI environment and have very few issues since our VDI users� rights are reasonably restricted.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2017 05:41

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

IMAP is just kind of a worn out protocol. In order for �push� to work it has to have a connection open with the server continuously, there are always stupid mailbox sync issues between client and server, depending on how caching/online modes work it can also cause a lot of stress on the server depending on how large mailboxes get, etc.

It was fine when everyone had a 500MB ISP mail account or whatever that they accessed irregularly, but now that connections are always-on and everyone expects to be able to keep gigabytes of mail and search it instantly, IMAP is showing its age.

I still say go ahead and test roaming profiles. But make sure you do a thorough test. Maybe involve a couple savvy users if they�re willing to be guinea pigs. I think email will be your biggest hurdle. Part of the reason we don�t see issues is that our VDI runs Outlook connected to Exchange in online mode, and we disallow PST�s globally because we have an enterprise email archive. Plus our network storage is fast so VM�s and profiles are loaded very quickly since it�s all within our datacenter network.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2017 06:50

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Been a while since I've seen a 4500. Good machines.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 18:46

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

E: wrong thread

# ¿ Apr 17, 2018 02:53

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

incoherent posted:

Perhaps this might be the first non-us law implicitly followed in the US?

Hahahahaha nobody in the US even follows existing US privacy law, why would we voluntarily follow some commie European snowflake stuff?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 18:54

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Collateral Damage posted:

I've seen people recommend Secret Server in the past, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

Secret Server�s functionality is very good but their interface is so bad that we opted to just stick with our KeePass database.

# ¿ May 6, 2018 01:04

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

CampingCarl posted:

Found out the current VM setup has the data store for critical VMs on the same storage device as the backups for those VMs. With no offsite backup. The storage has encrypted drives that we don't have credentials for. So now my weekend is backing all that up and resetting it.

Oh this sounds just like a company I moonlighted for a few years back. The storage was redundant so they didn't see how this could ever be a problem. I eventually built a backup target out of spare parts because they just couldn't comprehend that the lovely HP Lefthand array could fail.

# ¿ May 18, 2018 22:57

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Boywhiz88 posted:

The specs are an AMD Athlon II Neo N36L, 8GB RAM, 2X 250GB HDDs. The software is just server editions of tax software. Are there any pre-fab options that would work? Would a home-build be adequate?

Never home brew a server, you�re only asking for pain. Buy something with redundancy (power supplies, disks) and a support contract/warranty.

You could easily do everything you want to do on a low-mid range Lenovo SystemX or Cisco C series.

# ¿ May 31, 2018 04:54

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:35

Aunt Beth: Feb 24, 2006; Baby, you're ready!; Grimey Drawer

Comfortador posted:

So I'm looking for advice/opinions. My boss is having me take lead on picking our hosted phone solution, and I'm narrowing it down. Out of the blue one of our old vendors shows us a Jive demo and it doesn't look bad but it's clearly not as polished as a couple of the others we're looking at. However the price is loving ridiculous. Currently I'm looking at Nextiva, Mitel, potentially Bullseye and then Jive. Does anyone have any "OH DEAR GOD NO" when they see any of those?

We have an on-prem Mitel deployment and it�s pretty capable for the price. Just make sure either you get trained or you pick a vendor who understands these new-fangled computer phones. Due to institutional inertia our phones are administered by a vendor who was great at managing our ancient digital InterTel system, but good lord they�ve been making some facepalmy mistakes now that they�re in VOIP world.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2018 05:07

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Small shop admin thread: IDK, pretty sure my predecessor was just a fucking moron

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