IT BS thread

Actually I must admit we have really good sales guys. One of the requirements we have is they must have been a level 2 or 3 in the last 10 years in order to work for us. That way they understand what is required time wise to get stuff done.

The other thing is that all projects are billed by the hour. So if we get it done in an hour then great it costs the client less, if it takes 10 hours.. well.. thats a hefty bill.

Then they get charged a monthly flat rate for management based on how many servers and workstations they have.

Although I bitch about how mad the clients are that we take over from other IT companies, its really not the sales guys fault. We take them over with the expectation already there with the client that to effectively manage them certain projects need to be done and they're given a quote ahead of time. That way they can tell the techs "Hey we took on ABC client... Their network is garbage, I'm really sorry but its going to be terrible to troubleshoot for the next 4 weeks until we get the project done to fix it"

I'm actually very lucky the company is the way it is, however it doesnt make the management of horrible infrastructure any better. lol

 

lol I've never taken over a network that wasn't done by blind, drunk monkeys. To be honest I must have been blind and drunk during my first network build. I still laugh at myself, the finished product was a steaming pile

 

Firefox is running a little slow. I suppose having several hundred tabs open doesn't help.

Code:

$ top -b -n1 | egrep "firefox|plugin|PID"
  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 8214 replica   20   0 8572412 6.546g  67876 S  26.2 20.8   8097:08 firefox
13184 replica   20   0 4013040 2.956g  49768 S  26.2  9.4   4252:37 firefox
11699 replica   20   0 3215808 1.437g  49088 S  13.1  4.6   1218:36 plugin-containe
 5039 replica   20   0  987756 275832  36120 S   6.6  0.8 627:37.06 plugin-containe

 

So I get a ticket to go to a law firm and troubleshoot an issue with a copier not scanning to the network.

I get there, the copier is fine, it scans and prints and whatnot. I note the jack number on the wallplate and go investigate.

I go to the server room and plug in my laptop and map the LAN a bit. While there, I take note of the port number assignments and am surprised to see green lights for the copier jack.

Walk over to the machine, unplug, return to server room, no lights. Plug back in, lights. So we have connectivity.

I plug my laptop into the switch port where the copier comes in....I can surf the net, so the witch or port isn't bad.

I bounce the switch anyways on general principles....after warning the users of course.

No change.

Take my laptop into the copy room and plug into the jack the copier uses...no sweat, perfectly working 'net connection. Hrm. Plug copier network cable in, and see green lights on the jack on the copier itself, so there's conn...

...

...

Squat down, get face-down on the floor, and LOOK! Dumbasses. *facepalm

They had parked the rear-left wheel of the copier DIRECTLY ON the network cable when they pushed it back into place after cleaning behind it.



Enough connectivity for green lights and tranmission/RCT....too much damage and compression for proper packet transmission though.

Swap out the cable....instantly everything works perfectly.

And I was the third guy to get sent to this place.

 

^^ LOL! I'm the Xerox admin at work, I'll be sure to watch out for that!

 

Cleaning people, providing job security for the IT guy since forever!

 

I don't have any pictures of my best cleaning person keeping the IT guy employed screw up. I got a call that the entire network in one of our buildings was down. Went over to find that the MDF rack had had about 3 gallons of water dumped on the very top of it. Seems there was a leaking pipe above the rack and the facilities guy had put a garbage can on the dropped tile ceiling to keep the "computer stuff" dry. At least his heart was in the right place, because when the weight of the garbage can full of water exceeded the strength of the ceiling tile, it all came down.

It toasted the VoIP router and the UPS. We were able to dry out 3 of the 48 port switches and had to replace the power supplies in 2 others. Had to uncable all 240 ports and pull everything out of the rack to dry everything out. I

 

As someone who works at a food processing facility, you literally have no idea.

 

Anyone ITIL Foundation Certified? I've worked in an ITIL enviornment before so I have a very basic idea of ITIL but want to learn more and get certified. Anyone have any resources?

 

I have my ITIL Foundation certificate as does the entire management team. When I started with my current gig my boss and I were the only ones with ITIL experience. Let me tell you its tough working in an environment where people look at you with a blank look when you mention little things like change management, or continuous improvement, or service transition or anything else that makes incredible sense to me now.

After about a year of those blank stares my boss decided to send the rest of the management team to foundations training and after that things got a lot easier. My biggest complaint about ITIL is the use of England's version of English. If you tell one of our "C" level executives there was and IT "incident" in one of the buildings and they will want to see the police report. As you know an incident can be as simple as a printer running out of paper. The best ITIL trainer I've encountered would say "on ITIL island we use certain words, but in the real world you can use anything you want."

As for resources if you are anywhere near a medium to big city track down the Service Now user group. (servicenow.com) Around here they are a great ITIL resource. I even managed to finagle a free ITIL Foundations training class. At the time I was trying to replace our IT ticketing system and IMO Service Now is simply the best on the market.

 

I know exactly what you mean when you say the confused looks mentioning Incident or Change Management.

I found a really cool free app on the Google Play Store that has the info that I was looking for.

 

At my shop some people still struggle with change managment. Last week one of our major systems goes down and I'm totally pulling my hair out trying to figure out why. I even called the vendor out to have a look. Come to find out the network guys wanted to reconfigure all of the vlans, during business hours, without telling anyone.

So what is the app? I know a group that could use an ITIL refresher.

 

Good lord. You work with retards of this caliber and haven't killed anyone yet? You're a stronger man than I.

 

Here is the app for android. It's good for people that have no idea what ITIL is or need a refresher.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.examprepitilfoundation

 

To be fair I had asked them to make the changes and the system in question is crap. It never crossed my mind that it hadn't failed of its own accord. And the CIO used them as an example of, once again, this is why we have a weekly change control meeting.

 

Bit of a bump but I figured maybe you guys might know.

I'm currently trying to build my first computer and I'm looking for a graphics card that can run 4 monitors simultaneously.

I'm looking at the Radeon R9 270x and was wondering if it would run all 4 or if I would need 2 graphics cards to accomplish that

 

Most of the upper end (say, 200$+) cards usually need scarcely more than a couple splitters to handle 4 displays.

Maybe a driver update.

Otherwise, any Win 7 and newer OS can handle it basically natively. Almost every new setup I do is at least two monitors nowadays.

 

Are you gaming? And what resolution are the monitors?

 

Got to play with some awesome hardware lately.

One of these just came in

HP Moonshot



Its filled with 45 HP ProLiant Server Cartridges