IT BS thread

I disagree. Information Technology by definition is the "application of computers to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data" (Dainith, Dictionary of Physics via Wikipedia). By that logic, anyone who works within those boundaries would fall into this realm. Designers can fall into this realm on their own, and through additional roles - network management, hardware/software troubleshooting, etc.

 

You can disagree.

You're confusing the definition of IT the noun with the department that manages and maintains the infrastructure.

By your definition every single person in every company falls into the IT department because everyone uses a computer to accomplish tasks.

I'd counter that being "in IT" is actually the opposite of what you are saying. I dont manipulate models or graphs at work, that's a different department. I engineer solutions and initiate B/DR policies. That is IT.

 

Swung over a city hall network to new switches and a firewall this evening. Even had to guess their existing VOIP (on it's way out...) Config so they'd still work.

Fuckyear.

 

Did a brain transplant on the fallen server. Put my desktop's i7-4770K in to test the motherboard.

Failed to chooch.

RMA to ASUS in progress. Sigh.

On the bright side this picture came out of the fun.

 

Think I'm going to spend some of today cleaning out the hard drive. Only 42GB free out of 6TB. I'm a digital horder.

 

Clearly it's time to grow the partition.

Storage is cheap.

 

One day. I have a lot of stuff like zip/tar archives with both the zip and unzipped files around, VMs I don't use anymore, stuff from Win95, and other useless stuff. I'm sure I could free up at least a terabyte.

My plan is to get 3 x 4TB drives for my next setup, but depends on what's available when I get to it.

 

Do you RAID or just use something like JBOD?

 

RAID so I can also get the extra performance

 

Gotta love third-party upgrades to core systems that are a mess.

Was supposed to be a minor version upgrade. Was supposed to only take 14 hours. On hour 19 and counting so far...

Worst part is there's nothing I can do, though my boss doesn't want me to leave until it's done.

 

What sort of raid is going to get you a performance increase with 3 disks in it.... Raid 0 is the only one that comes to mind. Raid 5 is the only other option and it writes slow compared to a standalone disk. The problem with raid 0 is there is no parity, so if you lose 1 disk, it's all gone.

 

+1 to @drwx what RAID level?

General agreement is more smaller disks give better parity. I'd do 4x 3TB or more if you have a motherboard that'll fit it, a processor that'll drive it, and enough disks to justify it.

Fuck. I know how that goes...

I disagree that RAID5 really suffers from much write delay in a modern system. I've been using RAID5 for quite some time now and it's been quite good for me.

In other news, I just replaced an H87I-PLUS with an H97I-PLUS and experienced literally zero issues. Including rebuilding the RAID array on my system. Didn't even wipe the existing disks as it warned it would. Intel actually got something correct!

 

Still going...

The only reason I really care is I had a date tonight. Now that it's been canceled I'm just surfing the internet and going into the boss' room every few minutes with all the other execs to sit around and look available/helpful.

 

Does one need a degree to get into IT? I was originally in school to do Mech Engineering but dropped out. Am in construction now but I did take a lot of pre reqs (calc 1&2, physics 1&2, chem 1, etc).

I know the basics, built my own pc. But I'm hoping to learn about servers and networking, where would be a good place to start? What can i study? Thanks.

 

Most bigger companies require a 4 year degree though it doesn't have to be in IT. You could get a 2 year degree and then just load down with IT certs, but down the road a 2 year degree could possibly limit you in the higher echelons of IT.

 

Play with virtualization at home. If you go to school for IT or business they often will make full copies of all the Windows platforms available to you, server software included.

Get into technical support somewhere and start to get exposure. I've never really seen any good documents that open up servers to people... As far as networking? GNS3 is virtual networking.

 

Back when I was an undergrad, my college mentor had two degrees in psychology. When he left the University I was studying at, he ended up taking a job as CIO for a local school district where he worked till he retired. Having an IT degree helps but it's not a requirement. Hell... my computer science degree program was from back in the days of mainframes, minicomputers, and old school programming languages. Technology today is a whole lot different then it was back then.

In terms of what to study, that's really going to depend on what you want to do. If you want to work with servers then maybe work towards a MCSE. If you want to be somewhat more modern, study VMware. For networking, you can take an 800lb gorilla training program (ie., Cisco).

 

Disks today are faster, but you don't do a raid 5 if you're after speed because writing that parity bit will always make it slower than a standalone disk or something like raid 10. You do a raid 5 for data protection and the ability to lose a disk.

Of course, it comes down to how much money you want to spend because you lose half of your capacity with 10 and only lose one disk if capacity in 5.

 

I have a music degree and work in IT at a fortune 100 company. Most places want you to have a 4 year degree to advance into middle management, but it isn't really required to get your foot in the door on a help desk. IMHO, everyone should start out or spend some time in a support role.