IT BS thread

I took a Linux administration class back in 2004 and hadn't touched it since, until last week when a customer called for assistance getting a RH vm spun up for some new software that they'd purchased.

I do a lot with Windows Failover Clustering have read about some HA in Red Hat, but will probably never have a chance to play with it.

 

I had some folks like that, I flat out told them if they didn't adhere to how I setup the computer for them that I would not provide on call support for it and they'd have to wait until we we're both in at work to get anything resolved. It worked, haha. They were keeping me from more important shit constantly with their own fuckups.

 

I worked for a school district that was about 50% Mac, and attempting to phase them out completely, when I first got out of college. They were definitely a giant pain in the ass, but they aged well. The 5 year old ones that we were shuffling into the elementary buildings were always much more usable than the 5 year old Dells that were still in production.

To this day, I'll always keep a Mac at home. It works, it integrates well with my iPhone, I never have to fix it. Absolutely amazing for residential use, but miserable in any sort of professional environment where you need to manage a bunch of them. And didn't apple kill off their "Server OS?"

 

This is literally the best thing I've read today. (Written on a Mac in an enterprise environment)


FIFY

 

I think if you buy decent PC hardware (T-Series ThinkPad or similar), you're still under the cost of Mac hardware and it'll last just as well if not better. We don't get that luxury, we tend to buy lowest bid Probooks that are a couple hundred cheaper than that, but we still get ~5 years out of them. I'm a big ThinkPad fan, I and a few admins have X1 Carbons and they are phenomenal machines.

There isn't a server OS anymore, you're right. There is an "app" for normal OSX that gives it "server" capabilities. Apple can call it what they want, but if the only thing I can run it on is consumer grade end user hardware there isn't anything server about it.

 

I mean they did have a rack mount bracket for putting them in a rack But, yeah, I was not impressed with the Mac "Server" when I worked with it in 2009.

Ditto on the X1 Carbon, I love mine, but I try not to take it in the house when I get home or my wife gets angry. I can play on the Mac or iPad all night long and she doesn't care, but as soon as the X1 comes out she knows I'm working and accuses me of having a work addiction.......

 

I have a 5th gen at work with the Thunderbolt dock so I can output to three monitors. I take it home about half the time and work on things at night or on the weekends. I keep hoping the 5th gen (or even a leftover 4th) will drop in price enough so I can justify buying one for home.

 

Someone gave me an old Mac G4 750mhz. Ran OS 10.4? pretty well for an old machine. Bottleneck was the HDD. I find it's usually the OS that ages poorly, not so much the hardware. This is especially true for Windows.

 

2:56 on a Friday afternoon...
Joe app admin, "I have a VMware problem"
Me, "ok"

So I go look at vcenter and dude has error messages trying to start a VM. The message indicates that the VM is missing a vmdk. I looked at the VM and saw the disk path. I then browsed to the datastore and saw 0 vmdks in the VM directory. I checked the tasks on the datastore and saw that the user deleted the vmdks directly from the datastore about 45 minutes prior to IMing me.

I told him if the data was important that he needed to be contacting the backup team.

Seriously

This guy is responsible for production data.

WTF?


This is my life.

 

I'm assuming some of you guys play around in TFS websites for doing agile-type stuff. Is there a way to export/import your view preferences between projects? I used to be on 1 project, but now I'm on about 4 different project sites all of a sudden. I dialed in how I wanted all the columns laid out in the backlog for my first project, and now I have to get all fiddly with manually going through each project and getting all those views configured again. There's gotta be a better way, right...?

 

I'm a little jealous. I work for a consulting company and most of our customers, in the SMB segment, like to share the root password with everyone and get upset when I say "I told you not to use the root account......"

 

The last time someone shared an elevated privilege account on my network, armed physical security watched them pack their shit up and leave. Now, we use CyberArc to manage that - no one has it, they only check out enough privilege to do what they need to and all actions are audited.

Zero tolerance.

 

Time to revoke rights in VCenter.

 

Heh, I have a similar but different story. I worked as a BSA consultant for a company that provided large-scale software application deployments to small/mid-size SCM companies. In an effort to keep costs down, one of our small clients in Phoenix would turn off the A/C to the office building. As you can guess, some of the equipment in the building overheated and burnt the office to the ground.
No off-site backups
servers are gone
the only data they now have is incomplete sample data they sent us months ago.

However, the warehouse manager was one of those completely paranoid types. For many years, he had been taking it upon himself to do nightly backups from his desktop PC to a storage drive, which he kept in a desk drawer. The company was down a few hours of production, but was able to do a full data recovery. The warehouse manager saved the entire company from folding up.

I never heard more on them, but I'm really hoping the warehouse manager drives a car he didn't have to pay for, or was able to spend several months in Hawaii.

 

There's nothing to be jealous of. Another VMware guy that I work with is a paper vcap. He has relatively little experience. I also have a vcap but have been doing this for 10 + years.

So he is having a discussion about migrating a datacenter and is heavily advocating for using metro vmotion instead of the host based replication that we already own. In his words, "a vmotion is pretty much the same thing as host based replication". I asked our team if he could revoke that guy's vcap.

This was the very next working day after that other idiot deleted disks.

 

Lol if it were only that easy. That guy is the VMware guy for that app team. They own their own and manage their own hosts. They only reach out to us when they're in over their heads or really messed up.

 

I hold my team to fairly high expectations and use PassPortal to keep a decent audit trail (and keep some credentials on a need to know basis), but have little control of how our clients handle security policies with their own employees. Despite repeated warnings, one client adamantly refuses to implement password policies for ~60 employees. Seriously, 60 employees are using the same password, set to never expire, taped to half of their monitors, and 5 of them are domain admins.......They pay really well and keep my help desk tech busy, so I make sure (regularly) get their refusal to follow best practices in writing

Working for a small MSP, servicing companies with <500 employees, has it's shortcomings....It also has benefits, like "desk bourbon".

 

I have to telework for desk bourbon.

Wait - TODAY is my telework day! But I have errands to run so I can't enjoy some "you are all idiots who make me drink to keep from deleting your domain accounts" scotch, so I will simply put a dog in my lap.

We're also fully 2FA (cards for regular accounts, tokens for admins), so actual password use is extremely rare. When passwords are needed, we vault them. Still, developers are unable to follow simple, written instructions (with goddamn screen shots, no less) so an ISO's job is never done.

 

Honestly I do not know what they are teaching developers these days, nor how someone actually qualifies to be a developer. While there are some good ones, the bulk of them seem to only understand a language or two and just know how to code. Very little understanding of what is going on underneath. And we bring armies of these people in from overseas. The push for DevOps is starting to blur the lines -- developers are going to need to understand the ops side, and the ops side is going to need to learn to code and understand application architecture. Funny how there's all this buzz over Agile/CI/CD/DevOps and MicroServices Architecture now -- I started my career in startups, and we did all of this out of necessity, they are not new concepts. Just more formalized.

 

It's a crazy world. I'm on the infrastructure side of things, but I've had to learn a lot so I can fix bad development. They never understand how the underlying architecture works and just write code. It works, but extremely inefficient and doesn't follow best practice, or even mediocre practice. They do shit like hard code a domain controller in for authentication. Yes it works, but there is no fail over in case of an issue. Then when we have to do some emergency maintenance and it takes down their app, it's our fault, not theirs. It can be extremely frustrating working with crap developers.