IT BS thread

Other than boot disks, hands-down the handiest thing to keep around.

#3 on my list of never-leave-home-without-it is bootable USB thumb drives with various flavors of OS on it. My 8GB Cruzer that is bootable with Win7-64bit-SP1 and Office 2010 (ready for a key) begins to smoulder on some days.

Now that bootable USB is the norm on motherboards, I can start with a blank hard drive and have a patched, current desktop for a user in about an hour, fully ready for day to day office work. Its a beautiful thing, man.

 

Just fixed my mother's laptop. Win 7 was telling her "The User Profile Service failed the login". It's been some time since I've had to hack a registry, but good as new

 

not when ATI actually has their own devs before amd fired them

 

Another Chad, that does IT, in Des Moines, on Tacomaworld. What are the chances?

 

Secret santa

 

Anyone a Storage admin? If so how do you like it and what kinda of skill set is required? I work in a data center now as a servicedesk tech and part hardware person. Trying to figure out if I want to do full hardware going forward or try something else. Working for EMC seems like it would best of both worlds but I don't know what storage people do really.

 

Not really just a storage admin exclusively - IMHO the best plan is to become as well rounded as you can (better to know a little of a lot than a lot of a little) so you will be able to be highly adaptable to any position that comes your way. I am pretty much a one man show, running the SAN, VM's, switches and routers, exchange, intranet with LAMP, etc.

Knowing the core stuff and how to find the answers to stuff you don't know is a much more valuable asset then getting pigeonholed into one particular discipline looking forward (again, IMHO)

 

I just had that with one workstation at a client. Win 7 doing an 'upgrade' of the ProLaw software. During the rollout, the 'changes' to her profile on the local box (ODBC pointers and network drive mappings) shit the bed and corrupted the local profile.

Like you, had to go in as local admin and scrub the registry by hand, changing the profile pointers for a bunch of default actions to the correct place. Took about an hour, giant PITA that it was.

 

there are 3 TW IT Geeks in DSM? who knew. I'm just not named chad and neither is "chad"

 

I have run large, mixed storage systems. Mostly in the semiconductor industry. By mixed, I mean vendor, operating system and type.

In our environment, we managed day to day storage requirements (quotas, volume configuration, network configuration, backup and restores, etc.), system upgrades, system repair (almost any component), new installation and evaluation of new hardware configuration.

To effectively manage the data, it helps to have a good understanding of how your customer uses the environment. In the semiconductor world, for example, we create and delete a large number of files from a large number of machines using a wide variety of different software tools.

Most of the customer interaction was gathering information on requirements and schedules, helping them understand tool flows and ways to improve performance of the flows, helping diagnose tool problems (settings can cause a tool to create larger than usual files that run them out of quota).

Depending on your environment, it can be pretty interesting. Especially if you work with data compression or larger, interconnected storage environments or offsite volume replication.

It can be pretty interesting but expect periods of boring.

 

The company I work for now is in the semiconductor industry as well ! - pretty cool stuff down at the nanometer level

 

What's the old adage, about long periods of nothing with bursts of intense excitement?

I think it was in relation to being an airline pilot, the first time I heard it, but it works well for us IT folks too

 

Usually, the bursts come at the wrong time too

 

Truth.

 

*Heads to IOWA thread to further BS*

 

I work in an Enterprise environment with +60K users and you summed it up pretty well, well said. Ironically (aimed at OP) when we decided to create a storage team ~10 years ago I interviewed a gentleman from Chandler, AZ who was a DBA for Intel. We hired him and he did very well but I am biased, we hunt together and are good friends. In the end I decided not to join the storage team myself. My youngest sister was the manager of the host compatibility lab at EMC until a few years ago, it is the largest collection of computing power under one roof or at least was. IO is their main focus in the lab and they try to saturate everything they can on the host and not let the storage be the bottleneck. She was an early hire (low employee number) and did well with stocks over the years. I have been to the Boston EMC lab several times as both a customer and guest of my sister but where I now work we do not use EMC, it is pretty much HP.

Yes it can be boring but then again all IT can be. In most Enterprise environments that I have been in when I was in the field you rotate through different teams every couple of years to become a "well rounded" individual. I personally believe that is a good thing. And storage is something everyone in IT should understand in detail IMO. SAN and even NAS is a huge improvement over the bad old days. You want how much DASD and when LOL?! Our main site is in Mn. but have large regional sites in Fl. Wi. and Az. with replication between them based on business priority.

Replication, HA (or business continuity) and DR can be interesting to say the least, and then there is Oracle and other Databases and application replication on top of that. At 4:30 Monday morning I will be verifying one of those links. Damn I'm getting too old for this chit....

 

I agree with Johnny. Be the person that can learn anything quickly. It keeps you from becoming obsolete in the long run and having to retool. If you get caught in a decling field be the migration expert and get out.
IMHO.

 

I did not want to start a thread for this ,,,Any one know what this is..Somoto Update Checker,, on windows 7 ??? Thanks,

 

Never seen it before but go get the free version of this:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free/

And run it, first a quick scan and if it finds stuff then a deep scan - you may be surprised what it finds

 

I did avast & malware,as soon as I saw something new,nothing came up.. ...Thanks