IT BS thread

Also known as "The reasons we have jobs"

 

My next quote of the week:

 

The internet is gonna blow up from this OpenSSL bug!!!!







Luckily I run a windows server and IIS does not use OpenSSL.

 

Just upgraded mine.

 

Anyone using Sophos UTM? Thinking about going with them as our Sonicwall is going EOL.

 

We have been using fortinet, like them much better than sonicwall.

 

I've got a couple clients that use fortinets. Very flexible and cheap if slightly underpowered in wifi signal strength.

What I will say is they are at the very top of the pile, by a wide margin, of WAPs that require someone to yank the power cord cause they locked/shit the bed/need a reset.

No other type is HALF as often. Otherwise, I like their meshability (is that a word? it is now)

 

*sigh*

There's a bad connection someplace, he says.



*grumble

 

If you think that's bad you should see the shit I inherited.

 

Not 'bad', just annoying PITA. Nothing documented, nothing wired coherently or in any kind of order, just years worth of connections by various and sundry contractors of varying skills and attention.

And, yes, there was a bad connection. Found it eventually.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the Wi-Fi part, but as a firewall/router they have been pretty good.

 

I had a bad connection. It was the company being cheap and using netgear switches. Moved over to Cisco and amazingly no more bad connections.

The conditions I deal with at work are the bane of electronics everywhere. 100% condensing humidity, high pressure washdown, etc.

Noax is a lifesaver, and datalogics really stands by their barcode readers and will repair practically anything during warranty period.

 

LOL. Cable management leaves a lot to be desired. Hell back in 10mb switch days I would have bitch slapped anyone that did that.... Seriously.

Kind of glad to get away from networks myself, yeah when I was in the field walked into all types of that crap. And many with more than 250k hosts. From who swallowed the token ring to what the hell is Banyan vines. Out of all the gear I installed Cisco standardizing helped more than anything else. Of course by the time you really get a grip on Cisco IOS it changed or now is replaced. Now days I have no problem calling NOC and telling them MRTG or a host network trace is showing a problem on X or Y and please fix it, dropping packets or connections like a SOB. No desire to go back to even before that and pin out serial connections until your fingers bled. But it did work most all of the time. Then again so did the mainframe and NIX\SCO systems.

 

Guys I'm sorry to say i WISH network cabinets we took over from old IT companies looked like that. I WISH so bad.

We took over a hotel that has a machine running as a "server" on Windows 2000(note: not server 2000) and the PC is legitimately a white box from 1999 era, the modem was HANGING by the ethernet from router, the switches are circa 2002??, and the main server(SBS box) is at best from 2005. Oh and did I mention the wiring is 100x worse than that. NOTHING is to the sides, its all just hanging out of the switches.

We were very upset with our sales guys for doing this to us.

 

Let me guess, the sales guy told the customer "no problem" and under quoted the cost to straighten everything out.

 

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!