IT BS thread

My hardware biases go back to a time when Cyrix chips were a thing.

That said...I simply don't trust/use/like/recommend AMD/ATI. It runs too hot, sucks too much power, has crappier drivers and/or worse specs/worse support. Every single time I've gone against this I've come up to the same result.

GPU, CPU, don't matter.

I stick with the Intel based processors and nVidia or Intel GPUs. Its just a better option all the way around.

Don't get me wrong, I like that AMD is there pushing Intel and 'keeping them honest', so to speak. But rely on them? Hell no.

 

I was an AMD fan from the K6-III to the Phenom II X4 965. After that AMD fell too far behind Intel to keep up. A Core i5 4670K can keep up with a FX-9590 in most things, while sucking down less than half of the power.

I've never understood the point of the AMD CPU driver, as it only ever seemed to have negative results on any system I installed it on. The ATI GPU drivers weren't good on Windows, and bad on Linux.

 

I'm already growing out of my britches again. I have a car guy nagging sense to build it to handle more, in case I grow into it later-- the point of this lab is to do what work isn't doing for me, lean away from the administrative heavy IA side of the house, and migrate to the more technical side, moving onto more and more milestones of more complex setups and drills. I have friends that are corralling me into the web app security side (their opinion its the future/more employment), but I'm really drooling over an acquaintances 'jack of all trades' red team pentester job.

I'm maybe getting naive into also wanting headroom to make this thing usefull 24/7 (cloud hosting, HTPC, do work via nodes around the house such as running VMs outside the lab duties to play with compilers for arduino, parallax, web browsing where I have 30+ tabs open (thats been hurting my aging laptop), a VM for my sidebusiness with my shipping label printer software, support GPUs for both brute force exercises and gaming etc).

I'm looking at the ASRock LGA1150/Intel Z87/DDR3/Quad CrossFireX and Quad SLI/SATA3 and USB 3.0/A&GbE/ATX Motherboard Z87 EXTREME4 as it supports Haswell. Its predecessor (Z77) is listed on the IOMMU list, I hope this follows through. Paired with an i7, its cost is more than the AMD build, but over time I'd venture it starts to pay for itself due to power savings.

Its like the devil and the angel on one's shoulder skit, one saying a simple low budget build is more than enough, the other a Tim Allen grunting about all the extra bells and whistles I should go for while I'm at it.

 

Hmm, I am a little opposite. I prefer Intel CPU's these days. I was an AMD fan from the K6 up through the different Athlon versions until the Intel Core 2 came out. I did use Pentium 4's, but they ran so dang hot. I tried one Cyrix way back when and it had a compatibility issue with the motherboard, so I quit being cheap.

AMD has never really developed their own stuff. They bought the RISC86 stuff for the K6 and hired the DEC Alpha guys from Compaq to do the Athlon. I haven't been paying attention, but I don't think they have done much since then other than the ATI purchase.

As far as GPU's, I have always found ATI to be more stable as far as both hardware and drivers. Maybe not the top in performance, but I prefer stability. I just had too many nVidia boards that crapped out within a year.

If all you need is 2D graphics, though, the built-in Intel is good enough.

 

Wow-- too good to be true? This Newegg package supposedly supports VT-d and is Haswell.

Do you guys see the 500w PS to be too little if I had about two more drives and about two NICs?

 

No beefy video card? Even with a mid-range video card, you should be fine with 500W.

 

Yup. Watch your heat levels though...if you're really gonna be working the hardware and have lots of drives, you'll need moar fanz

Airflow > All

 

I'm looking into new keyboards and I think I'm starting to have holy grail syndrome.
I basically want a mechanical keyboard. Cherry MX red feels OK to me, blue is good as well, but I think brown might be my sweet spot - if I could just try one out.
I want a few macro keys. They are indispensable for repetitive SQL text strings and key combinations.

The Das Keyboard 4 Pro has almost everything I want, but is missing the macros
The Logitech G710 might be what I end up with but there's a lot of people hating on it..?

 

I've been in IT for 30 years and for that long my advise has been to buy the machine you need today because tomorrow you will get twice the computer for the same $$$. That said sometimes having a hotrod computer is fun. Depending on finances, what the heck go for it. In the scheme of things people drop tons of money on much more foolish things.

So, check out this link http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php It's where I found the motherboard for my server. And, save yourself the grief of flaky NICs and just buy the intel model, or get the motherboard with them built in. They cost more, but oh are they worth it if you get into VM routers.

Oh one thing about the server motherboards you'll find on the VMware site. They are a different animal than your typical enthusist board. They are built to run 24/7 for years on end without failure. You won't find a lot of overclocking and and tweaking options. But there are out of band management and remote control stuff that would be helpful to learn if you want your career to go that way.

 

I'd have to agree. Server hardware and OS is a game changer.
Since you are looking at budget PCs, you may want to consider Synology NAS, as they are pretty stable, and you can build or pre-build them.

 

I agree on the Synology NAS. Mine is 4 years old and still chugging along. Synology has been real good about supporting it over the years. They've put out an update every few months and its never given me a minute of grief.

 

We've got a pair of Synology 40TB rack mounts at the office and I have to say...the support and documentation is HELLA good.

The UI is a bit counter-intuitive at times but the product itself has been rock-solid.

Bad drives swap out easy and the initialization process for getting the new one in place is pretty damned fast. I like them quite a bit so far.

 

I read this after pulling the trigger. I agree, but the car guy stupid 'more is better' voice got the best of me. Got one of the newegg deals and added some goodies. Made sure the board and processor have been mentioned as VT-d and passthrough supporting.

I won't have time to assemble it and try booting for a few weeks.

I was looking into the FreeNAS software, but I take it if I use old hardware, its going to be a power hog? Sounds like Synology is trouble free, probably worth the money to not have any issues on what should be the most reliable aspects of my build...

 

Figured I might try to ask here but, I am looking at learning HTML because it will help me out a lot at my job that I start this summer. It's not needed but the job is temp and knowing HTML would give them a good reason to keep me on permanently.

That being said do any of you have recommendations on books or online courses to teach myself HTML?

 

Stupid question, but WHY

Lemme flesh that out a bit.

I used to hand-code web pages (and entire sites, if the paycheck was good enough) a long time ago. A LONG time ago.

HTML 3 came out, and I learned it well, and did lots of pages that way, with a text editor.

Then lots of snazzy and shitty tools to make things ooh shiney came out to make it 'easy' for people to make shitty websites. FrontPage, that sort of thing.

Then HTML 4 came out. I dove in, and kept doing it my way for almost a year. But all the FrontPages of the world made more and more pages really shitty code (and ass ugly, IMHO) and I flat-out refused to work on or maintain pages that were made with shitty upcode engines that break half the goddamn laws of procedure and best practices for putting together content. I had a wiggle-out in every agreement I made that if I fould a 'created by FrontPage 2' (or insert shitty software suite name here) that I could return any deposit and walk away from a gig.

I got frustrated and the crap code taking over and just flat-out stopping doing web design at all. I was already doing IT work full time, so it wasn't a big deal.

...


That all said, why do you want to learn HTML now? There's plenty of suites and sites out there that'll upcode your cat pictures for free, and add blinky tags twirly star gifs.

I know you said "for work"....but....WHAT for work? HTML code isn't really hard per se but it is a code language with rules and such to remember to use correctly. What is it you're looking to do with it?

Feel free to tell me to jam my inquisitiveness up my ass. I'm just wondering if maybe there's a better way to do what you're wanting to do while saving work and maybe even making you look even better to your new overlords.

 

I will be a business systems analyst. They just said knowing HTML is a plus but not required. Just figure it would help me stand out.

 

Oh, it will. In a good way. Please don't misconstrue my curious nature, I certainly wasn't dissin' ya.


If you're doing the more entry-level systems analyst work, and they would like it if you knew web code, you're going to be a spreadsheet grinder, and maybe an XML jockey....translating Bertha in accounting's 14 year old XLS files that she made up and updated over the years and trained other on and have become a backbone of the accounting department....and now those pages aren't supported by Office any more, and macro scripting is banned for security reasons, so you get to make a web-based version for intranet use.

Off the top of my head, this is what they had a couple college-aged BSA guys doing at my old law firm job anyways. Also they cleaned up a LOT of aged account information and translated it (read: brute force data entry of bad handwriting) into a modern front end.

*shrug*

YMMV. Let us know more specifics of what they want you to accomplish, and maybe someone can give you better info. Best o luck with it, regardless!

 

I still prefer a text editor to any WYSIWYG editor.

I tried to help my girlfriend with her squarespace website. Seemed there was a lot of unnecessary code used.

 

I'll be at PNC and hopefully with my finance degree they won't bore me with accounting.. But meh, they will pay me well so I guess whatever they need done will get done lol

 

I'd say get yourself down to the local book store and check out their computer book section. There will be a bunch of books on the subject and everyone seems to like something different. Keep in mind that any modern web page will have database back-ends, PHP code, Java script, CSS and the list goes on an on. If you came to me just knowing HTML I'd say that's like just having a screw driver to fix a car. You're going to need it for sure, but it won't be enough to get the whole job done.

Besides, now days you would be insane to code any website from scratch. Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal are the Content Management Systems (CMS) 28% of the webpages use. IMHO knowing how to work in the guts of what ever CMS your organization uses would be more valuable than just knowing HTML.