IT BS thread

Speaking as an infrastructure guy, we don't like when the ones with people skills without tech skills get hired/promoted. There's nothing more exhausting than small talk with an idiot.

 

lol - yeah the prima donna that applied for the last server job was pissed when he didn't get the spot. Posting all over facebook about how we was going to leave. The CIO and I just laughed, but I did offer to give him a good reference.

BTW references are 50% useless. If I call a reference and get a good one, it proves nothing. What kind of idiot gives a reference that isn't going to say great things about them? I'll tell you, the idiot that doesn't get the job. On the other hand what is the motivation of a previous supervisor? Is the tech a great guy that will be missed or an idiot? I can always find something nice to say about a person, but if an idiot or grumpy tech wants to leave why would I jeopardize their chance of not being my problem anymore with a bad reference? Most people who call me for a reference are not skilled in the ways of hiring and will ask general questions. I do not/will not lie, but unless they specifically ask I don't volunteer. And, because I trust about 25% of what a reference says I let my admin make those calls. If she gets a bad reference for a candidate I was otherwise interested in I might investigate, but for the most part a bad reference = no hire.

oh, and the guy that got the job is sharp as hell, respected by the other server guys, (because they have a say in who gets hired), and has great customer service skills.

 

It always makes me laugh when asked for references. I'm more then happy to provide them but like you say only the idiots would put someone down who would give them a bad reference. Most of the time companies prohibit any negative references due to the ever so slight potential for legal blowback/slander accusations.

 

Though I just applied for a nursing extern position with Centura and their references get an e-mail which takes them to a survey that asks 25 yes or no questions about the candidate which makes a lot more sense to me.

 

The Nashville IT scene is mostly in healthcare and most people have worked at one or more of these major healthcare companies at one time or another. If we get an applicant from X company, chances are the hiring manager knows people there or has people on their team who worked with the applicant or know people where the applicant works.

 

We just started doing the automatic reference thing too. My last hiring was with this process and I remain convinced that references are mostly useless. One guy gave me as a reference for a position in my group. lol One of our "lesser skilled" techs gave his boss as a reference. The CIO and I got a laugh out of that one because his boss didn't even fill it out. That means he got a score of 0 when the lowest score you can get when filled out is 5. (there are 5 questions with a range of 1 for idiot to 10 for god like)

 

I just started my ist courses in school, and the course I'm taking we are just starting to run vmware. I tried googling it and if I remember correctly the replies were saying the following as the minimum:

4 core processor
8 gigs ram
256 ssd

I wanted the Dell xps cause it firs these requirements, it's light for a 15 inches (will have to lug it to school and around campus). If I could keep it under 2000 that would be awesome, obviouslythe cheaper the better, but I'll pay up to the 2k mark for a good machine. My current laptop has been okay for Web surfing and word processing and the projects I've had so far.

 

I <3 VMware, but very rarely use vmware workstation. If you are running actual esxi, you will need/want at least a desktop. it would be useless on a laptop. you can't see or interact with VMs from the esxi console.

 

Running VMware I'd want at least 16GB of ram. Especially if you plan to have multiple VMs running at once.

 

Bong - It would be a lot easier to help if you were specific on what your goals were and what software you wanted to run. If you're paying $2K for a 4 core, 8 gig, 256 ssd, then you are getting TOTALLY ripped off. I built a quad core Xeon, 16 gig, 256 ssd server a couple of years ago for around $850. Its been happily running ESXi for years now happily serving up pages for the web sites I host. Come to think about it I ran ESXi on a 6 year old POS desktop for quite a while before upgrading to the Xeon box. If you're talking about running vmware player any $600 laptop will do that job too. I run the player on my Macbook Air and PC laptop and their spec aren't anything special. drwx is also completely correct that you need a dedicated machine if you want to run ESXi.

So what is it ESXi or vmware player?

 

Well, technically if he's creating VMs it would be vmware workstation, not player. Player will only let you import and run VMs.

 

If you're building host OS's, then 16 gb ram and the largest SSD you can afford. Go big or go home

 

I'm not paying 2k for the specs I listed above, that's just the minimum specs I read would be sufficient. I want the xps15, 16 gig ram, 521 ssd, intel i7. I was just looking for suggestions on alternatives. VMWARE player I think.

 

Yes. Workstation is OK... You could easily come under$1000 for an i3 or i5 with VTx and hyperthreading, 8GB of DD3+ and a solid state. If you have USB3/3.1 use an external disk and store your VMDKs there to save on disk storage.

Do you HAVE to use VMware/Workstation?

 

So I switched to self managed Dynamic DNS with a CentOS 7 VM tonight on Amazon AWS. Why did I wait to do this? Now my domains won't be marked as cancer from services like OpenDNS... I hope.

 

Power outage took out my six year old Foxconn, always-on Atom processored home Linux server last week. Found this little barebones number on Newegg for $140. With 8Gb of RAM and a 120 Gb SSD it came in at $215 delivered. These boxes look neat. Lots of people using them with pfsense since it has two NICs. Thought I'd pass it along.

 

Oh wow that's exactly like the NUC machines I've been considering. At half the cost!

 

Hello IT wizards! I have two questions this time around:

1. When making a pb&j sammich, is it more appropriate to put the peanut butter on first, or the jelly?

2. How can I Rick Roll my whole IST class, or at least my teacher? Would it be possible since we are all using VMware and we are all connected?

 

1- what sort of animal puts the peanut butter and jelly on the same piece of bread... peanut butter on one piece, jelly on the other, then stick them together.

2 - just because you are using vmware doesn't mean you are all connected. that depends on vlan configuration. hosts can't talk inside VMs. you can do some api calls through vmware tools, but that's about it. there is no direct interaction that you can do. you can execute basic cli commands through invoke-vmscript.

 

I too use your 2 slice method, but was not sure of the protocol of which should be shmeared on first.

Is there another way then?