IT BS thread

I had to work all Thanksgiving because of a network issue. I'm a server guy. Every 15 minutes, all servers on a specific switch would drop packets for 55 seconds (9 to 11 total dropped). It turned out to be a bad module on that core switch.

 

I'm a computer tech, and am doing an informal test to see where my creation below will get the best reception; the tech forum or the dog forum? Since there's no dog AND tech forum, this is the best I can do. Please let me know what you think! -- By way of short explanation, we currently have two dogs, and are in the process of picking up a third. I'm working on a flowchart about the motivations of our middle dog as well, but Tiger will be our oldest, and he never ceases to amuse. (Brian is the hubby.)

 

Fuck working in IT.



That is all

 

Why?

 

LOL. First did you go through the Oversite Committee and get approval? Then Office of Information Security. Then Application Review Board. Get funding approval from Business Office? If it wasn't so much work I'd fire up Visio for you
My oldest says Approved!


Just remember that 3 dogs now becomes a pack.

 

Because people

 

My work just replaced Linux based desktops with Windows based bricks

 

What are the bricks connecting too? Im assuming that by brick you mean thin client.

 

Yeah it's basically a plastic box with a processor and a couple USB ports. Mostly used for a terminal and a very outdated Firefox

 

That's about all they are good for. My company made a big push for them a couple of years ago, thinking they could replace desktops. The short story is nope, no way they can do that for normal users. Now they are a support albatross around our neck, running a mostly current chrome browser.

 

For normal users, no. But for heads down task oriented users that only run a couple apps a day and never leave them they do work, usually.

Back when Winframe (Windows 3.51) was the norm WYSE terminals were a gateway for those coming from mainframe and mid range systems and used to the green screen and terminals. Used to kill me when the salesmen would pitch them as the last "PC" they would need. Yeah right saw that writing on the wall. Refresh on those were about the same as a PC.

Can't say Vblock for VDI is a whole lot better today either. Great in theory, not so much in the real world at least for us.

 

The math never worked out for us. By the time we got the user/server ratio right so they could actually do meaningful work, we could have bought desktop computers. Now they just run one web based app that is just text, no pictures at all. Before this we just used the oldest, slowest, hand me down computers for that task. The thin clients are way over priced for what they can do for us.

^^ yeah, this ^^

 

This is what we have now. N.Computing L300

 

They sent me one of those to play with years ago. It is sitting on a shelf somewhere. We determined that, at the time, the VDI model was not cost effective.

 

I set up a trial lab of those at my former high school ( I worked for the IT dept after school) and they are utterly incapable of anything but word processing and super light internet browsing. We even gave them ideal conditions to run in, a brand new server that was serving the VM via 10 gigabit fibre to an IDF that interpreted it to 1000 base T ethernet to each individual terminal. Sadly they cannot even reproduce more than 16bit color with any hopes of reliability. They still e-mail me to try their products.

 

We just do vdi with xendesktop, or whatever the fuck they call it now. Go to citrix website, login, launch desktop to whatever device you are using. The back end is VMware on xtremeio solid state storage. Each VM is powered down after logging out and XD spins up another one and has so many in reserve. They are provisioned via images in PVS. We do this to the tune of roughly 10k desktops. Across 3 data centers that serve 200ish of our locations. It just works unless someone breaks an image.

 

Had an SSD start to fail on one of my hosts. Lenovo refuses to get me a new drive until I get them a diag saying it is bad. TSM says it is fine, but the lights indicate the "RAID controller is identifying the drive" and vSphere is throwing data service errors. Of course, vSphere is on this one so I have to move it before I can take the thing down. Don't have licensing for storage vMotion, so have to move it off to another physical server with converter. All to shut down the host to run Lenovo's diag that will hopefully prove the drive is on its last legs.

 

dang that sucks.

My work is slowly making the switch from a Dell shop to Lenovo shop...

 

I'm a big fan of Lenovo laptops. I think the build quality is head and shoulders above anything else. If it were up to me, we wouldn't buy anything but ThinkPads, but unfortunately HP Probooks usually win the bids. They're terrible, lots of board failures. Got a batch a year ago that shipped with the wrong heatsinks so we had dozens of them shutting down randomly due to overheating. I actually have an almost 4-year-old ThinkPad at work now as my own machine. I refuse to replace it until we buy a batch of ThinkPads again. We've ended up with ProBooks the past few years.

Don't have much Dell stuff here. We do have about 100 OptiPlex 390s that are now about the oldest things we have. They've been pretty solid. A few power supply failures and that's about it.

We've always run IBM servers because they are ridiculously bulletproof.

Lenovo recently bought out IBM's server division and started taking over support. IBM never asked questions, but apparently Lenovo does. I can't blame them too much. The server doesn't really show a true fault with the drive, maybe the fact that it's an SSD confuses it. Hoping the diag shows the issue.

 

My work laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T460s. I've only had it since October. It's been great so far.

We have a ton of Optiplex 7010's that we are going to start replacing with Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p machines. We are done (or pretty close) to replacing the Optiplex 790's.