IT BS thread

We tend to keep equipment far past its sell by date, so warranty work is only a part of what he did. Part of the argument to keep the position in house is because of the "savings" of keeping older, 5+ years, equipment in service. With 32K-ish pieces of equipment there's a lot of repair.

Until the CIO said you're in charge I tried to stay as far away from computer repair as I could. The previous tech didn't like his director and thought I'd be better, so he was pushing for a change with anybody that would listen. Having "owned" repair in a previous gig (and done repair before that) I know what a thankless job it can be. Frankly I was glad it belonged to that other director.

But, I'm talking myself into keeping the position in house.

• 5+ year old equipment is a fact of life that is ingrained into the culture of the organization. I pick my battles carefully and changing that is one battle I can't possibly win. Because of economies of scale we can do things smaller organizations can't, like have onsite repair. (need to do some math on salary, vs outside labor, but I'm thinking salary is going to be less.)
• One of the CIO's hot buttons is customer service and in my experience in house is usually better.
• Empire! Yes my empire grows, bwahahaha (totally kidding, more work, same money)

Help my talk myself out of this idea.

 

When I ran XP, I probably reinstalled every 6 to 8 months, not because it stopped working, but because it would just get sluggish over time.

The Debian install on my desktop is on its 7th year, 3rd or 4th mainboard. Still runs strong.

 

XP was different. Linux shouldn't even be included here

 

Man feel your pain. I'd stay as far away as possible.

I have no idea who or what you work for, but sounds like you'd be devoted to repairs only. If they do ask, then say I'll do it if a strict adherence to cycle out the old hardware and establish a guideline for timely replacement. You can opt for 5yr warranty. Also, hire more people or get temps until you cycle it all out. Cause you won't get anything else done while repairing equipment

Above all, I'd stay the fuck away. We currently have hardware reaching 6yrs. We stuck it out due to the economy, plus we wanted to deploy new OS ( yes, W10 with Office 2016) with new hardware as we didn't want to redo all the same work again just to update OS. We don't upgrade OS - back up files and reimage it.. Makes for clean installs.

 

I agree. There is no savings in keeping older stuff around in the long run. Way too much labor to keep it all healthy.

Our oldest laptops just crossed the 3-year mark and they'll be gone in about 6 months. Our oldest desktops are right around 5 years, but they are in places where I honestly don't think they're necessary, so I'm just waiting to prove a pattern of non-use so I can get rid of them.

 

Am I the only guy who pushes terminal services and thin clients?

 

Any thin client I've used isn't very powerful, so they're usually running obsolete software to make up for how under powered they are. We have quite a few at work we use for putty and a web interface, with Firefox 1.0 on them.

 

Thin client goes into a terminal server, brotato!

 

They say thin client on them

 

There's different kinds for sure. Most of the ones I deploy have nothing but a simple RDP client on them and plug into a terminal server where all the user's applications are installed.

 

We have many like the one pictured above. Every so often we get newer, yet lower spec'd ones.

 

We did the math years ago and couldn't make it make sense from a cost standpoint. A decent thin client wasn't that much cheaper than an actual desktop PC (and then you have to factor in the server side), and once our desktops go out I rarely have to touch them until we replace them. Laptops are a different story, but we couldn't really go VDI or anything with those anyway.

At this point, we have mostly portable devices. Our remaining desktops are often in situations like CAD and music tech labs, where you'll have 20+ PCs running AutoDesk software, or audio editing software using various audio inputs. I expect that would be quite a burden or in some cases not even possible on a terminal server.

I'm of the opinion that a huge part of the stability of an environment is how good your system images are. I see a lot of organizations running what looks like an untouched manufacturer's install of Windows and I cringe.

 

we do VDI with what i presume are thin clients at our facilities. I don't really know because i hate citrix and try to not look or think about it. hardware in the facilities is not our problem anyway... that's a local IT issue. =D

 

Yup, pretty much

We did a pilot a few years ago and deployed around 500 thin clients. It pretty much was a failure. By the time you put in the back end infrastructure to support our users work flow you could have purchased laptops. But, it really depends on what the users do. At a previous gig we had an order taking department that had a web based system. The order system didn't require much from the client so it made sense in that application.

At my current gig I am continuously encouraging the users to purchase laptops. (which makes thin clients kind of pointless) Yeah, I know laptops are more expensive, don't last as long, and are harder to support, but the financial payback is quick if you look at the value of employees being able to work from where ever they are.

 

100 Websites that Rule the Internet, interesting graphic:
https://www.vodien.com/da-100-websites-rule-internet.php

 

any of yall have any experience running ubuntu off of a flash drive? more specifically, how to get it to save settings and files to the flash drive? it starts clean every time i reboot it.

 

Anyone have fun with Avast today? I got into work and had 2 messages about random reboots and BSOD. Within 30 minutes I was up to 20 PCs with the same issue, which all turned out to be due to an Avast update gone awry. They patched it a few hours later, but by then my day was already shit.

 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence

 

i thought that was a dumb spin off of the FB live deal... dont killl me haha. just started looking into the linux stuff earlier this weekend. originally got the bootable usb and was confused why it wasnt saving any settings and what not. googling it brought up the live stuff, but for some reason it didnt click with me. ill give that a go. do you use anything linux?

 

I use Debian (in which Ubuntu is a derivative of) as my main OS.