IT BS thread

Im running HPE/Aruba these days. It works just as well for access layer and most campus deployments.
If I was doing complicated Data Centers like I used to do I would do Cisco Nexus hands down.

 

Thanks for in input. I was so surprised by Harry's comment I had to be sure. I've been spending a lot of time with just the basics and there is some stuff he doesn't know that it never occured to me you could not not know. He's a midlife career changer with a degree and zero experience in the real world of IT. He is in an entry level spot and I'm not too worried about him. He makes up for his lack of knowledge with enthusiasm and willingness to learn. This will just be another learning opportunity.

 

Midlife career change is often a mirage. He / She will probably flourish in a more diverse environment. Real world, jack of all trades, is tremendously valuable to a company these days.

 

And tremendously rare.

 

Amen. I got lucky when I retired from the Navy and landed with a VAR in 95. Did pre and post sales engineering support. A salesman would tell me the day before I was going to a site with Banyan Vines and 80K workstations. Oh shit... You learn quick or sink.

With the sit down gig been doing for more than 15 years now it is more stable. However have moved and also pulled into different roles internally in an enterprise environment. Sometimes miss having the keys to the kingdom but with the new security standards everyone should be doing no one has them, or at least should. All that experience in the past has payed off in the end. Systems are systems it isn't rocket science hell anyone can do rocket science. Nuclear science and reactors that is a different story... Sorry old Nuke joke.

Speaking of security was talking with my son today after he sent me this meme, it is floating around Apple tech support. Or so I have heard.



And yes I whacked the metadata info to protect the guilty.

Level 2 support is use to running sudo and being able to do what limited things Apple exposes to them but have been fighting with the recent boot strap issues permissions in Windows on dual boot. I explained to him about take ownership, NTFS security and runas at the command line. He said yeah that works and he has been trying to tell the others that. Proud of him. He is still a Mac head and hasn't learned to hate all Operating systems equally but he is still learning.

 

Since the 90s

 

I miss SunOS 4.3 and WinNT 4.0.

Why in all fuck hell am I nostalgic for old janky crap?

 

I do not miss NT 4.0

On a side note headed to LAX for a flight to NY for a Data Center upgrade this weekend.

 

Come upgrade my data center. Babysitting 5200 VMs, three brand-new IBM mainframes, a SAN so large it takes 20,000 hard drives, and 22 30-ton air handlers.

It's noisy in there.

 

Right there with you....I spent most my first 5 years out of college working in the K-12 environment. I had almost the same experience with a loop back, only we didn't have a working FLuke and it resulted in a late night tracing cables. While searching for the two wall plates that had been patched together in a lab, we discovered an 8 port HUB, above a ceiling tile, with the up-link from the IFD spliced together with an RJ-45 and a Keystone. This was in 2007, so the hub had to have been 10+ years old at that point and I have no idea how the classrooms at that end of the building functioned. It wasn't a particularly difficult environment, but it gave me a chance to see lots of regular faces and had nice predictable hours.

I went to a consulting firm after that and now spend most of my time dealing with Sales Monkeys who like to sell half baked solutions without consulting anyone technical.......It's a lot more stress and I have a lot more responsibility (i.e. late night calls), but it pays better and allows me to boats and camping gear.

 

Could always play with Solaris

 

Nah, we're divesting Solaris as much as possible for RHEL 7. Oracle 12 RAC plays nicely on those RHAL systems, and it doesn't have the same vulnerabilities.

 

I could never get into red hat.

 

We have it on THOUSANDS of VMs. Insane the # of server systems we have.

 

I'm just used to the way Debian does things, and I get lost with RH. I also like FreeBSD, but not as much hardware support as Linux (for the desktop anyways)

 

I second the Linux Mint route. I come from the development side, not the sys admin side, so not really an expert in configuring Linux OSes. The Mint folks have a minimal install that I used on old netbooks for a while (cheap Asus things with an Atom processor and minimal memory), worked way better than Windows on those things -- I considered them unusable even for browsing. I put the full distro on my wife's old notebook just as a spare machine for goofing around with. It's easy to install and just works.

 

Same here. And have moved most of the Oracle DB to RH off of Slowaris, HP-UX and AIX. Still migrating mainframe DB2 and Sybase databases and will be for a few more years yet. Sybase is almost gone though.

Think the preferred flavor of Nix has a lot to do with what you started with. Mine is RH and HP-UX. In the beginning RH was pretty much the main player until they went commercial.

I brought in VMWare when I had to migrate 60 NT 4 print servers with more than 10K printers. Against much kicking and screaming everyone told me it wasn't mature yet and was an unknown. Print servers were a perfect test IMO so went ahead and did it anyhow. Before P2V so used Imaging for Windows, MS printer migrate tool and SID Changer. Now they want us to get to 95% Virtual hosts LOL. Close now but some systems are still best run on a physical box.

 

I love all operating systems, the bugier and more complex the better.Seems that people are willing to pay me good money to keep their computer systems running. What would happen if all these systems just started working? Nope, thanks to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds and their crappy software, I've been making a good living for longer than I will admit to.

 

Seriously, you something is actually wrong when Linux doesn't kernal panic or windows doesn't decide to force an update that breaks compatibility, or when Apple has a piece of software you actually need (wait do people actually use macOS in professional environments)

 

Much of the development community is moving to Apple, at least the ones I have been around lately. I just do emails and Powerpoints now, but may switch over when it is time for a refresh.