IT BS thread

Ha .. management / non-management roles all the shit still landed on my desk to solve. In my last job I was one of the top engineers at the company and the only one who knew an entire stack from network (LAN/WAN/SAN), storage, servers, windows server, virtualization, voice, etc ....

On one hand its nice on the other hand you wonder wtf everyone else is doing.

 

VMs are fucking witchcraft. I only have to mention in passing that I need more servers for something, and some trolls in the dungeon magically shit them. Doesn't matter if they're Windows, RHEL 6, RHEL 7, AIX, Solaris, VMS, Novell, S5r4, or are needed in DEV, TEST, PERF, PREP, or PROD - instant servers. Like magic.

It's voodoo death magic, man.

 

It's the future, mannn

 

Sounds like IT these days mostly involves babysitting VMs.

 

As apposed to what?
Babysitting software running on baremetal hardware that no one wants to reboot because 1) it takes 30+ min and 2) no one is sure if the hardware will even come back up?

I'm not sure I would call todays IT babysitting.

 

The PC guys seem to think they invented VMs, but IBM introduced them back in 1972 on their mainframes with VM/370. In today's world any I can think of a thousand good reasons for a VM environment and none for a dedicated server.

 

Large on-premise exchange deployments.

The way Exchange is designed these days there is little benefit to virtualization and JBOD is cheaper than SAN .

This assumes anyone is still deploying on-prem.

 

I worked at a warehouse that sold cigarettes to convenience stores. We had one computer given to us by the government that ran a camera system to monitor the working area where the cigarettes were getting stamped to ensure the boxes were properly stamped and no one was stealing the stamps, and send the footage back to the ATF or whoever. It might have done slightly more things like count the stamps, but that's it.
Does that count as an application for a dedicated server, or not fit the definition? I can't help myself when given a challenge, even if it's out of my realm, hehe.

 

O365 - it's in the cloud man.......

 

I know, hence my last comment on assuming anyone still runs it on prem. There are still a lot of people that use it on prem but more and more are moving to O365.
That implementation of Exchange is also on bare metal boxes with JBOD.

 

There can be compliance / security reasons why you would use a dedicated box. But in general that app could probably also be ran on a VM.

 

You're probably right on this one for a large exchange deployment. But, for smaller deployments IMHO the cloud is where it should be.

I knew this one was coming The system is being provided to you to make sure compliance is being maintained by an outside entity probably doesn't count. Now if your organization were doing it, a VM is the place for that sort of task.

 

No, it has just evolved into more meaningful work and less bs repetitive tasks.

 

This vendor spam made me laugh, it's so pathetic. I haven't opened an email from them in 3 months, maybe they should get a clue and stop sending it. Yeah, like I'm going to be bothered to reply to them in any way

Anybody else getting begging email from vendor/spammers?

 

I get remarkably little spam from vendors. Maybe it's just the industry I'm in.

The bigger issue tends to be getting replies from people that you need to talk to.

 

What's your secret? I get 20+ what I call vendor spams per day. Our spam filter does a pretty good job of blocking the obvious junk, but it let's this stuff straight through. I'll go to a conference and get email from vendors that I didn't even talk to. That's probably where these clowns came from.

 

Last year I almost got thru all of Cisco Live w/o getting my badge scanned once. Then on the last day I was checking something out and got ninja scanned by a girl at the Cisco booth.

 

I love trade show swag. I left the last show with at least 30 pens, a dozen assorted USB devices, beer openers, countless pins, some mouse pads, and a set of SANS posters still up on my wall at work.

They know what they’re doing with the booth bunnies. You got off easy.

 

I research through 3rd party. I give out temp email addresses if I absolutely need to talk to someone.

I get an occasional "How're things going, did any of our shit break yet?" email from some of my vendors. Most of my stuff is specialty, but for the normal IT needs I just use a single VAR.