IT BS thread

Not really, depending on bandwith. We have fewer DCs per # of users, but we have 400K users.

The larger question is their ability to operate in the event of an outage, and what your recovery plan is. At that RTO, you're back up and running before any local failover would be called up.

 

Thanks for the input. The remote DCs are inherently less reliable anyway since I can't spend a lot on redundancy at remote sites. The two DCs would be in a vSphere HA cluster with a local and off-site backup, temperature alarmed racks, and backup power. The likelihood of those going down is pretty low and I've got backups and extra hardware so if I did have something awful happen I could spin up the VMs on something else. It wouldn't be super quick, but it'd be doable.

Realistically too, it's a public school district. 90% of our users wouldn't notice a thing as long as there's a usable internet connection, DNS, and DHCP. Only a few use resources on local servers.

 

Hell, you could take an hour to recover and have them not notice.

Your biggest issue is security and maintaining data. In that - good luck. Block webmail access - teachers are just as insecure as students.

 

When I was in K-12 I didn't bother with on-site DCs as long as the WAN connection was stable and a couple hundred megs.
I found managing the remote DCs was more trouble then any perceived benefit they provided.

Back when the sites only had T1 connections an onsite DC was almost mandatory.

 

Ha, I would never ever win that one. I don't know of any district that does that. They fought me when I set a policy to require passcodes on personal devices if they have their district email account added to them, fought me again when I set a 20 minute period for PCs to automatically lock, and yet again when I turned up the security requirements for passwords that were previously just three characters. I won all those but I try to pick my battles.

Fortunately, the SIS and nursing software is hosted off site, as is payroll. We self host the bookkeeping software, but that should be moving up soon too.

When I started, we just had the T1s. Then we added second T1s and teamed them for a whopping 3 MB! Now I am at 250 Mbps for the small schools and 500 for the larger one. Our district office, middle school, and high school are all on the same 100 acre plot of land so we have our own fiber buried for them at 10 gbps.

I am thinking they are unnecessary at this point too. They are getting to the point where I should replace them if I am going to keep running them, but I am thinking I will just get rid of them. I moved home directories off of them and to our main VMWare cluster years ago and that's been fine.

 

You’re fooked.

Sorry.

Hope your escape plan is good. I know some good IT contracting companies if you need to escape in a hurry because some idiot old biddies lost their entire year’s lesson plans because they kept forwarding emails to and from their personal accounts.

Seeent it. IT guy quit with 15 seconds notice.

 

So I am going to be graduating here in July with a degree in Computer Information Technology and I am starting to apply places to get my first job in the IT field. Any advice or tips on how to land a good first gig? I am looking at studying and taking some cert exams but since money is tight I don't want to waste money and time on certs that wont really do me any good. Any wisdom from you all is appreciated.

 

The certs you get should be in line with what you want to do. Not a lot of point in getting say, networking certs if you want to be a programmer. And when you say degree do you mean a BS, AS, or a cert in CIT?

 

BS in CIT. Should have clarified that. I'm most interested in Systems and Network Admin jobs. So Network+ was a cert I was looking at. I would like to get my CCNA as well after I graduate.

 

RHEL 7 and VMWare will open a lot of doors in a hurry too.

There's a large DISA data center up in Ogden - lots of IT jobs there. Find out who fills their contract positions and drop a resume with a headhunter.

 

Don't overlook an A+ cert. It's relatively cheap, quick and easy to add.

 

I got my Wifi 6 mesh network running and it's better in every way. Videos are instant HD and I now get a great signal out back and in the garage where I didn't before.

What took me a while was getting my security cameras to work on my phone. I kept messing with port forwarding and other stuff. Three hours in I realized I had a static address on the Security NVR and my printer. The third octet on the old network was 0 and the new one is the typical 1. I had 1 in the port forwarding.

I was running dual wifi a few years ago running Christmas lights on a separate network so I had changed the third octet to 0.

 

It should be but I hear also from others that it is a waste of time and money as it won't get you much unless you combine it with other stuff. Though these people didn't have any certs so maybe they are biased.

 

I just know if you plan on working for the government in any way they look highly to it. It lets them know you are capable to opening up a piece of hardware without killing yourself or destroying it.

Not that it would happen but its the way they think.

I was lucky enough to pass it before it became an annual renewal.

 

DoD jobs looks for Sec+ to meet entry-level 8570 requirements. Having that on your resume will get your resume looked at, even if it isn't a security job.

 

The CCNA curriculum will give you a great foundation in the core networking concepts that you can use even if you aren't a dedicated network guy as well as a good start with Cisco in general. Just be aware there are A LOT of CCNA's out there so while I think it's worth the money, you'll have to keep going along the Cisco certification path if that's where you want to land a job. In addition to the CCNA, I would also look at Juniper network certs and anything security related seems like a safe bet.

Along the systems path, someone mentioned VMWare which is always a great way to go especially now that they have jumped into the Kubernetes world with their Tanzu product. The DevOPs world is also a good area to explore especially with container (bare metal or cloud based) knowledge being in massive demand currently.

 

How hard is keeping Sec+ and Net+ current? I've managed to keep my CISSP active since 2006 simply because I never, ever, want to take that test again.

 

That's good to know. When I look on job boards I usually see quite a few government jobs so I will try and grab A+ as well. Many of them also require security clearance. Any insight on that?