IT BS thread

I picked up an r710 on ebay for a NAS. Normally its a bit underutilized, but these last couple months its been a godsend for work. And its super stout.

I've also had really good luck with gigabyte motherboards. The one on my desktop is circa 2013 and still ticks right along. Original seasonic power supply too.

 

Spent some of the morning sorting out WiFi MAC addresses for my devices. I use MAC filtering on my router. It only holds 32 entries. Over the years I've had to keep deleting entries to make room for new ones. Today I got the list down to 9 current devices.

 

I am going to upgrade my system. Currently on cable 64MB. Motorola 6140 modem. TP Link 24 Port Gigabit switch for wired and TP link Wifi 6 that sucks. My Linksys AC1900 worked better.

New stuff on order Motorola MB7621 1000 MBPS modem, NETGEAR Nighthawk Whole Home Mesh WiFi 6 System, 3-pack. I plan on upgrading my cable connection once everything arrives and should have no problem streaming anywhere on my property.

 

Kudos on the Nighthawk. I've tried to overwhelm my X10 - and all attempts have been unsuccessful. Even when family is over and we get the number of connected devices up to around 30 (everyone has phones and tablets, and my brother works from wherever he's at) it doesn't miss a beat.

In other news, I recovered the data off of my old system onto a less-old one. My office is literally 8 degrees cooler without that overclocked quad core converting electricity to heat. I should have upgraded that thing years ago. My MIL has offered me my FIL's system (3 years old) to convert into a storage server since it has the bays, and I think it's time to take her up on it. I forgot how much cooler these new processors are compared to the first-gen cores.

 

When I was younger living at my parents house I had a system with a processor that would run pretty darn hot. Combine that with an AMD graphics card that was known for running hot as well and I could pretty much heat my room with that sucker.

 

I have a ~2000 user environment with about 700 Windows PCs. Right now I have 10 DCs. I'm considering paring down that number significantly.

At a minimum, I want to cut it down to 5--two for the main campus and one for each remote site. I'm beginning to think of just running two total for DC, DNS, DHCP, and eliminating the DCs at the remote sites. They're point-to-point fiber connections at 250-500 mbps that have (knock on wood) never gone down for more than about a minute here or there in six years. Realistically, having a domain controller locally does nothing if that fiber link goes down anyway since their home directories are stored in the main datacenter and they'd lose their internet connection too.

Is just two DCs for an environment of that size insane?

 

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.