[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] TrackPoint is trademarked. Call it a clit mouse instead.

urahonky

bowen wrote: »

your job is the worst job

Apparently he told our CEO no this morning, but our COO called him and he accepted but she never got back to us... Now my CEO is calling my COO to verify. I'm supposed to be out in 30 minutes...

urahonky

Phew... He didn't accept. False alarm! I can leave on time today!

Dehumanized

Smart Hero wrote: »

Here's a bit of a silly question

How do you guys store all the miscellaneous crap (extra cables, hardware, various dongles and widgets, spare UPSs, etc) in your workspace?

We throw it all into a large plastic container.

If someone needs a cable or such as a USB to PS/2 dongle, we walk into the server room and wait a few minutes, then tell them that we don't have one.

Spoiler:

Well, the "large plastic container" bit is generally true, at least. Only maintaining around 40 workstations, so there typically aren't a lot of requests that come by.

bowen

We use plastic bins that have drawers in our server room.

I have hundreds of USB/monitor/power cables.

I also have a few dozen serial->network adapters.

Mr_Rose

Big ol' cardboard boxes, stacked haphazardly around the server room office. The biggest box, of course, houses our breeding colony of power cables.

itzerokewl

I keep a bunch of random cables at my desk, and all hardware is currently sitting in my office, we do have some large plastic bins in a storage closet filled with mostly ancient stuff, but I have yet to be brave enough to tackle the nightmare of sorting all that crap.

Abracadaniel

Yeah, I cleaned out a bunch when I took over the job, including IOMEGA ZIP Drives™ and a dot matrix printer.

After I rolled out new workstations to everyone to replace their 7-8 year old Dells (with dual monitors) I have SO MANY spare DVI and VGA cables. Tossed out about a dozen today, and my boss OKed ordering some plastic bins and wire baskets that fit into the wire shelving units I've got to handle the other crap.

TL DR

We have a cardboard box with cables, adapters, etc. It happens to have two suction cups in it, from the time we needed to get into an iMac to replace a hard drive.

End

heh I threw out some zip drives last week

also an old tape drive, some hubs, some 10mbit switches, a cd changer, an isdn modem and some other crap

ghost_master2000

Does everybody here properly dispose of UPS batteries and CRT monitors? I am having a very difficult time finding a place to do this without having to pay a ridiculous amount of money for the service.

End

crt monitors take so much space that we got rid of them long ago and I don't know what we did with them, except they are gone

batteries I think we might exchange when we get replacements maybe?

Dehumanized

Yeah, we take ours down to a secondhand PC reseller that either refurbishes or properly disposes of anything we send them. State law requires them to accept parts for recycling free of charge as long as you're not part of a large company, though.

http://www.ecyclewashington.org/

Abracadaniel

I think some of the big box office supply stores like Staples and Office Max will take them.

itzerokewl

At my old job we had a ton of old CRT monitors that we ended up taking to Best Buy to recycle. I want to say it was either free or fairly cheap to recycle them. Not sure about UPS' though.

Sentret

We have a sketchy dude we pay per pound to take problem disposables away. Sometimes I wonder if he just buries it in his yard or something...

electricitylikesme

Sentret wrote: »

We have a sketchy dude we pay per pound to take problem disposables away. Sometimes I wonder if he just buries it in his yard or something...

He sends them to Ethiopia. Seriously stop doing that.

Also jesus fuck, Googling for that got me nothing but links to waste disposal companies.

urahonky

What's the best way to wrap 50ft of ethernet cable and make it look nice? I can't seem to get it to look good...

Abracadaniel

Strangely enough, I found this the other day for the 'over-under' method. Seems good enough.

ArcSyn

That's awesome. I used to do figure 8's, which is basically the same premise but he's bringing up the bottom half of the figure 8 to the loop "under". It's a great technique and I'll have to do that. It'll save a lot more space and prevents the problem of cables twisting around themselves when you're pulling them out of a coil or trying to wrap them back up.

urahonky

Yeah unfortunately this cable doesn't wrap quite as nice as the one he was showing.

AtomBomb

I have a question about running a looping display off a memory stick. I tried H&A, but I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd drop it here. I'm guessing a few of you have to do something along these lines.

Spoiler:

At my work, we have various televisions that run promotional and informational stuff on a loop. I purchased most of these, and I made sure that the ones I purchased all took USB drives and would run the slideshow how I want. Super simple and reliable. However, we have one 42" 1080p TV that I didn't buy that can't do this. Currently, we have a somewhat shitty old PC running PowerPoint driving this display. This has a few disadvantages.

It takes up a lot of space.
It can't be very power efficient.
Staff has to VNC into the box to make changes, and this is confusing for them.
Someone managed to get a virus on the PC.
The onboard video can't to 1920x1080, so it doesn't look as good as it could.

I'm looking for something that we can hook up via HDMI that will run a series of pictures in a loop from a USB flash drive, the simpler the better. If it could do this without user intervention (plug in power and it just starts, resumes after power loss, remembers delay setting) that would be ideal.

I'm considering the Sony SMP-N200, mostly because it's cheap ($50). I looked at Roku, but they seemed to have taken the USB ports off all but their most expensive model. Also, I have one and I know it can't go straight to the slideshow after a power loss. These boxes do way more than I need them to, but I don't know if a simple jpeg slideshow box exists.

Any ideas?

expendable

AtomBomb wrote: »

I have a question about running a looping display off a memory stick. I tried H&A, but I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd drop it here. I'm guessing a few of you have to do something along these lines.

Spoiler:

At my work, we have various televisions that run promotional and informational stuff on a loop. I purchased most of these, and I made sure that the ones I purchased all took USB drives and would run the slideshow how I want. Super simple and reliable. However, we have one 42" 1080p TV that I didn't buy that can't do this. Currently, we have a somewhat shitty old PC running PowerPoint driving this display. This has a few disadvantages.

It takes up a lot of space.
It can't be very power efficient.
Staff has to VNC into the box to make changes, and this is confusing for them.
Someone managed to get a virus on the PC.
The onboard video can't to 1920x1080, so it doesn't look as good as it could.

I'm looking for something that we can hook up via HDMI that will run a series of pictures in a loop from a USB flash drive, the simpler the better. If it could do this without user intervention (plug in power and it just starts, resumes after power loss, remembers delay setting) that would be ideal.

I'm considering the Sony SMP-N200, mostly because it's cheap ($50). I looked at Roku, but they seemed to have taken the USB ports off all but their most expensive model. Also, I have one and I know it can't go straight to the slideshow after a power loss. These boxes do way more than I need them to, but I don't know if a simple jpeg slideshow box exists.

Any ideas?

I don't know how much this helps you, but I had a similar issue a while back. I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together some video clips, then burned it to DVD with Windows DVD Maker, which has an option to loop infinitely. Then all I needed was a cheap DVD player to play the DVDs I had (aside: it's completely dumb that there are still some DVD players that will only play DVD+).

The downside is, somebody has to push play after power loss, and if the loop needs to change, you have to burn a new DVD. But DVD players already work on TVs, and are generally dirt cheap...

Huntzy

Damn, I spent all day writing a thing for my office's intranet and my boss decided we aren't using it

Apothe0sis

I am dealing with weird LDAP Lookup issuesm Huntzy's boss is killing things off last minute.

Everything's falling apart.

bowen

My server issues have been resolved, seems it was 100% the powers supplies causing the blue screen/reboot issues. Odd, but alright.

Muppetman

I'm currently an IT technician for my local county council, looking after IT in schools. Everything from paper jams to server updates. I think what I want to do is more server support and less desktop support. Does anyone have any advice with regards to certification. I've had a look at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcitp.aspx#tab1 and it seems like it might be relevant. Work will quite possibly pay towards courses and also maybe let me have some work time as study time so it seems like something I should do. Any advice is welcome.

Edit : I'm in the UK and will most likely be doing distance rather then classroom learning so if anyone has experience with particular companies who offer training that'd be cool too.

ArcSyn

VMware and Teradici are my tormentors for the past week. I've been getting disconnects from my view clients, and vmware suggested upgrading the firmware on my thin clients to version 4 (I was running 3.5.1 from Feb 2012) and now every time they log in they get a security certificate warning. Ugh. So now I apparently need to install my security certificate on every thin client. And I REALLY hope this solves my disconnect problems..

Thin clients were supposed to REDUCE my work, not increase it!

AtomBomb

expendable wrote: »

AtomBomb wrote: »

I have a question about running a looping display off a memory stick. I tried H&A, but I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd drop it here. I'm guessing a few of you have to do something along these lines.

Spoiler:

At my work, we have various televisions that run promotional and informational stuff on a loop. I purchased most of these, and I made sure that the ones I purchased all took USB drives and would run the slideshow how I want. Super simple and reliable. However, we have one 42" 1080p TV that I didn't buy that can't do this. Currently, we have a somewhat shitty old PC running PowerPoint driving this display. This has a few disadvantages.

It takes up a lot of space.
It can't be very power efficient.
Staff has to VNC into the box to make changes, and this is confusing for them.
Someone managed to get a virus on the PC.
The onboard video can't to 1920x1080, so it doesn't look as good as it could.

I'm looking for something that we can hook up via HDMI that will run a series of pictures in a loop from a USB flash drive, the simpler the better. If it could do this without user intervention (plug in power and it just starts, resumes after power loss, remembers delay setting) that would be ideal.

I'm considering the Sony SMP-N200, mostly because it's cheap ($50). I looked at Roku, but they seemed to have taken the USB ports off all but their most expensive model. Also, I have one and I know it can't go straight to the slideshow after a power loss. These boxes do way more than I need them to, but I don't know if a simple jpeg slideshow box exists.

Any ideas?

I don't know how much this helps you, but I had a similar issue a while back. I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together some video clips, then burned it to DVD with Windows DVD Maker, which has an option to loop infinitely. Then all I needed was a cheap DVD player to play the DVDs I had (aside: it's completely dumb that there are still some DVD players that will only play DVD+).

The downside is, somebody has to push play after power loss, and if the loop needs to change, you have to burn a new DVD. But DVD players already work on TVs, and are generally dirt cheap...

That's a good idea. I'm going to try the Sony Streaming thing, but I'll keep that in mind as a quick backup if it fails. Thanks!

EDIT- I've got another purchase I need to make today, so I thought I might as well ask for input. Our corporate network is almost entirely wired. We only need corporate wifi for a few things (interns using provided laptops, company owned iphones). Currently, I've been using ASUS RT-N12 routers flashed with DD-WRT for both our public wifi sites (unsecured, acting as a router, using opendns to filter) and for the corporate wifi (secured, acting as an access point). I've got maybe 10 total. They've worked out okay, but 2 have died, and they're getting a little harder to find. There is a new version (RT-N12/B1), but from what I've read it's not as good as the original.

Anyone have something they like? Under $50 would be awesome, custom firmware or not is fine, stability is more important than speed.

SiliconStew

AtomBomb wrote: »

expendable wrote: »

AtomBomb wrote: »

I have a question about running a looping display off a memory stick. I tried H&A, but I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd drop it here. I'm guessing a few of you have to do something along these lines.

Spoiler:

At my work, we have various televisions that run promotional and informational stuff on a loop. I purchased most of these, and I made sure that the ones I purchased all took USB drives and would run the slideshow how I want. Super simple and reliable. However, we have one 42" 1080p TV that I didn't buy that can't do this. Currently, we have a somewhat shitty old PC running PowerPoint driving this display. This has a few disadvantages.

It takes up a lot of space.
It can't be very power efficient.
Staff has to VNC into the box to make changes, and this is confusing for them.
Someone managed to get a virus on the PC.
The onboard video can't to 1920x1080, so it doesn't look as good as it could.

I'm looking for something that we can hook up via HDMI that will run a series of pictures in a loop from a USB flash drive, the simpler the better. If it could do this without user intervention (plug in power and it just starts, resumes after power loss, remembers delay setting) that would be ideal.

I'm considering the Sony SMP-N200, mostly because it's cheap ($50). I looked at Roku, but they seemed to have taken the USB ports off all but their most expensive model. Also, I have one and I know it can't go straight to the slideshow after a power loss. These boxes do way more than I need them to, but I don't know if a simple jpeg slideshow box exists.

Any ideas?

I don't know how much this helps you, but I had a similar issue a while back. I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together some video clips, then burned it to DVD with Windows DVD Maker, which has an option to loop infinitely. Then all I needed was a cheap DVD player to play the DVDs I had (aside: it's completely dumb that there are still some DVD players that will only play DVD+).

The downside is, somebody has to push play after power loss, and if the loop needs to change, you have to burn a new DVD. But DVD players already work on TVs, and are generally dirt cheap...

That's a good idea. I'm going to try the Sony Streaming thing, but I'll keep that in mind as a quick backup if it fails. Thanks!

EDIT- I've got another purchase I need to make today, so I thought I might as well ask for input. Our corporate network is almost entirely wired. We only need corporate wifi for a few things (interns using provided laptops, company owned iphones). Currently, I've been using ASUS RT-N12 routers flashed with DD-WRT for both our public wifi sites (unsecured, acting as a router, using opendns to filter) and for the corporate wifi (secured, acting as an access point). I've got maybe 10 total. They've worked out okay, but 2 have died, and they're getting a little harder to find. There is a new version (RT-N12/B1), but from what I've read it's not as good as the original.

Anyone have something they like? Under $50 would be awesome, custom firmware or not is fine, stability is more important than speed.

Have you looked at the Unifi units from Ubiquiti? The 2.4 GHz AP's are $60-100 (5.8 dual band ~$250) and the controller software is free. Not bad for a cheap centrally managed wifi solution, but you'll have to see if it supports all the stuff you're trying to do. Most difficult part for us was actually buying them, vendors sold out of them right away.

AtomBomb

SiliconStew wrote: »

AtomBomb wrote: »

expendable wrote: »

AtomBomb wrote: »

I have a question about running a looping display off a memory stick. I tried H&A, but I didn't get a response, so I thought I'd drop it here. I'm guessing a few of you have to do something along these lines.

Spoiler:

At my work, we have various televisions that run promotional and informational stuff on a loop. I purchased most of these, and I made sure that the ones I purchased all took USB drives and would run the slideshow how I want. Super simple and reliable. However, we have one 42" 1080p TV that I didn't buy that can't do this. Currently, we have a somewhat shitty old PC running PowerPoint driving this display. This has a few disadvantages.

It takes up a lot of space.
It can't be very power efficient.
Staff has to VNC into the box to make changes, and this is confusing for them.
Someone managed to get a virus on the PC.
The onboard video can't to 1920x1080, so it doesn't look as good as it could.

I'm looking for something that we can hook up via HDMI that will run a series of pictures in a loop from a USB flash drive, the simpler the better. If it could do this without user intervention (plug in power and it just starts, resumes after power loss, remembers delay setting) that would be ideal.

I'm considering the Sony SMP-N200, mostly because it's cheap ($50). I looked at Roku, but they seemed to have taken the USB ports off all but their most expensive model. Also, I have one and I know it can't go straight to the slideshow after a power loss. These boxes do way more than I need them to, but I don't know if a simple jpeg slideshow box exists.

Any ideas?

I don't know how much this helps you, but I had a similar issue a while back. I used Windows Movie Maker to stitch together some video clips, then burned it to DVD with Windows DVD Maker, which has an option to loop infinitely. Then all I needed was a cheap DVD player to play the DVDs I had (aside: it's completely dumb that there are still some DVD players that will only play DVD+).

The downside is, somebody has to push play after power loss, and if the loop needs to change, you have to burn a new DVD. But DVD players already work on TVs, and are generally dirt cheap...

That's a good idea. I'm going to try the Sony Streaming thing, but I'll keep that in mind as a quick backup if it fails. Thanks!

EDIT- I've got another purchase I need to make today, so I thought I might as well ask for input. Our corporate network is almost entirely wired. We only need corporate wifi for a few things (interns using provided laptops, company owned iphones). Currently, I've been using ASUS RT-N12 routers flashed with DD-WRT for both our public wifi sites (unsecured, acting as a router, using opendns to filter) and for the corporate wifi (secured, acting as an access point). I've got maybe 10 total. They've worked out okay, but 2 have died, and they're getting a little harder to find. There is a new version (RT-N12/B1), but from what I've read it's not as good as the original.

Anyone have something they like? Under $50 would be awesome, custom firmware or not is fine, stability is more important than speed.

Have you looked at the Unifi units from Ubiquiti? The 2.4 GHz AP's are $60-100 (5.8 dual band ~$250) and the controller software is free. Not bad for a cheap centrally managed wifi solution, but you'll have to see if it supports all the stuff you're trying to do. Most difficult part for us was actually buying them, vendors sold out of them right away.

I hadn't seen those before. It seems like Amazon has some in stock, I'm reading up on them now. They certainly look nice. Thanks!

EDIT- I went ahead and ordered one. They seem pretty slick.

smokmnky

Hopefully this is the right thread, I didn't want to make a new one just to ask for some help. So first off a little back ground:

The company I work for does Internet testing and monitoring around the globe using consumer OS (read Windows) and browsers (IE, Firefox & Webkit-based).

One of our platforms is having both hardware, OS and proprietary software upgraded from a 9+ year old machine running Windows XP SP2 to a 5 year old machine running Windows 7. These “new” servers were previously used in our production environment for a different service that was upgraded recently as well. Before we did this upgrade the “new” servers ran Windows XP as well.

Now that the background is out of the way, the issue I’m having is this:

The “new” servers have two slight variations to them, ServerA has a SATA controller “daughter card” that plugs into the motherboard to control the hard drives. ServerB however is a newer motherboard and has that SATA controller built-in. Because of this we end up needed to have 2 different set of SATA drivers installed.

Now my company uses Ghost to maintain a set of images for all our different hardware platforms (5 currently). Each platform is for a specific software service that we provide and is tied to that server spec. As you can probably guess the issue I’m having is that ServerA and ServerB are unable to use the same image and end up needing to have 2 separate Ghost Images which is just unacceptable.

Now back when we used this same server platform for Windows XP we were able to “install” both sets of drivers for ServerA and ServerB and had 0 problems with the Ghost Images. However with Windows 7 I’m having a hard time finding a way to have it install 2 sets of drivers for hardware that isn’t actually present on the system. I’ve tried using slipstream to put the ServerB SATA drivers on an installation for ServerA but that hasn’t worked. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can try? I’m pretty desperate over here.

Thanatos

bowen wrote: »

We use plastic bins that have drawers in our server room.

I have hundreds of USB/monitor/power cables.

I also have a few dozen serial->network adapters.

I make it a rule not to keep more than half-a-dozen DVI, VGA, or generic power cables.

They just take up way too much space, and 90% of the time when you need one, you're opening a box with a new monitor that has one, anyway.

AtomBomb

I hold on to pretty much everything. I have started throwing out standard power cords just because those things are everywhere. I do still hold on to the particularly long or heavy duty ones. They can be handy when you need some wire. I cut one apart last week to wire up part of a 70v speaker system.

There were some plastic bins when I started here that I use, but I've found that cardboard boxes with the flaps folded in work just as well. If I put an effort in I can keep everything pretty organized. That's not the case at the moment. Here's my office, be glad you can't see the floor.

Spoiler:

itzerokewl

@AtomBomb, ohhh...I like the monitor hanging on the wall, is that for PC setup systems? Genius idea and something I may have to try!

On a different note, I have users currently at a Board of Trustees retreat in [REDACTED]. They've been there since Monday afternoon and so far we have the following:

Executive Secretary: Root Kit on his Laptop
User 1: Unable to connect to VPN
User 2: Unable to connect to VPN
User 3: System is actually working, but they are convinced it's my job to make their job more difficult
Internet connection at resort: Thanks to speedtest.net 0.33m/b Down 0.32m/b Up...and they wonder why VPN isn't working properly.

Worst part about the whole thing, I'm supposed to do a gotomeeting tomorrow morning with all our Trustees (using said .33m/b down and .32m/b up connection) to present a bunch of fairly technical stuff...I'm preparing for the worst (queue shopping trip to get case of b33r for after EPIC fail of a conference call.)

Athenor

Man.. We have DVI, VGA, and KVM cables coming out of the woodwork at our shop.. but DVI/VGA splitters like the types Dell/HP use? Those things are worth GOLD. I got lucky recently -- we did a monitor upgrade, but VGA didn't support the monitor's resolution and I had a VGA splitter. Rooting around last cleaning day I remembered seeing a DVI splitter, so I snagged it. It's.. so pretty...

bowen

No back on the chair is bugging me.

AtomBomb

@itzerokewl Yeah, it's handy for testing stuff. It's hard to tell in that picture, but it doesn't have a bezel on it anymore. I pulled it apart to fix it and never bothered to put it back on. It's hanging off of $2 wall mount from Monoprice. If you leave the set screw out you can pull it off the wall and bring it with you when the need arises. I just ordered 4 more to have around, they're super handy. If you need to mount any kind of screen Monoprice is awesome. I got a swiveling mount to put a monitor on a server rack as well and I think I could hang a car engine on it if I needed to.

Those DVI splitters are gold! I have 4 or 5 VGA spares, but no DVI right now. I hate that I have to "waste" them on single monitor setups.

As for the chair, it makes it easier to move around this L shaped desk. With the arms and the back on I was always off-center or leaning over. I admit it looks goofy, but it's better than these stupid ball-chairs a bunch of my coworkers have

bowen

So I'm not really too familiar with sec policies and vlans and all that. Nor am I an expert on all things cisco. But let's say I've got this server somewhere on the network (not patched directly into the ASA's port except through the switch). Is it possible to completely isolate this server from the rest of the network?

Let's say my network is like this:

192.168.66.1-254

Let's say that server is 192.168.66.2. Can I isolate this so it can't see anyone else? Do I have to give it's own subnet on a vlan? What are my options to isolate it (no pings, nothing). I mostly want this web facing machine with 0 access to the rest of our network.

SiliconStew

bowen wrote: »

So I'm not really too familiar with sec policies and vlans and all that. Nor am I an expert on all things cisco. But let's say I've got this server somewhere on the network (not patched directly into the ASA's port except through the switch). Is it possible to completely isolate this server from the rest of the network?

Let's say my network is like this:

192.168.66.1-254

Let's say that server is 192.168.66.2. Can I isolate this so it can't see anyone else? Do I have to give it's own subnet on a vlan? What are my options to isolate it (no pings, nothing). I mostly want this web facing machine with 0 access to the rest of our network.

I would do both, subnet and vlan. You'll run into less issues that way.

If you just give it a subnet, then nothing will be able to talk to it unless you specifically set up a route to it. However, traffic to and from that machine would still be traversing your regular network depending on your network layout and some traffic would be technically visible between the two subnets.

A vlan will isolate all traffic from other vlans. You'd have to specifically create a route between the two for them to communicate. You could actually run the same subnet on both vlan's if you don't need to route between the them.

bowen

Any advice on how to set that all up? I'm at a loss in how to do it in the ASDM. I know just enough of this shit to be dangerous.