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[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] TrackPoint is trademarked. Call it a clit mouse instead.
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I'm half the IT department at my job. My "office" is a desk in accounts receivable. Right by the lady who handles all the really troublesome accounts and everyone else comes to for advice and gossip. It gets pretty colorful around here.
Also the whole place is kind of a shambles I've been trying to slowly clean up. It's a manufacturing company that makes great product and loves to get robots and lasers and stuff for the factory, but really drags their feet on upgrading computer stuff. All the IT stuff before I got here was handled by my boss, who isn't a sysadmin guy at all, he's just the COBOL programmer, a guy from engineering who knows a little about networking, and a guy in marketing who was basically "the young guy who knows things about computers because he's young." The network grew organically with switches added in various places as more capacity was needed. So we've got a lot of computers that don't necessarily connect to the closest switch, or have a reason for connecting to the switch they do other than, "there was an open port".
Over the last couple years I've managed to get all the Windows 95/98/2000 pcs removed, or at least relegated to the factory where they can live out their last days without internet access.
Did I mention our internal IP address scheme 90.0.0.0/255.255.255.0? Yeah, that's not an address block that's supposed to be used for internal addresses. Actually belongs to a French ISP, and we've had some issues where a couple PCs that print to network printers randomly decided to resolve the IP to a name in the port settings so the print jobs got sent a router halfway across the world. That was fun. I've been trying to convince my boss for over 2 years that we need to set aside a couple days and just fix it.
enough grumbling for now I guess.
Wow.
That could be causing flaky behind-the-scenes problems with Active Directory or Group Policy or Exchange.
My strong feeling is that you need to get your TCP/IP and DNS implementations nailed down first; having something wrong (like a Class A :!: subnet being used in a private network) is like having termites in your foundation.
Whew, dodged a bullet there. Your fancy moonspeak words don't exist in our office. It's just a flat network with a couple different workgroups, a file server, and two servers that run the old (and thankfully in the process of being retired and contents moved to the) new document system. I would love to before I move on to greener pastures get a real actual honest to gosh domain going, so peoples shared documents are centrally located. I wouldn't have to add users on peoples PCs for every person who needs access to them. We could maybe have some DHCP. I'm drooling.
If I don't get that and the IP address thing fixed before I find something else, it's already on the "battles to fight" list for whoever will replace me.
Actually, I am using Microsoft Security Essentials on my laptop and it is fine, but I don't think that it would be right for use at large.
Funny IT stories: we don't have a designated IT staff here, but a very sharp programmer is in charge of most of it, with me taking up the slack because I actually was a netadmin for a different company (and I never want to do that again). Windows updates were in shambles when I started so I set up a WSUS server and everything works great. At least when the users don't turn off their computers. I told people for months to not turn off their computers, and some still didn't listen.
So I took the off button away in group policy. I now derive sadistic pleasure from watching people look around for the shut down button at the end of the day, only to get frustrated and walk away.
D:
What I do with WSUS is enforce a group policy that if Windows Updates were missed, they'll run immediately on the next boot. Works for me.
Stack Exchange | http://www.mpdevblog.blogspot.com
Ask away, I'm sure someone can answer.
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
More network fun:
The best thing about being remote network support is discovering undocumented customer additions to our network! Got a call yesterday morning that a site was without network connectivity. So I get to our switches and find host-flapping messages on our core switch. I eventually trace the problem to a specific access switch, which I can't reach, so I kill the whole thing and leave a message for the on site guy to call me.
He goes out to the switch in question and is describing the situation to me when he casually mentions the unmanaged linksys hub they've plugged in. Delightful! Sure of that being the problem I have him unplug it. Sure enough, no issues when I bring our access switch back on-line. He says, you know some of the port lights are showing collisions, let me unplug those and plug this back in. He does, errors come back.
I ask him what else is plugged into the linksys. "Oh, three old token ring cables with ethernet converters on them."
This was almost as good as the time I found out one of our switch's uplink cables was a token ring cable between two ethernet converters to another access switch. That was especially fun because the customer didn't think to bring this up until after an hour of troubleshooting.
I mean seriously. I had someone come up to me the other day and ask me how to execute a dos command. I was like "Dude I'm 27.... Fuck if I know. It's DOS..."
It's amazing how old the systems are at some of the larger companies out there.
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
We just had a tech leave due to longstanding medical issues. Good guy, very skilled, but it was obvious he was starting to have problems. We had a network segment in the office that was down. Turned out he had connected two switches together... with two patch cables.
I have a number of clients who just finally retired their last 2000 servers.
Biggest pain in the ass ever.
We've still actually got a few dev servers up and running with 2000 that haven't been migrated because they're just going to be phased out, but seriously, who does that.
The main office of info resources wouldn't sign off on us moving to server 2008 either. They made us jump to 2003, which we will have the same problem with in two years.
I don't know what the fuck they're going to do in 2013 when they stop supporting XP completely.
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
Yes, of course.
Like the programmer at my last job who begged me to reboot his build computer every day, because he thought the system had a memory leak due to "top" showing memory in use.
Explaining to him how the OS allocates memory for programs was no help. Every day, I would refuse to reboot the thing, he'd go to his boss, then the bosses would get on my case. Dude was a bit of a drama queen and was their best developer, so eventually they just told me to do whatever he asked.
Like the guy whose flat file db program locked up and he wants me to reboot the server and make it work.
Now that is retarded.
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
Make sure you budget for a trusted SSL cert with multiple names for each client access server. It's about $70-90 a year.
Different breed of programmer probably.
I guess a good way to find out is to ask them how large an integer is and see what they say.
Sametown Internash.
Nah we were the same kind of programmers, we all knew our shit (programing wise), they just knew nothing about computer maintenance.
The Vac - My Science Fiction Epic
Fortune Pancakes - My Gag-A-Day Comic
Whenever I've worked in a corporate environment, I've always taken the slowest spec in current use.
If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.
Extra triple pet peevey if they haven't actually mentioned any problems with the system until now.
"So when are you going to fix my email?"
"What do you mean? Are you having trouble with it?"
"I haven't been able to send mail in over a week!"
/strangle.
I work for DoD so dont need to worry about that, we have our own certification authority jazz.
I get a ton of tickets in like this. Also, best ticket was one where all it said was "Cannot access to email". No customer name(got 850k of them across multiple domains) or anything.
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
Yeah, those are annoying.
The ones I'm talking about are more like this:
"We need to talk about buying a new email server."
"What? Why?"
"Every time anybody in our department tries to email {emailaddress@domain.com} it never gets there!"
*emails {emailaddress@domain.com}. gets a bounceback for 'user account does not exist'*
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
Like, I've heard the words "Active Directory", and I know it's a thing that exists. But what does it do exactly? I assume it's a system for controlling who gets to log into what box, and who gets to print to this printer or that, and what box gets which patch when?
I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.
Confined to a tiny spit of sand, unable to escape,
But tonight, it's heavy stuff.