Are most of you guys serving a single organization, or are you like myself, managing lots of clients?
I'm the entire IT department for a company with 7 branch locations, 125ish workstations, and 500-1000 employees. From reading your posts I'm sure this would be a breeze for lots of you, but I'm self-taught and this was my first IT job. I've been doing it for almost 4 years now though, so I guess I'm not terrible at it.
I just got a 3DS XL. Add me! 2879-0925-7162
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Our new offsite backup partner offers Exchange mailbox-level backups.
I can restore individual emails from their web portal directly to the user's mailbox, without having to hassle with anything.
Are most of you guys serving a single organization, or are you like myself, managing lots of clients?
Single organization; network engineer for a major US airline, about 35,000 people, 20,000 hosts, 2,000 network devices. Not huge, but it keeps our team busy.
I work for a consulting company that has about 100 clients that range in size from 10 to 1000+ employees which theoretically doesn't sound that bad/big until you realize that they all have completely different network architectures/processes/Server and Workstation OS's etc.
Speaking of which, we recently picked up a client that uses Sage ACT! and omfg i can't get over how shitty a program and how terrible sage support is. Doing something supposedly basic like installing the client software on 5 workstations ended up being a 40 hour process because the installer just shits itself, and says the computer needs to be rebooted..forever, right after reboots. So eventually get that sorted out (by paying for a support contract with sage, and they had to use a special in house program that requires an employee ID and a password to force the installer to stop checking for pre-reqs and just install) and now a week later nobody can sync to that database due to server.outofmemory exceptions. Except the server has 20+ gigs of ram free and 2 TB's of space, and their support, who we have paid for a support contract with due to the above problem, have no idea, their only suggestion was to try wiping and rebuilding the server from scratch.
We're this | | far from dropping this damned client solely because they insist on using this terrible software and it's gotten to the point where we just can't be bothered to waste 80 man hours a week keeping it running, for a 20 person company.
tl:dr if anyone ever suggests you use act!, just punch them in the face. It's honestly for the best.
TBH though i've worked for other companies in their internal IT dept's and i dunno if i could go back to it. I always got bored of those jobs after 8 months to a year of doing the exact same thing, here we gain 3 or 4 clients and lose 1 or 2 every couple of months so there's always new shit blowing up in my face to keep it interesting and new projects needing to be done.
I'm just a boring old desktop support guy for a contracting/IT services company. Mostly working with hospitals. Did helpdesk for almost two years, for that we have abour 3-4 major clients at a time, with around 10 small clients that call like 2 or 3 times a day. That was hell and I'm much happier in the field.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Are most of you guys serving a single organization, or are you like myself, managing lots of clients?
I'm the entire IT department for a company with 7 branch locations, 125ish workstations, and 500-1000 employees. From reading your posts I'm sure this would be a breeze for lots of you, but I'm self-taught and this was my first IT job. I've been doing it for almost 4 years now though, so I guess I'm not terrible at it.
At my previous job I was half the IT department for an equipment manufacturer that had about 300 employees. I would not do that again, much less what you've got going on.
There just so long I can bear to try and resurrect Windows 98 machines.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I have got today that while I generally appreciate ibm's hardware and server deployment tools they really seem to go out of their way to be as obscuratan as possible when it comes to documentation or troubleshooting.
Still haven't figured out why the software wouldn't install, but I am now knowledgeable enough to be dangerous in the field of ServerGuide pe image creation.
I'm IT (the only IT) for a police department of ~80 users and ~50 machines. Fortunately, I have support from our local board of education which we used to share services with for things like AD, Exchange, etc. But due to some new regulations we are splitting into our own domain, which has been nothing but a gigantic headache..
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Hi guys and girls,
What's the recommendation for a free, (u)EFI compatible imaging/ghosting tool?
Is the answer clonezilla?
I'm going to try a different mechanism for the accursed x3250.
OK, here's kind of a weird one. What could cause a RDP connection to a server on vendors domain to fail when you connect through the normal RDP thingy with certificate or authentication errors, but not when you set it up as a connection in the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in?
OK, here's kind of a weird one. What could cause a RDP connection to a server on vendors domain to fail when you connect through the normal RDP thingy with certificate or authentication errors, but not when you set it up as a connection in the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in?
Windows 7 machine?
Because the answer in XP would frequently be "Windows Firewall." Maybe try turning that off, see if it works?
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
I work for a consulting company that has about 100 clients that range in size from 10 to 1000+ employees which theoretically doesn't sound that bad/big until you realize that they all have completely different network architectures/processes/Server and Workstation OS's etc.
Speaking of which, we recently picked up a client that uses Sage ACT! and omfg i can't get over how shitty a program and how terrible sage support is. Doing something supposedly basic like installing the client software on 5 workstations ended up being a 40 hour process because the installer just shits itself, and says the computer needs to be rebooted..forever, right after reboots. So eventually get that sorted out (by paying for a support contract with sage, and they had to use a special in house program that requires an employee ID and a password to force the installer to stop checking for pre-reqs and just install) and now a week later nobody can sync to that database due to server.outofmemory exceptions. Except the server has 20+ gigs of ram free and 2 TB's of space, and their support, who we have paid for a support contract with due to the above problem, have no idea, their only suggestion was to try wiping and rebuilding the server from scratch.
We're this | | far from dropping this damned client solely because they insist on using this terrible software and it's gotten to the point where we just can't be bothered to waste 80 man hours a week keeping it running, for a 20 person company.
tl:dr if anyone ever suggests you use act!, just punch them in the face. It's honestly for the best.
TBH though i've worked for other companies in their internal IT dept's and i dunno if i could go back to it. I always got bored of those jobs after 8 months to a year of doing the exact same thing, here we gain 3 or 4 clients and lose 1 or 2 every couple of months so there's always new shit blowing up in my face to keep it interesting and new projects needing to be done.
Nice! Sounds like you do what I do, on a larger scale.
Sage does make shit software, and it is pretty much guaranteed that you'll need a support contract to keep it operational.
OK, here's kind of a weird one. What could cause a RDP connection to a server on vendors domain to fail when you connect through the normal RDP thingy with certificate or authentication errors, but not when you set it up as a connection in the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in?
Windows 7 machine?
Because the answer in XP would frequently be "Windows Firewall." Maybe try turning that off, see if it works?
Windows XP. I'm pretty sure the Windows Firewall isn't enabled on these. It used to work, then after a while I started getting certificate errors. Then the vendor changed the IP address of the server and for like a week we couldn't get it to resolve. Then the other day it started working, from the few Win 7 PCs we have, but from the XP we had to do it the other way.
Cisco pulled a total dick move today. Time to start digging into building a Linux-based firewall.
Whoah. I'm glad mine is disabled though it's tempting me to install DD-WRT again on it. While I enjoyed the options of DD-WRT, it wasn't the most impressive version since my router isn't widely used.
Cisco pulled a total dick move today. Time to start digging into building a Linux-based firewall.
Whoah. I'm glad mine is disabled though it's tempting me to install DD-WRT again on it. While I enjoyed the options of DD-WRT, it wasn't the most impressive version since my router isn't widely used.
Apparently they'll only update if you have automatic updates enabled - which I believe are done by default. Thankfully, I have an E4200v1, which is safe...for now. Only the "Smart WiFi/App" routers are affected.
OK, here's kind of a weird one. What could cause a RDP connection to a server on vendors domain to fail when you connect through the normal RDP thingy with certificate or authentication errors, but not when you set it up as a connection in the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in?
Windows 7 machine?
Because the answer in XP would frequently be "Windows Firewall." Maybe try turning that off, see if it works?
Windows XP. I'm pretty sure the Windows Firewall isn't enabled on these. It used to work, then after a while I started getting certificate errors. Then the vendor changed the IP address of the server and for like a week we couldn't get it to resolve. Then the other day it started working, from the few Win 7 PCs we have, but from the XP we had to do it the other way.
Is it set to "only allow remote connections from computers with network level authentication"? If so it will only work with remote desktop "out of the box" on vista and 7, but XP will not. I think XP can connect with some tweaking if it is set up that way, but the easiest solution would be to change the server to "allow connections from any version of remote desktop (less secure.)"
OK, here's kind of a weird one. What could cause a RDP connection to a server on vendors domain to fail when you connect through the normal RDP thingy with certificate or authentication errors, but not when you set it up as a connection in the Remote Desktops MMC snap-in?
Windows 7 machine?
Because the answer in XP would frequently be "Windows Firewall." Maybe try turning that off, see if it works?
Windows XP. I'm pretty sure the Windows Firewall isn't enabled on these. It used to work, then after a while I started getting certificate errors. Then the vendor changed the IP address of the server and for like a week we couldn't get it to resolve. Then the other day it started working, from the few Win 7 PCs we have, but from the XP we had to do it the other way.
Is it set to "only allow remote connections from computers with network level authentication"? If so it will only work with remote desktop "out of the box" on vista and 7, but XP will not. I think XP can connect with some tweaking if it is set up that way, but the easiest solution would be to change the server to "allow connections from any version of remote desktop (less secure.)"
Well, it's not our server, so we can't do anything to it. It basically just lets us create AD accounts and do password resets for this software the nursing homes use. It's just weird because it used to work, and I have no idea why it would treat the RDP snap-in any differently from the standalone RDP client.
I'm sitting in the dark right now, middle of a storm, and middle of the night, dreading a knock on my door. I am positive that by now our backup batteries have died and we have no servers and no phones operational at work and this is going to absolutely ruin my weekend and/or Monday. I am surprised they haven't come for me yet as though I could magically recharge the UPS or make a giant generator appear.
I need to get out of the state, fast.
Edit: Not fast enough. Loud banging woke me at 7:30 this morning to "fix it" despite the entire city still being without power. Ugh.
I'm sitting in the dark right now, middle of a storm, and middle of the night, dreading a knock on my door. I am positive that by now our backup batteries have died and we have no servers and no phones operational at work and this is going to absolutely ruin my weekend and/or Monday. I am surprised they haven't come for me yet as though I could magically recharge the UPS or make a giant generator appear.
I need to get out of the state, fast.
Edit: Not fast enough. Loud banging woke me at 7:30 this morning to "fix it" despite the entire city still being without power. Ugh.
Now picture about 250 sites and one Help Desk having the same misguided notions.
Them, at 1:00am: "The power is out at <airport>."
Me, in my mind: "WHY THANK YOU. I SHALL BEGIN THE REPAIRS FROM HERE."
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
The answer is "so what did the power company say when you called them?"
Oh, it's even worse than that. When there's a power hit at a site, the network team is somehow responsible for determining the cause for the outage.
Me on daily ops call: "There was a local power hit, duration was about 30 minutes."
MGMT: "What caused the power hit?"
Me: "...the power...going...out?"
Sadly, we usually have to find out the actual RFO. It makes absolutely no sense. The power went out. The power goes out, sometimes. If you'd like to know why, I'd suggest you call the local utility. And in the end, does it really matter why the power went out? What are you going to do about it? Is our reaction going to be different depending on the root cause? Get real. Can we spend our time on useful things?
I'm sitting in the dark right now, middle of a storm, and middle of the night, dreading a knock on my door. I am positive that by now our backup batteries have died and we have no servers and no phones operational at work and this is going to absolutely ruin my weekend and/or Monday. I am surprised they haven't come for me yet as though I could magically recharge the UPS or make a giant generator appear.
I need to get out of the state, fast.
Edit: Not fast enough. Loud banging woke me at 7:30 this morning to "fix it" despite the entire city still being without power. Ugh.
Just ask them what your generator budget is, and make it clear that if it's not well into the five figures, it's not enough.
It stops at Copying Windows Files 0% every time...
Whyyyyy?
Broken image/disk?
Tried it with 5 different images from two different original discs.
From an image which successfully installed on another machine no problems.
I'm thinking it could be a ram issue maybe, but I haven 't been able to run a me test since having that think...
Or a weird driver issue - though I've added the drivers to the images prior or loaded them from USB.
Apothe0sis on
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
I originally thought my W7 image was busted when I first tried to install it; it turned out the thing was just taking its sweet time to start loading. Like ten minutes time. I think the cause turned out to be some weird bug in some impossible to update firmware…
Anyway, on your next attempt, wait to get to where it hangs, get up and go get a drink. When you come back, worst case you're as stuck as you were before, but now you have refreshments and have eliminated another possibility.
Last time that happened to me it was a bad hard drive.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Last time that happened to me it was a bad hard drive.
That would be crappy luck - the other machine - the x3650 - came with a dead hard drive as well.
I guess I should investigate that option too.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Hey droogs,
Talk to me about SIP phones. The boss wants to use a cloud based PABX. At the moment the settings we've been provided appear to fail to properly negotiate our NAT.
Seems like the server on the other end tries to respond over port 772 (from memory).
Once we add in multiple phones I imagine this could be (more) problematic, even if I solve the NAT issue I suspect they'd probably collide after NAT-reversal...
Do I need to add another server internally that all the SIP connections can be brokered through? Should this simply be sorted via NAT rules? I think my router/firewall has SIP settings section, so maybe that will be the answer, but I'd prefer something more general/first principles/that I can understand.
I've had a lot of mixed luck with SIP phones. Our current SIP phones are able to negotiate their way through the NAT on their own, but they were sent to us pre-configured so I don't really know, aside from the fact that any SIP ALG on the firewall or dsl modem really confuses them.
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
Posts
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
I'm the entire IT department for a company with 7 branch locations, 125ish workstations, and 500-1000 employees. From reading your posts I'm sure this would be a breeze for lots of you, but I'm self-taught and this was my first IT job. I've been doing it for almost 4 years now though, so I guess I'm not terrible at it.
I can restore individual emails from their web portal directly to the user's mailbox, without having to hassle with anything.
They must never know.
What.
Whaaaat.
I cannot install the windows on this machine.
It stops at Copying Windows Files 0% every time...
Whyyyyy?
Single organization; network engineer for a major US airline, about 35,000 people, 20,000 hosts, 2,000 network devices. Not huge, but it keeps our team busy.
Speaking of which, we recently picked up a client that uses Sage ACT! and omfg i can't get over how shitty a program and how terrible sage support is. Doing something supposedly basic like installing the client software on 5 workstations ended up being a 40 hour process because the installer just shits itself, and says the computer needs to be rebooted..forever, right after reboots. So eventually get that sorted out (by paying for a support contract with sage, and they had to use a special in house program that requires an employee ID and a password to force the installer to stop checking for pre-reqs and just install) and now a week later nobody can sync to that database due to server.outofmemory exceptions. Except the server has 20+ gigs of ram free and 2 TB's of space, and their support, who we have paid for a support contract with due to the above problem, have no idea, their only suggestion was to try wiping and rebuilding the server from scratch.
We're this | | far from dropping this damned client solely because they insist on using this terrible software and it's gotten to the point where we just can't be bothered to waste 80 man hours a week keeping it running, for a 20 person company.
tl:dr if anyone ever suggests you use act!, just punch them in the face. It's honestly for the best.
TBH though i've worked for other companies in their internal IT dept's and i dunno if i could go back to it. I always got bored of those jobs after 8 months to a year of doing the exact same thing, here we gain 3 or 4 clients and lose 1 or 2 every couple of months so there's always new shit blowing up in my face to keep it interesting and new projects needing to be done.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
There just so long I can bear to try and resurrect Windows 98 machines.
Still haven't figured out why the software wouldn't install, but I am now knowledgeable enough to be dangerous in the field of ServerGuide pe image creation.
What's the recommendation for a free, (u)EFI compatible imaging/ghosting tool?
Is the answer clonezilla?
I'm going to try a different mechanism for the accursed x3250.
Because the answer in XP would frequently be "Windows Firewall." Maybe try turning that off, see if it works?
Nice! Sounds like you do what I do, on a larger scale.
Sage does make shit software, and it is pretty much guaranteed that you'll need a support contract to keep it operational.
Whoah. I'm glad mine is disabled though it's tempting me to install DD-WRT again on it. While I enjoyed the options of DD-WRT, it wasn't the most impressive version since my router isn't widely used.
Apparently they'll only update if you have automatic updates enabled - which I believe are done by default. Thankfully, I have an E4200v1, which is safe...for now. Only the "Smart WiFi/App" routers are affected.
Is it set to "only allow remote connections from computers with network level authentication"? If so it will only work with remote desktop "out of the box" on vista and 7, but XP will not. I think XP can connect with some tweaking if it is set up that way, but the easiest solution would be to change the server to "allow connections from any version of remote desktop (less secure.)"
Well, it's not our server, so we can't do anything to it. It basically just lets us create AD accounts and do password resets for this software the nursing homes use. It's just weird because it used to work, and I have no idea why it would treat the RDP snap-in any differently from the standalone RDP client.
I need to get out of the state, fast.
Edit: Not fast enough. Loud banging woke me at 7:30 this morning to "fix it" despite the entire city still being without power. Ugh.
Now picture about 250 sites and one Help Desk having the same misguided notions.
Them, at 1:00am: "The power is out at <airport>."
Me, in my mind: "WHY THANK YOU. I SHALL BEGIN THE REPAIRS FROM HERE."
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Me on daily ops call: "There was a local power hit, duration was about 30 minutes."
MGMT: "What caused the power hit?"
Me: "...the power...going...out?"
Sadly, we usually have to find out the actual RFO. It makes absolutely no sense. The power went out. The power goes out, sometimes. If you'd like to know why, I'd suggest you call the local utility. And in the end, does it really matter why the power went out? What are you going to do about it? Is our reaction going to be different depending on the root cause? Get real. Can we spend our time on useful things?
'The fax line is down'
'Yea, I know, I contacted our provider, they know about it.'
*glares at me*
'Well are you going to fix it?'
Sure, let me just grab a pair or wire cutters and go to town on a telco's wiring at an undetermined location.
Tried it with 5 different images from two different original discs.
From an image which successfully installed on another machine no problems.
I'm thinking it could be a ram issue maybe, but I haven 't been able to run a me test since having that think...
Or a weird driver issue - though I've added the drivers to the images prior or loaded them from USB.
Anyway, on your next attempt, wait to get to where it hangs, get up and go get a drink. When you come back, worst case you're as stuck as you were before, but now you have refreshments and have eliminated another possibility.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
IBM just hates me.
Last time that happened to me it was a bad hard drive.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
That would be crappy luck - the other machine - the x3650 - came with a dead hard drive as well.
I guess I should investigate that option too.
Talk to me about SIP phones. The boss wants to use a cloud based PABX. At the moment the settings we've been provided appear to fail to properly negotiate our NAT.
Seems like the server on the other end tries to respond over port 772 (from memory).
Once we add in multiple phones I imagine this could be (more) problematic, even if I solve the NAT issue I suspect they'd probably collide after NAT-reversal...
Do I need to add another server internally that all the SIP connections can be brokered through? Should this simply be sorted via NAT rules? I think my router/firewall has SIP settings section, so maybe that will be the answer, but I'd prefer something more general/first principles/that I can understand.