So today Training decided to enroll every one of our employees in an asinine fucking Flu Prevention Training lesson. Said lesson uses the latest version of Flash. Guess how many of our 8,000 workstations have the latest version? The five the training department uses to develop these retarded lessons. We use Bigfix for enterprise-level patching, and we already have a nice little fixlet for rolling Flash 10. So I say to my boss, hey why not schedule this to be rolled on every box tonight? And apparently the security team wants to test the fixlet for a week. I've rolled it, it takes ten minutes, it's fine. There's no more testing to be done, let's just pull the trigger already so help desk stops getting swamped and escalating tickets to me.
IronKnuckle's Ghost on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
So today Training decided to enroll every one of our employees in an asinine fucking Flu Prevention Training lesson. Said lesson uses the latest version of Flash. Guess how many of our 8,000 workstations have the latest version? The five the training department uses to develop these retarded lessons. We use Bigfix for enterprise-level patching, and we already have a nice little fixlet for rolling Flash 10. So I say to my boss, hey why not schedule this to be rolled on every box tonight? And apparently the security team wants to test the fixlet for a week. I've rolled it, it takes ten minutes, it's fine. There's no more testing to be done, let's just pull the trigger already so help desk stops getting swamped and escalating tickets to me.
God, sounds like you work in IT Hell.
mrt144 on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
The worst thing to come into work with on Monday is some one freaking out that they lost an important file. Okay that will be easy I'll just restore from the backup. 9 time out of 10 though the user saved it on their hard drive and not the 10 millon network drives we provide them.
Cut to going over to their computer and opening up "My Computer"....."What are all these letter things I have never seen these before!?"....
Guy has 5 gigs of documents on his C drive. Sometimes I wonder how people do their jobs and have no idea how to work with documents in the network drives......D:
Are they desktop computers?
Redirect their My Documents and Desktop to the server. You can do this with a roaming profile, or you can do this with the User Shell Folders registry key. (I prefer the regkey. It's a little harder to manage, but performance is a lot better.)
Yes, that means you're going to be wasting storage on people's iTunes Music folders and crap like that, but storage is cheap. Just add iTunes and iPhone related strings to the exception list in the backup.
If they're laptops... that's a little harder. One free and easy solution that I've made work well is to remove the "My Documents" icon from the desktop and replace it with a shortcut that says "Laptop Documents." Then I'll also add a shortcut right next to it that says "Server Documents." Then when I give the user the laptop I impress upon them that the laptop documents are on the laptop and the server documents are on the server.
The vast majority of users get the message.
There are technical ways of solving the problem too but I've never found one I've really loved. I prefer just strong user education and constant reinforcement.
You can specify this is AD too.
mrt144 on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
Welp, I have had one of those days that make me think twice about getting a career in IT.
I work in local goverment IT for a small town in Colorado for the city IT department. The county IT came in about 3 weeks ago and set up the voting stuff for the election today. I gave them a block of 11 IP addresses to bypass our network and go right to the Internet for them to check people off coming in to vote.
Cue to today. There is a line an hour long out the door. All the counties laptops are locking up and timing out. I'm getting yelled at by the head of IT for the county that the computers are locking up. There is a county IT guy there thatnhas been sitting around the entire day and doesn't know at all what the problem is or what he is doing. I finally got on the router console and switched the port over to a outside comcast network we have for testing and downloading large files.
Now I had confirmed with myselve that the comcast connection was up and running. I told the county IT guy to switch the 5 laptops they had to DHCP off static. As I watch him do this I see that each computer has the same static IP address from the 11 I gave them original. All the computers were running the same IP address....................
So the computers come back up, and they cheer the county guy for fixing all their problems :x
This is after the election judge came up to me and said "I hope you know that the democrat and republican people here are judge this towns problems today because of you."
I'm going home to drink my brain into oblivion.
If this were fallout new vegas I'd have murdered the guy Helios 1 style. In fact this exact scenario plays out in the game.
mrt144 on
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited November 2010
Anyone know the most graceful way to deal with files you have administrator but not user access to in Windows 2008? I'm trying to move a bunch of files around, but this is going nowhere.
I get the "YOu don't have permissions" box, which prompts the UAC box, which works for the top level but forces skips on the lower levels. Windows really needs to learn how to sudo.
Is there a way to launch an administrator version of explorer or something, or am I stuck doing this through powershell?
Apothe0sis on
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Anyone know the most graceful way to deal with files you have administrator but not user access to in Windows 2008? I'm trying to move a bunch of files around, but this is going nowhere.
I get the "YOu don't have permissions" box, which prompts the UAC box, which works for the top level but forces skips on the lower levels. Windows really needs to learn how to sudo.
Is there a way to launch an administrator version of explorer or something, or am I stuck doing this through powershell?
You want the runas command:
runas [{/profile|/noprofile}] [/env] [/netonly] [/smartcard] [/showtrustlevels] [/trustlevel] /user:UserAccountName program
Parameters
/profile : Loads the user's profile. /profile is the default.
/no profile : Specifies that the user's profile is not to be loaded. This allows the application to load more quickly, but it can also cause a malfunction in some applications.
/env : Specifies that the current network environment be used instead of the user's local environment.
/netonly : Indicates that the user information specified is for remote access only.
/smartcard : Indicates whether the credentials are to be supplied from a smartcard.
/showtrustlevels : Lists the /trustlevel options.
/trustlevel : Specifies the level of authorization at which the application is to run. Use /showtrustlevels to see the trust levels available.
/user: UserAccountName : Specifies the name of the user account under which to run the program. The user account format should be user@domain or Domain\User.
program : Specifies the program or command to run using the account specified in /user.
/? : Displays help at the command prompt.
You can then move stuff around using the command prompt if you runas... cmd.exe
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited November 2010
@Mr_rose: Thanks for the suggestion but that puts me back where I started. I'm already logged in as a user which is part of the administrator's group, but doesn't have Full Control granted to it directly.
So I'd just be running as myself, and the only trust level I am seeing is Basic User which isn't getting me anywhere.
I'm still stuck with the same problem, Explorer complains about permissions, does the UAC thing then forces skipping instead of letting the Admin activation propogate to the children of the directory.
is this even a sane option? are there better virtualization options that are ... cheap/free? we have no budget and we already have volume licenses for r2, standard only though...
So I'm coming up on a crossroads in my fledgling career. For the last 4 years, I've been running the IT of a college textbook store. By running, I mean, I accidentally revealed to them I could fix a PC 4 years ago, and now I maintain 47 machines, a watchguard firewall, our array of IP-based cameras, our POS server and its 17 slave registers, and everything with an electric heartbeat in between on the network. This is a very fun and fulfilling job, even though I am grossly underpaid and there is almost zero IT budget aside buying duct tape and jars to catch my tears. It's a nice little mini-IT environment that allows me to train on almost anything.
But I will be moving in 2012 (barring apocalypse), quite randomly, depending on the missus' grad internship posting, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't cement my real world experience with some of them there certs and or degrees. My experience looks lovely on a resume, but I don't have any real education to back it up. I'm great in a room and though I am fairly technical, if I had to come down on people vs. robots, I'm people.
Have any of you had an experience with certs, a la A+ and whatnot?
@Mr_rose: Thanks for the suggestion but that puts me back where I started. I'm already logged in as a user which is part of the administrator's group, but doesn't have Full Control granted to it directly.
So I'd just be running as myself, and the only trust level I am seeing is Basic User which isn't getting me anywhere.
I'm still stuck with the same problem, Explorer complains about permissions, does the UAC thing then forces skipping instead of letting the Admin activation propogate to the children of the directory.
Can you take ownership of the files and alter the permissions?
chamberlain on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
So I'm coming up on a crossroads in my fledgling career. For the last 4 years, I've been running the IT of a college textbook store. By running, I mean, I accidentally revealed to them I could fix a PC 4 years ago, and now I maintain 47 machines, a watchguard firewall, our array of IP-based cameras, our POS server and its 17 slave registers, and everything with an electric heartbeat in between on the network. This is a very fun and fulfilling job, even though I am grossly underpaid and there is almost zero IT budget aside buying duct tape and jars to catch my tears. It's a nice little mini-IT environment that allows me to train on almost anything.
But I will be moving in 2012 (barring apocalypse), quite randomly, depending on the missus' grad internship posting, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't cement my real world experience with some of them there certs and or degrees. My experience looks lovely on a resume, but I don't have any real education to back it up. I'm great in a room and though I am fairly technical, if I had to come down on people vs. robots, I'm people.
Have any of you had an experience with certs, a la A+ and whatnot?
Why not just look for an IT job now and see if you can do it without the certs? You seem to have plenty of experience.
In the mean time, ask for a raise.
TL DR on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
It's more just a communications problem between departments. Nobody likes to inform people what they're going to do/just did, and then when the phones explode help desk is left to pick up the pieces. Also every department other than mine hates actually using our ticket software, so whenever I escalate a ticket out of the support department to another team it goes into a black hole.
I like how this thread is 50% bitch and moan, 50% useful q/a.
And on that note, how do y'all like printers? My company is notoriously bad at enforcing any kind of adopted standard with printers, and as a result we have ancient HPs all the way up to these weird-ass Konica-Minolta Imagistics ones. There are fewer things that mystify me as quickly as a bizarre printer problem. Is it a networking issue? A mechanical one? A user error? Mix of the three? Who knows!
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
Ugh. Printers. I had to maintain stocks of about fifteen different inks and toners at my last place and we only had four printers.
At least the Xerox Phaser 8560 was easy; no actual plastic box, just wax blocks wrapped in paper that you drop into a hopper on top. Didn't even have to interrupt a run to put a new one in.
So I'm coming up on a crossroads in my fledgling career. For the last 4 years, I've been running the IT of a college textbook store. By running, I mean, I accidentally revealed to them I could fix a PC 4 years ago, and now I maintain 47 machines, a watchguard firewall, our array of IP-based cameras, our POS server and its 17 slave registers, and everything with an electric heartbeat in between on the network. This is a very fun and fulfilling job, even though I am grossly underpaid and there is almost zero IT budget aside buying duct tape and jars to catch my tears. It's a nice little mini-IT environment that allows me to train on almost anything.
But I will be moving in 2012 (barring apocalypse), quite randomly, depending on the missus' grad internship posting, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't cement my real world experience with some of them there certs and or degrees. My experience looks lovely on a resume, but I don't have any real education to back it up. I'm great in a room and though I am fairly technical, if I had to come down on people vs. robots, I'm people.
Have any of you had an experience with certs, a la A+ and whatnot?
Why not just look for an IT job now and see if you can do it without the certs? You seem to have plenty of experience.
In the mean time, ask for a raise.
Check out monster/dice and see what is out there and what you need for it. Certs can get you in the door at times but it depends on who is the gatekeeper and what they are looking for.
lwt1973 on
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
is this even a sane option? are there better virtualization options that are ... cheap/free? we have no budget and we already have volume licenses for r2, standard only though...
I would contend that VMWare is still the best virtualisation option.
Both ESXi (barebones hypervisor version) and Server (used to be GSX, runs as a service on a Windows or RHEL box) are free and easy to use. If you want to do fancy smancy things that Hyper-V does then go with that, obviously. But everything I have heard is "Hyper-V will be really good after about 2 more years of sensible development".
We use both ESXi and Server, but I'm currently in the midst of a project to move to ESXi only. It's a bit of a pain because the server with VMWare Server also does a few other things.
The only trap with ESXi is that it has limited support for different NIC chipsets out of the gates. There are however ways of hacking them in, which I spent some rather frustrating time figuring out a few months ago, but have never looked back.
Apothe0sis on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
I run HP over here and haven't had much of an issue. I'm just tired of everyone wanting errrr "needing" their own printer.
"But I need a printer in my office for the off-chance that I might print something confidential which I usually do once a year."
"But I need a printer in my cubicle because I don't know how to load labels in the networked printer."
"But I need a printer in my cubicle because I print so much (10 pages about once a day) that I don't want to tie-up the networked printer."
"But I need a printer in my office because the networked printer is thirty feet away."
The 4 Universal Reasons!!!
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited November 2010
I particularly love HP because they keep me awake. Instead of comfortably trusting their software installer when connecting a new printer, I have to stay hyper-vigilant, lest an errant mouseclick commit me to 400MB of HP Bloatware With Bing Toolbar
Anyone know the most graceful way to deal with files you have administrator but not user access to in Windows 2008? I'm trying to move a bunch of files around, but this is going nowhere.
I get the "YOu don't have permissions" box, which prompts the UAC box, which works for the top level but forces skips on the lower levels. Windows really needs to learn how to sudo.
Is there a way to launch an administrator version of explorer or something, or am I stuck doing this through powershell?
Multiple Windows Explorer windows all launch under the same process (which means it's under the same credentials).
There are a few ways around this. The easiest one is to launch Internet Explorer with runas. IE will launch under the specified credentials. Then you can point IE to the local folder on the hard drive and it will act like Windows Explorer.
If the computer is in a different location, you might get some leverage just logging in to your local machine (or a server) under the domain admin account, and just pointing Windows Explorer to \\computername\c$. That's assuming the c$ share hasn't been turned off in group policy, which some organizations do for security.
You can also hack the registry to change this behavior but I don't like doing that.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yeah, please, lets order a $50 card because your printer can't handle POSTSCRIPT without it.
Savin too.
That one threw me for a loop once when I installed the PS drivers, send the copier a test page, and instead of erroring out nicely it decided to do the old-school conniption fit of spitting out 50 pages of gobbledygook.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Anyone know the most graceful way to deal with files you have administrator but not user access to in Windows 2008? I'm trying to move a bunch of files around, but this is going nowhere.
I get the "YOu don't have permissions" box, which prompts the UAC box, which works for the top level but forces skips on the lower levels. Windows really needs to learn how to sudo.
Is there a way to launch an administrator version of explorer or something, or am I stuck doing this through powershell?
Multiple Windows Explorer windows all launch under the same process (which means it's under the same credentials).
There are a few ways around this. The easiest one is to launch Internet Explorer with runas. IE will launch under the specified credentials. Then you can point IE to the local folder on the hard drive and it will act like Windows Explorer.
If the computer is in a different location, you might get some leverage just logging in to your local machine (or a server) under the domain admin account, and just pointing Windows Explorer to \\computername\c$. That's assuming the c$ share hasn't been turned off in group policy, which some organizations do for security.
You can also hack the registry to change this behavior but I don't like doing that.
This is cunning and brilliant. Thanks Feral. I'll give this a burl.
EDIT: Though further deliberation makes me sceptical of whether it will work. Powershell is working for me, which I don't really mind, but for the lack of progress information.
Though further deliberation makes me sceptical of whether it will work. Powershell is working for me, which I don't really mind, but for the lack of progress information.
Progress bars in the Windows GUI are stupidly inaccurate anyway.
You could just launch a second powershell process, do a DIR /S and look at the total number of files and total filesize to get a sense of how fast the copy process is going.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
At my last place we used Xerox WorkCentres. I can't stress how amazing these printers are. Rock solid, never any driver issues, could do thousands of pages without a single jam. Pricy, but to my mind worth every penny.
Current job is using a Ricoh. Awful.
ben0207 on
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited November 2010
I'm also adding my own experiences to the ring of HP prnters being a nightmare in every single way. From the network accessible all in one scanner that locks up computers if you try and use it without having administration privileges, to the printer that always reports low ink no matter what or the duplex printer which jams every second page they seem to find a way to create headaches.
is this even a sane option? are there better virtualization options that are ... cheap/free? we have no budget and we already have volume licenses for r2, standard only though...
I would contend that VMWare is still the best virtualisation option.
Both ESXi (barebones hypervisor version) and Server (used to be GSX, runs as a service on a Windows or RHEL box) are free and easy to use. If you want to do fancy smancy things that Hyper-V does then go with that, obviously. But everything I have heard is "Hyper-V will be really good after about 2 more years of sensible development".
We use both ESXi and Server, but I'm currently in the midst of a project to move to ESXi only. It's a bit of a pain because the server with VMWare Server also does a few other things.
The only trap with ESXi is that it has limited support for different NIC chipsets out of the gates. There are however ways of hacking them in, which I spent some rather frustrating time figuring out a few months ago, but have never looked back.
I've found that it works with most varieties of Intel and Broadcom chipsets (ex., E1000, NetXtreme I/II, etc.). We use all Dell PowerEdge boxes (last gen stuff, mostly), and have no complaints running it on those. We have an Essentials license for ESXi which gives us three hosts running together with vCenter, which is certainly nice for central administration of the boxes, but not really required for so few. The setup mostly runs our internal stuff and a few databases.
The basic license for ESXi is completely free though, and is certainly enough to get work done on. So really, all you have to lose is a few hours experimenting with an install of it.
Posting over in the wow chat thread reminding me of the time I was a system administrator of a whole host of systems that were passworded with 'key.' One of which was a doctors office. That got hacked about 3 weeks after I started and I told them they should probably not use key anymore for a password. Bye bye patient records.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I particularly love HP because they keep me awake. Instead of comfortably trusting their software installer when connecting a new printer, I have to stay hyper-vigilant, lest an errant mouseclick commit me to 400MB of HP Bloatware With Bing Toolbar
I've got some that don't even give me the option not to install that. Fortunately, I found the actual driver part on the disc (for once HP didn't provide 1239487915 different .inf files for 1 printer) and just installed it using the Add Hardware Wizard. Took about 50 seconds, as opposed to the roughly 10 minute process installing from the disc was, and without all the crap.
I'm also adding my own experiences to the ring of HP prnters being a nightmare in every single way. From the network accessible all in one scanner that locks up computers if you try and use it without having administration privileges, to the printer that always reports low ink no matter what or the duplex printer which jams every second page they seem to find a way to create headaches.
We got a new HP network printer several months ago (P3015) that has the stupidest driver. I haven't been able to find a bare bones print functionality only driver, which is annoying. On some computers I was getting severe performance problems when I opened the printer properties sheet. I got out Process Explorer and watched, as when I opened it, it spawned a rundll32.exe process, which would peg the CPU at about 80%, then kill it a second later. Then start it back up. And kill it again. And it would do this endlessly until about 5 seconds after I close the properties sheet. So stupid.
Tofystedeth on
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FFOnce Upon a TimeIn OaklandRegistered Userregular
I particularly love HP because they keep me awake. Instead of comfortably trusting their software installer when connecting a new printer, I have to stay hyper-vigilant, lest an errant mouseclick commit me to 400MB of HP Bloatware With Bing Toolbar
Oh God, don't get me started on this crap. When I first started with my current company a lot of the branches had locally installed flatbed scanners. The lovely HP software that ran the things had this awesome updater service that would periodically contact HP's servers. Our firewalls were configured to block all such updates, and when the updater bit would time out it'd throw a dialogue box indicating such, and start trying to update again. We had months of trying to scrub this updater out, and with no actual list of how many of these local scanners we had it just kept going on forever.
Of course now we use HP's MFPs for scanning duty, and surprisingly we had way fewer problems with them right up until we started converting to Exchange.
We got a new HP network printer several months ago (P3015) that has the stupidest driver. I haven't been able to find a bare bones print functionality only driver, which is annoying.
HP Universal Printing PCL 6? Or 5? It's super generic and doesn't work all that well with older models, maybe give that a shot.
IronKnuckle's Ghost on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
LMAO, Why in the world did you go that route in the first place?
Seriously?
We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 Macs, at least two thirds of those are managed with mcx/OS X Server software. We've been using XServes, XServe RAID's and there's even a couple of XSan setups in the company. Hell, most of the departments in the company are either Mac based or 100% Macs. Not to mention that the hardware has been rock solid.
Posting over in the wow chat thread reminding me of the time I was a system administrator of a whole host of systems that were passworded with 'key.' One of which was a doctors office. That got hacked about 3 weeks after I started and I told them they should probably not use key anymore for a password. Bye bye patient records.
Also not HIPAA-compliant. They could have been sued if a patient found out.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
We got a new HP network printer several months ago (P3015) that has the stupidest driver. I haven't been able to find a bare bones print functionality only driver, which is annoying.
HP Universal Printing PCL 6? Or 5? It's super generic and doesn't work all that well with older models, maybe give that a shot.
I'm not a fan of the universal print driver. It works, but it seems slow and clunky, and it is glitchy with some of the not-terribly-old models I've tried it on.
Yeah, HP printers were fucking awesome back in the day of the Laserjet 4000 series. There are still a ton of those in active use. I'm pretty sure that after the nuclear apocalypse all the cockroaches will still be using Laserjet 4000s.
But each successive generation gets worse and worse. Don't even get me started on their all-in-ones. So much burning hatred.
The best new printers I've dealt with recently have been Brothers, BTW.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Posts
God, sounds like you work in IT Hell.
Coming back to this, Any good tutorials without the needlessly long microsoft filler?
You can specify this is AD too.
If this were fallout new vegas I'd have murdered the guy Helios 1 style. In fact this exact scenario plays out in the game.
I get the "YOu don't have permissions" box, which prompts the UAC box, which works for the top level but forces skips on the lower levels. Windows really needs to learn how to sudo.
Is there a way to launch an administrator version of explorer or something, or am I stuck doing this through powershell?
Parameters
/profile : Loads the user's profile. /profile is the default.
/no profile : Specifies that the user's profile is not to be loaded. This allows the application to load more quickly, but it can also cause a malfunction in some applications.
/env : Specifies that the current network environment be used instead of the user's local environment.
/netonly : Indicates that the user information specified is for remote access only.
/smartcard : Indicates whether the credentials are to be supplied from a smartcard.
/showtrustlevels : Lists the /trustlevel options.
/trustlevel : Specifies the level of authorization at which the application is to run. Use /showtrustlevels to see the trust levels available.
/user: UserAccountName : Specifies the name of the user account under which to run the program. The user account format should be user@domain or Domain\User.
program : Specifies the program or command to run using the account specified in /user.
/? : Displays help at the command prompt.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
So I'd just be running as myself, and the only trust level I am seeing is Basic User which isn't getting me anywhere.
I'm still stuck with the same problem, Explorer complains about permissions, does the UAC thing then forces skipping instead of letting the Admin activation propogate to the children of the directory.
I'm also interested in this. and any good guides to get into implementing hyper-v on 2008 r2 to virtualize a classroom workstation environment.
I've been reading this and this pdf looks promising
is this even a sane option? are there better virtualization options that are ... cheap/free? we have no budget and we already have volume licenses for r2, standard only though...
But I will be moving in 2012 (barring apocalypse), quite randomly, depending on the missus' grad internship posting, and I'm wondering if I shouldn't cement my real world experience with some of them there certs and or degrees. My experience looks lovely on a resume, but I don't have any real education to back it up. I'm great in a room and though I am fairly technical, if I had to come down on people vs. robots, I'm people.
Have any of you had an experience with certs, a la A+ and whatnot?
Can you take ownership of the files and alter the permissions?
Why not just look for an IT job now and see if you can do it without the certs? You seem to have plenty of experience.
In the mean time, ask for a raise.
Virtual Box is legit. I use it for WinXP for a few of our applications (FUCK YOU NORSTAR) that don't want to run in Win 7.
I like how this thread is 50% bitch and moan, 50% useful q/a.
And on that note, how do y'all like printers? My company is notoriously bad at enforcing any kind of adopted standard with printers, and as a result we have ancient HPs all the way up to these weird-ass Konica-Minolta Imagistics ones. There are fewer things that mystify me as quickly as a bizarre printer problem. Is it a networking issue? A mechanical one? A user error? Mix of the three? Who knows!
At least the Xerox Phaser 8560 was easy; no actual plastic box, just wax blocks wrapped in paper that you drop into a hopper on top. Didn't even have to interrupt a run to put a new one in.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Yeah, please, lets order a $50 card because your printer can't handle POSTSCRIPT without it.
"But I need a printer in my office for the off-chance that I might print something confidential which I usually do once a year."
"But I need a printer in my cubicle because I don't know how to load labels in the networked printer."
"But I need a printer in my cubicle because I print so much (10 pages about once a day) that I don't want to tie-up the networked printer."
"But I need a printer in my office because the networked printer is thirty feet away."
Check out monster/dice and see what is out there and what you need for it. Certs can get you in the door at times but it depends on who is the gatekeeper and what they are looking for.
I would contend that VMWare is still the best virtualisation option.
Both ESXi (barebones hypervisor version) and Server (used to be GSX, runs as a service on a Windows or RHEL box) are free and easy to use. If you want to do fancy smancy things that Hyper-V does then go with that, obviously. But everything I have heard is "Hyper-V will be really good after about 2 more years of sensible development".
We use both ESXi and Server, but I'm currently in the midst of a project to move to ESXi only. It's a bit of a pain because the server with VMWare Server also does a few other things.
The only trap with ESXi is that it has limited support for different NIC chipsets out of the gates. There are however ways of hacking them in, which I spent some rather frustrating time figuring out a few months ago, but have never looked back.
The 4 Universal Reasons!!!
I got passed this problem when I showed the head of finance the bill for all the toners for all the "individual" printers people needed.
Multiple Windows Explorer windows all launch under the same process (which means it's under the same credentials).
There are a few ways around this. The easiest one is to launch Internet Explorer with runas. IE will launch under the specified credentials. Then you can point IE to the local folder on the hard drive and it will act like Windows Explorer.
If the computer is in a different location, you might get some leverage just logging in to your local machine (or a server) under the domain admin account, and just pointing Windows Explorer to \\computername\c$. That's assuming the c$ share hasn't been turned off in group policy, which some organizations do for security.
You can also hack the registry to change this behavior but I don't like doing that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Savin too.
That one threw me for a loop once when I installed the PS drivers, send the copier a test page, and instead of erroring out nicely it decided to do the old-school conniption fit of spitting out 50 pages of gobbledygook.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is cunning and brilliant. Thanks Feral. I'll give this a burl.
EDIT: Though further deliberation makes me sceptical of whether it will work. Powershell is working for me, which I don't really mind, but for the lack of progress information.
Progress bars in the Windows GUI are stupidly inaccurate anyway.
You could just launch a second powershell process, do a DIR /S and look at the total number of files and total filesize to get a sense of how fast the copy process is going.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Current job is using a Ricoh. Awful.
Every piece of technology has improved where with printers we're constantly moving back in time.
I've found that it works with most varieties of Intel and Broadcom chipsets (ex., E1000, NetXtreme I/II, etc.). We use all Dell PowerEdge boxes (last gen stuff, mostly), and have no complaints running it on those. We have an Essentials license for ESXi which gives us three hosts running together with vCenter, which is certainly nice for central administration of the boxes, but not really required for so few. The setup mostly runs our internal stuff and a few databases.
The basic license for ESXi is completely free though, and is certainly enough to get work done on. So really, all you have to lose is a few hours experimenting with an install of it.
We got a new HP network printer several months ago (P3015) that has the stupidest driver. I haven't been able to find a bare bones print functionality only driver, which is annoying. On some computers I was getting severe performance problems when I opened the printer properties sheet. I got out Process Explorer and watched, as when I opened it, it spawned a rundll32.exe process, which would peg the CPU at about 80%, then kill it a second later. Then start it back up. And kill it again. And it would do this endlessly until about 5 seconds after I close the properties sheet. So stupid.
Apple's Xserve is dead.
Of course now we use HP's MFPs for scanning duty, and surprisingly we had way fewer problems with them right up until we started converting to Exchange.
HP Universal Printing PCL 6? Or 5? It's super generic and doesn't work all that well with older models, maybe give that a shot.
LMAO, Why in the world did you go that route in the first place?
Seriously?
We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 Macs, at least two thirds of those are managed with mcx/OS X Server software. We've been using XServes, XServe RAID's and there's even a couple of XSan setups in the company. Hell, most of the departments in the company are either Mac based or 100% Macs. Not to mention that the hardware has been rock solid.
Also not HIPAA-compliant. They could have been sued if a patient found out.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm not a fan of the universal print driver. It works, but it seems slow and clunky, and it is glitchy with some of the not-terribly-old models I've tried it on.
Yeah, HP printers were fucking awesome back in the day of the Laserjet 4000 series. There are still a ton of those in active use. I'm pretty sure that after the nuclear apocalypse all the cockroaches will still be using Laserjet 4000s.
But each successive generation gets worse and worse. Don't even get me started on their all-in-ones. So much burning hatred.
The best new printers I've dealt with recently have been Brothers, BTW.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.