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[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] ...maybe they should have hired a professional

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Posts

  • AbracadanielAbracadaniel Registered User regular
    I am a huge fan of 1Password for password (and software license) management, but KeePass is a good free alternative.

  • Mei HikariMei Hikari Registered User regular
    Cog wrote: »
    Mei Hikari wrote: »
    jaziek wrote: »
    Okay, well those are just separate systems. It's not like one continuous chain of logins.
    I've got 7 or 8 that I need to get into by default on any given day plus about 30 more that crop up. Fortunately a lot of them use built in AD authentication or are covered by our SSO app.

    Since starting this job a month and a bit ago, the amount of passwords I'm having to memorise is getting silly already. (VPN password + 10-15 different server passwords + firewall passwords) x 10 or so clients that I'm working on. Plus passwords to get on machines that you have to use to connect to said VPNS, plus passwords to the VMs running on the machines you have to remote onto to get onto the VPNs, plus passwords for test servers. I am running out of head space for actual things.

    Do we have a central store for all these? Hell no. Find it in a randomly named text file in the labyrinthine setup of file servers. Maybe.

    Sounds like you need this: http://remotedesktopmanager.com/

    I kinda prefer Terminals, which is like Remote Desktop Manager on steroids, with native support for VNC, SSH, screen cap auto export to flickr, built in ping, trace, dns lookup, whois, Terminal Services admin console, can wake on lan other machines. It can connect to your damn vcenter server and do VM console sessions too. It's pretty fucking awesome.

    Also if you just need to remember a lot of passwords, look into KeePass. Not only does it store them in an encrypted, centralized, searchable database with a nice gui and room for notes, you can actually train it to auto-type usernames and passwords into the appropriate windows for you, and copy/paste the passwords without ever seeing them in clear text.

    I'll have to try it out, but except for the export ss to flickr, RDM does all you mentioned.

  • halkunhalkun Registered User regular
    bowen wrote: »
    Why not just tie to AD group? That way your roles would migrate based off your group.

    Because I actually have to change my identity sometimes. For reasons above my paygrade, they split the field and corp systems into two different forests. Sometimes I have to pretend I'm a field agent and sometimes and have to use the corp tools, and most often I'll need to do that simultaneously. We're in the process of unifying the forests now, but they will still keep Corp and Field separated because the computers are architecturally different in their OS builds. Field people use their systems differently the Corp does. Because I have a Corp system, and support the field, I have to have my feet in both.



  • Khade97Khade97 PE10, UKRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    @Bowen - Re the Cisco Meraki, if you attend one of their "Intro to Cloud Networking" webinars they have an option towards the end to give them a call for a free device with a 3 year license. Well worth it for an hour of your time.

    Khade97 on
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    Finally swapped out my crappy work provided laptop for the Macbook Pro. My monitor here at work doesn't have HDMI but apparently the Dell Displayport --> DVI adaptors fit into the HDMI port and work just fine.

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    8bitogre wrote: »
    Finally swapped out my crappy work provided laptop for the Macbook Pro. My monitor here at work doesn't have HDMI but apparently the Dell Displayport --> DVI adaptors fit into the HDMI port and work just fine.

    Uh, wouldn't a Macbook have mini displayport out, not HDMI?

    (also, fuck hdmi, why does it keep showing up on new laptops. Give me that sweet, sweet displayport)

    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
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    It has Thunderbolt ports, which I'm assuming is backwards compatible with Displayport? Either way, the adapters we got with the Dell laptops were full size DisplayPort which conveniently work/fit with HDMI

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    8bitogre wrote: »
    It has Thunderbolt ports, which I'm assuming is backwards compatible with Displayport? Either way, the adapters we got with the Dell laptops were full size DisplayPort which conveniently work/fit with HDMI

    Yeah thunderbolt is displayport++

    But uh... how are you jamming a displayport plug into an HDMI jack? Is this possible?

    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
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    No jamming required, just slid right in. I dunno if it because Dell is using some weird ass terminology for their HDMI ports on their laptop or what.

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    8bitogre wrote: »
    No jamming required, just slid right in. I dunno if it because Dell is using some weird ass terminology for their HDMI ports on their laptop or what.

    Huh, what model is it? I've got to find out the answer now!

    Aioua on
    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
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    My Macbook, or the Dell?

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    I guess the dell? We're going from (macbook's thunderbolt / dell laptop's ??) to the (dell's ?? to dvi adaptor) to the monitor, yah?

    Aioua on
    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
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    It's not going into the Macbook thunderbolt. It's going from Macbook HDMI, using a Dell adapter, into DVI.

  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    WELL I'M DUMB

    ...I thought they only made macbooks with dp/thunderbolt :oops:

    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
  • 8bitogre8bitogre San Antonio, TXRegistered User regular
    LOL I dunno about others, but my Retina has HDMI, 2 USB, 2 TB

  • iTunesIsEviliTunesIsEvil Cornfield? Cornfield.Registered User regular
    Yup. I'm not positive what all models have them, but the 15" retina MBP's have an onboard HDMI port. Which is handy!

  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    Well that's cool: this month's kb2868116 patch improves the content of error messages when running local executables. I always thought "Unspecified Error" was pretty crystal clear.

    Le_Goat on
    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    So I just put a ticket in with my new job's in-house IT for the first time. (They use a different system than the one I use for my work.) I open up theit little web portal, click to the 'New Ticket' page. Type into their form box:

    "Printer \\servername\printer has a job stuck in the queue in 'error' status, other print jobs can't proceed. Can you please cancel it out?"

    Hit submit.

    "NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ('\') ALLOWED"

    facepalm.jpg

    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
  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    Escaping is hard!

  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    Le_Goat wrote: »
    Well that's cool: this month's kb2868116 patch improves the content of error messages when running local executables. I always thought "Unspecified Error" was pretty crystal clear.
    Just a forewarning to anyone who is planning on installing this update. I've run into some issues where the install on some servers took over 45 minutes for just this stupid patch. Some went through quick, but a few took waaaaaaaay too long. I'm not sure why, but just plan accordingly. I should have been out of here by 6:00; now I'll consider myself lucky if I'm out by 7:00.

    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • halkunhalkun Registered User regular
    edited September 2013
    New story!

    We are in the process of migrating our field systems from XP to 7. The conversion is complete for the most part, but we have some agents who are holding on to their dear XP machines with white knuckles. With our last update, we set a timer on it. You have 30 days to get a Windows 7 machine or we are locking you out.

    Agent calls up, and she wants a second extension for her XP machine. We tell her it's been extended once and we have to make a request to management to see if she has a business need to continue using XP. ("Because I don't like 7" is not a business need).

    Well, she gets super-hot about not being able to use her system, and I tell her that we can't extend it forever because an about a month we will be shutting down or encryption servers here and she's going to wind up with a scrambled hard drive that won't boot after that point. Then she'll need to send the HDD in to use so we can get her data off of it.

    Tables were flipped and she hung up. She called back and got an extension from a new rep who didn't know any better. I flagged the system though so she can't do this forever.

    If she doesn't figure out that we really mean this, her system will be dead in October.

    halkun on
  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Phyphor wrote: »
    Escaping is hard!

    It still baffles my mind that in 2013 people can't get a concept from the early 90s.

    Worst case at least allow everything for passwords.

    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
  • halkunhalkun Registered User regular
    Aioua wrote: »
    So I just put a ticket in with my new job's in-house IT for the first time. (They use a different system than the one I use for my work.) I open up theit little web portal, click to the 'New Ticket' page. Type into their form box:

    "Printer \\servername\printer has a job stuck in the queue in 'error' status, other print jobs can't proceed. Can you please cancel it out?"

    Hit submit.

    "NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ('\') ALLOWED"

    facepalm.jpg

    Database sanitation is sooo hard!

  • chamberlainchamberlain Registered User regular
    halkun wrote: »
    New story!

    We are in the process of migrating our field systems from XP to 7. The conversion is complete for the most part, but we have some agents who are holding on to their dear XP machines with white knuckles. With our last update, we set a timer on it. You have 30 days to get a Windows 7 machine or we are locking you out.

    Agent calls up, and she wants a second extension for her XP machine. We tell her it's been extended once and we have to make a request to management to see if she has a business need to continue using XP. ("Because I don't like 7" is not a business need).

    Well, she gets super-hot about not being able to use her system, and I tell her that we can't extend it forever because an about a month we will be shutting down or encryption servers here and she's going to wind up with a scrambled hard drive that won't boot after that point. Then she'll need to send the HDD in to use so we can get her data off of it.

    Tables were flipped and she hung up. She called back and got an extension from a new rep who didn't know any better. I flagged the system though so she can't do this forever.

    If she doesn't figure out that we really mean this, her system will be dead in October.

    I look forward to you recounting the tale of her losing all of her data with 'no warning' and that it is 'all your fault.'

  • BigityBigity Lubbock, TXRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    Guess who some home office person called today at 6:20am to try to get help with their home internet?

    This guy.

    Guess who told them to call their ISP and charged an hour?

    Also this guy.

    Bigity on
  • DiannaoChongDiannaoChong Registered User regular
    halkun wrote: »
    Aioua wrote: »
    So I just put a ticket in with my new job's in-house IT for the first time. (They use a different system than the one I use for my work.) I open up theit little web portal, click to the 'New Ticket' page. Type into their form box:

    "Printer \\servername\printer has a job stuck in the queue in 'error' status, other print jobs can't proceed. Can you please cancel it out?"

    Hit submit.

    "NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ('\') ALLOWED"

    facepalm.jpg

    Database sanitation is sooo hard!

    It found the exact character that was the problem, it just told him to go fuck himself with it instead of fixing it, which is amazing.

    steam_sig.png
  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    halkun wrote: »
    Aioua wrote: »
    So I just put a ticket in with my new job's in-house IT for the first time. (They use a different system than the one I use for my work.) I open up theit little web portal, click to the 'New Ticket' page. Type into their form box:

    "Printer \\servername\printer has a job stuck in the queue in 'error' status, other print jobs can't proceed. Can you please cancel it out?"

    Hit submit.

    "NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ('\') ALLOWED"

    facepalm.jpg

    Database sanitation is sooo hard!

    It found the exact character that was the problem, it just told him to go fuck himself with it instead of fixing it, which is amazing.

    The gall of it, too. The sheer laziness. Like, I can kind of understand it when it's a username or password. Those are things where you're making it up, you can choose what characters to use. But the main body of a helpdesk ticket? Really?

    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
  • CogCog What'd you expect? Registered User regular
    Aioua wrote: »
    halkun wrote: »
    Aioua wrote: »
    So I just put a ticket in with my new job's in-house IT for the first time. (They use a different system than the one I use for my work.) I open up theit little web portal, click to the 'New Ticket' page. Type into their form box:

    "Printer \\servername\printer has a job stuck in the queue in 'error' status, other print jobs can't proceed. Can you please cancel it out?"

    Hit submit.

    "NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ('\') ALLOWED"

    facepalm.jpg

    Database sanitation is sooo hard!

    It found the exact character that was the problem, it just told him to go fuck himself with it instead of fixing it, which is amazing.

    The gall of it, too. The sheer laziness. Like, I can kind of understand it when it's a username or password. Those are things where you're making it up, you can choose what characters to use. But the main body of a helpdesk ticket? Really?

    Good luck filling out a ticket for any network location or local file path ever.

    Personally, I would just re-enter the ticket as "BACKSLASHBACKSLASHservernameBACKSLASHprinter has a job stuck" and keep doing that sort of thing til its fixed.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Don't forget to escape your blackslashes so it doesn't cause an issue.

    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
  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    !!~~^```\\\\\\!!~~^```\\\\\\servername!!~~^```\\\\\\printername
    

    Aioua on
    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
  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    Question for the masses here:

    We restrict local users rights to Power User, which obviously means that certain things they cannot do. In this question, I'm speaking about running the command prompt. To run it, you'd have to put in admin credentials to get into the command prompt. While command prompt is being run as administrator, if you make any profile-specific changes (such as netsh configurations), would it only being doing such changes on the local administrator account (since you're running the command prompt as admin) or on the account that the user who is currently fully logged in as?

    In an attempt to further clarify, let's say George is logged in but there are some issues with this profile's proxy configuration. I get on his system logged is as George, but have to run the command prompt as Administrator. If I start making netsh configuration changes, will I be making changes to the Administrator or George account?

    Le_Goat on
    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • finalbroadcastfinalbroadcast WisconsinRegistered User regular
    Ugh, two conference calls on two phones. An entire VM Ware farm with VDI's sitting in Agent Unreachable. Why did I leave home without a cyanide tooth.

    finalbroadcast.jpg
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    So I've been tasked with migrating a client to O365. The email side should be easy; only a few users.

    They also use Sharepoint, though. I know next to nothing about Sharepoint. Any of you beautiful humans want to point me in the right direction? Even a way to just dump everything as flat files onto a server share would be keen.

  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    edited September 2013
    If SharePoint is already set up, there isn't much you need to do. Honestly, the hardest part is getting SharePoint working. Once that's done, it's more rights/privileges work than anything else. Is there anything specific that they want?

    If you want to seem spiffy, you could setup calendars on the SharePoint site and have Outlook link to it so that everything is synced between the two. Take note that you cannot get an Outlook calendar on SharePoint but you can get a SharePoint calendar in Outlook.

    Maybe it's my lack of knowledge with O365, but isn't it pretty much just a cloud- and subscription-based service for the new Office software?

    Le_Goat on
    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    Sorry, I guess I was unclear. They have Sharepoint on an SBS that will be decommissioned when they go to 365. It's my task to export their Sharepoint files and upload them into SkyDrive. I'm not concerned about the upload bit, but I'm trying to suss out exactly where to get into the Sharepoint library such that I can dump the files.

  • Mei HikariMei Hikari Registered User regular
    TL DR wrote: »
    So I've been tasked with migrating a client to O365. The email side should be easy; only a few users.

    They also use Sharepoint, though. I know next to nothing about Sharepoint. Any of you beautiful humans want to point me in the right direction? Even a way to just dump everything as flat files onto a server share would be keen.
    From http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852518.aspx:
    "Office 365 does not provide SharePoint content migration support for customers. If you plan to migrate SharePoint content from an on-premises or hosted service to SharePoint Online, your organization will either use a manual approach or to use a third-party SharePoint migration tool.
    One way to manually move content to SharePoint Online is by connecting the SharePoint Library to SharePoint Workspace. You can then upload content to SharePoint Workspace and it will automatically synchronize these files to SharePoint Online. Another manual approach is to use the capability of SharePoint to upload multiple files. This will allow you to upload batches of files at once."

  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    Oh damn... I'm not sure about that. I'd have to look into it because it's not as simple as a file server migration; those files are in a database

    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    Right. I'm seeing some stuff about viewing a file library in Windows Explorer, which would let me copy them (sans versioning, etc) to a network share and go from there.

  • Le_GoatLe_Goat Frechified Goat Person BostonRegistered User regular
    Check this out: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Bulk-Export-SharePoint-51857b22

    I didn't read heavily into it, but since everyone here adores PowerShell, I figure it'd be pretty sweet if it worked.

    While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
  • jaziekjaziek Bad at everything And mad about it.Registered User regular
    Client IT Guy who could just not get his around how a USB HDD attached to one DB server didn't magically have the ability to jump over to the other DB server, just because they're in a failover pair. Oh the backups stopped working? No shit. Thats because H:/Backup doesn't exist on both servers unless you actually bother to set it up that way. Not to mention that they actually went out of their way to mess with what was in place before, where nightly DB backups were stored on a cluster shared RAID array. What was wrong with that solution? Who knows. USB HDD plugged into one of the servers is a much better idea!

    Steam ||| SC2 - Jaziek.377 on EU & NA. ||| Twitch Stream
This discussion has been closed.