@MarkHenderson Time to accept the quote, approach the company as an independent contractor, and offer to do the work for $150,000 with your magical ability... to use a SQL query?
Everyone pockets a fatty profit, everyone goes away happy, right?
@ewwhite Ohhh, wait. I didn't think that you were mentioning them earlier because you work there now. And really? The self-identify as a MSP? That's... no where near what the definition of MSP is. =P
@ewwhite I suppose Webster isn't going to have anything to say about it, but from a historical perspective, I suppose going back to ISVs and ASVs, MSPs were more about handling business technology on a per seat / per device level.
@ewwhite I'm getting to be equally proficient in *nix administration. Haven't done much Windows in over a year. Actually, my latest client is a mixture of both, so it's been the first time I've had decent exposure to Windows Servers in a long time it seems.
@ewwhite 7TB in a week, well that's not the most unreasonable request I've ever heard. Withotu knowing anything else I'm assuming that a single SAN shelf should be able to handle that - if you can get it from your vendors in time :p
@ewwhite A company that is sort of a 'sister' company to ours deal in that sort of outsourcing of infrastructure. One of our shared clients is a plumbing business that has two racks in their office, and outsource everything. Management of hardware and OS's goes to the other company, our company manages the SaaS apps that run on it
@MarkHenderson Really. If I had my way, we'd be slamming in an extra 20TB of storage "yesterday" as well, if only because the suits put off upgrading or spending any money of any sort for so long, we literally have a SAN packed to capacity with ~72 146 GB SCSI drives. sigh "We're out of storage space!!!" ... "Yeah, no shit."
I believe that poor sysadmins will probably be chopped, but they deserve to be. Ultimately though someone has to patch your Windows XP machines that connect to the cloud
@ewwhite Yeah, the idea that SysAdmins will be replaced by developers has a small kernel of pseudo-truth to it, wrapped in a bunch of red bull and puppet manifests.
That's not even the half of it. Like, you're too cheap to spend $300 on a drive made sometime this decade... but you'll pay me and an army of consultants and architects and other SAs (literally) over $100,000 to tell you "you need to replace those with higher capacity drives."
Freaking executive accounting is... brainful to the pain, or something.
It's nothing new, but here's my perspective on this whole thing. Going back into the 60s and 70s, new fangled computers required operators that were also the ones who developed the "software" to run on it.
The culture moved into the 80s, UNIX was strong, operators were also strong developers. Those who were purely developers were seen as the low men on the totem pole.
Bah, it's that whole cycle of IT (technology/life?) crap all over again. Like how outsourcing will put 90% of American IT job overseas by 2010... and now the vast majority of them are back here already.
Now, after 10, 15 years of slacking, the idea of SysAdmins who can't code is sounding archaic, when in reality it's a new concept that was always bad, and was destined to die.
So, short story: SysAdmins who don't understand development to some extent, and can't interface with an API given a popular language and enough pizza are going to be lackies eventually.
Honestly, I can't code either... almost failed outta my MIS degree on that account. (Or maybe I just can't bring myself to reinvent bubble sort and string tokenization.)
@ewwhite I find it's usually best to assume it's due to your innate awesomeness, or good karma... if for no other reason than "I lucked into it" is a pretty depressing reality. :)
:6132349 Lol, awesome. I was also wondering about the [redacted] along those lines, but was most intrigued by the [redacted], and less so by the [redacted] or the [redacted].
Seems like it could make a very interesting discussion on [redacted] and [redacted]-related [redacted]. :D
Honestly, that kinda shite... well, the shite that makes normal people say "call the cops"... is what makes me seek out and exchange favors with technically-challenged lawyers.
"Sure I'll fix your computer(s) for you, for free. Mind reciprocating by writing a letter for me on firm stationary...?"
The radical change in behavior a registered fuck-off-or-get-dragged-into-court-for-the-next-5-years letter from a law firm a can provoke is well worth putting up with the ~"where did my menus go in the new version of Word?!!?" questions.
@HopelessN00b I had someone the other day tell me tha tthey were going to write a letter to my pastor to tell him that they've been worshiping the wrong god the whole time and they should worship me. No shitting you. And all i did was install a Windows Update that fixed his NLA problem.
Yeah, it's astounding to me how it's usually the simplest, bullshit, *you-coulda-done-that-yourself-in-2-minutes-flat* fixes that impress everyone the most.
I had a former client call me today because a world-class luser exceeded her quota, and the asshats doing their hosted Exchange managed to incorrectly disconnect the mailbox... so I connected it, changed the mailbox quota, and 3 minutes later, the guy was falling all over himself to offer me compensation for less than a dozen mouse clicks. Like... buh... I didn't get that kind of appreciation when I did a flawless Exchange migration o…
"Oh Hell - 500 is a hybrid of the American/English games of Oh Hell and 500. It is commonly known as just Oh Hell!. Alternate names include Up and Down and Up and Down the River."
Say, has the idea of "earning" more votes/day, as one can "earn" more flags/day been shot down and beaten to a bloody pulp on metaSO? Or might it be worth feature requesting/suggesting?
@HopelessN00b I'd be up for that... But I doubt they'll change it, look at the whining and bitching they got when they upped it from 30 to 40 (with conditions)
@Ward Yeah, I figured it would be something like that. Do the devs read metaSF too, or must I brave the unholy quagmire that is metaSO to have any chance of someone with decision-making ability read the idea?
Oh, and while people are here, do either of you think I veered too far off-topic, or into "not an answer" territory with my answer below? I accidentally let the fact that I got my IS degree through the college of business really shine through, so I'm not sure if the answer should be on SF.
I administered a somewhat similar server cluster (two-member cluster) a little while back, and my basic approach was ~"CPU bottleneck... max out processor speed and core count." It was also on high-end servers with a lot of RAM, high capacity SSDs (for quickly accessing the images that were temp...
@Andrew I wouldn't think so. You'd still have to setup and admin it like a physical box, with the downside of being charged directly for utilization... which on a system like that, you'd expect to be very high, so you'd probably be paying more for... the convenience of not having to physically rack the server?
And actually, I think in the case I alluded to, the public cloud was not an option, because of the sheer size of those and number of the raw images coming in for processing. At least at that time, you weren't going to get a dedicated 100meg (which is what we used for that system) from anyone with a public "cloud" offering.
Not sure if his case is similar in that regard, but he mentioned specifically using Photoshop, so those could easily all be 100+ MB images he's talking about.
@MichaelHampton Yeah, clearly. I had to stop for a second and think about why the hell he'd be mentioning C# classes in his question, and then had an overwhelming sense of sympathy for the poor SoB.
@Andrew Suggestions on how to make that an actual question/idea, or suggestions for the answer? The basic idea is doable, but the devil's in the implementation.
Hey, @ewwhite if I do end up with a job in NYC, I found a great place to live on that site you linked earlier. I just might need a roommate or... 100... to afford it. :D
@Andrew Easy. (assuming AD) Inter-forest trust on some level, server hosted somewhere (at either site, or with like rackspace), users from both companies granted access.
But yeah, encrypted DropBox would be way easier... and result in far fewer billable hours to setup. :)
@Andrew It's still LDAP, so it shouldn't be impossible to setup shared accounts or mutually-trusted accounts in both LDAP implementations... they do both use LDAP, right?
@HopelessN00b we actually have a server that's pretty much just hosting a website they both use. Used to host ours as well but we outsourced it because web is hard.
@MichaelHampton Yeah, pretty much. When you stand up a new domain controller, you create a forest, and a domain within it. Forests can have multiple domains, and if you wanna get really funky, you can even host multiple forests.
@Andrew Honesty I'd go with Wuala before Dropbox; the former is run by an actual company I recognize, and the product is better from what I can determine. For instance wuala.com/en/business
@Andrew So... slap some drives into that (or attach a nice 3 TB consumer-grade external drive :D ), and serve the files to both from your newly-promoted-to-a-file-AND-web-server server?
@MichaelHampton Yeah, not a big fan of Dropbox. Main thing they've got going for them is consumer/end-user name recognition for adverts.
Alternately, if you prefer to not use Linux, I have a shit-tonne of legit licenses for Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 I'd be happy to ---afflict on--- ... let you have.
As a result you've got like 80 gigs of "personal" work-related "stuff" on your company laptop. Professional development, useful scripts, configs and work product you punch up and keep reusing, etc. Would you be pissed or... miffed... if another domain admin "underneath you" copied all that stuff to his machine, presumably as a free, unauthorized... educational/career advancement supplement?
I'm trying to decide how I feel about it... and what I should do tomorrow... or the day after, or whenever the guy next comes into work.
@HopelessN00b 80gb of stuff of personal stuff on a laptop? That seems a bit excessive. The fast majority of my personal stuff is sitting in a VCS somewhere that people can access already.
@JourneymanGeek It was attached to a 128GB USB drive I had plugged into the company laptop to access the stuff... got caught up with shit all day, noticed the logs had a bunch of it being transferred off via the administrative share when I got back.
@HopelessN00b So you couldn't arrange for him to "accidentally" let a virus loose on the network? You know you have to plan for these sorts of contingencies.
@Zoredache Yeah, the actual personal or dangerous stuff IS, but punching in my ginormous passphrase and keyfile combo every time I need to grab a powershell script is... not a good idea.
I dunno about asshole... almost flattering... or feels flattering, actually, even if it was kinda of underhanded of him.
I'm kinda leaning towards a) you owe me a $300 bottle of scotch b) did you enjoy the file transfer I did you *your* machine where every image file has been replaced by David Hasselhoff in a speedo?
I'd probably confront him and tell him that he owes you a big one, and that if something like this ever happens again you'll make sure that he'll get a shitstorm
@Zoredache I dunno, not so sure I see it as... "as bad as" theft. Unauthorized data transfer, sure, but it doesn't actually deprive me of anything, or harm me... so, I'm not actually worked up about it, ya know.
@Andrew I work in the government at the moment where pretty much everything we create is technically supposed to be public domain. So yes, I plan on taking it with me forever.
@JourneymanGeek at least in Australia, industrial law is that skills developed belong to the employee, product belongs to the employer. Case law supports this.
Ok, seriously, if you feel that badly violated, get legal advice. From their, either chew him out for being impolite or sue him for plagiarism or whatever.
@MichaelHampton Windows logs don't use any cryptographic hashing, signatures or encryption of any sort. What's to brush up on?
Naw, I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about it until someone made me realize I need to do my due diligence and read through audit log now. :(
Was really just asking how I *should* feel about it and what level of pranking in return was... "too far."
@Zoredache No, not these days. Corporate policy is that we care about security, and take it very seriously... but the subsidiary I'm at now makes food. (Surprising mountains of money in that, by the way.) And wouldn't know actual security if they got bludgeoned to death with it.
@HopelessN00b One thought is to just wipe any copies of the data that he took. Another is to replace several of the more interesting Powershell scripts with buggy scripts that either don't work, do something completely useless, or break stuff. AFTER he's had a chance to look at the originals...
Seriously, our IT "security officer" had a problem on my... ~4th day there, and while I was troubleshooting it she said, "oh I have a meeting, let me write down my password for you so you can keep working on this..."
@MichaelHampton That's interesting! Make it a ... "educational" experience by making the scripts he's got on there buggy... or output "interesting" emails to the rest of IT... yes, this is a thought.
Uh, if there's one thing I got there it's job security.
They can me, they throw a multimillion dollar infra refresh project off by at least 6 months. No one's gonna want to tell the CEO we're not delivering the new network until 2014, or even 2015 because a helldesk guy got his panties in a twist about being pranked, which is what it would come down to.
@Zoredache His machine (IP) somewhere. I can use the administrative share on his boxen to search.
@Andrew So, I can't actually get away with murder there, but unless I do something objectively awful, or end up getting caught in bed with the boss's wife... or daughter, I'm not getting fired.
So, I rotate it 90 degrees, and he's lying on his side. The eye is still drawn to David Hasselhoff, infinitely emerging from David Hasselhoff's crotch.
See, @Iain thought so much of it, it didn't even last 100 seconds before he nuked it. :)
@MichaelHampton I really doubt that. It'll last about 30 seconds after he logs in, either way. Unless I engage in some fun with permissions or other trickery to prevent it from being removed and respawn when replaced... but I'd do that to the Hasselhoff crotch thing too.
@MichaelHampton Domain Admins can change/override GPOs. And on helldesk, he'd know how to do that.
It would have to be all the old-school evilness. Corrupted or blanked ACLs, directories/files with the null character, path too deep, path too deep on a reg key with a corrupt ACL in the registry creating a service to apply that as wallpaper every x seconds, and like that that there.
Oh, nah, I've been doing this Windows shit long enough that I know damn well how to make something effectively unremovable short of a disk format (or being me/the guy who did it and knowing exactly how it was done)... the one good thing about viruses and malware on Windows is they teach you a lot of cool tricks if you dig into how they work.
(And DRM too, but that's just malware by another name.)
Well. I freely admit to being much less familiar with Windows than with various other operating systems.
@HopelessN00b And while I'm thinking about it, do you KNOW the kid is competent? I mean, he did swipe your scripts and didn't seem to realize you'd find out about it.
Great, one of my backups failed. See you all later.
@MichaelHampton Yeah. Turning on file-level auditing logging on the company laptop is pretty paranoid. (And fills up the disk really fast, lemme tell you). I wouldn't expect to see anyone else do it myself.
Gah. Who the feck decided that 4,8" screens on mobile phones was a great idea? They're just way too big to fit in a pocket!
Nokia Lumia 920: 130,3 x 70,8 x 10,7mm - 185g Samsung ATIV S: 137,2 x 70,5 x 8,7mm - 135g Samsung Galaxy S II: 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49mm - 116g Samsung Galaxy S III: 136.6 × 70.6 × 8.6 mm - 133g iPhone 5: 123.8 x 58,6 x 7,6 mm - 112g
I was hacked but still have access to my account, My high lvl main character was deleted, Can support recover it!! And I can also continue to use the previous gw 2 gold? idwwl0913
The best one of those I ever saw (which didn't make for a good picture) was a guy who went off for a long tropical vacation he won, (and rubbed in to the rest of us) and returned to find his cubicle enclosed in plexiglass and completely filled with sand.
Freaking awesome. Expensive, for the sand and plexiglass, and time-consuming as hell to wrap all the electronics up in plastic wrap, but so worth it. Took almost a month for him to get back into his cube. :)
@pauska Not the first by a long shot... and already flagged.
@HopelessN00b How did he get back in? With a spade?
@pauska My Arc is 125×63×8.7 mm. I was concerned about the size of it when I got it but it's fine. Couldn't use anything bigger though, as nice as the SIII is.
When he bitched about it, someone put a shovel, a stepladder and a large trash bin (the type with wheels that you roll out to the curb) outside the former doorway to his cube.
And since the boss was in on it (and pissed off by his vacation-bragging), that's all the help he was allowed to get. :)
I was hacked but still have access to my account, My high lvl main character was deleted, Can support recover it!! And I can also continue to use the previous gw 2 gold? idwwl0913
