@gparent Seriously. The strange shit that goes on around wouldn't be remotely believable in a work of fiction.
We have an electronic shift log where staff can type in reports of incidents and whatnot regarding our client to pass on to future shifts later that day or in future days.
Some of the stuff posted in there is pretty impressive.
Crazy people pooping on the floor is a rather mundane occurrence, generally speaking.
@vCole Client got drunk and lit a cigarette. Put it in the ashtray sitting their their bed and then went down the hall to visit another client to bum another beer.
I know now if the pipes start banging to not wait for the fire signal, just get up and leave.
But the best log in our system I ever saw was one where the night shift counselor reported that someone had pooped in the mens dorm and instead of "feces in men's dorm" listed it as "Fetus found in Men's dorm".
@Adrian My dad worked as level 2 tech support some place, one of the clients had a plant on top of their computer case. They fed the plant regularly, eventually the computer had a short and stopped working. Dad wrote the ticket: "Replace computer, do not replace plant."
My best ticket was when I worked level 1 at the same place. One of the clients is the most technically illiterate you can imagine. he writes down his user password on his laptop's Intel sticker, and basically refuses to do most things on the computer he's supposed to do.
So one day his laptop encryption software locks him out due to bad password entry.
I get the ticket from the call center with the following two comments:
1. The client identifies himself as the missing brain cell
2. Client refuses call center instructions, dispatch local technician
As screwed up as things are here now, it was far worse when I agreed to come back. I think our average server uptime was 6 weeks and the ratio of uncontrolled vs. controlled outages was 6:1.
and controlled is pretty loose here. Means it didn't barf on its own and it was shut down by us, even if that was only to keep it from freezing up which it was on its way to already.
Early in my career I worked in a big financial setting up some of their first Internet presence - multihoming at a point where half of our carriers couldn't spell BGP. The change control guys were about 700 years old and weren't quite sure why anything beyond CICS was ever written. As long as the change control didn't involve the mainframe, it was OK. We submitted a ticket stating that we were taking down the network core @ 3PM on a Tuesday just because.
When we got to the change, the guy looked at us and one of our people just said "On target" and it was approved.
"on target" eventually became a euphemism for a change control going straight to hell
@vCole So your complaint about tape is that you can't get (afford) to get tapes/drives large enough for your requirements? I can certainly understand that.
the same place with the bad change control had 8 igloos for their mainframe backup and something like 1500 Solaris and AIX boxes each with its own tape drive... Everything from DAT to 8mm to DLT, etc.. Ops just went around with a cart and collected tapes for a living. Hilarious.
some lunatic from Iron Mountain would show up in a van to take the tapes somewhere... never saw him at less than 50 mph in the parking lot. I think he actually flipped the van over at one point. It was suggested that this was potentially a problem as far as backup strategies went, but that was dismissed as being silly.
still - hard to argue with the bandwidth of a van full of tapes, even if the latency sucked
@vCole Not terribly rough. Most of the staff don't really care, but we have limited resources to replace due to tight budgeting, so its stressful when you can't do much about the problems.
@rnxrx Yep. Most infrequent is monthlies. Yeah, I'm not really happy with any of this, frankly. Very little of it suits our needs. Of course, the biggest problem is that while our mgmt. understands that IT costs money, they really just want the entire problem to go away.
Frankly, we'd be a perfect candidate for a total out-source of IT stuff. Mgmt. wants to focus on core strategies and doesn't want to have to deal with any details.
Hell, at this point in my career, I'd probably still sign on with whoever took over.
@Iain I'm half tempted to try and talk our boss into looking that direction. He sure doesn't want to deal with it since the database side is enough to keep him busy too.
@Adrian I hear you... I think a lot of management teams get that IT costs money, but that's different than seeing actual value. No matter the industry it kind of sucks to be viewed simply as a cost-center. The thing about a lot of outsourcing contracts is that they end up structured in such a way that you end up needing smart guys to sit there and try to squeeze value out of every nickel billed while the outsourcer tries to bill as many nickels for the least amount of their own output.
It's not a comment on outsourcers or their honesty, just the basic underlying point of tension in just about all of these situations I've seen.
You bargain for the best price on hardware - it's a pretty easy equation. The vendor would like to charge more, you'd like to pay less. If you buy more stuff (or commit to buy, or whatever) then there's some incentive for them to charge less. If you have another player who can sell the same thing, it's still the same motivations.
I try to kick the performance questions over to DBA as much as possible - all the guys who are good at it who hang out here also seem to spend time there
@voretaq7 That's what I told them. But nobody over there understands what the impacts are to an upgrade. They do it when they're forced to by outside pressures.
the impact of not doing an upgrade is you get bitten by bugs that got fixed years ago. (with Postgres) the impact of an upgrade is (within major versions) is virtually nil - maybe a minute of downtime while the server restarts.
But yeah, I have to explain a lot of things to them that they should, one would think, be arguing with me about from a position of Superior Knowledge, not a total lack thereof.
@voretaq7 To them, the bugs are just part of the ecosystem. They have no expectation of how it works other than the way it works now.
@WesleyDavid Heh. The infamous staff direct query page where they get the idea that they can check every single table for every client. OUTER JOIN TO THE UNIVERSE.
I'm very novice in termos of administrating a server.
Website was running fine till yesterday, load averages under 1.
Suddenly, yesterday it stopped working fine, I was getting load averages to up to 50 (!)
I haven't changed anything in the server nor in the website, and the users in the websi...
"But you must remember that Dropbox has problem with synchronize truecrypt files because adding new staff to truecrypt files doesn't change any of truecrypt file so dropbox doesn't know is it already modified file and need to by synchorized."
I feel so strange creating the interview materials for the people interviewing for the vacancy I'm creating. Who has some totally fucked up trick questions relating to AD, VMWare, or iSCSI storage?
@MDMarra This is very basic, but it's surprising the number of people who do not know that you can join a machine via AD just with login credentials by default.
So far I just have basic questions like What are the 5 FSMO roles and what do they do? What is a Fine-Grained Password Policy and how is it implemented? What are AD Sites, how do they impact logins and DFS namespaces? What order are GP object applied?
I feel like those are all pretty straight forward
I really want to come up with a question that's going to ruin someone's day.
@MDMarra Think about the people in here that you consider to be knowledgeable folks you'd like to work with. Think about why you pick them. Try to use that as a basis for your interviews.
Open-ended questions... one firm a few weeks ago drew a diagram with a server and a black-box appliance connected to a router. The black-box had a fixed IP/subnet. The server was on a different subnet. The task was to give as many possible methods of connecting the two systems (goal: ping the black box from the server)
@MDMarra Ask them popular questions from serverfault. Ask them to give you a nice long list of all the various features that you would look for in a switch. Ask the about what they would do if the security auditor is an idiot. :p
@JeffFerland s/gotcha/difficult/ -- because how the candidate gets to the answer is as important as the answer itself, and if they just spit out the answer you don't learn much.
I was thinking about making magnets that said "router, switch, firewall, pc, printer, domain controller, web server" and giving them a marker and saying, draw how you would arrange these into a network.
yeah its fun. Doesn't take itself too seriously and has bad reviews from people who took it too seriously, but if you're happy to have some fun, it does the job
Spotted this on reddit's r/sysadmin page. I'm almost impressed with the tone.
We are not a vendor of end-user software. We don't work with users. Consequently we don't have obligation to explain anything to you here, on third-party forum. As I specified, if one is interested in answer, he is welcome to use our support channels for assistance.
Currently, code highlighting is turned off (see balpha's comment here). It is possible to turn it on, if we want so.
I think this would be nice to have, maybe on a per-tag basis, but turning it on is definitely the first step.
Because it is disabled site-wide, we can't force it by manually spec...
PowerShell is listed as a strongly preferred skill
In the hands-on section I have "Using the language of your choice (PS preferred), return a list of user names, samaccountnames, distinguished names, and SIDs in text file"
@84104 I think most motherboards have some mechanism. A bunch of my servers just have a couple of solder pads that need to be bridged with a screwdriver. My point (and I was generally kidding) was setting up an external switch to bump it when an OS completely noodles your machine.
@rnxrx My wife was frying some stuff in oil the other day and she put the frying pan in the sink when she was done and turned on the water to wash her hands without thinking. Big explosion. I found her in shrunk in the corner of the room as hot oil rained down
I'm very novice in termos of administrating a server.
Website was running fine till yesterday, load averages under 1.
Suddenly, yesterday it stopped working fine, I was getting load averages to up to 50 (!)
I haven't changed anything in the server nor in the website, and the users in the websi...
