Well I'm generally a fan of Exchange, but I cannot vouch for the administration of this particular installation of Exchange.
When you have 100k employees in your company, and a time like this comes along and exposes the fact that you don't have the redundancy necessary to keep EMAIL up if one server or switch fails... that's an URLT event if you ask me.
@Adrian Oh heck yeah. My home e-mail server might be easier to break than Exchange, but problems are easy to track down and fix. And the compartmentalization of the system means a problem in one little area doesn't bring the whole thing to its knees either.
@Zoredache baww, beat me to it. Or something that downloads "Never Gonna Give You Up" and plays it at random times. Let it read e-mails so when people complain about it it "hides" for a week or two and then starts back up again.
@MikeyB Yeah, we don't have one of those. That's one of the things that was on the to-do list for after we virtualize the existing mail server, but I'll be leaving before then.
And frankly, this place'll likely be moving to Exchange over the next year instead.
Alright, network admins... is there something like Puppet/Chef for switches? If I have to change 500 bits of network gear the same fucking way, manually, I'm gonna kill... everyone.
@Adrian Yeah, it's pretty much the same as Cisco, so could be worse. Only problem is the "pretty much" part, so the management tools don't work too well between platforms.
@HopelessN00b - I have your solution for both the switch configs and the time off needed. If you don't care about that pesky security BS. yourmaninindia.com
Seriously though, anybody showing up at my house and hammering on the door to get me to go into the office is liable to get the business end of something between .32" and .45" inserted in one nostril.
@voretaq7 Will take a look. right now it's just repassword all the things!!! and evolving into correct helper IPs, hostnames, ntp servers, logging server, ... on all the things too. So no identical config, but identical config changes.
@HopelessN00b Unless you got family/kids there that are keeping you from moving, I'd look into relocation. I've been having to answer my phone so I can personally tell recruiters to go away because they're filling up my voicemail queue.
@Zoredache Yeah, probably what it's gonna come to. I assumed the old guy had some management system for handling all our gear. Turns out he managed them with a connection manager and logging into all of them. I'm not gonna be doing that.
Are they at least running the same version of firmware/ios/whatever? For HPs, the NTP settings are slightly different on different versions of the firmware.
@Adrian Yeah, well, as I've said, once I clear this replace everything infrastructure project and boost my salary by ~20K, relocation is definitely on the table.
@Iain Not if I ask first, but yes, that is on the list of things to "discover" has been put on our network gear "while I'm at it."
@HopelessN00b will they let you bring in a intern/college student that you make do all the work while you supervise? That would be a wonderful opportunity for some student to learn switch configuration.
@HopelessN00b You're not going to find that on this coast though. All the young girl geeks are generally taken or have issues that make them complete non-starters.
I have a server running on windows 7. I want to install DNS server. I have not found anserver available from Microsoft for win 7 machines.
I found BIND difficult while configuring it, Is there any other DNS servers available for windows 7 machine which can be easily installed and configured.
Is...
@HopelessN00b Google, of course, has more highly-talented geeks than you can shake a stick at. Anyone who doesn't run a company with a vast majority of tech geeks shouldn't be using them as a model.
Ubuntu doesn't have the distinction Windows does (you physically CAN'T enable those roles on the Desktop OS under Windows. Nothing stops you from installing BIND on Ubuntu Desktop).
You can tell them it's a right stupid idea and they shouldn't be doing it though, as long as you're nice.
@MDMarra Honestly if I can't figure out if you're a good fit in a 1-3 hour interview (depending on depth of position) you're not a fit. I shouldn't need all day to figure that out.
Maybe I'm the kind of person who places higher standards than needed on myself, but I can't see Google ever wanting to fly me out for an interview. Is this common occurrence only for senior staff?
Interesting. I don't think I'd really want to work at Google honestly. They sort of do their own thing all the time, I rather like participating in a community.
@gparent I guess people that really care about tech are either offering relocation and free travel for interviews or are working with distributed teams to stay relevant
if you want the best people in the world, you really need to sort of look around the whole world, i suppose
@gparent tele-commuting is becoming less common from what I'm seeing.
@gparent IBM ran pandemic response tests while I worked there. Everyone HAD to work from home until notified by Corporate that they could go back to the office.
@Adrian Really? While we don't have anyone that works from home we do have the capability now, and more people than ever work from home here and there.
@ChrisS Most of the big names in town here are shelving those projects. They realized the Dev teams need the continual interaction to work well, even if individual engineer satisfaction and efficiency is better.
Not quite the same, but we had a scare (I forget what it was) a few years ago and I was drafted in to help write some disaster plans for the future. The scope on one was "This plan will put into the action in the event of a serious disaster. Presumptions are that 70% of the office workforce are dead or otherwise unavailable for work".
They didn't really like my response of "If 70% of the office is dead, I don't think the other 30% are going to give a flying fuck about the data centre". I was told I wasn't taking it seriously and wasn't asked to contribute any more :D
Do what we had a guy back in 2001 do. Host your own webhosting company on the corporate servers. He was going great for over 2 years with almost 300 clients before I started. 2nd week on the job I'm asked to look at 4 servers in our Dallas offices for possible replacement. Do a little research on the servers themselves and was like "WTF?!"
So as I slug my way through /review/close and /review/first-posts I'm finding an alarming number of what I'm calling "Serverfault is a search engine" posts -- people asking us to find software for them.
A couple of examples:
How does the Apache download for Windows work?
Where can I download M...
The first thing you should know is that Active Directory and DNS are so intertwined that they're almost one. For all intents and purposes, you should forget the idea of having an Active Directory domain which doesn't have a primary DNS server for Windows clients.
I won't say it's "impossible", b...
I've worked in places where the solaris guys had their own DNS zone and the AD guys had theirs and we just had conditional forwarders and configured an additional search suffix for clients of each
No need to "keep them in sync" as JimB is claiming you need to do
@KyleBrandt Try ab on 2-3 machines -- ab gets pretty crappy hardawre utilization on modern systems for some reason. You can't really load the target server before ab hits the wall
@gparent from a single source host? I've gotten it up to about 500/second, but that's usually where ab hits the wall and the server is still begging for more
Dammit. I've finding shit for questions & answers to properly diagnose and respond to oom-killer and virtual memory address space over-allocation issues.
I have several websites that use Telerik controls and need to install the assemblies to a new VM running Windows Server 2008 R2. Normally I would drag the *.dll straight into the C:\Windows\Assembly folder, but I'm getting faced with an "Access Denied" error.
From what I've read, you can overcom...
@KyleBrandt I forgot about that -- I assume you're using `-k` with ab though right? (otherwise i don't think you'd get into the hundreds of requests/second range :P)
@ChrisS I wouldn't benchmark SSL without it - otherwise your bound is OpenSSL rather than your system (and really are there any browsers that don't do HTTP(S) keepalive?)
Another option you might consider:
http://www.wisesoft.co.uk/software/account_management_spreadsheet/default.aspx
It's a tool I wrote a number of years ago to import users from Excel to AD.
This answer (and associated question) are why I think Windows sysadmins are generally idjits.
@Dan When I worked at IBM, the assumption is that 30% of the staff would be unavailable to work due to illness, infrastructure collapse, or whatnot. The Professional Services staff who can't go onsite would be filling in on the support queues for the products that they normally install to cover for support engineers who were unavailable. Aside from a few glitches around services that couldn't scale fast enough, it worked quite well.
So as I slug my way through /review/close and /review/first-posts I'm finding an alarming number of what I'm calling "Serverfault is a search engine" posts -- people asking us to find software for them.
A couple of examples:
How does the Apache download for Windows work?
Where can I download M...
Another option you might consider:
http://www.wisesoft.co.uk/software/account_management_spreadsheet/default.aspx
It's a tool I wrote a number of years ago to import users from Excel to AD.
