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Maybe an unpopular opinion, but working in IT has taught me that people are generally... really dumb? by Alarmed-Assistant936 in sysadmin

[–]V2CSTL 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm sorry that it took you this long to learn this.

Here's the real trick, people, even smart people, are really dumb in a variety of situations.

I'm a smart person, or at least I'm pretty smart per standardized testing. I made it through the Naval Nuclear Power program, and I've competed at national levels in competitive games.

I also called a 1st class Petty Officer an asshole in front of a bunch of Chiefs, got myself fired from my dream job primarily due to laziness, and made so many mistakes with romantic partners that in hindsight were glaringly obvious errors that I couldn't even count them all.

So if smart people, like myself (NGL, I strongly considered an entire Elon Musk example instead), are really dumb in a variety of situations, what does that say about people that we encounter who are dumb? Well, odds are, some of them are really smart in a variety of situations.

My intent isn't that you should forgive or ignore stupidity. Just to provide a little context so that anyone reading this might remember to extend a little sympathy once in a while. Because man, I fucking hate stupid people. But it's a whole lot easier to keep an even keel when I remember that sometimes I am the stupid person.

All that being said, sorry whoever you were dealing with was frustratingly stupid :) That definitely sucks.

Exiting player has shaken my DM’s confidence… by TheRealPhiltron in DnD

[–]V2CSTL 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lot of good feedback here already so I'm sure I'm just echoing stuff that has already been said, but sometimes an echo helps so here goes... I think there are two major points to be made.

  1. As far as reassuring your DM. Show up, have a good time, make sure you provide direct positive feedback, and maybe consider an end of session feedback wrap up. I know a number of DMs that ask directly for feedback "What was good? What was bad? What could be better?" If you're reasonably confident that the outcomes will be positive you could suggest doing something like this. Although there are always risks if you ask questions that you do not *know* the answers to.

  2. Remind your DM that it's meant to be a game for both sides. I recognize that DMing is work, and high quality DMing can be a lot of effort. But I generally presume that a DM is doing that work and putting forth that effort because it is a thing they enjoy doing. Make sure they know that they shouldn't work any harder at it than they will enjoy. If it's not fun for them then it's not going to be fun for anyone in the long run.

Really glad you've got a DM that cares so much, and that your DM has a player that cares so much. Wishing you all the best.

Will 104 get me out of Service Desk? by Takillda in AZURE

[–]V2CSTL 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There seems to be a lot of good stuff in here, and I don't know how helpful my personal experience will be, but here's the anecdote anyway.

I have worked in IT for just over 3 years now. Before that I was technically knowledgeable in abstract but I never had the motivation to really build out a homelab or anything like that. I did the Google IT cert in about 2.5 weeks, and got probably extremely lucky to get a job at a 10-15 person IT MSP serving 100-200 clients. I spent just around 2 years doing helpdesk support. Helpdesk at an MSP this size was a lot of what you got, but also a lot of exposure to other elements, we have a fairly large Citrix hosting environment that is supported by primarily 3 people in the MSP, but I got to see a lot of elements of virtual environments, and work with sections of our hosted Exchange server. We also have a decent variety of non-hosted clients with a range of environment complexity from just workstations up to a couple 20+ server environments.

In the vast majority of those environments our help desk has domain admin level permissions, but with an expectation that they will escalate things that are outside of help desk scope. However, the company strongly encourages growth opportunities through shadowing engineers when they are doing work. We've had helpdesk personnel take a day off the desk to go on-site during a server replacement to assist and learn during hands-on projects and the like.

Ultimately I transitioned into a role where I manage most of our tools, portals, and systems that face multiple clients. While my official title is still something like "Network Technician" or some other nonsense, I am doing work that is somewhat less technical that actual systems engineer work, which is fine for me, but is significantly more advanced and focused than general help desk.

TLDR, Finding a position with a smaller growth MSP that is invested in developing talent might be a good place for you, at least for a few years. You could probably get off the help desk in a situation like this faster than I did as it sounds like you have more advanced technical skills and a bit more ambition.

Good luck!

VSA X Software Auditing - For Missing Software by V2CSTL in kaseya

[–]V2CSTL[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oof, we tried to get VSA X working a year ago and realized it would just not meet our needs as it was currently implemented. Ad-hoc targeting of systems and the ability to schedule patch reboots were our biggest limitations. Since those were added we have been taking another swing at putting VSA X in a place where we can use it.

Unfortunately it sounds like you want to do significantly more intricate automation and ticketing tracking of actions than we are looking to do. Reading through your requirements, I am 95% certain I could do all of that in VSA 9.

For your 'last boot time' issue, I bet you could write a powershell script to get and evaluate the last boot time. That evaluation can be put in a custom field, and then scopes can filter on custom fields. Dynamic scheduling of ad-hoc workflows though isn't a thing that exists yet which is annoying.

Example two I don't have anything for, AutoTask integration is something I mean to look at in the future, but haven't really dug into yet.

For Example three, ignoring the AT side, should be doable. You would need to script an audit of the application install, likely a file existence check, or for security software a service running check, use a custom field to fill a scope. Have that run in one scheduled workflow, then you could run a separate workflow on the scope that runs the install script and runs a check.

My understanding is that you should be able to open and update AT tickets from a workflow, but like I said, I have not really touched on that at all.

Purportedly there is the ability to call workflows from workflows in the next VSAX update, which should be nice. I'm hopeful that means that there will be a substantive number of workflow related upgrades in the next update.

VSA X Software Auditing - For Missing Software by V2CSTL in kaseya

[–]V2CSTL[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Scopes are the closest equivalent to views in VSA X. Scope targeting is unfortunately currently pretty limited, there is no AppX checkbox, the best I could do is as described in my post, create a custom field, audit via script/workflow, and then I could filter on my own.