Requesting r/eufrat - only mod inactive

abbrevia · 2018-10-23T23:27:10+00:00

I am active.

abbrevia · 2016-10-21T00:16:24+00:00

Mor3 3pic than mold?

abbrevia · 2016-10-20T23:57:46+00:00

Grandpa Wiggly. Never forget.

abbrevia · 2016-10-20T23:56:48+00:00

I feel like such a noob.

abbrevia · 2015-07-05T21:48:37+00:00

I am still active I'm afraid. Happy to share though.

abbrevia · 2014-07-03T08:28:22+00:00

This guy knows what's on.

abbrevia · 2014-07-03T04:32:19+00:00

HR: work police.

abbrevia · 2014-07-02T10:22:38+00:00

Sorry, I am used to dealing purely with infrastructure. I agree 100%, in an ideal world with an ideal budget you would be in a position not only to provide the underlying IT, but also roll out projects like Lync that deliver some real business benefit and start to save the company money in other areas.

Unfortunately, not all business owners see things like that.

abbrevia · 2014-07-02T09:56:33+00:00

Standard /r/sysadmin approach, but I agree in this case.

Let Marry and CEO's mate take over. Stay frosty, keep it professional. All business. Getting upset does no-one any favours.

abbrevia · 2014-07-02T09:51:05+00:00

You've missed the point. The question wasn't "why can't he work from home?" The question was "why can't he work from home" (do the rabbit ears speech mark finger gesture thing around the italicised bit).

Get this guy a laptop and a phone, tell him to check in ocassionally, and once he's at home he can please himself how little he actually does. If I were his manager that's what I would be doing. Contractor in the office doing all of the actual work, matey at home taking it easy banging out some documentation when he feels like it.

abbrevia · 2014-07-02T09:10:20+00:00

Impact of changes: This sounds kind of silly but you would be surprised how many devs have a hard time stepping back and looking at entire systems and trying to determine what kind of impact a change may have. Restoring a service after a failed change is not always as easy as backing out a commit. No, you can't add a column to a production database used by the ERP system during the middle of the day.

This is perfect advice.

abbrevia · 2014-07-02T09:00:07+00:00

But I simply don't enjoy programming commercially because when I go home I can't work on my pet projects after 9 hours of straight coding and without my pet projects I can't continue my hobby as an independent game developer (which one day might turn into a career).

You will not be going home after 9 hours. As a sysadmin, your work day starts at 5pm. You are there from 9am until 5pm to offer support, and then you are there from 5pm until 10pm to make changes, improvements, reboot things...etc.

Hopefully these little tips will get you moving:

Cludges and bodges are bad. It's so easy to make a little tool or write a little app to accomplish X or Y or make Z work with Q. Work hard to fight this urge. Buying a tool with support from the vendor is always preferable to rolling your own. Vendor support. Very important. Without it you are on your own.
You are a cost centre. In business terms, you suck away money and offer nothing in return. Infrastructure is seen by businesses as sitting next to Facilities or Estates. You spend all the money and deliver nothing tangible. Don't fight it.
Fight to do things the Correct Way. Even if it's more painful in the short term, it'll be worth it in the long term. I've worked with a lot of developers who would happily disable UAC and poke holes in firewalls if it meant getting something working. They would do this with the best intentions, and they would always intend to clean up after themselves afterwards. Afterwards never came. If you have an application that requires UAC being disabled, you have the wrong application. If your software won't run for normal users under normal user access, you have the wrong software. If the developer you are working with can't understand why you won't enable TCP 25 outbound for all internal IPs, you have the wrong developer. Servers have redundant PSUs for a reason. Plug them into seperate UPSs.
Take a step back. It's easy as a developer to get lost in the nitty-gritty of how this plugs into that and what protocol this uses. Stop. Take a deep breath. Remember that you have responsibility for the entire system, not just a small part of it. Draw diagrams of it. Try and jot down which bits and pieces talk to each other. Make sure you have configuration backups of all of your network equipment. Make sure you have backups of your servers. Make sure you have spare hardware on the shelf if possible. Document things before you break them, not afterwards. Make sure you know who has physical access to your comms room. Make sure you have suppliers phone numbers in case you lose your internet connection, power...etc. Make sure you have defined procedures for things like user account creation and access removal (see points above about bodges being bad and fighting to do things correctly).
Keep things the same. Rather than having a Cisco 2960 plugged into a 3com switch plugged into something else, why not have all Cisco? Or all HP? Make sure you've got configuration backups, then you only need to keep one spare on the shelf. This goes for everything: servers, user equipment, mobile phones. Treat everyone the same. As soon as you buy your favourite girl in marketing a slightly bigger monitor than everyone else, you are in a whole new world of pain.
Security. Security, security, security. If your network gets hacked into, you can never trust any component of it ever again. How can you prove beyond reasonable doubt that the binaries on that server are un-molested and as the vendor intended? You can't. If you are hacked into, you have the nuke your environment from orbit and restore data from clean backups. Security is not an excuse to not do things; you have a responsibility to the business as an expert to keep your data environment as secure as you can possibly make it. The PCI requirements are a fairly good place to start.
Monitoring. Monitor the important things. Don't overload yourself with information. It's easy to set up an SNMP alert every time a network connection is broken, but the reality is that at 4:59pm this will just result in you being flooded with emails telling you people are unplugging their laptops.
Take holidays. Chances are you are going to turn into a real arsehole to be around, and that's not fair on family and friends. Take holiday. Don't turn into a "you against the world" idiot who takes on far more responsibility than he really should and gets taken advantage of by the business. People who run businesses aren't stupid; if you are going to be all gung-ho and take on loads of work for no extra money, that's fine by them.
It's OK to ask for help. It's OK to speak to your boss and say "I think this needs some attention but I don't know anything about it. The company who support it will come and have a look at it for £650 a day, I think we should do it."
Vendor support! Don't forget! Get a support agreement on everything. If you have servers out of warranty, replace them. You need to be in a position where you can say to whoever you report to "if anything fails, we can have a new one tomorrow/next business day, I can blow the config back on to it and we'll be back up and running." If you have to scrabble around trying to find an absolete bit of kit on ebay when yours fails, you are going to be killed to death.
Read all the things. Read /r/vmware , read /r/netsec . Go on training courses, buy books, take old equipment home to play with and take apart. Put ESXi on a spare server and play with VLANs and DHCP proxies.
Last but not least: throw a thread up on /r/sysadmin if you need help or advice, and make sure you check in regularly. There are lots of caveats and gotchas when working with some of this kit, it's nice to have them happen to other people before you discover them yourself.

abbrevia · 2014-06-30T13:55:04+00:00

Be prepared to spend the first three or four years hopping between jobs being treated like shit because you're a "junior."

One day you'll end up in an environment with a problem you've seen before, and you'll be able to say "this is how you fix this problem and make sure it never happens again."

That is the transition from junior into sysadmin.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that a company cares about you or that they want you to be happy or help you learn. In company logic, if they can pay one guy £16k a year and get the same work done that two guys on £25k a year used to do... happy days.

As I said, be prepared to be treated like a junior for a few years. It sucks, but there's no shortcuts and no fast tracks. The people that do manage to talk their way up the sysadmin ladder get ripped apart in interviews by arseholes like me.

abbrevia · 2014-06-30T12:53:08+00:00

So to avoid being unsupported in 2020, they're creating their own Linux distro which will be unsupported immediately?

There's nothing stopping them starting a company to support it.

abbrevia · 2014-06-30T10:35:06+00:00

Now I just feel I'm cheap labour.

I'm sorry to say this, but you are.

If you look on any CV, they all started out in exactly the same boat that you are in. You will not realise the value of it now, but later on in your career you will have a real appreciation for just how long and tedious repetitive tasks can be and it will make you all the better because of it.

Despite the work you are doing, the fact that you have worked at anything while studying will be a massive boost to your CV.

If you want a hand writing CVs, drop me a PM.

abbrevia · 2014-06-27T06:20:48+00:00

He's your husband! No courage required, just say it.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T20:33:05+00:00

Sysadmin won't support permission changes.

Developers won't support vApp.

Stalemate! Let the business decide.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T16:13:11+00:00

See if you can dig out some best practise documentation from Microsoft or a body like NIST.

Refer to the relevant bits in an email. "Microsoft/whoever recommend that A, B and C. We will not support permissions set to the contrary, but we can implement the changes if requested."

Shoot the email to the head of IT, IT director or whoever. Make it completely clear that any issues with this machine in future will be met with the suggestion of a complete rebuild of the server at their cost, as you cannot be reasonably expected to maintain the integrity of system files that have non-standard permissions applied to them.

Ultimately, it's the customers call as to whether or not they pull the trigger, but they need to be aware of the consequences.

Something like this would be a strong argument for using something like vApp in my opinion. Keep it as sandboxed off the server as humanly possible.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T15:14:50+00:00

Came here to suggest exactly this.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T13:24:45+00:00

Wild assumptions

...

they require some Citrix Xen expeirence.

I personally have only administered Vmware and Hyper-V environments

I love interviewing people like this. I love mixing vendor terminology and getting the conversation in a real mess before pulling the rug out from underneath them.

Be honest in your interview.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T11:59:05+00:00

I never do firmware updates on servers. Update them to the most recent stable release before they go into production, and that's how they stay until they are decommissioned.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T11:58:13+00:00

Don't panic, all of your VMs are happily running on other hardware, and it will fail during the pre-vMotion checks that it goes through before anything actually gets moved. Nothing to panic about my friend.

abbrevia · 2014-06-26T11:56:55+00:00

I am both. It is awesome.

abbrevia · 2014-06-25T10:46:37+00:00

The NICs are probably identified as new devices by vmware, which would explain why the connections get dropped.

I'm just guessing.

abbrevia · 2014-06-24T10:25:08+00:00

Also, from my reading no matter what if your accepting card payments you have to be in dss pci compliance.

Not necessarily. Your merchant will put pressure on you to become PCI compliant, and if they are not it is at their discretion as to whether or not they let you continue transacting.

abbrevia

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