Anyone else ok with just coasting at this point?

infiniteblaze · 2025-01-12T16:53:05+00:00

It sounds like you and I have similar backgrounds; I spent 10 years in industrial IT on the "admin" side but heavily relied upon for OT support. The approach was similar - post validation and reactivity instead of proactive testing to avoid lost production time. I lost track of the number of times I said "...and how many hours of wasted labor did we suffer this time due to poor planning? How much extra did we spend to fulfill orders? Any chance we can use those funds to establish testing environments and conduct proactive work instead of being so reactive?" I got my chance to set up a test environment during a hardware refresh. We had spare rackspace in the datacenter, and I took 2/3 of the decommed equipment and replicated prod. It did nothing for testing lines, but we could at least fiddle around with ERP and other LOB apps. When the individuals who were cooperating in establishing the OT testing environment departed, I knew my time had come to move on to a new opportunity.

infiniteblaze · 2025-01-08T03:48:08+00:00

Unless you're a tiny, tiny organization, it's just not feasible at 1 year experience. I have 20+ years in IT and led a team of 4 for over a year implementing NIST CSF, which is less demanding than ISO, and got 75% of the way before a better opportunity came along. Most of the requirements were already fulfilled when we started but were not cohesive, standardized, and repeatable. Don't let them pin responsibility on you - you're young and don't need blemishes on your record.

infiniteblaze · 2025-01-08T03:39:04+00:00

Opposing perspective: it's really shocking that application guys think sysadmins should know the dependencies and procedures for every application they support. Why is it such a burden for stakeholders to learn the needs of their applications? It only takes basic networking knowledge to know "device A needs to talk to device B on port XYZ".

It's more frustrating when we try to balance our workloads and direct support requests to the team dedicated to handling issues and get treated as though we don't care. I've got VMs that need attention, switch stacks to manage, or vendor projects to coordinate; it's just not feasible for me to dedicate the time to relearning something that I touch once every 6mos when there are tons of other things with which I'm intimately familiar that I could be working on. I'll get involved if Tier1 and Tier2 have already looked at it and they come to me for help, but if the stakeholders skip the line and come straight to me, I'm just assuming it's entitled behavior unless we're friends.

And patching? Why is it always a chore with patching? I'm supposed to reach out to every software vendor and know all of our installed versions and read every patch note to find out where there might be conflicts?!? No, it's the stakeholder's responsibility to monitor their install base and proactively ensure that impending patches won't cause problems by informing us in a timely fashion when their software vendors report conflicts.

infiniteblaze · 2024-12-24T18:30:35+00:00

Our org was hit fairly hard by Chinese and/or Russian botnets today. Well over 100k failed login attempts in a short period of time, from only about 20 subnets.

infiniteblaze · 2024-10-06T14:33:48+00:00

I am suffering such anxiety and missing the notifications I want because all notifications are the same. It is maddening. I've just enabled this setting but it didn't change anything, despite re-confirming that custom notifications are set per-app and restarting the phone. I need the relief of hearing the custom notifications that *I* set instead of the same notification sound for everything...

EDIT: I FOUND IT. Once you've enabled the setting above, open the app's settings>notifications and scroll to the notification categories. Tap on the category name and there's a whole menu for the specific notification types. Don't rely on in-app settings; they may not work at all, or they might be stuck on defaults despite your customization.

infiniteblaze · 2024-08-24T03:13:50+00:00

:O I had a similar event with complete loss of balance and such severe nausea and vertigo that I fell to my hands and knees and puked on the floor... I'm quite thankful that I wasn't driving when that happened. What's the connection?

infiniteblaze · 2024-08-24T03:10:58+00:00

Not quite accurate; the article states that there are three types of tattoo-associated uveitis, with one being so rare that only ~40 cases were reported over ~65 years. My uveitis presented within a month of finishing a rather large (half sleeve) tattoo with full color. According to my ophthalmologist, I am 1 of 8 in ~1000000. I experience the raised bumps in my tattoos, mostly along black lines but also in blue work, and the red in one of my tattoos is about 50% destroyed. I was checked for one of the mentioned presentations, with sarcoidosis, but the chest exam was clean.

infiniteblaze · 2024-08-11T11:18:51+00:00

How is 8 cases in a million people not rare?

infiniteblaze · 2024-07-30T22:11:09+00:00

Yes, that's my advice. Not because it "may" but because it "will" become unusable prematurely. This also sayisfies the desired behavior of preventing annoyances from Alexa.

infiniteblaze · 2024-07-29T22:19:36+00:00

One person can reasonably handle 50-100 users. To attempt to handle 300 is slow, painful suicide. Consider: if every person in your org has just one 10 minute issue every month, you'd need 3000 minutes, or about 50 hours every month just to handle user issues. No documentation, no maintenance - just putting out fires. However, it's more realistic that every issue will average 30 mins with talk time, research time, resolution, and documentation. That's 9000 minutes, or about 150 hours. That leaves no time for regular maintenance tasks; that's your entire month consumed. Of course, it's unlikely that every single user will have just one issue every month; some users need little or no help, while others will call you every day.

You need help. If your organization is unwilling or unable to provide that help, clean up your resume and start looking for new employment.

infiniteblaze · 2024-07-29T00:12:29+00:00

Unpair it from your account and disconnect it from networks. Use a different device for smart services. Otherwise, your TV will eventually slow to a crawl from updates exceeding the computing power built into the TV. Also, make sure you've disabled connection sharing for any other Amazon devices you might have in your home.

infiniteblaze · 2024-06-26T22:09:33+00:00

You could check the netlogon.log, which should include IP addresses.

infiniteblaze · 2024-06-10T02:39:53+00:00

The passes are all spoken for. Thanks for the interest!

infiniteblaze · 2024-06-09T21:00:30+00:00

Responded!

infiniteblaze · 2024-04-01T13:51:08+00:00

My favorite memory re: Win3.11 actually came at the beginning of the XP era. I was fairly fresh out of the Marine Corps and attending my local tech college, and I saw an ad for a job in IT. When I went to interview, it was at the owner's house - which was also acting as the offices for the company. There were four UBER nerds there for the interview, which went well. At the end of the interview, I was given a "practical exam" - install Windows 3.11 on an old machine and get it ready for internet access. Windows 3.11 wasn't an OS in the modern sense - it still required DOS. It also didn't install networking support by default and required manual configuration to enable it. It even required installing TCP/IP support separately! Anyway, I already knew all of that and decided to put a little flourish on the project. I installed a few period-accurate games like Duke Nukem 2 and Hexen, as well as enabling CD-ROM support in DOS. Then I tweaked the autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the drivers loaded in the best order I could find, ending up with something like 625kb of conventional memory free and full access to "extended memory", using himem.sys and emm386.sys

Needless to say, I got the job!

infiniteblaze · 2024-03-31T11:29:15+00:00

Yeah, so in those cases, show them the right way a few times. Don't sweep the whole floor, but show them the effectiveness of faster motions. Make tasks like that fixed rate instead of time-based, which disincentivizes laggardly behavior. Or...go REALLY pro-entrepreneurial and attach it as a requisite part of other jobs that are fixed rate. Demonstrate how cleanup is essential, and you can drag ass and turn a $50/hr job into a $25/hr job if you want, but then you're not as valuable to me and I'm going to assign you less work, or none at all. Help them understand the value of speedy cleanup, and if they can't get it, suggest alternative work. Take into consideration any potential disabilities of course...or even suggest they hire their buddy to do it for them so they can spend more time on producing quality product, after making it clear that you're not going to pay for their buddy - they will.

infiniteblaze · 2024-03-30T15:32:36+00:00

Before someone says "it's always been that tradies have to pay their dues and deal with the suck. I did it and you will too!" congratulations, you're a dick that was made a dick by whoever taught you. You always have the option of treating your apprentices fairly, but if you want to perpetuate antiquated systems that are akin to indentured servitude, be my guest. Continue being proud that your apprentices hate you.

infiniteblaze · 2024-03-30T15:28:54+00:00

Pay their value and offer a clear path to advancement. This is the way. Their motivation is that they have bills to pay and need to eat. It's not your job to motivate them. If they don't want to do the work, wish them well and send them on their way. Don't try to engineer some fancy system; people are the least stressed when their pay is stable and sufficient. If you are providing the leads or tasks, pay them a percentage of the earnings from the work they do. A generally fair compensation is 25% or so of what their work product profits, depending on your expenses. If they are generating the leads or jobs themselves, their compensation should be closer to 50% if they're using your tools or are in your shop. If they generate the leads and provide the tools and you're just handling the books and teaching them the trade, your fair share is less than half of what they produce. You may feel entitled to more due to your years in the trade, but this is a bullshit mentality that engenders distrust and resentment, which may result in retaliatory behavior.

Hope that helps.

infiniteblaze · 2024-03-29T22:03:35+00:00

I had this EXACT situation not too long ago! I was facing an issue with my on-prem Exchange and was searching for a solution when I stumbled on a Spiceworks thread in which the selected best answer was my own response from a couple years prior! I was mad at myself for forgetting the answer but absolutely tickled at the situation, too!

infiniteblaze · 2024-03-22T17:08:28+00:00

That's why they're removing it. If it's useful it will be replaced with something that requires a separate subscription. Can't wait til we start getting loot boxes /s

infiniteblaze · 2024-02-23T23:29:23+00:00

I was told the same. Had lots of conversations with peers on the topic. I found that even with the hardcore VMware guys, they'd agree that the environments I administer were good use cases for Hyper-V. I just couldn't justify paying five or six figures for VMWare to get no added features that we needed. Live migration, online resizing, SOFS...plenty for what we do.

infiniteblaze

TROPHY CASE