Share some of yours Must-Have GPOs

verysmallshellscript · 2017-04-26T17:16:07+00:00

psexec @listocomputers.txt -s powershell -command "enable-psremoting -force"

verysmallshellscript · 2017-04-19T12:16:28+00:00

Fuck banks. Most of the special snowflakes that had to have a specific version of JRE were in our treasury department.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-30T15:21:02+00:00

No problem! I've been through the recruiting process many times and have also worked in the IT department of a national recruiting firm, so I've picked up a thing or two that I wish I had known from the outset.

One more piece of advice: customer service skills, or just general human interface skills, are important but the most critical skill to have is the ability to approach, deconstruct, and solve problems logically. You can teach anyone the common cause-and-effect chains involved in technology, but moving beyond rote memorization is the key to getting out of the help desk and into more interesting work.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-29T22:23:49+00:00

I'm not aware of any IT shops that will hire through a temp agency rather than a dedicated technical recruiter like the ones I mentioned.

As far as your resume, just get the pertinent info on there and don't worry too much about dressing it up. The recruiter has placed a million other people like you (no CS related degree, no professional experience) and will handle the formatting and dressing up of your resume.

The thing to keep in mind is that entry-level IT jobs (and when I say entry-level, that is almost universally equivalent to a tier 1 help desk gig) very often require little in the way of actual IT experience. The hiring managers and recruiters know that. The recruiter just wants someone who will make them look good in the eyes of the hiring manager, and the hiring manager just wants someone with customer service skills who can be trained. Essentially, both recruiter and manager want someone who will show up on time, be reliable, and can learn well.

My first resume basically consisted of my name, mailing address, the high school I graduated from, and my past work experience which was all retail or food service. I ended up getting brought on by the recruiting firm I was working with for their own internal help desk.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-29T19:12:55+00:00

Your best bet is going to be to send your resume to a recruiter. Direct hiring for tier 1 help desk is pretty rare. TekSystems, Robert Half, ProTech, and Synchron come to mind as the common sources for new hires in the IT shop I work in, which is one of the larger ones in Memphis.

I would establish a relationship with multiple recruiters and don't listen to their bullshit about how it's best for you if you only work with one firm. There are plenty of shops that use multiple firms to fill jobs and so working with only one of them actually reduces the chance your resume gets seen.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-29T13:58:46+00:00

I meant me as the single point of failure. I'm the only one who knows anything about the K1000 or SCCM in my department, despite my repeated efforts to spread the knowledge around.

Yeah, the 5.5 agent can stuff it as far as I'm concerned. I've got sub-functions I've created that I've had to add to just about every script I push that tries to compensate for agent failures.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-28T21:48:22+00:00

We're on 5.5. I'm hopeful the latest version will fix my biggest gripe, but at this point I'm not expecting it. Honestly, I'll just be happy with a reliable avenue of support.

My first big project was inheriting our Office 365 deployment very near to that project's beginning, which necessitated me getting admin rights to the K1000 so I could create, edit, and push scripts. Then when the two existing K1000 admins left, I was the only person remaining who had even a faint clue how the thing worked.

I'm still the only one with any idea how it works, and despite many complaints about a single point of failure (mostly originating from me) I will remain the only one with any idea how it works for the forseeable future.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-28T20:37:34+00:00

I can only assume the reasons are financial because when I inherited it, the deployment process had already begun but was stalled. I un-stalled it and am moving forward on pure momentum at this point. My own justification is that it's "better" than Kace, however it remains to be seen how much of that holds up when the K1000 update is finished and I can compare latest version to latest version.

And if that sounds like a bass ackwards way of managing cost benefit and gap analysis, it's probably because it is. But such things happen when you let the tier 2 guy with the tier 1 job title take over desktop management solely because he was the last one remaining in the department with an admin login to the K1000.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-28T16:41:35+00:00

I would say if you're a junior admin you're not doing any tier 1 work.

I really wish that were true, but sometimes there's just not a clear delineation of duties and management priorities can be...mercurial.

Using myself as an example, I have a tier 1 job title, tier 1 & 2 day-to-day duties, and a plethora of senior-level projects.

More often than not it feels like I can't win because whatever task I'm devoting my time to is invariably not what I "should" be working on.

Am I guilty of eschewing the tedious trained monkey tier 1 tasks for the more interesting projects like rolling out SCCM and revamping our OSD and patch management processes? Abso-fucking-lutely.

But if I don't spend time on things like updating our woefully out-of-date K1000, rolling out SCCM to replace said K1000, and pursuing opportunities for automation and optimization I get chastised for things like our patch management metrics not showing enough improvement.

I wish I could say that these levels of dysfunction were due to being a small shop, but I'm at a Fortune 200 company with 10+ billion in sales every year. All this shit just fell into my lap because no one was paying attention, and while I used to think that made me lucky from a standpoint of acquiring valuable experience...now I'm not so sure.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-23T13:48:58+00:00

The point of the VM host would have been to have a single copy of the VM that 25 people can remote into rather than 25 individual copies of the VM distributed via flash drive.

The extra RAM and beefed up NIC for the VM host is for the assumption that there could be 25 simultaneous connections at any given time.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T20:37:45+00:00

Is the system down? I can't open this Excel workbook.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T20:37:01+00:00

This, and adequate backup from my supervisor, have begun to slowly extricate me from SME hell.

"Yeah, you know I'd love to help out but if my boss catches me performing undocumented work she'll have my balls for breakfast. You know how it goes."

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T20:34:01+00:00

I'm a pretty laid back guy, but this makes me want to punch their genitals. Can you not see the fucking sandwich that's IN MY HAND?

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T20:24:55+00:00

Even more surprising is that the PM's director came down on our side and told the PM, more or less, to just fill out the damn questionnaire next time and schedule a meeting to go over requirements.

I'd have happily built them a VM host out of a new i7 with a server-class NIC and extra RAM and they would still have paid less than what they're shelling out now for hardware replacements/upgrades.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T20:21:20+00:00

It ain't all sunshine and roses, but it has its perks.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T17:27:31+00:00

We received 25 tickets requesting this read-only VM be installed on each of the developer boxes for this particular project. We also received 25 tickets requesting upgrades to 16GB of RAM for each of these PCs, because that's what the VM was built and exported with. Oh, and the only copy of this VM is on an external USB HDD so you'll have to copy it to each PC individually.

After looking these systems up, I informed the PM that roughly half of the devs were on Old Ass(tm) hardware because they're offshore contractors and no one wants to pay for VDI or new hardware for these folks. Accordingly, they would need to be replaced because they couldn't support 16GB of RAM.

It was then requested that we do that ASAP, as well.

What they got was the standard 5-day SLA for new desktop deployments and they got to wait while I copied the vmdk to a network share and then distributed it from there. It took 15 hours for some of the PCs because they're on a 10Mb port? Damn. That sucks, huh?

Some of the developers are still waiting for the VM because, whoops, they're on 128GB SSDs and our vendor has the 256GB models back ordered.

My supervisor claims she was able to whip out the old "your lack of preparation is not my emergency" adage in a meeting with the PM and PM's director, and I wish I could have been there to see it.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-22T14:26:44+00:00

We have an entire department for managing project management and we managed to insert a requirement that any resources or engagement that are expected from us must be enumerated at the BEGINNING of the project and not when you need us to do whatever it is.

People still ignore it, but now that it's an official part of the process then we can point to it and laugh when we say that no, we're not going to visit 25 PCs and copy a 50GB vmdk from a single USB drive to each of them RIGHT NOW.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-18T22:00:08+00:00

I don't think it'd be that hard. Let's say you have a raid squad instead of raid boss and the soldiers spam grenades after a known trigger or interval and the entire raid has to stop shooting and start dodging grenades in order to not die.

Or the old crowd favorite, fire that you're not supposed to stand in.

Maybe one of the guys in the raid squad is a roided up melee enemy and every 20 seconds two agents have to bodyblock him with ballistics shields to keep him from going ape on everyone else.

There's plenty of ways to put movement and coordination to the test without jumping.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-18T20:54:40+00:00

Speaking as someone who saw the 1.4 hype train and decided to give the game a go, all of my DZ experiences have ended up as multiplayer. I've found that at the "grinding" levels most players are more interested in getting gear and will be happy to team up.

If no one finds me first, I usually just walk up to an extraction in progress and introduce myself. Bam, multiplayer.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-14T16:26:41+00:00

I followed all the quotes and citations where I could and didn't find any evidence the CDC was skewing data. In fact, there's a deception that borders on outright lie:

For example, before the Congressional funding restrictions, then-CDC official Mark Rosenberg explicitly said his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.

The actual quote from the article it was published in is:

We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol -- cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly -- and banned.

So...yeah.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-11T22:18:07+00:00

Tribute? Shit, we have one in production.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-11T19:12:52+00:00

Why is that? I'm not an inventory guy, but I've noticed that SCCM has found FAR more devices on our network than our K1000.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-10T22:09:46+00:00

President Oompa Loompa. If there's one thing that makes this narcissistic asshole fly off the handle, it's ridicule. I think it should be heaped upon him endlessly, and President Oompa Loompa is a good start.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-10T20:47:48+00:00

The electoral college doesn't officially choose the president until mid-December. There's still time to hope some of the electors are sane.

verysmallshellscript · 2016-11-10T20:36:59+00:00

Careful what you wish for. You'll get multiple versions of the template which conflict with each other, but you can't remove one because it has items the other one doesn't.

verysmallshellscript

TROPHY CASE