Consolidated Business & Enterprise Computing Rant Thread

Officially my $BigWorkplace does not acknowledge that Linux exists. However, my team run god knows how many VMs and servers, and about 500 desktops. Other than sysadmins, we even manage to have Linux desktop support officers. These jobs were created through my original team by two of my previous bosses / predecessors (I was the sidekick / stooge). We sold the benefits of Linux to certain divisions under $BigWorkplace and they bought into it. Suckers!

Not many people looking for Linux jobs though even in Melbourne. I've advertised a few and for every job, I'd get ~50 applicants with maybe 2 that have any relevant Linux skills at all. Not asking for 1337ness, just the basic stuff you can learn for free at home on an old PC or VM, yet very few people bother. Mostly I get a bazillion of bullshit MS, Cisco, ITIL blahblah certs dumped in the resumes. Shit, I even interviewed (and hired) one guy because he mentioned he used Puppet in one line, despite his resume being dumped by HR and everyone else in the panel because he can't write one to save his life.

They also know how to party too, and from those world famous glutes, you know they squat.

I'm learning Spanish and Portuguese atm

 

^ This. Just gotta slow down and work out a plan for how you want things. Sounds like you've got a pretty good idea of what you want in your head, now just put it on paper

 

i always tell them straight up that i'm not interested.
that gives them a chance to not be a dick and say ok, thanks for your time and end the call, but they almost always never do that.

and when they don't that's when i just string them along.

i had one guy who was getting quite argumentative considering he "wasn't selling anything".
at one point he mentioned that he'd kept me on the call for 20 minutes so he couldn't be doing too bad.
i asked him if he got paid by the hour or the phone call.
he said he got paid by the phone call.
i pointed out to him that rather than wasting my time he had actually been wasting his own because if he had just said "ok thanks for your time" right at the start of the conversation he probably could have spoken to 3 or 4 other people and maybe even converted some of those calls into sales.
instead he'd been stuck talking to one person who was never going to buy whatever the hell it was he wasn't trying to sell.

you could almost hear the gears turning in his brain before he quietly said "ok. thank you for your time" before hanging up.

 

Well like "Gupta" will send you an email about the case, you reply and then "Sharinda" will reply back asking you the same story again. So you reply back and explain it and "Mussaman" will reply back asking what the problem is. So you explain again and "Kanushka" gets back saying "Ahhh yeah delete all the backup jobs and try again", or "uninstall and reinstall the software and see if that fixes it". Eventually toss your hands in the air and give up.

I'm not sure how many support staff they have there, but a few times I've been on the phone and got my call "escalated", the support escalation engineer has had an IDENTICAL voice to the tech I just spoke with.

I reckon a few of them are handling different personas to make their support seem larger than it is. Would explain the emails too.

E.G .. Do we have 20 support staff, or 5 support staff with 5 different "names".

Thanks I think that's it. I get a little flustered and overwhelmed.

Rather than focussing on fixing the problem, I get caught up in trying to fix the problem then and there (if that makes sense).

I'm reserved to the fact I'll be losing my old backups, BUT if they aren't working anyway, nothing lost nothing gained if I stay with the same software, as they aren't recoverable anyway.

In a somewhat laughable coincidence, today I cracked it and thought "one more go". Did it a completely different way and the first time it worked and extracted files, second time (exactly the same files and procedure) it failed.

Inconsistency say what!!

 

When my staff get the run around, I quote a popular NBA coach and say "show Me some nasty"..

There's nothing wrong with channelling your inner nasty when timed call for it.

 

So, can anyone guess how much longer a log in is when you attempt to add over 3000 URL's to an IE zone via GPO? We do (over 7 minutes if anyone wants to know). Add hot swapping of desks into the mix for even more fun

So, the business saw this as unacceptable and we did a rollback (YAY!). Cue the meeting with the project managers, coordinators, my manager and the executives from the business. The PM started talking, but as he wasn't explaining it properly, I butted in and started from the beginning (poor form I know, but he was taking the meeting the wrong way talking about the solution and not the original issue). The exec's agreed that the recently rolled back solution was unfeasible (excessive log in times and management overheads aside) and asked for another solution. So I told them what I originally suggested which was to test our web apps without Compatibility View. They agreed and we moved on Currently awaiting the results of testing before actioning a full deployment

 

So in short.

You told them it would be fucked. they persisted. it was fucked. they rolled it back. now they are doing it your way?

 

I'm going put this here.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...es?taxonomyName=Linux+and+Unix&taxonomyId=122

 

Pretty much. Just putting in as it was a resolution to my previous rant.

I question whether these decisions were being funnelled to the appropriate person in the first place though. When I said what we had implemented, the execs straight out said it was a bad solution. The PM gave budget and timeline constraints as the reason for persisting, but he's spent ~2 weeks of my billable effort and 3 months of time attempting to shoehorn this in.

 

and so begins the search for backup software.

At the moment BackupExec or DPM are looking this goods.
Everyone seems to rave re DPM, and pricing is pretty damn impressive, but apparently logs can be a bit of a pain, ditto agents.
BE gets some pretty horrible reviews, but a partner we've been workingg with reckons it's not *that* bad once you realise how it wants to backup.

How do you guys handle changing backup software when you have older backups though? Do you keep both software installed, migrate your backups over, or just hope never to need them?

I ask as I found a (albeit lengthy) workaround this afternoon that appears to work to recover our files from old backups. Certainly not keeping Acronis now though after this screwup.



Time to VM up Server 2012 and have a play, and at same time test the speed of file serving. After that my next plan is converting our backup server to 2012, with whatever decided backup software. and from there more testing for file serving. It means come time to implement another 2 Server 2012s I should be quite comfortable with it, and confident in it's performance (else using linux for files again). Came in a bit of an epiphany today after reading the posts of calming down, distancing oneself from the computer, and going from there.

 

If they are VSS based backups (like Backup Exec) I would not suggest running 2 side-by-side. It can be a nightmare if the wrong VSS provider is called by default or 2 VSS operations are called at the same time.

Best option is to get your old software's recovery media or what have you and archive the images with the media should you need it and use the new software from this point on.

 

Just do not use BackupExec. I understand sys admins that inherited that god awful program but I didn't know people actually went out and bought it still.

DPM's logs can get clogged up it but it doesn't stop the backup from working.

 

Puts hand up

i bought it, only backing up a single file server and a single DC though, so not asking it to reinvent the wheel so it works well. Will move to Veeam when we move to a virtual environment.

As for what to do while transitioning - leave both installed but stop all backup jobs the old software, can still recover if need me. Wait for a month and then remove the old software.

 

Backup Exec is fine if you are backing up non current versions of windows, e.g. 2012 R2. Took them a year to support 2012 with the caveat your backup server must be 2008R2 or older.

If all you are backing up is exchange and a file server you are doing your backups wrong if you think you need backup exec.

 

The reason quoted to me in the past for using BE over simpler software was individual exchange mailbox restorations. Is this not a problem these days?

 

Iv'e got a iSCSI blade chassis, and old xSeries pizza box and a LTO2 tape drive sitting downstairs in the basement for this very reason

Our backups have really jumped around over the years, as we went through our "not sure how we want to do things" phase. When I started 10 years ago we used to backup everything from pizza boxes using LTO / Backup Exec, then moved to iSCSI Blade chassis with the disk images on the iSeries, which was backed up by BRMS. Off that and onto VMWare, now running a combination of TSM and Veeam.

I'm not looking forward to the day when someone says "I need a file back from 6 years ago.." but to be honest, it hasn't happened so far. We were going to go through an exercise to restore and rebackup everything into a single platform, but right now, thats a cost and a time drain that this business can't really afford, given I get get the kit up and running within an hour to kick off a restore.

Its not the most elegant solution, but I've got far more important things to be spending the companies limited money on right now

 

BE can die in a fire. I've replaced it at all our client sites with Shadowprotect once the license on BE expired.

 

I migrated my current workplace from an ancient version of Bacula with an single-drive, 25 slot Sun LTO4 tape loader to the most recent version of Bacula with a three-drive, 90 slot Dell LTO6 tape loader.

Dumped the database off the old tape controller box, put it in on a new box, configured the services, ran the database upgrade script, turned it all on. Worked first go. Hooray!

Told the thing to restore 3 old backups simultaneously, it asked for the LTO4 tapes, and restored them all at the same time. Hooray! Now we have a mix of LTO4, 5 and 6 in operation with no fuss. Old backups and archives are all usable, new ones get put on bigger/faster tapes, everything gets read from one piece of hardware without any problems.

I loves me my open source.

 

Hey Elvis, I recall you mentioning you were using enterprise google services at your organisation, how do the T&C's vary around retaining copyright and whatnot?

On gmail services and whatnot it seems similar to fb for free accounts, I'm figuring that it's different for enterprise but I don't have a copy of hte T&C on me

 

*laughs*

Anyone seen the current crop of spam coming through?

We are getting the "65% off ones" (which our spam filter nukes), and the latest ones are entitled "Very Important Information - Please Read", and honestly it's like a stoner has emailled us.

It's caught by the spam filter as well, but every single email is different and full of delightful incoherrent ramblings.

E.G

and

What the ?????