@Dashrender Agreed.

@Dashrender said in Defining the Hobby Business vs a True Business:

@Carnival-Boy said in Defining the Hobby Business vs a True Business:

My uncle ran a successful hardware distribution business employing dozens of people for over 30 years. His motivation was to generate work, security, and happiness, for owner and employees. He could have been more profitable, but chose not to.

I'll have to tell him he spent his life devoted to a hobby 🙂

But then he was a socialist. Maybe we just think about business differently in Europe? Scott likes to label things, but I'm not sure it makes any difference.

It does, to the point Scott as trying to make, though the posts were long so perhaps you missed it. IT is a Business Tool, as such when in a "business" as Scott would call it - it's pretty easy to know what to do - IT does what it takes to make the business the money money. When you're running a "something else business" (really hate the hobby term, it's pretty demeaning), IT doesn't actually have a cut a dry clear goal... now it has to fall to the whim of those in charge.

So the real question becomes.... why would anyone find the term "hobby" demeaning? Hobbies are what we love to do. Hobbies are the important things in our lives. Hobby is not demeaning or negative. It's just honest. It's only demeaning if the hobby itself is embarrassing.

@Obsolesce said in Writing a Job Posting:

@scottalanmiller said in Writing a Job Posting:

It's hard, risky and it sucks.

You must be going to some crazy parties...

I absolutely do.

@EddieJennings said in Suggestion for books on MSP and others?:

@Pete-S said in Suggestion for books on MSP and others?:

@EddieJennings said in Suggestion for books on MSP and others?:

@Pete-S I bought the digital version a while ago, but never got around to reading it.

Well, I just plowed through it. I like to do that to quickly get up to speed and then I'll go back later.

I'm not sure how useful the book is going to be for someone already doing MSP work. But on the other hand, seeing it from another persons perspective is always useful.

I'd be curious to see if there's information that could apply to a one-man operation / side job kind of thing.

Someone needs to write a Dummies Guide to... kind of book.

@JaredBusch said in Verizon cuts 10,000 jobs and admits its Yahoo/AOL division is a failure:

@Dashrender said in Verizon cuts 10,000 jobs and admits its Yahoo/AOL division is a failure:

@bnrstnr said in Verizon cuts 10,000 jobs and admits its Yahoo/AOL division is a failure:

Hasn't AOL been a failure since dial-up internet was dead? like mid-1990s?

nah - really more like early 2000's, but man I sure thought so - I guess they held on because they were some sort of advertising company.

AOL was solid well into the mid 00's

It was around 2004 when I worked for the fed and they were using it for communicating in the senate.

@eddiejennings said in Domain name opinion:

@brandon220 said in Domain name opinion:

Nobody went and bought all of the domains he listed and then sold them back to him a a higher price? Slackers 🙂

I owned them before making the post. 😛

Curses! Foiled again!

@dafyre said in Wireless presentation solutions for business:

I could see something like a wireless VGA / HDMI transmitter and receiver set up. That way, at least any device with a VGA or HDMI connection could wire in and present with few issues.

Tried a few of those (good ones) in some conference rooms. They are great on paper, but works poorly in practice. We boxed ours up and moved on.

@uroni said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:

@scottalanmiller said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:

Does UrBackup have a process for writing to tape as well?

No, it is wholly disk based and additionally leverages advanced file system features (such as snapshots, reflinks, compression) when available.

So if we wanted to have cloud storage, we'd run a UrBackup server hosted then, rather than a local one and pointing to something like S3?

@eddiejennings Another possible option is to use Jared as a paid resource if he is willing to do that. If we got along better I would hire him for x amount of hours for projects in my lab. That way when I ran into issues I could schedule time with him to go over why something is happening and the correct way to diagnose and solve the problem. This could be a valuable learning experience for you.

Unsure if he would be willing to do that, but I'm sure someone here would. I'd offer it myself but I would not be of much help. If you're going to hire someone, make sure it's someone who knows their stuff.

Thanks for your comments all.

@guyinpv said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:

@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:

Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.

This is actually my favorite part.

If the new boss is open to upgrades and fixing everything up and implementing better documentation and records and stuff, it can be a lot of fun "restoring" the old thing, or "modernizing".

To me it has the same appeal as restoring a car or a run down house project or something. There is some enjoyment in tinkering everything back to life and putting on a fresh coat of paint and blowing out the dust. Plus there is just a lot of work to do, versus when everything is smooth and automated and you find yourself getting bored.

I agree, the "fixing it" is one of the best parts.

@JaredBusch said in Ripping the bandaid off of the Sunk Cost Fallacy Issue:

@Dashrender I have been using this lately for small office main copier and / or workgroup copier in larger offices.

HP Laserjet Pro M477fdn All-in-One Color Printer, (CF378A)

$380 on Amazon.

Those look nice. I've had decent luck with HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 series, and now the Epson EcoTanks. The EcoTank refills are just amazingly inexpensive compared to anything else around except the other printer models you have to mod to add the tanks to.

@DustinB3403 said in Why IT Builds a House of Cards:

Just to necro this thread, how would someone in IT actually get the business to see and understand these risks? I've tried this, explained in full detail the chances taken and I get a "thank you for telling us, but let's stay the course" sorts of responses.

Thanks for the necro. Get greeted with a comment I didn't recall making, just to look at the date 2 1/2 years ago. lol.

Then, on a second note, this article legitimately applies to me today.

@aaron said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

@scottalanmiller said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

@aaron said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

We are long past the point where running systems non-virtualized is considered acceptable

/me looks around at servers

I think it's ok to not virtualize 🙂

Doesn't BB cluster their entire farm? I thought virtualization was an effective necessity at that scale. You manage the servers without them being clustered in any way? I thought that the pods were nodes in a single farm

Oh they're clustered. I was thinking of a specific pod not being virtualized by itself. As in they aren't running a hypervisor. And we do have virtualized stuff around too. 😛

That cluster is really the virtualization, the nodes are below that level. We had another thread discussing this previously. Clusters are not always virtualized at the node level because the node is like the CPU, not a server and the entire cluster is really the computer and the cluster manager is the real hypervisor. Workloads run on the cluster, not on the nodes. Each node remains replacable as just part of the overall "Computer" which is, virtualized.

@Breffni-Potter said:

@Kelly said:

As for the article @Breffni-Potter. I like it. You have laid everything out very clearly for the non IT decision maker. I'm not sure if I would go with the FEAR acronym personally, but it is memorable.

All the best ones were taken.

I request you bacronym Uncertainty and Doubt next please

@johnhooks said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@DustinB3403 said:

A bit of an old post (2013) but apparently "Facebook doesn't virtualize its servers, because its software already consumes all the hardware resources, meaning virtualization would result in a performance penalty without a gain in efficiency."

Seems odd, but ok, and I assume their still using Spinning Rust too... (again I know the topic is almost 2 years old)

This is one of those odd situations. I had a 10K compute node (yes, 10K individual servers) cluster on Wall St. We didn't virtualize at the individual server level because the entire thing was treated as a single computer and virtualized at the cluster level.

This is what Facebook is doing. Those are not really individual computers, the virtualization is up the stack higher.

You can even do this at home with Maas and Juju 🙂

Not quite the same. That's just super efficient management of hardware. It doesn't turn the hardware itself into a cluster that acts like a single computer. It acts, more or less, like an autoprovisioning cloud, but not like virtualization.

Rolling out several more Linux machines here today and hopefully will be building out some demo environments of what a 100% Linux environment would look like.

@MattSpeller First off - epic avatar 👏 And Nic is absolutely right! Customizable marketing pieces with areas for your logo and branding that make it easy to send to your clients.