Happy to report my last day is next week!
I did set them up on a small retainer to help answer any email questions the new guy has. But I put lots of stipulations in the agreement. Cancel any time at will, only X type of stuff will be done, no expectations or promises about turnaround time or response time, etc etc. Just a small token for maintaining email contact essentially.
f they need me after that, they will pay contract rates.
So wait, if I stop eating junk food I'll become Japanese!?!?
How do these product meetings go? And how does someone learn programming without understanding the vulnerabilities in this?
Lead: "So we need to basically monitor all keystrokes. Would be a good idea to store them all in a plain text file too, just in case. All management and CEO think this is a great idea."
Programmer: "Seems legit. There's probably a Windows API hook for this.....[runs back to desk]"
@DustinB3403 said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:
@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:
And all I wanted to do was open up a conversation so they could start looking for a replacement. I wasn't expecting a circus.What were you realistically expecting?
To begin a detailed, thought-out, plan of finding a competent replacement. Start looking at quality job boards, map out job requirements, etc. Be reasonable, efficient, mindful.
Instead they panicked that I was going to walk out and leave in a couple days. They rushed to find anybody with basic knowledge of a computer from the local staffing agency and threw them onto my lap with little consideration. Now I'm trying to train a person with no experience and fairly rudimentary knowledge. Plus they dumped all these demands for an encyclopedia worth of how-tos, procedures, vendor notes, troubleshooting guides, etc.
It's funny but also sad. One day the new person was there and I was at home, sick or something. A shared network connection in Windows got disconnected which made an app pop up an error. New person tried to troubleshoot the app, perhaps not knowing the shared network drive existed. So boss asks if I've already written a specific procedure for this specific app when having this specific error caused by this specific problem.
I'm just like, no, I can't write a procedure detailing every conceivable error that can happen on every one of 50+ vendors we deal with, lol.
The IT person is supposed to know how to troubleshoot issues, not just read from a procedure book encyclopedia written by the previous IT person!
Question: Why should I participate at Mangolassi?
Answer: Um, well, ok, think of it as kinda like a hamburger, but it has no onions. The hamburger is tasty and useful, but maybe missing some flavor. You click reply and type something. That something is like onions you're adding to the burger. The burger becomes tasty and has more flavors, people like it. The entire burger becomes more complete. And the more people reply and add ingredients, the better the burger tastes. When you create new threads, it's like having fries or shake, and then other people add some salt or chocolate. Mangolassi is like a multi-course meal, the Internet is like a restaurant.....
That answer your question?
Ok I'm out.....
@stus This continued to affect systems across the world all weekend long.
Another article with ongoing details:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/15/nhs-cyber-attack-latest-authorities-warn-day-chaos-ransomware/
Do your updates gentlepeoples.
Has anyone been affected you know of? Make sure them backups are in order!
I'm new to the forums, came over from Spiceworks by recommendation.
Small time IT here, dabbling in hardware, software, programming, web design, Adobe, video, photography, and generally complain about dysfunctional stuff a lot.
Always fun to walk in the office and basically hear scary beeps coming from somewhere. Is it a server? Workstation? Battery backup?
Turns out it was the Synology DS216+. This has two 3TB drives in RAID0.
All the lights were off but it was beeping regularly. Pressing the power button didn't do anything. I tried to access and it worked fine, must have just been asleep? All the lights came back on but disk 2 was orange.
I was able to log in to DSM where it said disk 2 had "crashed" and I should try to backup my files.
This was already confusing. It's a RAID0, if one drive was crashed I'd think it would be total data loss, but I could still access the folder shares just fine, hmm. SMART listed it as "normal" as well.
Then I saw in the HDD/SSD section that disk2 had a "bad sector count" of 1. Apparently it found one lonely little bad sector and I assume marked it to avoid in the future as drives are supposed to do. But why did everything have to crash and burn over one stinking bad sector? I was hoping not to have to replace a drive for this.
I did some reading and found out that when DSM marks something as "crashed" it may disconnect it. Since I wasn't using a redundant RAID type but could still access data, I doubt that happened, but why not try?
I simply turned the unit off, took out both drives, sprayed some canned air while at it, and reinserted the drives.
After turning back on, it was no longer crashed, both drives showed "normal" and the RIAD0 self-tested as healthy. It did suggest that I do an additional data validation scan which it said would be about 25 minutes per 1TB of space. I said ok, but I guess it finished in about 2 minutes while rebooting cause I didn't see this happen.
The final message I got was that there was something wrong with a SCSI LUN something or other, I wish I took a screen shot. I'm not using the iSCSI LUN features and DSM says there is no iSCSI LUN in the system, so not sure how that message was relevant.
In any case, I'm writting this for the future. If your Synology is beeping and talks of crashing drives and end of the world events, just stay calm, it may just be a bad sector and it's throwing a hissy fit.
If SMART says your drive is fine, try turning it off and reseat the drives and turn back on.
You might even remove the drive and run a test from another computer to look for further sector issues, then put it back in.
Also I'm writing this to see if this has happened to anybody else and if I should be worried about this one bad sector issue. Drives develop bad sectors all the time, I don't know why the entire thing flips out and dies over it. I'm disappointed how the Synology handled something so simple as marking a bad sector and moving on.
I'll tell you, it's automated attendant phone menu systems.
Please, let this tech die a slow painful death. And please, companies just hire a little thing we used to call a receptionist. Have a human answer the darn phone and then direct the call. Automated systems with their slow talking computer people who never have any answers or menus to what we actually need, are useless.
And then in the 1 in 10 chance a menu kind of sounds like what I need, the person who eventually answers just tells me I need a different department anyway and then puts me back on hold again.
Ya I get it, a "personal attendant" sounded all science fiction 20 years ago or whatever, but for the love of all that is good, and to prevent turning all your customers into raging haters of your company, just get a freaking receptionist to answer phone calls and direct them!
The age of fighting a phone attendant for 28 minutes just to figure out how to reach a receptionist who can direct my call properly in all of 8 seconds must come to an end.
My life as a customer of any company on earth has never been made better or easier with these systems. They are only an exercise in frustration and make me angry and stressed by the time I actually do get to a person.
If you want the secret why phone operators hate their jobs, it's because the auto attendant already pissed off the customer and put them on edge before they answered!
Rant over
User of CentOS and Ubuntu servers myself. Mint is still top go-to for desktop, though there are interesting alternatives like ElementaryOS.
Linux is not always easy to learn, I just forget everything if it's not regularly used, especially CLI with their bazillion switches that no mere mortal can ever memorize. And moving between different distros where commands don't work exactly the same, Aptitude and Yum, etc.
Cool, but always challenging.
Here are some notes from setting up Seafile as a company file store and any gotchas I ran in to. This is in chronological order, as I'm taking notes while playing with it.
Seafile version 5.1.3.
Ubuntu 14.04 VM on XenServer. I set up with 1 socket, 2 cores, 1GB RAM, and 16GB drive. All updates done before installing Seafile. I set up a static IP for networking.
The total amount of storage for our files is currently about 9GB which we keep on Box. I'm testing Seafile as a replacement for Box ultimately.
I used the installer script for Ubuntu as explained here: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile-server-installer
The install seemed to go well, no critical errors or anything. It left me with some post-install instructions such as "Run seafile-server-change-address to add your Seafile servers DNS name". I went ahead and ran this but the following screens were all German or some other alien language.
There are other instructions for working with NAT firewall and ports and email server and so forth.
There were instructions at the following link for getting an SSL certificate for Nginx. I believe the script already created a self-signed cert but I went ahead and generated one as explained anyway.
http://manual.seafile.com/deploy/https_with_nginx.html
I thought at this point everything was supposed to work, but it didn't. Opening the IP actually gave an Nginx error for "Bad Gateway". This means whatever Nginx is supposed to be proxying FOR ain't working.
Some quick searching turned up that there is an issue of the auto-installer not putting the config files in the correct folder. Gee great!
Read it here: https://github.com/seafile/seafile-server-installer/issues/81
These three config files:
/opt/seafile/ccnet/ccnet.conf
/opt/seafile/seafile-data/seafile.conf
/opt/seafile/seahub_settings.py
Needed to be moved into the folder /opt/seafile/conf/.
After moving the files, the server and web portal can be started with the following two commands (which previously failed before the configs were moved).
Start Seafile server:
./seafile.sh start
Start Seahub portal:
./seahub.sh start
When Seahub started (successfully) it prompted to create my admin user account which I did.
Now going back to the IP address in the browser, using port 8000 by default. For me internally this is 192.168.1.14:8000. I now got the login screen after accepting the self-signed cert. Yeah!
After logging in I created one library that I just called "Everyone". This is meant to be shared by every user in the company. We don't have many folders that wouldn't be, only the boss has a folder of two they won't share with everybody.
Next I downloaded their Windows Desktop sync tool. This thing looks like an old school chat app.
And finally, I dropped a folder from Box into my new Everyone folder to watch it sync up. This folder is a little over 6GB.
After the files were copied, it began indexing and syncing.
It also shows a status message in System Tray as files are uploaded.
The desktop tool has its own bandwidth monitor. This went anywhere from 3MB/s to 30MB at the top end. Some peaks as high as 50MB/s.
I was also watching Windows reporting on it (this is a Win7 Pro workstation).
Network utilization ranged from 3 or 4% to as high as 50% of the gigabit available.
When looking deeper into the Seafile process itself, it was pretty regularly set around 26MB/s, or just over 200Mb/s. This is an internal network after all.
As a test for bandwidth over the Internet I compared with Box sync. Box uploaded at about 1.9Mbs when I stuck a video in there. I then did a video upload test from another computer into this office and it was chugging along at 4.8Mbs. Very informal "test" but Seafile did perform better. This was the same ISP but two locations. Both ISP packages were 50Mbps or higher plans. Box was just slower to upload in this instance.
I also needed to open port 8000 and 8082 in the router of course. If you intend to use SSL then 443 should be opened too, I'll deal with that later.
One nifty feature of the desktop client is that you can selectively sync any given library, but other libraries are still visible as "cloud" libraries and it uses an internal file browser and a cache folder to let you browse cloud libraries without having to open a browser tab.
You can also set a sync interval timer (in seconds) if you only want it to sync every so often instead of constant monitoring.
In our company we rarely share anything, but as far as my experience with every other sync tool I've used, I still want a good feature set.
One nice thing about Dropbox is that the System Tray tool actually shows the files that were most recently uploaded, and lets you grab a share link right from there. No other sync tool has been this convenient. Sadly, Seafile does not show you most recently uploaded files.
If I right-click a file in Windows Explorer, I get three options:
Before I could share files I needed to update my domain name. The server was setup with just "seafile" as the hostname but in my case I needed a FQDN in order for share links to work. I created a subdomain and pointed the IP to the office. Just seafile.ourdomain.c-m is what I used.
I had all kinds of trouble making the domains work, and sorting our all the types of share links as well as the web interface.
The domain needed to be updated in the Nginx config and also the ccnet.conf file. There is a setting called SERVICE_URL and this is essentially what is prefixed to share URLs when they are created. I also had to change FILE_SERVER_ROOT to use my domain as well.
Even after all the settings were right, it still wouldn't work and my share links would time out. They say to run with fastcgi for production so I tried that by starting the server with ./seahub.sh start-fastcgi.
Even then it just wasn't working. Hitting refresh in the desktop client would do this:
If Nginx wasn't working, nothing would load. If Nginx worked by seahub had an issue, there would be a 50x Gateway type error. If I use the seahub internal server (not fastcgi) the web interface would work but not share links or uploads/downloads from the browser. I had a feeling something else must have been skipped with the auto-installer.
I'm stopping for now as I have to keep troubleshooting the browser-based uploading and downloading and why fastcgi seems broken. It's probably just something skipped in the auto-installer, maybe somebody else had these issues. I can't seem to get around it, something is broken with the seafile server and how it uses fastcgi and SSL, etc.
More to come if I figure it out.
In summary, I like the desktop client and it looks like I can even sign in with multiple accounts which is nice if I'm part of multiple servers. I do wish it would show a short list of most recently uploaded files so I can quickly get a share link.
I also like that the right-click share menu gives you a quick checkbox to get a direct download link versus a web page view.
The "internal" links can use a protocol so it actually opens the file directly in your local file system. This type of link is nice for texting/emailing links because it just opens from their local machines without creating an actual share link.
The local sync versus cloud folders are nice, and I can browse cloud folders without needing to use the browser.
@Breffni-Potter
To be fair, Win8/8.1/10 treats it as a backup. After all you go in settings and open "Backup" and that's what you see.
Crazy after 72 years Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to give Windows users a simple backup utility. Half my career is because Windows people never had good backup abilities. They never even figured they needed such things.
The answer seems obvious at first. Which is, yes it is, but then, no it's not.
The simple paradox is that your average Walmart or Costco basic computer for $400-$500 bucks tends to last about 4 years or so before it's bogged down or could use a reload.
But to do this business full time, or to even run a shop with a physical location, means you have to charge at a minimum $60/hr. People in my area charge more for doing in-home work, and more still for businesses. My friend charges $120/hr for computer repair/break fix/networking for any business. If you have a location and employees, you can hardly dip below $75/hr.
The problem is obvious. Who wants to spend $60/hr on a $399 computer for in-home repair that could easily take a couple hours? These cheap computers are NOT fast! They come with hunky spinning rust 2TB drives that take 4.5 hours just to run a single malware or virus scan or check for bad sectors. It's almost impossible to do in home repair exceptionally well due to compromises like not being able to stay around for long running scans. I've had plenty of days where chkdsk took all day to scan, the.entire.day. Just to fix 2 sectors.
Typically by the time I get a call by a frustrated person with computer troubles, they give me a sob story about they've paid $xx to this repair person and had to pay $yy for some other issues and THEN they had to get a new printer bla bla. I know people with $500 laptops who've spent over $1000 keeping the darn thing running over the years!
It's almost not worth doing computer repair because it simply feels like a ripoff. It's like "here is what I will do for you...buy a new computer, I'll do a data transfer." We bypass troubleshooting, scanning, updating, fixing, reloading, whatever. It would take a couple hours and you end up with a new system instead of dropping cash down the toilet on the old one!
My sister in law has one of these old Gateway laptops, around $600 new perhaps. They've replaced the keyboard twice, the entire LCD once, new battery, and another technician dropped the entire system and had to replace the mobo (their cost).
To top it all off, the system has always been buggy and was bought at the time of Windows 8, not even 8.1. They've spent 2x or 3x the cost of the laptop in maintenance and it's their only computer.
I'm not sure where this puts the industry, or how to solve the simple equation that as systems get cheaper and cheaper, but the cost of a repairman goes up and up, something has got to change.
Should computer "people" refuse to work on or buy or recommend cheap computers and insist on custom or high end builds? This might give them a longer lasting system, or change the ratio of how much it's worth to fix.
If I buy a $1000 car, I don't want to pay $100/hr to work on it! But if I buy a $50,000 car, it feels cheap to fix something for a few hundred bucks!
One of the reasons I'm thinking about this is I'm trying to figure out if I want to promote computer repair as something my business will do, or if it's not worth it at the end of the day.
Should I specialize and just build and support custom systems? <----- I've seen this style of business and it never seems to work out. The custom builds are still cheap cause people don't want to pay, and if they ever buy one batch of bad memory or mobos or something, they get a dozen clients with intermittent failures and it becomes a nightmare! For the life of the computer, everything is the builder's fault!
Should I do in home repair or is it just not worth it in order to do full scans and really do a good job?
Should I only promote break/fix for businesses only and make the rest pay out the ear? It's their choice after all.
On one hand, not doing this would seem to leave money on the table. They will hire somebody! But I always feel like a ripoff working on the proverbial 8 year old $300 e-machines junker.
I just wonder, is computer repair a dying business? And if so, how can aspiring entrepreneurs pivot this industry into something more useful for our business, and the end user.
P.S. Geek Squad is who rips everybody off around my town! But I do see a lot of repair businesses come and go. Every other day somebody has a sign on their car "hire a geek" and "buy a nerd" and "rent a tweeb PC repair". They don't last.
That's the impression I have. I've always liked Backblaze, if for no other reason their transparency about their infrastructure, and cool hard drive failure reports.
I don't think $10/m is all that terrible if I had to, but if BB is $50/yr and also unlimited, what's the benefit? I'd rather save the other $5 and buy another silly online subscription!
@StrongBad said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@dafyre said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I'm like that... I want to help folks ge ttheir IT problems fixed... I really, really do. But I can't stand it when I'm working with a client and they take days or weeks to get back to me on something. Argh!
Just lets you move on to another client that is ready to work with you!
Says the guy using Lappy 486 to answer emails.
@JaredBusch
I have no less than 10 user/pass on sticky notes around my desk, LOL, half of them say "root" or "admin".
Never fear though, they are mostly just things I'm testing or internal VMs.
My boss demands I keep our most important passwords in a black binder on my desk, not kidding.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.
But how viable is bench as a career?
You need to fix 2 to 5 computers a day with at least 5 billable hours at $75/hr.
That's 1300 billable hours a year for gross $97,500. Sounds good but take away tools, accountant, taxes, secretary or intern part time, whatever. You might make an OK $60k give or take.
But if 1300 billable hours is split into an average of 1.5hr jobs, I need 867 clients a year, 72 a month, 18 a week. These are hard numbers.
Not only that but just processing 18 people a week, the documentation, billing, phone calls, followup calls, inevitable customer support calls, emails, etc. 5 billable hours a day easily becomes a 10, 12, 14 hour day.
I'm not saying working 12 hours a day is bad, or even that fixing 18 computers a week is all that difficult. The hard part is trying to get 18 clients a week! And even then, getting them all to bring computers in is annoying for them.
If I do onsite work, 18 a week becomes much harder.
Anyway, I know people who do it, but it takes a long time to get established, and then a lot of work becomes repeat clients over the years.
Free, open source web office, installed on own systems. Gives web based docs, spreadsheet, presentation, files, email, collab stuff, etc etc.
I suppose it's akin to the poor man's Google docs or MS office or even Zoho.
Just wondering if anybody has used it.
@RamblingBiped said in Logical IT Certification Progression:
@Dashrender said in Logical IT Certification Progression:
@guyinpv said in Logical IT Certification Progression:
al details. I don't regret buying or reading through any of them. Books on Windows, DOS, printers, networks, repair and troubleshooting techniques, system design and building, etc etc. All of that is good.
Answer questions posed at an interview.
Besides, bench techs don't think, according to @scottalanmiller, they work by script - aka, reading a script and doing what it says. Once you have to start making decisions, you're no longer a bench tech, you're in IT.
Arguably, if you've done bench work for any extended amount of time it really doesn't require much thought. You see the same types of issues coming in and your response is almost reflex, especially if you are working on a standardized set of hardware.
Yes and no.
I had to do a lot of bizarre stuff and a lot of bizarre requests. We would solder loose power ports on laptops, or USB ports. Reseat loose mobo chips. Analyze POST codes. Do advanced data recovery on dying hard drives, repair MBRs from viruses. Replace various broken control boards on CRT monitors.
After about 8 years you've certainly seen it all. Like wanting DOS 7 installed in a WinXP world. Or recalibrating a dot matrix printer for an old custom application on DOS.
Bench tech used to be fun when people actually wanted "repair". Nowadays it's either replace hardware and reload. Or just reload. People don't care about "fixing" any more, half the time it's faster to wipe out and start over.