Prepping for an interview on Friday hopefully allowing me to get away from where I work now!

Just finishing off agreeing and signing a new job! Exciting news :)

Watching the British Inbetweeners, drinking Cobra, looking forward to asking GFs dad tomorrow over dinner and beers for permission to propose to his daughter. Fun fun.

Hi folks,

This position is based in London, Camden, UK. If anybody in UK/London knows anybody that could be interested feel free to have them message me. Probably good for somebody interested in training/law, or a recent graduate within law.

Location – Camden Town, London. Salary, £24k pre probation, £26k post probation. 20 days holiday plus bank holidays. Hours: 9am - 5:30pm with 1 hour lunch.

Company

We are a London based legal technology company specialising in the development and distribution of digital research platforms involving case law and legislation. Our partners and clients include law professionals in over 50 countries, including law firms, governments and academic institutions. With the recent release of a brand-new product we are looking for talented individuals to join our company at a very exciting time.

The Role

As a Training Executive you are a high achiever, with a passion for training, technology and the law and have joined our team based in Camden Town, London.

Your role will primarily focus on, but not be limited to:

• Organising, improving and performing customer training
• Planning and running online sessions for existing and potential customers
• Working and improving the customer helpdesk and becoming an expert on our platforms

Training is performed online and in person therefore national and international travel is required.

We track performance through a range of KPIs including, but not limited to:

• Customer feedback
• Helpdesk response time
• The volume of training booked and performed

This role is office based in Camden Town, Monday to Friday, 9am – 5:30pm with flexibility and travel required.

Key Attributes

Candidates should be:
• Confident in dealing and liaising with a variety of customers
• A strong and confident presenter
• Able to meet and exceed targets
• Able to work well within a tight knit team
• Efficient with their time management skills
• Able to communicate professionally, both written and verbally
• Able and eager to learn
• Familiar with MS Office

Any questions, feel free...

Best,
Jim

For real, if 55k is similar to what you make now, and the benefits are the same, but the drive is 4x longer, and you don't need to move jobs... Pass. Nope. Not for you. Working g for an MSP sucks imo.

"Dear xyz,
Thank you for the offer of 55k. I appreciate your offer but must decline. I am comfortable in my current role; to entice me to leave a comfortable job with a far longer commute I would need a fair increase in wages and benefits. I'd reconsider for 65k and 10% bonus, private healthcare and life insurance, and x days leave per year.

I'd be very excited to work with you but the finances must be financially viable. Sadly, 55k does not meet that requirement for me.

If you can reconsider I'd look forward to agreeing a contract. Otherwise I wish you luck in your search."

Boom.

Applied to a job earlier today and just had an email confirming an interview. The interview details say the format is an online meeting where I sit in front of a webcam and answer automated questions which may be reviewed later... and is scheduled for 2h 40m minimum... PASS... too impersonal to me.

From those, option 2.

I've only worked SMB. I'd like to try Enterprise some day but worry everything would be too impersonal. With SMB, some of them have been like a family. Real nice. I've worked some that were truly nasty though - I'd go SMB, but move until the right SMB is found.

@quixoticjeremy said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@quixoticjeremy If you could be a shitty scientist or a fantastic window washer, what would you choose to be?

Likely window washer.

All I do is clean Windows all day anyway!

Wow. Poor. Feel sorry for anybody applying.
"I want a performer! Not someone watching the clock!" - that says it all. Bad first impression!

^ it goes with saying they no doubt want somebody to work above their normal hours too all the time, be always contactable, never take holiday and be willing to only be paid peanuts.

Hi folks,

We have quite a few servers running outdated firmware. Due to an issue with the current firmware version, we have been going server by server updating to a newer bios firmware. These are Dell servers, all the same model and under warranty.

We have so far done about 20 servers and they went fine. However, the 21st server developed a flapping issue on one of the NIC interfaces causing unplanned downtime to the VMs.

Management are asking us to identify which of these servers, as we have many remaining to patch, will develop an issue following patching such as a flapping problem, so they can be done at a different time to lower the impact of an outage.

My thoughts are that we cannot know if a server will develop an issue from a patch before doing the patch. But, they want a plan to know which to avoid.

Any advice here on how we could accomplish this? My plan would be to plan the patch, as the patch is valid for the server, and then leave the server out of the cluster for 24h and monitor for flapping/blue screen/whatever, then put back in the cluster. I do not think we could ever know beforehand if any one server will happen to develop an issue from a patch which is for that server.

Looks like upper limit is 100k in those areas then. Cheers folks

@nadnerb said in Senior sysadmin salary in Perth and Brisbane:

@Jimmy9008 You thinking of heading down this way?

No. We are expanding the team with two more people. Probably a senior system admin in Perth and a senior network admin in Brisbane. Just looking for suitable salaries to add on my budget request.

Hi folks,

Would you happen to know a rough salary range for senior sysadmin in Perth or Brisbane, with the following abilities? I am London based and understand tech salaries out there are higher(correctly?), but have no idea what is suitable for budgeting for the position.

Competencies:

• Windows Server/AD - core requirement

• Experience supporting VMWare and Hyper-V - core requirement

• Cisco UCS & Dell Servers – an asset

• Generalist experience of networking – an asset

• Storage (Nimble) – an asset

• RHEL – an asset

Cheers

@nadnerB
Cheers, if no improvement I'll take a look at some of those.

Keep in mind today was the go live for the switch over and only now have they spoken up about these problems. Way too late. Until now all we have had is the project is going to plan and they have configured correctly and are ready for the switch.

I got access to the new server via the old network earlier today and then found all these issues.

Hi folks,

Would anybody be able to recommend IT Contractors/ITSP in Perth, Australia? Ideally ones you have worked with, which you know are good at their job.

We have a new office out there (acquisition) and the current providers we are using are making a mess of things, so may be looking to move to some other solution if they don't sort this out soon. They supported the company we purchased already so we initially decided to use them due to the existing good relationship and are starting to regret that.

What we need (overview only, and new hardware already on site):

• stack + configure two Dell N3000 switches

• configure Cisco ASA for existing internet line outbound, and internal interface, plus SSH for management, and ASDM

• physically migrate from old firewall to new, and old switches to new over a weekend (new properly managed cabling)

• configure new Dell server with datacenter 2019 core and Hyper-V enabled, setup redundant 10GB uplinks to new switch stack. Provide access over that weekend once completed for UK team to roll out DC, DNS, DHCP

• configure APC UPS for PowerChute network shutdown to turn off the host upon power outage

• connect two meraki MR33 to n3000

• label everything, document, and supply photos for our remote support teams

Do you know any resources out there which could accomplish this? We would of course discuss specifics that's just an overview.

Some of the issues we have with the current supplier:

• can't get the new ASA to work with the internet line. Can't figure out how to enable SSH on the ASA

• have installed 2019 datacenter GUI, not core. Did not enable hyper-v

• have not been able to stack the switches, have not been able to enable remote access to switches (webui/SSH/telnet)

Basically, little confidence left.

Cheers

@Dashrender said in Virtual WAF:

@DustinB3403 said in Virtual WAF:

@Jimmy9008 said in Virtual WAF:

If this forum is not one that is able to help and would rather comment on structures that are entirely outside of my control, ill go elsewhere.

This is the place to discuss this sort of thing. @Dashrender is just trying to ruffle feathers. Ignore him.

You may see it that way - I see this is a shift of - they no longer have money, so they are going to pawn off the responsibility to someone else - that's at minimum seemingly disrespectful.

It is. For sure. I get what you are saying. 100%. But that is the situation we are in, disrespectful or not. Until 2022 I will not have budget to put something perhaps more solid in place, so I need to put something in place for now until then. Discussing the situation wont help, I am at the stage of seeing what is possible to get us somewhere better than nothing.
If that makes sense?

@Dashrender said in Virtual WAF:

@Jimmy9008 said in Virtual WAF:

@Dashrender said in Virtual WAF:

@Jimmy9008 said in Virtual WAF:

@VoIP_n00b said in Virtual WAF:

Cloudflare Pro has a WAF but it's $20/month.

I don't think that would be a direction we would use. I like CF but it just wont happen here.

They can't afford $20/m to protect this? does whatever they are doing even make sense to do?

Currently correct, no budget for this. What they want to do makes sense for them, but not for an IT perspective. The applications are demo environments which are shown to potential customers. We have many of these environments to demo the solutions globally.

The product team have decided they want to cut their budget this year and have cut out the WAF which sits in front of their demo applications. I believe they had some form of Citrix solution which sat in front of the webservers to do the higher layer checking like XSS/SQL Injection and stuff like that. Due to their decision, this now sits with IT.

Essentially, this is not in the IT budget and it is rigid. So most likely will be until 2022 until any budget is allowed at all for this. Crazy I know.

Hence, wanting something between the internet and their now less protected application at no real cost. ModSecurity or something like that looks like a good start.

So they believed they needed good security - hence why they looked/had Citrix stuff before (didn't know they did that), but now, because of budget, they no longer care about it... this is completely the wrong way to do things.. wow.

Now that's not to say they shouldn't reevaluate what they are doing - and find a solution that is more cost effective, but to go from a hugely expensive system (Citrix) to a free one is just asking to be hacked.

Also, you said this is now for IT to manage - uh.. what? It's always been for IT to manage.

Perhaps in other companies, yes. But not here, until now. The teams are very well defined and IT here is kept to core infrastructure only. As this infrastructure interacts with customers it is with a different team. That team has decided to cut their budget out and remove the component, and has said "IT, its now your problem" which until now had not been the case.

I am not here to discuss the particulars of where this should sit or not. I am asking for any thoughts on what WAF options are available, ideally at no direct cost.

If this forum is not one that is able to help and would rather comment on structures that are entirely outside of my control, ill go elsewhere.

@Obsolesce said in Virtual WAF:

@Jimmy9008 test or demo environments should never be any less secure than production.

Yes, I agree. Hence wanting to put something in place.