Best posts made by jmoore

Installing Fedora/cinnamon on an old laptop for m,y 7 year old to watch youtube on

Dell 55" and chromeboxes here

Getting Pokemon deck ready for this weekend. Dallas regionals coming Saturday. It will be 1300 or so players.

@wirestyle22 said in Looking for Career Advice:

@jmoore said in Looking for Career Advice:

@wirestyle22 said in Looking for Career Advice:

@jmoore said in Looking for Career Advice:

@Emad-R said in Looking for Career Advice:

Play with Suse man, i am loving it right now. If your in US/Canada study RHEL and Centos. I said stay cause you should be master in it, and you can learn another thing without that effecting. and be system admin

Yes I have always used rhel as a hobbyist. Suse has been much more current, like the last 3 years. I just keep vm's running and experiment on them to learn.

Learn automation. 100% doable at home and it puts you ahead of a lot of your peers. you can be leaps and bounds more efficient. Highly desirable.

Yes I forgot to mention that. I am currently learning Ansible. Bought a book and I'm going through all the exercises. thats what i did with KVM and many other topics.

In your learning, lean on @stacksofplates. He's one of the most active Ansible users here and in my experience is very willing to explain concepts and sharpen your understanding. That's the point of ML--we are all here to sharpen each other.

Thanks that makes a lot of sense. @stacksofplates has been very helpful in the past and I appreciate it. Ive tried out a few ideas from him in the past and I enjoyed learning.

@DustinB3403 He needs to use your system or not complain. That's what you have it for.

From my experience they will generally work fine on Win10. I've upgraded a couple hundred win7 machines in the last 3 years. Most of the time things actually work better.

Just got to work a few minutes ago. Went to start the car at 6:30 this morning and one of my tires was on the ground. I hooked up my electric tire charger and of course the hole in tire was too large for it to hold air. So waited for daylight to change tire and head to discount tire. $300 later, I replaced the two tires, I am at work.

@WrCombs There are many reasons to virtualize. For servers you want to use your resources efficiently. You can have many "servers" on a single physical machine. Each will be in their own vm.

I virtualize my desktops and laptops too. I always run Fedora or Suse with a Windows vm for when I have to use powershell or write a "how to guide" for a user who needs Windows 10 pictures. There's probably a million reasons to run a vm. Very few reasons not to.

@WrCombs A lot of people do DuoLingo here to pass the time on their phones when they need to. If your interested that could be worthwhile. Then start talking to girls in whatever language you choose if your not married or something like that. It will make them laugh and thats always a good thing!

In my job searching I was wondering what would be other good roles to step into other than a system admin?

My current role at work at desktop support, patching, imaging, and basic network troubleshooting. I took it on myself to learn a bit of powershell to use as often as I can. As a result of powershell I don't usually have much to work on as it made me much more efficient over time. I enjoy c++ and am teaching myself python currently. I have my own cloud servers I manage and use for websites and and experimental installs. They are Fedora and I enjoy managing them.

My current certifications are A+, CTS, and Network +. My current learning path includes working on my MCSA, then SCSP, and maybe Asterisk for voip. If I don't find a junior admin position or something similar is there something else I should be watching for to move into instead of an admin position that would also be rewarding?

@dafyre Welcome Back!

I have both here and to me there isn't any difference. Both have been reliable and easy to work with. I have win10 on both sets. I currently have about 20 of each in labs.

Reflecting on an interview yesterday. You ever go into an interview and have a lot more questions than the people interviewing? They were also so vague about the things they could answer. Its only appeal was its 10 min from home whereas I drive an hour every day to work. Other than that it seems real sketchy.

@scottalanmiller said in A different mindset:

@StuartJordan said in A different mindset:

I've worked with computers since I was 16, I'm now approaching 38, starting from a break fix environment, I just feel the last couple of years I've lost some enjoyment working within IT, has anyone else experienced this feeling?

I've definitely felt Windows in a continuous decline since 1999 with the late released of NT 4. NT 4 was an absolute joy to work with and really felt like MS knew what they were doing and cared. Windows 2000 changed all that and Windows got slow, flaky and felt... amateur. It got harder to use, and less powerful, and less stable. Sometimes they get things right, but overall so much of their product line has just felt like it has been in continuous decline for a long time.

I'm lucky, in a way, I started on UNIX and was a UNIX guy for years before I ever touched Windows for the first time. So Windows has never felt like my native environment, not even in the 3.1 or NT4 eras, it was always a "quirky, amateur alternative" to the "serious, standard" UNIX stuff that was older and used more in business. Windows always seemed like it was for end users and really small shops and never for "real business". Obviously MS pushed Windows into serious places over the years, but that came later. As someone that's been around for forever, I've seen Windows go from a novel idea, to it rising to being a serious contender, to becoming an absolute joke. It feels like it will likely just fade away pretty quickly. It is amazing how quickly NT4 popped up out of nowhere, squished Novell who had been the SMB leader before them, and how quickly it appears it is going to fade away.

I've rarely had Windows as a main driver in all that time. I didn't start using Windows in any real sense until 1995 and by 1997 was back to UNIX. I've had Windows focused jobs, and I have the MCSE+I, but NTG only used Windows exclusively for about 18 months in the early days, and only because it was our development platform. Our internal servers have been Linux since day one. Our desktops have nearly always been Linux.

In my professional life, once in a while I'd be put into a place that pushed Windows on us. But from the oil company to Wall St. to the K12 private school to NTG to IBM all of my major jobs were Linux as my daily driver. The non-profit I worked at was Mac (eww, so awful.) I've certainly used Windows a lot, and while NTG is Linux internally exclusively, the majority of what we support is Windows so I touch it so much every day. And all day long it amazing me that anyone, ever uses Windows by choice. It's not "bad", it's just... so unproductive. Everything is flaky and slow and just... sloppy.

So I'm lucky, I managed to start in the industry before Windows existed, got to enjoy it at its peak, and now that it is rapidly in decline I honestly barely notice. It feels like it is going out with a whimper. I would be pretty unhappy if I was tasked with working on Windows day in and day out, though. I would definitely find my career a lot less rewarding.

I feel like Novell was a better product than Windows at this time. I worked at a small IT shop that provided support for all kinds of things and places that were all Windows just had problems all the time. This was in the 97-2000 period.

@dafyre Can't go wrong with FF

Do you have a real need for seperate arrays? If not I would not complicate it ans just do raid 10.

Tostadas for lunch

@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:

My shop always ignored this, for a few reasons. One, just the math showed that it didn't work. Not at a restaurant scale, anyway. And it missed a few key concepts, like that the manager managing but never doing was often lost and not able to manage well. And that it made the workers feel like "us vs them" and not like a team. It also meant that you needed more workers.

This was something I used to complain about where I work. Management was so disconnected they only managed( went to meetings, verified payroll, checked off their projects, etc) and had little idea how things actually happened or what needed to be done to make things happen. It hasn't got any better, I just got tired of complaining .

About to get on roller coaster with Percy.

@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:

The thing that I learned, and still apply today, is that there's no job beneath me. I do whatever is needed to make sure that the company runs smoothly - which is primarily making the team run like clockwork. Sure, I earn more than most of the team, but what makes me valuable enough to be paid that isn't that I'm normally doing some magical work that no one else could do or that I'm better or anything, it's that I magnify the people on the team to best effect.

This I greatly admire and wish my management did some of. We are very disconnected. Management doesn't know how I do things and when I try to talk about it i think her eyes glaze over lol. I'm by far the least paid person in the department but I can do the basic roles of all the other positions. I've helped with our erp, sql queries, php on the website with our web dev guy, gone over quotes for av installs because we were getting robbed, helped the secretary with mounds of paperwork when she came back from maternity leave, and of course my job which is functionally a desktop admin. None of my coworkers or management have ever tried to help me or tried to learn what it takes. For example we got 300 desktops and 70 new laptops in which is typical for a summer refresh. I do it all by myself every year. No one outside my supervisor knows how to image anything and he hasn't done it in 10 years I'm guessing. I move all imaged machines myself to labs and classrooms over 3 campuses which are in 3 different towns. I do all the software installs and app updates for all 3 campuses as well as general work tickets. I currently have 40 tickets between the 3 campuses which is about average I guess. It rarely gets much lower than that. Its not that I have to have help but it would just be nice if someone took an interest one day to at least know why I am always stressed every day balancing users tickets, hardware installs, and daily patching duties.