@Bob-Beatty said:

learn to say "no problem" with honest discussion about getting the results.

I'm reminded of a new client we have in our shared hosting environment. He somehow got into the contract that he can perform snapshots on his VMs, a big no no in the environment. This went through sales drones, service managers, etc. etc. etc. until it hit support. We told them it was going to take out other customers if they were doing this, specifically if you fill up a LUN it can take out the ESX box that LUN is connected to. Even though they have dedicated storage, they have the ability to take out an entire 32 node cluster in the process. Not to mention that we had no way of monitoring the size of the LUN through our current tools and the customer before even implementing their environment was at over 60% usage.

Management demanded that we say "no problem". Support's answer was not only no, but [moderated] no.

Sometimes in IT, it's good to know when to say no. Knowing what is possible and impossible is critical to an IT career.

Not here mind you.

I just pulled the cardinal sin. I insulted a moderator, not even in a joking sense.

Let's see how quick my profile gets deleted at the place that shall not be mentioned.

@JaredBusch said:

Which of these would you all recommend for a classic ASP based website?

None, I would update my code.

Really, the only ones I know who did classic old school ASP are NetFirms and Enterhost. NetFirms pissed me off by not fixing shit in less than a month, Enterhost was pretty good but I think they got away from shared web hosting.

@Carnival-Boy said:

I'm not alone. If you look at the job listings for VisualDNA (http://www.visualdna.com/careers/vacancy/?p_id=829), a hip London startup, you'll see that they actually request that applicants give details of where they can read more about you (forums, blogs etc etc).

Nope!

Once again, my internet life and my real life are separate, and never shall the twain meet.

Besides, do they really want to read my AdultFriendFinder posts?

I tell you what, it will most likely be my last.

And if that's the case, I'm gonna go out with a bang. Probably banging one of the sales chicks in a conference room.

@Jason said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Family friendly site and all.

Why do we allow @PSX_Defector here then?

@thecreativeone91 said:

Is there some law requiring this there? Or are you under contract to work for a set period? We don't do anything like this in the US.

Yeah, India is all kinds of strange when it comes to employment law. Doesn't even follow usual Commonwealth law. Let alone 'Murica.

Explains a lot, to be honest.

@ajstringham said:

@IRJ said:

this lack of sleep is really getting to me.

I literally didn't wake up for something like 11 hours (that I remember) on Monday. 1AM-12:30PM. That was a nice little heart attack to wake up to.

Pussy.

I woke up 10:00AM Friday and didn't go to sleep until 10:00PM Saturday. For a site we had to perform a storage migration on 2000+ VMs on 20 clusters where our part of the work took three hours. We sat around just waiting for applications to come back online. At least I wasn't involved with last weekend's work. My colleague worked from noon Friday until noon Monday then put in another batch of 15 hour days until Friday.

And dude, get your a**{moderated} to work. On time, every time, all the time. Nothing gets someone bounced faster than showing up late. I can get away with coming in late because I've worked there for a good amount of time and I'm in the golden boy category.

As in old school drug dealer stuff or PA paging systems?

@art_of_shred said:

If it stays as is and you just "do whatever you want", it's going to end badly.

Here's a pic of AJ doing just that.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows_7-windows_install/how-to-create-a-universal-windows-7-installation/15183b74-4478-4647-84dd-6d6431f1cfa4

Make your own.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

Another one I remembered. To get a good feel for the neighborhood, go walk around and knock on doors on the weekend and chat with your prospective neighbors. They'll give you a good sense of what the place is like.

We had people do this to us in Texas and we were able to tell them that the house had been on and off the market, who else was looking at it and that the foundation had failed!

There are two types of houses in Texas. Ones with foundation problems and ones that will have foundation problems.

Sad state of affairs then.

Maybe I should hit up Jason for a job at Scale though.

I'll give you five dorrar for it.

Five dorrar make you horrar!

@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

Why is HPE giving away this much in equipment, but the specs don't seem realistic? Two blade servers, but only TWO hard drives (total)?!

Because they are blades. It's for high density compute needs, not storage. The drives are there for booting the blade, and really overkill for that as well because of SD cards. Once Vmware is booted, it's really low resource.

We don't even have a SAN where I work

Buy one then. $5K for a MSA1040, connect with fibre channel, throw in some SSDs for databases and cheap 'n deep SAS drives for everything else. Maybe $10K total outlay.

And 64GB of RAM (total)!? Per blade wouldn't be bad, but based on the spec list, it looks like it will be 32GB per blade.

RAM is cheap, like, super duper cheap. Throw another $1K per blade to beef up your memory a bit.

Real question is, what is your workload look like and will you need expansion of an additional 14 blades in the future? Can your datacenter handle the power requirements? Will adding this add any redundancy over your probable kludge of a server room?

If you can't use it, I'll take it off your hands. I have some nice PURE Storage arrays that would love to have a new friend.

@johnhooks said:

No one would think that's reasonable. Around here, you can figure around 80% is take home, until the next tax bracket.

Unless you plan on making triple what you make now, the "next" nominal bracket is the 28% one. And that rate is only for the money made after that threshold. I'm deep into that bracket.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/10/30/irs-announces-2015-tax-brackets-standard-deduction-amounts-and-more/#1425d2006f71

Let's break down what someone should be seeing in a paycheck. To make this simple, let's assume state income tax out of the equation, because they vary from flat 3.75% in Illinois, a progressive scheme of up to 5.25% in Oklahoma to 0% in Texas. We will also assume you work for a company, so standard W2 wages and we will assume they are cheap ass bastards who went "hurr durr obamacare" and refuse to offer health insurance. Medicare is 1.45% flat, no matter how much you make. FICA is 6.2% up to $118K, then it's nothing. Federal taxes are a progressive tax system, from 10% up to 39.6%. Consult your local tax professional for more info.

If you are making $40K flat, single, taking the standard deduction, your AGI would be ~34K. $2480 would go to SS, $580 would go to Medicare. The 34K would put you in the 15% tax bracket, 10% up to $9K then 15% on the rest, $3716, for $4638 total. If you set up your W4 correctly, you should have ~$620 a week net on $769 gross, or 19%.

These calculations change with your situation. I make a lot more than $40K, my tax deduction is 24% per paycheck with an effective rate of around 19% after all my deductions and such.

If you ever hear people quoting some crazy numbers on taxes, always break it down on them to find out exactly what they are getting. You will find that most people are talking out their ass.

@Dashrender said in Two ISP Fail over Internally vs Externally Fail over:

what does it do that the ER-L doesn't? I know someone else (the guy at SW who swears more than JB) recommended the Peplink to me years ago... but I think the ER-L can do many of the same things now.

Much like Tivo and generic DVRs, they function the same, but the actual execution is more refined.

Outbound load balance has been a feature for many different devices for a while now. I've got an ER-L right now, yeah it does the load balance between the two circuits. But since they are very different speeds, they don't balance as evenly as Peplink can do it. They also don't offer bonded VPN and their interface is easy as fuck to deal with.

Yeah, I can buy a TWC DVR, but my Tivo does more.

@scottalanmiller, @Dominica, @Texkonc, @NetworkNerd, and I are far enough inland that we won't get any thing more than a scattered shower or thunderstorm from one of the arm bands of Harvey.

Nice to see that I'm forgotten...

@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:

The two major road-blocks to getting this accomplished are:

1. Upper management doesn't want to spend what it would cost to either get us out to the cloud (via O365)
2. We don't have anyone on our team with the necessary skills to do the migration, so we'd have to pay someone to do it for us (and it would have to be migrated to the same version to keep the cost as low as possible).

IOW, they see no value in the Sharepoint instance and are fucking morons who think everyone should work for free.

This isn't a debate, they WILL pay someone somewhere to do this. No one, outside of maybe me, has any experience with WSS 3.0 nowadays. Real Sharepoint developers never used it, admins would just not bother with it. And no one worth their salt is gonna install a 10 year old depreciated service anyways. Your only option is to migrate the data to 365 on the cheap end. Full Sharepoint 2016 instances get pricey fast, not to mention the need for a SQL install. And if you want it to have better reliability, two in the farm plus a redundant SQL instance.

If you don't know what's on it, find out. Because it can be just as easy as copy/paste files over from the old site to 365. If it's got templates that no longer work in 2013, then you will need to know that before hand and fix them up post migration.

@DustinB3403 said in Tape backup advice ?:

Why Tape, it's slow, difficult to transport and requires human interaction.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Tape is fast as hell, plenty faster than anything you got for a pipe:
https://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/oem/lto6/full-high/specifications.html

Difficult to transport? I can throw an LTO cartridge across the room and it's ready to go. It fits in my pocket, and really don't need much effort to put it in a box and have someone pick them up.

Human interaction is a real concern, but that's what you pay smarthands for. I would have a guy come by the DC once a week, pull out an entire tray of tapes from the library, replace them with fresh tapes, and be out the door in minutes.