@thanksaj said:

Eating lunch. Got KFC today. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, insert comments from @PSX_Defector as to "this is why you're fat"

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

Accents. And I could hear other accents in the background. I suppose it could have been somewhere else, but that was unlikely.

I get this a lot from people. Remember that call centers in both NJ and Dallas, as examples, are often nearly all staffed with people with accents. I've gotten tons of people making assumptions when calling NJ. While there are many call centers in India, there are many in the US and you have no way to tell them apart. That's an assumption you can never make. You are just as likely to be upset with US labour as offshore labour.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, no. You can tell the difference of a foreign worker versus one onshore.

One phrase, do the needful.

Another way, the ones onshore done sound like they have marbles in their mouth. Native speakers don't have this. Remember that call centers only hire goons at the beginning of their careers, so many of them have "fluency" in English but still have noticeable cadence of how they use it. English syntax is quite different. And they can't make the sounds properly. I am a cunning linguist, I hear it all.

And I don't know where you find your call center goons, but I've worked for some of the largest ones in Dallas. None of them only hire H1Bs. And the one that did, good old Software Spectrum, promptly lost big contracts because of it. There is a smattering of foreign workers, but vast majority of them are local. That includes Stream, Frontier, AT&T, TelVista, T-Mobile, State Farm and Cisco. The reason they hire onshore is because the vast majority of offshore goons suck serious ass. Can't even follow a script. I call it dot logic, somehow they twist and turn anything into thinking that it's no longer their problem.

@Joyfano said:

Reading post here on ML.

Funny, that's what I'm doing too.

Damn night guy, taking the week off. Now I have to fill in and deal with the nonsense.

Besides the obvious IM clients, there is msg.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771903.aspx

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

With the Indian workers, we still have a massive shortfall, but in terms of skill and not body count. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of competent and skilled Indian people in IT. But I have only met one or two.

I would guess that I have worked with over a thousand. Hard to guess when the numbers get large. I've lived right in the middle of the Indian cultural centers in both NJ and Dallas (the areas where Netflix "local recommendations" are all in Hindi!!) I've worked with an awful lot of people in general, so all of my numbers are large.

The problem with that particular subcontinent is cultural.

They are taught to not think, follow the directions or else. It's deeply engrained in their society, they have a caste system for f [moderated] sake. This results in most of the lower level goons not knowing jack s [moderated] beyond their tiny part of the picture. Improvisation is not their strong suit. We interviewed a few guys who were supposed to be our "peers" over the phone. One put in his resume he was an "Active Directory Architect". He couldn't even name ONE of the FSMO roles.

Then there is the blatenly false thought that they are somehow more educated and are equivalent to Western education. Sure, if they pay attention. But most just buy their way out of it. I can't seem to find it, but there was a article on the WSJ a while back about how the education system in India is hugely corrupted, in that 3/4 of all students pay professors for passing grades. A degree from Calcutta Technical Institute (CalTech) isn't worth even a degree in Underwater Basket Weaving from UC-Davis. What we see in the for-profit sector of our education system pales in comparison against their pay for play system.

Until companies figure out that these guys are not worth even considering, we will be stuck with them. I would take me an Eastern European resource before I consider anything in that subcontinent.

@scottalanmiller said:

I think very few people deploy Sharepoint in house anymore.

I have entire customer's sites hosted within Sharepoint. Not the usual collaboration stuff, straight up consumer level sites. Like, huge company, 500 sites a host level. We had a lot of other customers use Sharepoint to extend their site's abilities.

For a simple share, yeah, go O365. Extend the functionality to other stuff, you need a local install.

@scottalanmiller said:

WTF dude, no gigabit ethernet? No bonded ethernet? No Jumbo Frames?

How else am I supposed to push a shitload of data over the wire?

Shit, that's like a 30 minute job with a goon and a probe and tickler. A few mintues with a labeler to make it pretty, done in no time.

Now, network design and recabling, add a full day on top of that. Not that recabling would be hard for a small place, but getting things in a good state would need some design time.

If I was somewhere near there, and I could run it on an off hour, I would grab A.J. as my goon and teach him stuff.

@thanksaj said:

@PSX_Defector said:

@thanksaj said:

Thanks for the product keys!

Touche.

Meh, it's for Windows 7, they are already in use and have been for a long time. And they are going away in 30 days. Do your worst!

I have Dreamspark Windows 7 and Vista (and even XP) keys. I'm good.

You mean BXMG3-4RVCD-DYH75-XBH3B-6PDMG? Our ever so favorite volume key?

@thanksaj said:

@PSX_Defector said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

So Action Pack was the Technet killer?

No, they have nothing to do with each other in any way. There is really no overlap in use cases. This is the second time I've heard someone say something like this today. Where is that idea originating?

Both Technet and MAPS have been around since the 1990s. Technet was eliminated because its content was just made basically free.

I think it was more of the fact that folks were selling the keys. Back a while ago, you could get 5 legit Windows licenses per version, so with 7 you would have 25 licenses to sell. They dropped the request rate down to two keys per account, but soon after they went ahead and killed Technet.

I always get a chuckle when I look at my soon to be expired Technet account and see this.

Thanks for the product keys!

Touche.

Meh, it's for Windows 7, they are already in use and have been for a long time. And they are going away in 30 days. Do your worst!

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

So Action Pack was the Technet killer?

No, they have nothing to do with each other in any way. There is really no overlap in use cases. This is the second time I've heard someone say something like this today. Where is that idea originating?

Both Technet and MAPS have been around since the 1990s. Technet was eliminated because its content was just made basically free.

I think it was more of the fact that folks were selling the keys. Back a while ago, you could get 5 legit Windows licenses per version, so with 7 you would have 25 licenses to sell. They dropped the request rate down to two keys per account, but soon after they went ahead and killed Technet.

I always get a chuckle when I look at my soon to be expired Technet account and see this.

Didn't do something stupid like VLAN the port it's on right?

@thanksaj said:

Ok, scheduled for 10AM and 12:15PM on Saturday, Dec 27.

Don't puss out like the last one.

@Mike-Ralston This is Scott we are talking about.

@thanksaj said:

@PSX_Defector said:

Yeup, with my new Mikrotik router.

Badass. Can I come see it tonight?

Got work to do, unfortunately. Have to focus on that stuff, tomorrow morning too.

Aahhhhhhh, virtual disaster recovery. So much fun.

Yeup, with my new Mikrotik router.

The need for speed!

@scottalanmiller said:

All major enterprise clouds are Xen except for Azure which is HyperV.

Our cloud is on Vmware. And we got bought up because of our cloud offerings.

I'd still get an arp output from the switch. If you have that few amount of devices it's probably nothing to go through and read what MACs are there and compare it to the database of addresses. If you find something that doesn't belong, it's potentially your culprit.

Beyond that, usual troubleshooting. Trace, ping, das boot which has already been done. Etc. etc. etc.

Got any cascaded switches behind it? Or, god forbid, a hub?

Yeah, smelling like a packet storm on the network is puking all the good stuff for higher level protocols. Parse the arp tables and see if you can find something out of place. I'll put the two bucks I won on the single switch stuff onto there being a crap "router" somewhere plugged in. Double or nuthin'!