There are tons of examples to work from too: http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/projects/category/desks-tables/

I've looked at DIY projects using kee klamps in the past. Might cost a bit more in parts/labor, but they look like they are made to last and you can design everything to fit your space.

http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/solutions/pipe-desk-frames/

@MattSpeller said:

4" un-treated fence posts, 1" Marine fine grade good one side plywood.

How fancy you get after that is up to you.

No cement blocks to ensure structural integrity? (or is that considered part of fancying it up?)

@MattSpeller said:

Favourite ticket title of the week:

"I have misplaced or lost the Telus Hotsport (Wifi Devise)."

I don't know why, but my brain read that in Borat's voice...

Down here in Kentuckiana we can't handle a 1/4 inch of snow without shutting down the entire tri-state...

@Kelly It looks like they instruct to install openssh-clients in the final response at the bottom of the thread (as opposed to openssh-client). Have you attempted that?

@hobbit666 said:

No this was after we had moved the cab and started but it was that messy (the patch panel was in place before hand lol) can't find the "before" shot.

In the picture below it looks like that rack just threw up on itself...

What Am I Doing Right Now? What I do every Thursday morning Pinky... Documenting obscure tasks and workflows.

Sold!

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

My server room is cooled by a typical consumer grade window unit that management refuses to change. It broke Friday without me knowing. I came in today (Monday) and my server room was 85 degrees and climbing. They don't listen to me and then still hold me responsible for the end results.

I once interviewed at a place that had their AC unit fail in their little, glass-encased data centre of the office on a Friday night. There were a LOT of servers in there. They had no monitoring or automation. The room was tiny and all glass so that everyone could see it.

It had gotten hot enough that the wires started to melt and burn. Every single device in it was destroyed.

I bet that smelled magnificent!

My server room's cooling isn't isolated from the rest of the building HVAC, and it is normally sits around ~80 degrees.

--edit-- (addendum)

So how quickly did you do the fan shuffle? We had a liebert unit that seemed to go down every few months at my previous place of employment. Our server room would spike from 68 degrees to 95+ in about a 45 minute time frame. We had a portable AC unit we would turn on and then shuffle a series of fans into the hall to help pull hot air out.

Quick way to kill an entire day's productivity.

Where do I fit in as a SysAdmin working for a SMB? And, assuming this visualization is correct, how inactive should I be to achieve maximum income?

Wasting my time trying to file a phishing complaint with GoDaddy.

@Dashrender said:

so, you'll have three partitions? one for Ubuntu, one for Windows, and one for shared data that's encrypted?

I know Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions, so maybe you can get away with two?

I'll only have one system that will have three, and the third will be on a second hard disk that will be used for data storage. He will mostly be operating from Windows so I plan to use NTFS for that disk. Other than that, I should just have two partitions on a single SSD.

--edit--

Most of what they are doing doesn't require a lot of shared data between the Operating Systems, just different sets of tools. They are interfacing with a lot of prototype hardware using various tools. Most of the stuff is designed in Linux, and frequently runs in Windows. Although, some of the design tools are only natively available in Windows. (Altium as an example)

I've got several laptops that I am planning to deploy that will be dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04LTS. As these will be leaving the building and traveling on occasion, I'm wanting to encrypt the disks. Since we're using Windows 7 Pro, I don't have access to bitlocker. I've been looking at and evaluating the use of VeraCrypt to accomplish this.

Any other reasonable alternatives that might work as well or better? Any problems/pitfalls that might come as a result of using VeraCrypt?

Most of the disks being encrypted are MMC SSDs with the exception of one 7200rpm HDD. These are Dell Latitude e7440 Ultrabooks if that makes any difference.

@Jason said:

So I've always wondered, why do so many people treat IT Staff (Technicians, Network/server admins and even directors) like crap? Is is because employees think these positions are below them or what?

I have yet to be treated poorly, and if I was I would address the person's attitude immediately. I frequently deal with users that are irritated because of a problem related to technology, but I don't take their attitude personally. I've never had someone irrationally take their problems out on me. However, I'm usually pretty quick to be empathetic and try to get the issue resolved. I think a lot of this stems from the IT/support person's expectations of interacting with end users and the reality of the situation. Also, when you get in larger environments where people frequently do not know each other personally, or environments that are mismanaged, this can probably result in anger and frustration being misdirected at the IT department instead of the actual issue/problem at hand.

Still, if I found myself being talked down to or addressed in an unprofessional manner I would address the problem immediately with the end user. If the behavior persisted I would report them to HR/Management. If the attitude problem continued past this point, and was not appropriately acknowledged by management, I would look for another job.

@scottalanmiller said:

As a start, when it comes to "I want to advance my career" and especially when you don't have super solid direction, which is not uncommon because how do you know what you want to do until you have done it all, the top thing (and this goes for people with really solid direction too) you want to build a home lab, an epic one.

A home lab you can get access to the tech, the techniques, the trends, the products and all the stuff that your job does not. Certs are a decent way to push yourself to do boring things or things you never thought of, helping to avoid gaps. I like certs not for the paper that they provide but for the education they push you to do.

Build a lab that makes your company jealous. Make sure that in any discussion you could roll your eye and laugh with disdain at the joke of IT that your company uses. Don't actually do it, but have those thoughts deep down inside. Make your servers better, your email better, your security better, your file serving better... everything, make it more current, better implemented, running faster and doing more than you get to do at work. If they ever question what you are doing, mention that they take their business less seriously that you do your home network - set the bar higher than they do. Don't let your job define your quality bar.

Ha! You must have been typing this out as I was starting to make my own reply evangelizing the usefulness of home labs...

@wirestyle22 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

If I could do anything I would be working with File Servers, VM's and maybe even Media streaming. I find them all to be interesting. At the same point I don't really care. My primary concern is to put myself in a strong position to provide for my family ultimately. I will do what I need to do period.

File Servers I see as phasing out very quickly. Already I see them dropping very quickly. Like AD, we phased ours out in the past few years. They just don't make sense like they used to.

VMs are ubiquitous and is almost like saying "working with computers". All servers are VMs and should have been for nearly a decade now, even in the SMB. It should be assumed that anytime someone says servers, VMs are just assumed. It's not something that you really specialize in, it's just part of doing everything else. In the enterprise space you get a few rare roles that are "platform" roles that just handle the VM layer, but they are few and seem to be getting fewer as that gets absorbed by the more technical and needed systems departments.

I can't answer what I want to do because I don't really have a preference. I currently run Exchange, our File Servers, VM's which include AV, print servers, utility servers, and a domain as well as a SQL database server. I run all cabling, setup all switches etc. I have no preference. Keep in mind I didn't build this I inherited it and they won't change anything.

Do you have a home lab? If not maybe you should like at implementing one and working with systems and technologies that you will not be able to get firsthand experience with at your current job.

So you've got experience administering a Server 2012 Domain. Can you join a Linux client/server to it?

You've got experience managing Virtual Machines. Can you migrate a Hyper-V VM to XenServer? KVM? VMware?

Are you able to setup VoIP? Conigure a SIP Trunk? Register a SIP Client?

Even if you don't know the tasks in and out you can setup a list of tasks like those above and expose yourself to the associated systems, services, and technologies enough to have an informed/intelligent conversation in an interview.

@gjacobse said:

@scottalanmiller said:

I got my SW PMs down to a fewer than 20, which means that they fit on a single page now. And all of the ones that are left are ones that I need to maintain for reference reasons (they have information in them that I don't want to lose.) Nothing more requiring follow up and now I can, I hope, keep on top of new ones as they come.

#feelingaccomplished

I had the impression that using email as a place to store important or reference information was a bad idea..

I say that,.. but I find that I still do so. There are over 4,460 emails in my Gmail account....

15,938 in my personal gmail account...

A paltry 3,328 in my work email.

@Jason said:

@scottalanmiller said:

This is the natural state of anything with a monopoly. Doesn't mean that they will not make an effort to show up on time, but it does mean that they have no reason to be concerned with customer service issues. Bad customer service is still better than what their competitor does... because they don't have one.

Oh, they have competitors but they suck too. Not in customer service like Comcast does. Verizon has great customer service but the dsl speeds here only go up to 2mbits. There's wireless internet which goes up to 50mibit but there's a lot of latency and a data cap. Great customer service as well. Comcasts service/network itself is great but the customer service is probably the worst in the industry.

In my experience (and I've dealt with both firsthand from the residential and business customer's perspectives) TWC goes above and beyond when it comes to Customer Disservice. At Comcast you can usually at the very least find one Customer Service Representative, that you can treat like a human being, and get something somewhere accomplished. TWC has all of their services so segmented that the left hand doesn't know where the right is at any given time. I had 3 different contractors and 3 different project managers to coordinate with just to get service installed onsite. After the fact I had to call and talk to Engineers on their end to actually get the service active. And within 24 hours of having service they disregarded the public IP addresses we had purchased and set everything to Dynamic; resulting in us having to get a completely new set of IP addresses.

In my locale their network is mostly undependable as well. I have to have them as a backup to my primary provider because of lack of competition. I actively monitor the connection and I regularly lose connectivity for 5-30 minutes at a time at least once every week to week and a half. When I had them briefly for residential service it was worse and I rarely saw the actual bandwidth that I paid for.

They sold us VoIP service as well and strung us along for 6 months before revealing that they couldn't actually transfer our numbers from our old office locale to the new one because of a difference in their network distribution centers. Their policy required that the transferred numbers area code match the actual location. I told them they were full of shit and the number could be transferred without a problem. I had verified with several other providers that this was not an issue. They informed me that because of corporate policy they could not make that change.

Fortunately, while waiting through numerous delays across the six month period of time I had been doing research and learned quite a bit about VoIP, SIP, and the numerous alternatives to TWC. I ended up saving a substantially larger sum of money using our own FreePBX server and VOIP.MS. After the VoIP fiasco and wasting 6 months of my time I immediately canceled my home internet service with TWC, negotiated our primary connection upgrade at the office with the only local competitor (and ended up getting more bandwidth at a slightly cheaper price), and downgraded the bandwidth of our connection with TWC to the cheapest service that we could function on during an outage with our primary provider.

I hate TWC with the fire of a million burning Suns.