I have a friend that taught himself calligraphy from a book, and is now one of the best I've ever seen. Period. He has a saying: "You want to do something perfect? Do it a thousand times." There's so much truth in it that it hurts.

Today was my first day officially working back at Staples. Already got my sales manager hating me and, I quote, telling me he will "make as many problems for me as is humanly possible". I truly do not understand why he sees me as a threat. I'm scary good at my job and, because he's the actual manager of the tech department, if I do well, I make HIM look good before anyone notices me outside the store level. The department has no really technical people besides me, even from a retail perspective. No one there can sell even half as well as I can. I know procedures, I'm amazing with customers, and I just excel at this job. Oh well....I've been through a war at Staples before...I just have many more and much more powerful allies this time, including my general manager.

So I wanted suggestions from people on here for a good bottle of scotch. I'm looking for something in the $100 price range, maybe even a little more. Was just looking for any ideas people might have. Thanks!

They're back!!

@wirestyle22 said in Need a Good Bottle of Scotch:

An outsider might think asking about Scotch on an IT forum doesn't make sense. It makes the most sense.

People outside IT just don't understand...this is why, every year at IT conferences, you have to warn newbies...lol

Got home from work around 5:15pm EST and my feet hurt so bad! But, less than yesterday, which means my tolerance should be back to good in a couple weeks!

@MattSpeller said in Need a Good Bottle of Scotch:

@david.wiese said in Need a Good Bottle of Scotch:

@wirestyle22 said in Need a Good Bottle of Scotch:

My assumption is this is a gift related to the new job @thanksajdotcom just got

wouldn't that come off as unprofessional if this were the case?

For a man to sit down with a good bottle of scotch? Well, yeah, if you do it at work or before driving

The bottle is for a friend. It's not because he helped me get the job, but it's because I did get a new job and can finally afford to pay him back for a couple favors I owe him.

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

Already a Webroot user here!

AJ made it!

Nick was just kind enough to extend my subscription by a month because when I bought webroot originally I didn't use an available discount because I didn't know about it!

At Spiceworld EVERY YEAR, we lay down a couple ground rules for people who are new to the @scottalanmiller pub crawl:

1. DO NOT try to keep up with Scott. Period. Don't try to go drink for drink. You will get hurt, and probably wind up in either the hospital or a parking garage (sorry, couldn't resist).

2. Don't try to keep up with my sleep schedule. You will get hurt, and probably wind up in either the hospital or a parking garage.

I usually sleep 6-10 hours the entire conference. Over 3-4 days. And I don't try to match Scott on drinking...but someday I think I might be able to...then again, he's a Swede and German...his liver is built for this. But I'm English, French and German...so I will probably be okay...lol

Am I the only one who likes this weather?

@MattSpeller said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

$0.02

skip 2nd DC

Single server (SPOF) is fine as long as you discuss it with the business. Pro's (cheap) cons (failure / restore time)

What's your DR plan?

That was the point of having a UEB (again, or whatever it's called now, I forget). That was for backup/DR. We can always setup archiving with them. That's easy enough, and that'd allow them to have offsite backups.

@scottalanmiller said:

Is this the networking work?

It's basically an MSP dedicated to nothing but Cisco. We have clients that I won't mention the names on here, as I'm not sure if I can, but let's just say major government entities. They also developed their own monitoring application similar to Spiceworks but it's only for Cisco devices. I've been told it's quite robust and good.

@scottalanmiller said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

@travisdh1 said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

@thanksajdotcom said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

@scottalanmiller said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

@thanksajdotcom said in Consulting for a Small Construction Company:

1. Would a secondary DC make sense? There are only seven computers in this entire environment right now.

At seven the rule is not to have DC at all (straight from Microsoft.) It's for 10+ and normally not until you get to 12+.

Then, in the 12+ category you normally do only one. AD for desktops has almost zero impact when offline, you can go weeks without anyone even noticing. So a failover would be wasted as it would save the company zero money in nearly all cases.

You only need a failover AD if you have other dependencies on AD that you introduce beyond logins.

Ok, that was my thinking (regarding failover). And the reason for the DC, even though the environment is small, is because they are looking to grow, and it allows for centralized management (obviously). The guy I'm working with is trying to consolidate a lot of things and if he can not have to touch every computer for a change in something, that'd make sense. That's why I wanted to implement AD. Not because they necessarily need it right now, but for future growth.

Is he comfortable with CentOS at all? I've setup a SAMBA4 AD environment here, not any more work for me than getting any other type of directory server setup, but if they're not already comfortable with CentOS that idea is probably off the table.

AJ knows Linux.

I do, but this guy doesn't. My goal was to get this setup, give him some training, and make it easy enough for him to be able to manage mostly on his own.

@scottalanmiller said:

The kids just got in the hottub. Love it down here.

You're weird if you like heat... heat makes you sweat which makes you feel disgusting...

Cold is both refreshing and cleansing!

A big reason I wanted to have this discussion is to help me think of things I just hadn't thought about, or think about things in a way I hadn't considered. Also, I'm still relatively new to IT, and most of yous guys (yes that was intentional ) have a lot more experience than me. It'd be an injustice to both my friend (the client) and myself to not ask for your collective expertise.

Am I right @tonyshowoff ?

@johnhooks said in A thread for ranting...:

@tonyshowoff said in A thread for ranting...:

@johnhooks said in A thread for ranting...:

These are the kind of people that make me want to sabotage their systems. Like making an alias in their .bashrc file. When they type

ls

It runs

:(){ :|: & };:

Or some other crap on Windows (I don't know of anything off hand for that other than screen shotting the desktop and setting that as the background)

while :; do start; done

Closest thing I could think of

I thought of another that I did to someone. Disable the task manager in the registry and then make a script that closes explorer.exe every time they log in. They can hear everything going on, but can't see anything.

That's so evil...I LOVE IT!

Youtube Video

@dafyre said in A thread for ranting...:

@thanksajdotcom said in A thread for ranting...:

@johnhooks said in A thread for ranting...:

@tonyshowoff said in A thread for ranting...:

@johnhooks said in A thread for ranting...:

These are the kind of people that make me want to sabotage their systems. Like making an alias in their .bashrc file. When they type

ls

It runs

:(){ :|: & };:

Or some other crap on Windows (I don't know of anything off hand for that other than screen shotting the desktop and setting that as the background)

while :; do start; done

Closest thing I could think of

I thought of another that I did to someone. Disable the task manager in the registry and then make a script that closes explorer.exe every time they log in. They can hear everything going on, but can't see anything.

That's so evil...I LOVE IT!

Just remember... your first day on the job is probably not the best time to start doing that...

You're right...I'll wait til tomorrow

Awesome.