tshile Posted June 30, 2016 Share Posted June 30, 2016 (edited) <question about the current email outage> all I can say is <repeat of what was already said> <another question about the email outage> all I can say is <repeat of what was already said> <another question about the email outage> all I can say is <repeat of what was already said> *look on person's face when they realize you weren't bull****ting them about the cons of moving to "the cloud"* *look on person's face trying to calculate whether the cheaper option was actually worth it* no, the cons of 'cloud' based systems are not made up by people just trying to protect their job. your **** is now in someone else's hands, and no you cannot talk to them, and no they will not tell you when it's going to be fixed. enjoy! that will be $20/user/month, thank you! (or $8/user/month or $12/user/month, depending on which option you picked) Edited June 30, 2016 by tshile 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wildbunny Posted June 30, 2016 Share Posted June 30, 2016 Cloud is the worst invention in IT that have ever been done. That's nothing more than a commercial ADs to stole your stuff and get a hand on your datas and network operating system. Still, there's lots of people that thinks it's great. Originally, the cloud is just a drawing to represent your FA network because it's a complete mess and you don't know what's going on, and you'd better not know anyway. Now, you've got commercials that makes you think it's great... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renegade7 Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 looks like office 365 took a giant **** today. people roll their eyes when you say you want control over your own stuff, when comparing the price of a cloud based service vs in-house service. but all the people who have email issues are stuck waiting for microsoft to fix it, with no real details, and they're not just fixing it for you they're fixing it for a ton of people... of course, if you have ****ty people to setup/configure/manage your email system you're probably still better off. going on 6 hours now. wonder when they'll fix it lol. Its funny you mention that, because we use 365 as well (came in right when we were shutting down our on-site exchange server). We use Unified Messaging and Auto-Attendent for our on premise Lync server, so our phone situation was a nightmare (having to redirect all service calls to the lead Customer service manager). Just listening to my co-worker on the phone with Microsoft was maddening, just got it working again today (had been days we were dealing with this). I have my feelings about Azure as well, but that's a topic for another day. I've heard wonderful things about AWS, though the more I get into IT, the more I get a feel for what probably should or should not be in the cloud. You can make an argument its a risk no matter what you do if you don't have quality support for when something eventually goes wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) Yeah that's the key. Do you have quality support? I know people that run school districts that dreaded going to office 365. But their budget wouldn't allow for him to hire people that actually knew how to manage exchange (or more importantly: fix it when there's a disaster) It's great for things like high volume websites when establishing redundant datacenters around the country is cost prohibitive. Of course - you pay a premium for that, and it's in a different category. I get small businesses using Google Apps or office 365. 5-10k for an in house email solution is hard to swallow. It just irritates me when things like this happen and they're shocked the cons listed up front *actually* occur. But what irritates me more is when execs, with no tech knowledge what-so-ever, over rule you on the issue and the real reason is because they sit around with their buddies that are like 'yeah we're in the cloud now! You're not? Oh man lol you're so behind.' Then this happens and they're the first to call you in complete befuddlement that their services are down; then you tell them - you want a better answer on the issue? Here's their 800 number. Knock your socks off. I already know how it's going to go. Azure and O365 have gotten much better. This one of very few outages I've seen (of course, I havent had an on premises outage last more than 15 minutes in the last 5 years so my record is better ) There was once a day when you'd make a change in o365 and it'd take 20 minutes to 4 hours to go through the system. It was a joke. You update someone's email address or login name and say - it's done, but I have no idea when it'll take affect, check tomorrow. Edited July 1, 2016 by tshile 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chipwhich Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) LOL tshile, I am pretty sure you were busting my b's saying I should have used Microsquish instead of Rackspace. Regardless, if you are running a corporation you are in a no win situation. At least buying Office 365 you get some level of hope for backup recovery and continuous uptime. Hiring some certified exchange schlub isn't much of a better option imo. Keeping your own servers, backups, backup power, etc. We are prisoners of technology and the buildings that house it and the clowns that manage it. Edited July 1, 2016 by chipwhich Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 LOL tshile, I am pretty sure you were busting my b's saying I should have used Microsquish instead of Rackspace. Rackspace is a cloud solution too... O365 is cheaper and you get more out of it than with rackspace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chipwhich Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 Rackspace is a cloud solution too... O365 is cheaper and you get more out of it than with rackspace. Obviously it is a cloud solution. And not sure how I could get more out of it. I get exactly what I need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) Obviously it is a cloud solution. And not sure how I could get more out of it. I get exactly what I need. Well, my issue was/is with cloud solutions. me telling you office 365 is better than rackspace has nothing to do with my isuses with cloud solutions. rackspace is just reselling the same service, minus some functionality. they're purchasing products from microsoft, then selling it with their own management/profit of both the software and the hardware they run it on put on top. it's your money, so obviously, do what you want with it. edit: I also don't think i was busting your balls. I believe I simply asked why you'd go with rackspace when all you're doing is choosing a middleman when it requires the same amount of effort to go direct to the manufacturer. i don't recall really discussing it any further than that, but maybe i'm wrong. Edited July 1, 2016 by tshile Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chipwhich Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 edit: I also don't think i was busting your balls. I believe I simply asked why you'd go with rackspace when all you're doing is choosing a middleman when it requires the same amount of effort to go direct to the manufacturer. i don't recall really discussing it any further than that, but maybe i'm wrong. Well as with everything in life, it's not all black and white. I used to have a different provider for my exchange email. Without getting into the gory details I went through, the provider was "migrating" my companies email from exchange like 2007 to 2012 or something at the time. They knocked out my email for a week. Pissed me off. My IT wanted me to move email providers. I was so pissed off about the week long outage and skiddish I was opposed to moving. Long story short, Rackspace had by far the cleanest and most comforting option of not only providing the new exchange servers but migrating my entire companies email. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renegade7 Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) Yeah that's the key. Do you have quality support? I know people that run school districts that dreaded going to office 365. But their budget wouldn't allow for him to hire people that actually knew how to manage exchange (or more importantly: fix it when there's a disaster) It's great for things like high volume websites when establishing redundant datacenters around the country is cost prohibitive. Of course - you pay a premium for that, and it's in a different category. I get small businesses using Google Apps or office 365. 5-10k for an in house email solution is hard to swallow. It just irritates me when things like this happen and they're shocked the cons listed up front *actually* occur. But what irritates me more is when execs, with no tech knowledge what-so-ever, over rule you on the issue and the real reason is because they sit around with their buddies that are like 'yeah we're in the cloud now! You're not? Oh man lol you're so behind.' Then this happens and they're the first to call you in complete befuddlement that their services are down; then you tell them - you want a better answer on the issue? Here's their 800 number. Knock your socks off. I already know how it's going to go. Azure and O365 have gotten much better. This one of very few outages I've seen (of course, I havent had an on premises outage last more than 15 minutes in the last 5 years so my record is better ) There was once a day when you'd make a change in o365 and it'd take 20 minutes to 4 hours to go through the system. It was a joke. You update someone's email address or login name and say - it's done, but I have no idea when it'll take affect, check tomorrow. Ya, as I've mentioned, I'd say we're a mid-sized company with a definitively understaffed IT department. Every once in a while I can sense a decision being made over my manager's head (Directory of IT) that is more about being new then being right. The more I think about it, I don't know if I'd put the move to 365 in that category of "bragging rights" (for many of the reasons you mentioned). +1 for powershell getting better and now being able to do a force replication from the dirsync server : ) Edited July 1, 2016 by Renegade7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) like rackspace actually resells office 365: https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/office-365/pick-your-plan and it's literally the microsoft plans with a couple extra dollars per person added onto it. https://products.office.com/en-us/business/mostsecure-office-in-the-cloud?wt.mc_id=ps_google_comm_ocma_acq_o365_office%20365%20plans&ls=pd_sem&channel=psearch&lsd=google&ca=o365#AxD6QuDobcruVZjW.97 It looks like rack space is $0.25 cheaper for Office 365 business, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's an mistake/temp price or if MS just changed it and rackspace hasn't adjusted yet. every other plan is a few dollars more, it's weird that would be 25 cents less. it could also be an old contract that has guaranteed pricing, before these other plans came out, so they fall into this weird situation where they get cheaper pricing for a while. Here's the enterprise plans directly from MS https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans Again, cheaper. They (rackspace) advertises 10$/month/user for hosted exchange which sounds nice on the surface, but i know from experience that if you want any of the latest features they nickle and dime you to death with the addons. Want activesync and not just pop/imap? That'll be an extra few $'s per month Online archives instead of dreaded PST archiving solution? Extra money It gets cost prohibitive quickly. The only upside? You get your own exchange environment, so you're not shared like O365, but your environment is still hosted on their services which means you're still at the mercy of their ability to keep your services up and running. Slightly less risky than Office 365. The few times I've worked with Rackspace's hosted exchange tech support... they're not any better than the average "exchange" person. I've had to tell them how to fix their problems before, or had them argue with me about something and had to go to their supervisor to get someone who understood how Exchange works. Edited July 1, 2016 by tshile Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chipwhich Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) I only use Rackspace as an exchange server. I get all my MS office licenses from 365. When I moved to Rackspace they didn't offer the Office suite. And not sure what addons you are referring to. I just use email and calendar. Edited July 1, 2016 by chipwhich Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 (edited) They knocked out my email for a week. Pissed me off. That's unacceptable. I believe the default/spec for retrying delivery to a system that is having issues accepting mail is 48 hours. So... if you get close to, or past 48 hours, you're an idiot/don't know what you're dong/must be having upstream issues out of your control because they picked 48 hours thinking there's really no reason you should get close to (much less go beyond) that for an email outage. (edit: by you i mean the people managing the system, not you specifically) Which is the #1 good reason to go to the cloud - you either cannot afford, or cannot find (or are unable to determine the quality of someone applying for the position), quality support for the product. The risk for downtime from using a cloud service outweighs that issue. I only use Rackspace as an exchange server. I get all my MS office licenses from 365. When I moved to Rackspace they didn't offer the Office suite. And not sure what addons you are referring to. I just use email and calendar. Archiving, activesync, and various other items that cost extra that are built into Exchange (ie: there's no real reason to charge extra other than because you can) Rackspace advertises "email on y our phone" for 10$/month. What they don't tell you is that if you want to use activesync (push notification) instead of bull**** pop/imap you have to pay extra for that "addon" All of which comes with o365 + you get access to lync, sharepoint, onedrive for business, skype for business, etc. the difference between hosted exchange and o365 is... well, i already explained it. if you really need hosted exchange, I find it interesting it makes more sense to pay for a cloud solution than to have it on-premises.... but I'm sure it makes sense for people, just no situations I've seen (of course, we know how to manage/set up exchange...) Edited July 1, 2016 by tshile Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chipwhich Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 Well we don't use lync or skype, etc. My developers use the free version of slack and we do business using webex and other methods. I don't have any IT infrastructure to speak of other than some development linux stacks/vm's. I also have no IT support so to speak. My developers built the development environment to include openstack accumulo etc. What my developers wont do is manage an exchange server, which means I would have to hire someone. That's not cheap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gamebreaker Posted July 1, 2016 Author Share Posted July 1, 2016 Finally got the leadership at my company to approve adding port security to all of our remote switches. It only took me two years of badgering, lol. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 (edited) Worth the 5-10 minute read if you have the time. We missed the boat on fun programming David G Wiseman - Robin Hood And Friar Tuck just posting enough for a tease The following story was posted in news.sysadmin recently.The more things change, the more they stay the same...Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staffat Motorola (I believe it was) discovered a relativelysimple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-Vtimesharing system (or it may have been CP-V's predecessorUTS). ... So... one day, the system operator on the main CP-Vsoftware-development system in El Segundo was surprised by anumber of unusual phenomena. These included the following(as I recall... it's been a while since I heard the story): ... - Disk drives would seek back&forth so rapidly that they'd attempt to walk across the floor. ... - The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B. One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually. ... I believe that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola'smanagement about the merry-prankster actions of the twoemployees in question. To the best of my knowledge, noserious disciplinary action was taken against either ofthese guys. .... Dave Platt Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303 Edited July 6, 2016 by tshile Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 6, 2016 Share Posted July 6, 2016 anyone in va want a job and not have to commute into northern va/dc? pm me your resume. i could write a book on do's/don'ts for helpdesk/sysadmin interviews at this point. good lord. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 12, 2016 Share Posted July 12, 2016 http://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity/map/ LOLLOLLOLLOL Comcast is having a nationwide phone outage. that map only shows major outages, but essentially its the entire country. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zguy28 Posted July 22, 2016 Share Posted July 22, 2016 (edited) Work wants me to get MCSE in Exchange 2016. But first I have to take exam 70-417 to upgrade my MCITP 2008 to MCSA 2012 as prerequisite. Basically it condenses all three tests for 2012 into one, and eliminates any material that hasn't really changed since 2008. This leaves a heavy dosage of Hyper-V (we are solely a VMware shop), DirectAccess, Azure etc. And the questions are almost all in Powershell. I don't know who they get to write their questions, but I swear that person doesn't work in the real world. These questions are way too hard for an entry-level cert. By the way, Mindhub is selling booster packs of exam vouchers for $200 w/ 4 retakes. Offer expires Aug 31. Edited July 22, 2016 by Zguy28 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Uh... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/password_sharin_1.html Password Sharing is Now a Crime In a truly terrible ruling, the US 9th Circuit Court ruled that using someone else's password with their permission but without the permission of the site owner is a federal crime. ... Using an analogy in which a woman uses her husband's user credentials to access his bank account to pay bills, Judge Reinhardt noted: "So long as the wife knows that the bank does not give her permission to access its servers in any manner, she is in the same position as Nosal and his associates." ... Guess I'm committing a felony now. Suppose I'll have to get my own bank login... Work wants me to get MCSE in Exchange 2016. But first I have to take exam 70-417 to upgrade my MCITP 2008 to MCSA 2012 as prerequisite. Basically it condenses all three tests for 2012 into one, and eliminates any material that hasn't really changed since 2008. This leaves a heavy dosage of Hyper-V (we are solely a VMware shop), DirectAccess, Azure etc. And the questions are almost all in Powershell. I don't know who they get to write their questions, but I swear that person doesn't work in the real world. These questions are way too hard for an entry-level cert. By the way, Mindhub is selling booster packs of exam vouchers for $200 w/ 4 retakes. Offer expires Aug 31. The powershell questions seem intimidating at first but in my experience: 10% can be ruled out simply by understanding when a comlet does and doesn't start with new, remove get, and set Another 60% can be removed by getting the suffix of the comlet right which just requires a little studying and practice, nothing serious. The remaining 30% have to deal with understanding what you're trying to do and fudging your way around the switches being used. Ie: with a little studying and understanding of powersgell you can guess your way through most of it without being really proficient in powershell. Also if you understand VMware well then hyper-v is cake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zguy28 Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Uh... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/password_sharin_1.html Guess I'm committing a felony now. Suppose I'll have to get my own bank login... The powershell questions seem intimidating at first but in my experience: 10% can be ruled out simply by understanding when a comlet does and doesn't start with new, remove get, and set Another 60% can be removed by getting the suffix of the comlet right which just requires a little studying and practice, nothing serious. The remaining 30% have to deal with understanding what you're trying to do and fudging your way around the switches being used. Ie: with a little studying and understanding of powersgell you can guess your way through most of it without being really proficient in powershell. Also if you understand VMware well then hyper-v is cake. In the real world, Powershell isn't bad, on the test though, they want exact commands chosen from a list for how to add a vswitch or remove a vnic from a VM or how to enable SR IOV or to initiate or schedule an Azure Online Backup etc. Or multiple steps in Powershell for doing a complex task in hyper-v. Its not the concepts and things. For instance, a question may ask you how to create a new Desired State Configuration and presents you the choice between Start-DSCConfiguration or New-DSCConfiguration. The answer is Start. If you've never used it, intuition will get you nowhere. It just seems to me that for an Associate level cert, its extremely difficult and excessive in the memorization. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Yeah but I think that's the point. You have to have done some of the work. I'm not disagreeing with you though. It's why we don't put much into certs here. I can tell way more about what you know with a few questions than what a bullet point that says you have a cert means. Also, in interviews, we found tons of people that understood best practices, but had no knowledge of what was going on 'under the hood'. Ie; they read a technet article on how to deploy it. Knowing the database and and log files for Exchange need to go on separate storage is great. Not understanding that is a critical issue for recovery, and that under the hood you're talking about being able to replay logfiles to recover from backups but also not miss data since the last backup, means someone can say they know exchange but not actually understand how it works. Which leads to people putting the logs on a partition and the database on another partition, on the same physical storage, and losing data when a disaster happens. It was funny doing interviews when someone said they knew a technology, asking them a basic question about what is going on underneath it, and getting blank stares... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zguy28 Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Yeah but I think that's the point. You have to have done some of the work. I'm not disagreeing with you though. It's why we don't put much into certs here. I can tell way more about what you know with a few questions than what a bullet point that says you have a cert means. Also, in interviews, we found tons of people that understood best practices, but had no knowledge of what was going on 'under the hood'. Ie; they read a technet article on how to deploy it. Knowing the database and and log files for Exchange need to go on separate storage is great. Not understanding that is a critical issue for recovery, and that under the hood you're talking about being able to replay logfiles to recover from backups but also not miss data since the last backup, means someone can say they know exchange but not actually understand how it works. Which leads to people putting the logs on a partition and the database on another partition, on the same physical storage, and losing data when a disaster happens. It was funny doing interviews when someone said they knew a technology, asking them a basic question about what is going on underneath it, and getting blank stares... Its like talking storage and all they know is Terabytes. No understanding of why the performance sucks (IOPS) or of dedupe. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tshile Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Yeah. We also had a ton of people with no formal education. They were people that were 'good with computers' that got into the field and then worked with what they found on google. 10 years later they know some stuff but have tons of gaps in their knowledge. Gaps they're unaware of, and they get by because ultimately the people running the organization don't know enough to know otherwise. System was down for 2 days and you lost data? That's because this job is hard and oh microsoft/vmware/emc/dell/vendor-to-blame sucks, didn't you know? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koolblue13 Posted July 28, 2016 Share Posted July 28, 2016 Wtf are these HP machine commercials about? Sorry if it's being discussed, I'm catching up and have no business in this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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