@scottalanmiller said:

If you want to learn CRM basics and not a specific system, SugarCRM is very popular and is free and open source. You can install it on a Linux VM quite easily. Or you can install it to a system like A Small Orange with a single click. Getting access to a common CRM to play with it would be pretty easy. Then you can say that you have deployed it as well.

Azure has an out of the box SugarCRM in the Web App gallery 🙂

@Dashrender said:

The bad thing about splitting the threads is the purpose the OP originally had is lost to the new threads.

And makes it likely that people start posting the new thread's stuff to both.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?

His goal was career growth and experience. I brought the SAN or storage consolidation up as a means to improve the environment, shake up the status quo and get experience in a totally new area through potentially improving the environment.

Awww yes, that's right. Considering there is no budget according to Mfd, I'm not really sure what can be done.

Mfd - Perhaps you can have @NTG or Dell run a DPack for you so you can get a good idea of where you stand today. Perhaps you can do some consolidation now within your current confines.

I'll say! I posted this in the wee hours this morning and figured I would check back before I get out of here for the day.. O M G!

But I like the activity! Just need to read through it all now haha

@Bob-Beatty said:

It depends on the job. If you have to support end users, you need to be at the office when they are, that is usually a scheduling task. But for engineers, administrators, etc... I don't care, nor do I pay attention. If I have to micro manage that, then I'm in the wrong job and I hired the wrong person.

In this case it was end user support. The part about hiring the wrong person is what turned out to be true in my case, but we've resolved that problem now. Thanks everyone for your advice on this one.

That guy, while valuable, is just a nutter.

It is a very straightforward scam. I'm shocked that people actually not realize that a scam is happening.

Sales engineer is a tough job. I don't think that it is one that is very easy to look for or seek out. Pretty much any SE that I've met seems to have kind of "fallen into" the job role. It's just something that comes along and people grab the opportunity. I am not sure that I know anyone who has started off in their career wanting to be an SE and working towards it in any sort of methodical way.

@hubtechagain said:

post pay

Not sure I asked them and i will post it here soon..

@BBigford said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

It's I suppose believable that there are parents that feel this way, but the student/child? Wow - can we say brain washed?

So I blame this on high school. The average (I'm guessing) high school grad has never worked. By the time that @Minion-Queen, @art_of_shred and I were out of high school we each had years of experience (we all went to school together, that's why the example.) I was working as an IT intern at 13, then did farm work till I was legal to get a normal job and worked continuously through the rest of high school and during my college time. So both high school and college were always "sideline" activities to actually being in the real world and having jobs and careers for all of us.

But for lots and lots of people, high school is their entire focus. It is all that they know and, of course, people who work in schools are focused on that as "the whole world" in the same way. If you think about how there is a huge group of people who live their lives reminiscing about the "glory days" of high school and how cool that senior year football game and homecoming dance were and the rest of life is just working the cash register at the local hardware store and being depressed as life is never as good as high school.

We that same crowd exists, one level up, in college. There are tons of adults for whom college was the "glory days" or they imagine that it would have been and they want their kids to have those same awesome memories and they feel that a happy life and a good career are impossible dreams So, avoiding the hell that is their vision of adult life for four years while they party at college avoiding the responsibilities that will follow seems like the only possible way to at least have a memory of what happiness was like.

You never find people with these feelings that also went on to great careers or are happy with where they are in life.

...and THAT is the reason I stopped working for a mid-size public school district after some years of service, about a month ago. Never again, if I can help it. Never again.

I ran screaming from K12 IT work, and never looked back. It takes a special kind of sucker to do that job. I wouldn't go back to it if you had a gun to my man parts.

@scottalanmiller said:

... except the assumption that the professors can't actually do what they are attempting to teach.

This is my assumption of anyone trying to teach technical level classes at a 4-year college. The folks that I had as teachers were excellent, but you could tell they had little-to-no real world IT Experience. At my technical college, however, the CCNA and A+ teachers actually knew their stuff forwards and backwards and sideways... the Cisco professor even knew his upside down, lol./

How is the job hunt going?

i really find an excellent course of CCNA, really awesome explanation ...
http://www.freeccnastudyguide.com/study-guides/ccna/
can anyone tell me whether it is the latest CCNA V5 or not ??
because they didn't mention the version

Got this up and running last night. Here are my notes:

On AWS EC2 micro instance for PCI compliance, reliability, and practice with AWS. Would probably work just as well on Digital Ocean or Vultr.

Used Debian 8 64 bit HVM AMI to get things started, with SSH access from a specific IP and open ports 80 + 443.

Total list of software installed via apt-get:
nginx
php5-fpm
mariadb-client
mariadb-server
php5-mysql
curl
php5-curl
sendmail

I used Nginx's WordPress config as starting point. Had to modify the PHP socket to match the listen directive in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf, but otherwise worked great.

Once I stopped getting 502 errors and loaded up the install files, things looked pretty good until I got to the license verification step. It said to put in the email address I bought the license with, but gave an error saying it wasn't recognized. I ended up forwarding my purchase receipt to the developer along with my error - this was around 11pm Tuesday evening. I went to bed, and by the time I had woken up I had two emails from the developer: one suggesting a possible fix on my end, and one indicating he had dug deeper on the problem - he found something on his end of things that might have been causing the error and would be working on fixing it today. I was pretty impressed with the quick response!

My hypothesis is that my .co email address was throwing some errors for the verification system but I have no real way of knowing for sure. Yet another reason why I'm moving away from a .co domain, as I've run into a couple of weird snags like this before... Either way, I tried it again last night and it succeeded. It's all hooked up to Stripe and, outside of setting up HTTPS for payments, seems ready to go!

A couple of hiccups along the way:

I didn't realize you needed to install php5-curl as well as php5-mysql at first, leading me to spend some time vehemently disagreeing with the install requirements page saying I didn't have cURL installed on the server. 502 Bad Gateway errors for the nginx WordPress config's PHP socket... I had to hunt down the location of the PHP5-FPM socket to fix this. Part of the installation includes setting 777 permissions on a few folders - I am going to experiment with setting those back down to something less worrisome and see if it breaks the installation tonight.

@scottalanmiller It is for that reason that I never say something is impossible. If I can't come up with a good way to do something, then I'll say "I don't know, let me ask some other folks" and see what everybody else has done in my situation...

...or a lion tamer.

@johnhooks said:

Ya, 8 weeks for a help desk position to help Frank who can't get this POS to turn on.

That's a really long time to have hired someone before you have any idea if they are going to be able to do the job. That is a ton of training for an entry level position.