@scottalanmiller said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:

@JaredBusch said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:

@scottalanmiller's recent example clearly shows that. I would be interested to know how many man hours @NTG sunk into restoring that. And it was a small typical SMB office. Not a huge SaaS provider.

Not done yet. But ~28 to mostly recovered.

I"ve seen everything from 1 billable hour of labor (kicking off Veeam restore of 4 VM's and coming back when it was done) to 200 hours (rebuild from scratch, and recovered core ERP database from a developer clone on someone's laptop).

@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

They hired some IT service provider for like $600+ a month to do random stuff we don't even need, but mostly be an IT backup phone if ever needed by the new guy. The dollar bills in my eyes are kinda saying, screw paying them $600, just pay me $600 retainer and I'll answer emails from the new guy and maybe do a few more advanced things like web dev. But that is contract rates, they would only get about 20-30 minutes of my time a day, max. Is that worth a retainer? Just for a few months or something? I suppose they can contract me just like any other client who comes calling. So I'm trying to decide whether I completely cut ties, or let them keep paying me to aid the new inexperienced person.
I know even if I try to cut ties, I will not escape the occasional communication, I just know it.

You are one person. They are a cross-function team with different skills you might not see, and also they have SOMEONE who can work 24/7 365. You occasionally might be at a wedding, or in Maui or just might not feel like picking up that day. There is a large premium on this.

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

We're not using it for 2FA - its just to verify the following:

Your in North America (Foreign cell phone numbers wont work)
You are actually a real human being (because you have to put it in)
You are not planning on committing fraud.

DING DING DING

Given how much VOIP fraud and spam is happening, telco's need to be able to have something that traces back to a person the FBI can lock up.
This (combined with shaken+Stir being deployed) is critical to saving the PSTN.

Couple thoughts..

I think 1/2 my trades are issued from my cell phone. (Generally when I"m selling vested RSU or ESPP). It's convenient as I've got my 2FA token on my phone. As others have noted actual trading doesn't drive much. A lot of traders (like the local energy trading floors) use thin clients.

This isn't stock trading which implies your roommate is a moron who should be putting money in a 401K, HSA, a Roth or maybe some index funds if he's feeling frisky and needs liquidity on a shorter time table.

quantumtrading is a dynamic currency risk indicator program for forex trading. My general viewpoint is only the absurdly well capitalized (triple comma club) have any business trading currency for anything other than hedging other positions (and even then there are other ways to hedge currency like JNUG, or just buying treasuries).

If your roommate is serious about YOLO currency trading using 1000x leverage, I might want to direct him to the best place for such degenerate gambling intelligent discussions, reddit.com/r/wsb/

@Emad-R Eh, I got 6 of them with the maximum memory (4GB). Also looking to acquire some beefier ARM platforms that I can run experimental ESXi builds on. - https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRM8040S00D16GE008S00CH/ has caught my eye, but there are a few other ARM packages that are also reasonably priced and have different capabilities (Jetson etc from Nvidia for CUDA etc). Was really hoping rancher would sort out a ARM install but egh, might end up running that on my Intel NUCs.

@jmoore said in How do you know what a fair salary is for the area you work?:

@StorageNinja Really interesting points because I'm looking for a change too. Thanks for the info!

The funniest conversation was one shop that only offered 1 week of vacation max. They also wanted staff working on-call and after late calls still coming in at 8 AM. Had to explain to the VP that either that policy needed to go, or he needed to hand out 30% raises across the board to stop his attrition problem. In places where IT staff engaged in criminal behavior (Deleted data when being fired, running rogue servers at work, planting listneing devices in the board meeting) it was ALWAYS in a place where they were "getting a hell of a deal" on the skills of the staff they had. Discount IT staff are... expensive. Between that and staff who were honest but just wayyy underskilled (and projects took months instead of hours or days). arguing about paying an extra 15 or 20K just isn't worth it in most larger shops to get the right people.

Why should you listen to the Ninja?
I was a hiring manager for an MSP/IT consultancy. Note, because of my role I also was privileged to what a lot of my customer's IT staff were making (They'd either tell me, or it would come up in discussions with management if they were getting good value from their staff). I now work in a global role for a major technology company and fly around and talk to IT admins and archiects all over the world.

@Pete-S said in Does VMware have developer/trial licensing?:

I was wondering if VMware has some kind of developer licensing for ESXi, vSAN and vCenter or if they can be installed on some kind of time limited trial license for testing?

Thanks!

You can download almost anything for a free trial and get a time limited key. For a lab/testing enviroment VMUG advantage is cheap as chips. If you just want to kick the tires on something Hands on Labs are not terrible.

@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

ESXi recommends SD card, USB is a bit to fragile for the number of writes you'd be making to it.

M.2 SSD is the recomendation. SD cards lack any kind of ECC and the controllers are too dumb to prevent read discards. Throw in the fact that cheap SD cards are slow on boot, you can log local on a M.2, I'd say for non-lab usage M.2 is the recomendation going forward.

If you must go embedded SD card, I'd get at least 32GB as it will likely have fewer read endurance issues.

@Pete-S said in Dell PERC H740 with SSDs?:

I think not. The H330 (LSI SAS 3008 controller) will push hundreds of thousands of IOPs. The bottleneck will be your SSDs.

The H330 is the crap HBA that has a cut-down queue depth. If memory serves, it's maximum queue depth is equal to a single SAS drive (256 commands). It's still better than the garbage tier H300 from the last generation.

The HBA 330 is the version that has full queue depth.
Note, for high-performance setups, going all NVMe is easier (no need for an HBA).

@scottalanmiller said in Proxmox install for use with a ceph cluster:

We could have told you that. True hardware RAID cannot be bypassed, it's physically in the path, if you cut it out, the drives have to vanish.

Some RAID controllers have a way of running pass through. For the 3108 based cards (Example P730) there is a pass through. Note historically it's been "pretty damn buggy", and it took a lot of joint engineering to get it stable enough for our purposes (don't even dare try it with the 2208 based 6Gbps Avago parts). Now this is kinda moot as everyone's using 3008 pure HBA firmware parts (We stopped certifying RAID controllers from Broadcom for pass through) and the other thing that's making it moot is NVMe running "proper" talks directly to the PCI-E bus. There are "Tri-Mode" RAID controllers that can raid NVMe but I just don't see a point. You bottleneck throughput pretty hard pretty fast.

@scottalanmiller said in Proxmox install for use with a ceph cluster:

Yes, but it blocks SMART so you never want to do it, it undermines the stability of the JBOD. There's always a standard controller on the MOBO for the JBOD connections.

Also blocks TRIM commands (not that I trust the Linux TRIM driver to ATA drives given how many one off exceptions to disable they've had to write).
Operationally it's messy because on a drive failure you have to go in with PERCLI etc, and rebuild the RAID 0s. We used to run this but it was just a royal pain in the ass.

@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:

Right, those would be the options. Obviously the colo approach is cheap and easy and going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.

You put VDI in public cloud for a few reasons:

1. You have some shitty DB2 based app that requires 1ms of latency from the app to the DB and the dataset is in that cloud (and for political/gravity reasons you can't move it)

2. At a certain scale being able to spin up a Desktop pool for 8 hours then shut it down (and not pay for it) for 16 a day (and roll through regions and follow employees) you can do some wacky things to cut costs.

3. Microsoft licensing being punitive as hell for some things that are not in Azure, or Oracle kinda forcing people to put things in Oracle Cloud and you want desktops that are "close" to other applications.

@scottalanmiller I went to a private religious k-12 school (The movie SAVED! with Mandy Moore is really the closest explanation of it) and we had Bob Jones history text books. The result was rather hilarious. A 2 page spread on why the Beatles were the beginning of the downfall of western civilization. Lots of anti-catholic references.

They used a 3rd grade health book to cover sex ed (or rather avoid it).

Generally 1-2 chapters of any science class were anti-evolution talking points. Somehow this stuff even crept into non-biology classes.

Honestly if it wasn't for the internet, Encarta, the library and some AP classes (That used college level text books) I would have been an idiot.

I went to public school, and it wasn't this horribly place that everyone made it out to be. The biggest issue was they taught to the lowest common denominator in the room and I ended up in the dumb kid hall (transfer mid year). Honestly the teachers were nice, they cared, and the kinds were nicer than at the private school I had attended (For the most part).

20 network printers - Printer support is one of the lowest tiers of IT pay. Saying you worked somewhere too poor to outsource it (or have a tier 1 bench guy to deal with it) implies lower wages.

 Configured and maintained several virtual environments, including Windows XP and Microsoft Server 2003 - A 16 year old, and 13 year old operating system have nothing to do with a virtual environment. This line right here I would have thrown out the resume over.

Deployed several ADP time clock server systems for use both locally and out of state - How about Deployed and supported HR tracking system across state lines. Time clocks also are pretty low on the pay value standpoint.

 Developed and implemented several quality control processes. Tell me more specifically as well as what the outcome was. Ex. "Standardized on a common image and application deployment system with SCCM and Airwatch to cut new employee setup from 1 week to 15 minutes, with Mobile device app deployment being self service." What you did, what business problem it fixed, and how impactful was it.

Organized several networking closets, maintaining business continuity and reducing network latency. Another meaningless sentence. "Brought in structured cabling, flattened 3 tier network design to leaf spine, solving multicast problems for imaging performance, and reducing the support and management costs by 50%" Cleaning up some cables in a closet, and color coding them makes it sound like you didn't have much productive work to do and were bored.

 Managed setup and maintenance of Active Directory, Windows 2003 server - More highly generic phrasing. - Deployed GPO's to homogenize configurations, automate printer and application deployments of end user devices, and reduce application ticket support by 60%. Your original sentence implies you had a single 2003 server in the entire place, and somehow that kept you occupied for 5 years. This isn't something I'd want to highlight that the environment was this small/simple.

Network Administrator Junior - So this place had one server and you were the junior guy? I tend to drop superlative title bits that don't really make sense (I would simply say network administrator). I used to have a title that was 4 works long (Junior Assistant Systems Analyst) or some nonsense that 3 of the 4 words implied I was a lackey. I simply put Systems Administrator (What most closely tied to my job) on my resume.

I feel special (and finally recovered from it).

@anonymous This is not correct. That is the price WITH one year of support. Additional support (And upgrades) are ~1K a year (assuming mission critical 24/7 phone support contract) so comparing that to free anything else is apples/oranges.

@DustinB3403 said in What are you listening to? What would you recommend?:

FYI I just called out that p***k storageninja

Spice Pe**** forum.

Sorry if you can't read it.

here is a screen grab (does google read these?)

That guys a dick!

@scottalanmiller said in You can't quit, you're fired!!:

@s.hackleman said in You can't quit, you're fired!!:

@coliver said in You can't quit, you're fired!!:

@DustinB3403 Find me a reference then. Everything I've seen points to the opposite. You are employed at the will of the company and can be terminated for almost any reason, or no reason. It doesn't matter if you've put in your two weeks notice or not. For reference here is the NYS Attorney General's list of Employee Rights.

https://ag.ny.gov/labor/your-rights-employee

No where does it say protection during a transitional period.

Also in an at-will state here. You are paid for the hours worked, if your employer let's you go, they have to pay you for every minute up until that point, but once you are fired, quit or other wise not working, your pay ends. If there is another contract outside of that, that may be the case, but nothing exists on state labor laws. Typically, you only give your 2 week notice so when you use the place you worked on your resume they will mark you available for rehire, and give a positive review. If you bail with no notice they won't mark you for rehire, then using them as a reference can be difficult.

Yeah, ALL of the power comes down to things like unemployment costs and claims with references. You say they fired you for putting in notice, they can't legally deny it. They want to say you quit, you can prove that you didn't. You want to claim unemployment, they have no way to stop it because they fired you. They want you back, you can negotiate anything that you want, you have no obligations at all. Firing you puts most of the power in your hands. Other than stopping you from riding out two weeks, you get all the cards. They also make it public that they don't accept notice, so other employees have no professional obligation to give notice either. It's now a free for all for others to quit simply by calling in on the morning that they start their next job. That's not something an employer wants happening.

This is also when you fire people you pay a severance so employees don't get paranoid and jump ship to avoid cashflow issues if they THINK they might get let go in a RIF. Companies that just "throw people out" and stop paying them are more likely to see employees do the same.

If an employees regularly fires people without putting them on a performance improvement plan, giving warnings, and pays no severance people are going to be much more aggressively always looking for their next job.

I've heard of us giving 3 months pay and medical insurance as severance. That means if we have a down quarter people are less likely to run for the exits and more likely to come back if they can find another role.

@scottalanmiller said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

@momurda said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

Short sellers typically don't own the stock they are selling.

In finance, short selling (also known as shorting or going short) is the practice of selling securities or other financial instruments that are not currently owned (usually borrowed), and subsequently repurchasing them ("covering"). In the event of an interim price decline, the short seller profits, since the cost of (re)purchase is less than the proceeds received upon the initial (short) sale. Conversely, the short position closes out at a loss if the price of a shorted instrument rises prior to repurchase.

Yes, but you can't remove that part of the market. All investing is investing "against" something. You can't isolate certain types and limit it. Forcing people to only invest in growth and never in shrinkage is a huge problem.

I took out options against Nutanix after IPO because I thought they were overvalued. I made money. Inversely someone thought it was going up and took the opposite position. What exactly is unethical about what I did? It was a business contract between me and the other party in the option.

@Dashrender Belive SA is required for Exchange/SQL to move hosts if memory serves.