Just wanted to take a minute and say thank you to everyone. I've been in and out of MangoLassi for about the last year, but frequenting much more in the last 4 months or so. I only post here and Spiceworks really. MangoLassi gives some things that other sites really haven't. The threads here seem to start with a focus, and when the issue is resolved, it often spins off into another direction of good conversation. Not always a bad thing since the conversation can continue and the OP can just stop watching if need. Where other sites discourage that, which doesn't make sense cause you really don't need to start a new topic for every conversation shift. But I digress.

I've definitely taken to a different perspective on things here, rather than just a rigid mindset that I've found in other threads. I find myself considering new concepts while surfing through MangoLassi, and that is really important for continued growth.

A special thanks to some people that have given me some extensive time in private chat, whether it's idle conversation about what's going on, or diving deep into different concepts and ideas about stuff. Seriously, thank you for your time and knowledge. You're the kind of people that make this community truly great for me and help provide a path to being better in more than one regard. @scottalanmiller @zuphzuph @MattSpeller @RojoLoco @dafyre @Dashrender @RamblingBiped @coliver

What's the old saying, "When you get hit by a truck, you get back on that horse." I was never good with sayings, so here's a story.

It's been about a month now. I got laid off just before Christmas because of a telecommunications deal with a few major carriers that went sideways. The company couldn't afford the head count so people were let go. I didn't realize how far up it went until just last week. I have never, ever been let go from a job before. On the contrary, the guy letting me go was actually getting choked up about it, because he's a great guy to work with and I do miss him. He even pushed for 2 months of severance, so that was nice as I had to pay for another semester of school which doesn't come cheap. I also found out last week I didn't get a scholarship I really needed, even though I have a 4.0 and was making no money at the time of applying.

I got laid off at around 11am. I was sitting in my car with all my shit packed up, thinking "well what am I going to do now... I need a drink." But instead of going home, getting wasted, and feeling sorry for myself, I reacted. I put on my Sunday best, and hit the bricks to look for a job. I cut out online jobs, because I've always gotten great jobs cold calling. I had my first interview at 1:30pm, "perfect" I thought, "maybe I'll have a job by the end of the day. Wouldn't that be something." Interviews kept rolling in, but I couldn't lock anything down either because of super low pay, junior engineering positions, or just weirdo companies I didn't want to work for. But I didn't let it discourage me.

So I kept my head up and within a week I had a job. "Man, this is great. I get 2 months severance and now I'm back to making money!" Well that didn't go as planned. That company was paying me engineering wages to do less than sexy work, knowing that I'd be moved into engineering quickly. They weren't transparent about their engineering department, so I put in my first day worth of work, and opted not to return. The manager did say I was very respectful though, and was welcome back any time because I was a great culture fit.

Bummer! Back to square one... I could really use that drink now. By this time I was sifting through online jobs during nights and weekends, and walking the streets looking for a job during operational hours. I love cold calling. I got interviews at every single place I was targeting, but because it was near the end of the year, operational budgets were scarce, so it looked like I wouldn't be employed till the start of the year.

Some days, it has been hard. My girlfriend kisses me goodbye in the morning before she leaves for work, and I go about my day. I text her sometimes, part way through, and tell her it's a rough one and I'm barely keeping it together. She's encouraging, and I'm lucky to have her. I keep my head up, and get back to it.

There was this one company, the first company I applied to and got an interview at the same day I was let go. They tried working around my school schedule, poking at the budget to see if any nickels would fall out to pay me if I could come on. But there was nothing there, and they couldn't work with my schedule. Fast forward to earlier this week. I had gotten a call to come back and interview. Again, I nailed the interview. This was a culture fit interview. They pointed out that having someone with engineering knowledge is great, but they can teach someone anything. They determined I was a great fit for the company, and are paying a good wage to boot, with benefits. I've been in the doctor's office more than a 28 year old should, so medical is important to me.

Today, I accepted an offer from that company. I start on the 4th with the new year's budget. Their final words, "Welcome to the team!" still ring in my ears. It is a very welcomed feeling. For a company to want you to represent them, because you're a great culture fit, and good at what you do. I've never truly appreciated the jobs I had, until I finally lost one.

So now I'll have that drink. Not because I feel sorry for myself, but because I'm celebrating. Cheers everyone, and happy Friday!

-Brandon

People thought I was crazy, but I found it. It takes the form of a car dealership. Cleverly disguised.

I put in my two weeks notice this last week. Mostly because I hated where I worked, absolutely toxic place. So I found new opportunity. I spent the last couple weeks helping out as much as I always have since they lost 2 other people for similar reasons. Those two people were trying to get out for some time.

Today I walked into a firing squad. I walked in and they walked me right back out. In tech, I get it. It's standard in the industry but a shitty thing to do. You're expected to give two weeks so they can get their affairs in order, but they don't do the same so you can get yours in order. I had a really nice email sitting in my drafts for my departure, waiting to be sent to some select people I really valued working with. I held off, because I was asked to keep quiet.

Sitting here with some good German beer in hand (dunkel, if you're wondering). Cheers to bad experiences behind, and to the unknown in front. More importantly, cheers to a 5 day weekend.

Mmm, mango lassi and Taj? Yes please.

Always baffles me when you see a server hasn't been rebooted in over a year. It's my opinion that servers (all servers, regardless of the OS), should be rebooted as part of the monthly patch cycle, to test the hardware.

How could anyone know it will come back following a power outage, or something which forces a reboot...

Client gets infected with cryptoware, a surprising conversation went as follows:

Person: "Please tell me $client has healthy backups."

Me: "Yep. I receive health reports every day and mitigate issues as soon as I receive faults."

Person: "Well they just got hit with cryptoware."

Me: "Yikes. Time to break out the backups."

Person: "Are you joking? You don't just immediately think to restore a server."

Me: "Well that's why we have backups, and it's the only way to sanitize the server... What do you recommend?"

Person: "Isolate the server and go through the logs. Clean it up, don't restore it."

Me: "That doesn't make any sense... Clean WHAT up? The files are all encrypted."

Person: "Have you even looked for a decryptor?"

Me: "No... that wastes more time than just restoring for around the next hour."

Person: "Seriously, do not restore servers as a go-to. That's just lazy."

I'm lost here... I don't think I missed something. You get hit, you restore. Server crashes, you restore. That's why we have backups...

I had to give a user a quote for a MacBook Pro. They need dedicated graphics and I went to look at Apple for a build-to-buy. Looks like they really slimmed that down. The only one that doesn't just have Iris graphics is their highest end model for $2499.99 ....

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

I was thinking about this on the way to work today. A colleague is going to be putting in their notice, and we were on the discussion of how much time to give. I've never been slighted by an employer before, but here's what I've witnessed over the years:

*Person puts in their 2 week notice. They finish it out and move on.

*Person is somewhat on their last leg, puts in their notice, employer fires them since they are leaving anyway.

Person puts in their notice with an employer they have a REALLY good relationship with. Working with the employer, they are really cool and level headed. Employer fires this really good employee on the spot after receiving a 1-month notice. I ask the employer, very surprised. Employer's response, "meh, he's leaving anyway. F** him. It's just business."

*In an environment highly concerned with security, I saw many people get put on administrative leave during their two week notice. I was actually given the option, "We can either put you on leave and phase you out, you'll be paid the entire time, or you can work and be paid." I opted to be put on leave with pay, and they could contact me with any questions about the transition. I received many questions, as well as a comment of "geez... you have a lot of institutional knowledge. Would you like to come back during the duration?" I already had a new gig so I declined.

I've had employers tell me they want me to give as much notice as possible, because talent in that area was very sparse and it took a long time to find someone. While others would fire you if it meant you wanted to leave.

Bottom line, how much notice do you put in? Because if you have a good relationship, and are trying to help out the employer by giving a HUGE notice, they may not return the favor. I think the average is typically 2 weeks as it's pretty standard...

Likely, I missed something. There have been a couple different people either using a term at work that is not correct, or I am wrong here.

Me: "Is that SAN FC or ethernet?"
Person 1: "It is iSCSI."
Me: "Ok, so the physical interface is ethernet then...? I need to know what card is in it."
Person 1: "It is iSCSI..."
Me: "Right, that is the protocol the servers connect to it by. I need to know... nevermind, I'll just look myself... Glad I looked, it's FC."

Received an email from another person about something completely unrelated to the SAN discussion... "the new iSCSI switches are NOT trunked to the rest of the network." ... so, ethernet switches?

Am I missing something here? There's no physical 'iSCSI' I thought... it's an IP based networking protocol, not an actual physical interface.

@Dashrender said in Excel freezing:

@bbigford said in Excel freezing:

Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.

Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.

Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).

Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.

On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.

Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.

Decent list of options

1. user is on 64 bit - I made the switch for my images about the time MS made the recommendation change
2. hardware acceleration is disabled, but only after reported issues
3. there are zero Office add-ons
4. good idea - I'll run a memtest tonight. This is a 6 month old workstation class HP machine, though it does not have ECC RAM.
5. could be failing drive - but this user has been having issues for years over 4+ different machines, seems unlikely.
6. The files do all live on the network - a Windows 2012 R2 server. Most if not all of the excel files do not reference other worksheets.

Ah, you'll waste your time on memtest. I didn't realize it was happening on 4 different workstations. It's not the workstation.

I've also had this be a permissions issue. I had one weird incident where a file had share and NTFS permissions all over the place. It was basically recalculating the perms while they worked, because I changed shared to FC everyone and gave the person most access to the folder and the issue went away.

Nice video.

I've found in conversations that if I provided too much technical detail, thinking they wanted to know, it ultimately destroys the conversation and gets everyone off track. Approaching conversations with business value first, technical second, was an interesting growth area for me.

@Emad-R said in Robocopy/7-zip bat file with high compression ratio:

try to use those

simple put ``` at the start and end to make block

And that looks very complex, robocopy is meant to be easy I used it back in the day

simply

robocopy /mir /mt source target

anytime you want to make full copy make 7zip archive of it, like snapshot.

I use /mir /mt: most often. Works fine. I sometimes forget /mt: and immediately see slowness with large jobs.

Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.

Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.

Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).

Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.

On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.

Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.

FastStone also works fine.

https://chocolatey.org/packages/fsviewer

We support several tools for BYOD, VMware Workspace One and Microsoft InTune being the most common.

For the companies that support BYOD, they will ask some specific users to put email and company apps on their phone; but they don't strongly imply or anything toeing legal related.

The MDM solution used is really specific on the data that it can see and has control over. If a user chooses to use their personal device, they are agreeing to have that company data controlled, not their entire device; meaning that if they leave the company then the company can remotely remove that data from their device. The company is also monitoring the usage of that data within that company app, as part of the terms that the user is displayed with upon setting up the app.

If a user is provided a company stipend for a cell phone, by using their personal phone, there may be qualifications of a device that have to be met. These could include: phone call and SMS text messaging availability, photos, email, and specific company apps that run on a certain platform such as Android and/or iOS. Basically, the company will provide a stipend to most modern smart phones, no flip phones as they likely don't have the basic functionality for certain things such as email/etc. If a user is uncomfortable with the company having any access to their device, then they can go without the stipend, but the company is thereby not allowed to attempt contacting the person on their personal device as that's a clear separation; another alternative is a company requiring the employee to carry a company-provided device instead of offering a stipend, with certain hours/days that the employee must respond to inquiries using the device (possibly even limited to whom they are able to respond, i.e. no personal calls made or personal data stored).

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Desktop Setup Ideas:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

KVM is also nice because you can continue using that machine as a regular desktop as well, if you need to do so. (Can't do that with VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer).

No one expects to use their Type 1 hypervisor as a desktop.

What? Tons do. Both KVM and Hyper-V are very popular for exactly this.

No. . . very few people say "I'm going to install Hyper-V and use it as my daily driver on my Dell Server" no one does that.

Actually a HUGE number do. It's insanely common for developers especially and IT folk. It's hard to state how common this is.

Have you never heard of the desktop virtualization market? This is a totally normal thing. Nearly everyone I know does this, both IT and dev and loads that are neither.

The only reason I don't use Hyper-V for testing is because we get VMware Workstation for free as a partner; I used VirtualBox for a long time when Hyper-V on Windows 7 couldn't create virtual machines, just to test out a few things or use it as a place to keep up-to-date images which I could capture later for deployment without using any additional server resources.

Type 1 definitely runs better as it doesn't stack the hypervisor on top of the OS, but I definitely don't see VMware Workstation going away.

I can see a couple niche things about VMware Workstation though; of course, there is more to add to the list. 1) Many that don't use it to push new configs to their VMware environment; if it's just being used as stand alone for some VMs, you could use literally anything else (and many are free obviously). 2) Nested virtualization to test clustering, site replication, etc while not needing to buy really expensive hardware.

One thing I am shocked many MSPs don't do, which we've done since the first deployment, is secure each Office 365 CSP account (delegated access to each customer through one provider portal) with MFA. In reality, if the MSP was compromised, every customer is then compromised.

I also witnessed many MSPs not securing their secure password databases with MFA. They secured the front end client application in case a computer was compromised or stolen, but the database itself was wide open.

@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@bbigford said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

They are slow as fuck in most environments

Are they slow, or did someone underprovision the Shitrix environment behind it?

Not a configuration issue with infrastructure (Citrix or VMware), since zero clients ran great. The thin hardware endpoints were always just slow as fuck.

@Emad-R said in Guess what SSH can do VPN:

The protocol that has more features than my mom

I envy you for having a living mom.