The 'I work in I.T' thread

[Advikaz]

New faster line goes into customer.
Customer complains speed on WiFi is still s**t.
Engineer checks controller.
All users connected to SSID that has bandwidth limitations.

We had a client last week who didn't want to pay the money, so decommed and binned their server themselves.

Obviously didn't check for any dependencies or services (which there were) and took out Radius in doing so

 

[Ray Gin]

Is anyone familiar with a system that can assist with keeping on top of physical stock/material levels?

At work we have a stone age system of a paper stock check. Once a week a work order (unique job ID) is assigned for someone to physically go and check stock levels and update the sheet.

Is there a way that we can state the quantity of the most commonly used parts and have a Qr code on the shelf that we can scan, and when parts are taken from that shelf a page comes up saying 'Quantity taken - with a dropdown list of numbers'.

Then a threshold set, so when the stock amount is 20% of the 'full' amount, it pings an automated 'Low stock of part xyz' to management?

 

[charltjr]

Is anyone familiar with a system that can assist with keeping on top of physical stock/material levels?

At work we have a stone age system of a paper stock check. Once a week a work order (unique job ID) is assigned for someone to physically go and check stock levels and update the sheet.

Is there a way that we can state the quantity of the most commonly used parts and have a Qr code on the shelf that we can scan, and when parts are taken from that shelf a page comes up saying 'Quantity taken - with a dropdown list of numbers'.

Then a threshold set, so when the stock amount is 20% of the 'full' amount, it pings an automated 'Low stock of part xyz' to management?

Many moons ago I worked for a company called Kerridge Commercial Systems, that sort of stuff was their core business although it was becoming part of a much bigger ERP product.

They’re still going, and the software was solid, so might be worth a look to see if they still offer anything along those lines.

 

[Hixle]

We do exactly that @Ray Gin, but not as a standalone solution typically. But yeah, could even automate a procurement process to buy more stock once the ‘below 20%’ is triggered.

Was going to DM you the details but you limit your DM’s, you knob 😂

 

[Ray Gin]

Many moons ago I worked for a company called Kerridge Commercial Systems, that sort of stuff was their core business although it was becoming part of a much bigger ERP product.

They’re still going, and the software was solid, so might be worth a look to see if they still offer anything along those lines.

Cheers!

We do exactly that @Ray Gin, but not as a standalone solution typically. But yeah, could even automate a procurement process to buy more stock once the ‘below 20%’ is triggered.

Was going to DM you the details but you limit your DM’s, you knob 😂

I didn’t actually know that…I think it’s sorted now?😂

 

[Krarl]

We use netbox for asset management and inventory items

Open source but takes management skills and a bit of dev knowledge. There are plenty of paid things out there that are much easier to set up though

 

[Krarl]

 

[andybond]

We use netbox for asset management and inventory items

Open source but takes management skills and a bit of dev knowledge. There are plenty of paid things out there that are much easier to set up though

Netbox isnt bad , but its a bit clunky. I dont think I have got to the same part of any page the same way twice!

 

[Krarl]

Netbox isnt bad , but its a bit clunky. I dont think I have got to the same part of any page the same way twice!

For something opensource you can't complain, especially when you start adding packages

We're still yet to upgrade to Netbox4. It's vastly better than ServiceNow though, what a steaming heap of shite that is. 6 years I had to deal with it

 

[andybond]

For something opensource you can't complain, especially when you start adding packages

We're still yet to upgrade to Netbox4. It's vastly better than ServiceNow though, what a steaming heap of shite that is. 6 years I had to deal with it

Ah , another product I know.

Bag of shite as well.

Have you used the MS IPAM?

 

[Krarl]

Ah , another product I know.

Bag of shite as well.

Have you used the MS IPAM?

I haven't mate

Typically we left the IPAM up to SRE but now we've been sold off we're learning about a whole new world instead of being so stupidly silo'd

 

[.Joe]

Ah , another product I know.

Bag of shite as well.

Have you used the MS IPAM?

Excel works fantastically as an ipam 👀

 

[Krarl]

Excel works fantastically as an ipam 👀

And password share... On a non password protected file with customer numbers, server hostnames and IPs all in one easy to manage space...

 

[Donny_Dog]

For something opensource you can't complain, especially when you start adding packages

We're still yet to upgrade to Netbox4. It's vastly better than ServiceNow though, what a steaming heap of shite that is. 6 years I had to deal with it

Wot dis, Netbox4 about? I need to look at that.

Just finished a proof of concept using virtual Palo's and Cisco NVA's in Azure and my wormhole is blown open. Its incredibly ghey, is cloud.

 

[Krarl]

Wot dis, Netbox4 about? I need to look at that.

Just finished a proof of concept using virtual Palo's and Cisco NVA's in Azure and my wormhole is blown open. Its incredibly ghey, is cloud.

Aye I think 4 has only just come out

 

[rctempire]

We use netbox for asset management and inventory items

Open source but takes management skills and a bit of dev knowledge. There are plenty of paid things out there that are much easier to set up though

Good suggestion. May have a tinker to use it for more, personal customers first. Handy though.

 

[Donny_Dog]

Use on the pc/laptop for those meeting where you just waste your life being on mute in the background.

I always hit the fckin post

Roberto Baggio’s Magical Kicks

 

[charltjr]

We have just been bought by a big private equity firm who have their own dedicated offshore unit in India.

As expected it’s all very “don’t spook the staff” at the moment but big cuts are inevitable, it’s what I’d do in their shoes. Will be surprised if I still have a job in 12 months, but meh, at least I can plan for it.

They‘ve delisted us from the stock exchange, so we’re all getting our share options paid out in full (company switched to part cash part shares bonuses a few years back).

They are going to face a serious brain drain if they mishandle the next month, giving the staff a cash handout and then not being open about their plans will not go well. I know several key people are waiting to see what’s said in the next couple of all hands calls and if it’s just the usual happy clappy garbage they are gone.

Fun times 😂

 

[Donny_Dog]

Same thing happened at my last place.
Seems like it's the global norm! Private equity job.

Bought out, move all skilled functions to cheaper countries, customer satisfaction nose dives, products get worse, sold off in smaller chunks.
Usually the decent ones who see what's coming, start prepping and leave early. Looks like you're one of those.
I've worked with folk who believed the bull s**t fed to them, and stayed. With a hope of redundancy or a pay off. By the time they get anything theyre sick of the place, get less than thought and then have to rush about in the market to try find alternative employment.

 

[charltjr]

Same thing happened at my last place.
Seems like it's the global norm! Private equity job.

Bought out, move all skilled functions to cheaper countries, customer satisfaction nose dives, products get worse, sold off in smaller chunks.
Usually the decent ones who see what's coming, start prepping and leave early. Looks like you're one of those.
I've worked with folk who believed the bull s**t fed to them, and stayed. With a hope of redundancy or a pay off. By the time they get anything theyre sick of the place, get less than thought and then have to rush about in the market to try find alternative employment.

I’m hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. If they come out and say they will be offshoring shared functions and first/second line support over time then I would respect that.

If they don’t say that, then they’re most likely liars and I’m going to take my time to find something else which is right for me before the axe falls.

Offshoring is the obvious move and will reduce costs without hurting service levels if it’s done right. In fact, we tried to put an offshored function for the less specialist support functions years back, but the company wouldn’t invest in the startup costs. If it’s done ruthlessly then it’s always a disaster.

 

[Donny_Dog]

I agree in part, one thing that's never really considered is the satisfaction of those users, customers etc - who consume 1st/2nd line - before it's too late. The reputation damage of shifting to cheaper labour states is hard to recover from.

It may sound derogatory or racist TBF but in my experience (so I'm just talking about that rather than going full Farage) is that India in particular - the workers never say no.
Therefore you can never get honesty that they can even do what they're asked. They also turn em and burn em with employment ruthlessness not seen on these shores (in the last 20 years or so, at least).
I've had some truely horrible experiences with off shoring 1st/2nd line in a quarter of a century of doing IT. Agreed, financially it makes sense - company accountants or heads of finance dictating business strategy is always a big worry for me - but it has never ended well, when it's happened.

You know what you're doing though - I'm just venting my s**t. Don't read into it, as I'm just an old miserable duffer. Hope it all works out, sure it will.

 

[Advikaz]

We’ve also just merged with another firm. Seems to be a lot of this going on at the mo.

A small handful of admin staff went very early on as they already had those elements. Thankfully they don’t have a department that does what my lot do, so we should be okay .. and they’re very interested in what we do.

Nobody knows. But so far so good. They’re giving us all pay rises and have said there’s no more staff going.

They’re a US firm and decided to buy a successful UK outfit rather than trying to develop it on their own, which makes sense. In doing so they have over doubled their U.K. client base, which still needs managing right ?

We shall see. Thankfully I’m running on sequential 7 month record months and have just had the best month ever for the company.

Fingers crossed. If not, off to new pastures, which tbh, isn’t the end of the world.

 

[charltjr]

It may sound derogatory or racist TBF but in my experience (so I'm just talking about that rather than going full Farage) is that India in particular - the workers never say no.

You are absolutely right, and there’s nothing racist about it IMO. Some contractors from India who I’ve worked with in the past have been absolutely top notch, the equal of anyone. People pulled in to do lower end jobs can often have that awful culture of dishonesty through omission and never being able to say no. I don’t know, but I’ve had it suggested to me by people from India that it’s partly the caste system and partly the total lack of job security.

We were looking at setting up a satellite office in Eastern Europe partly to get around that and partly because it’s so much closer that we could afford to have people out there long enough and frequently enough to get the company culture right.

I wanted us to have a really good front line and second line team which could cover all the products in the portfolio and act as a pipeline to feed future specialists and team leads, but nope, wouldn’t pay for it and wouldn’t lay down the law to some PITA personalities who just wanted to build their own empires.

So now it’s years later and we still have several discreet support units across multiple locations, all looking after their own domain, and all absolutely starved of resource. It’s madness. It’s one of the reasons I quit managing the support function and moved to a senior troubleshooting role. It’s more fun and I don’t have to bang my head against the political brick walls of a tech company run by salespeople and accountants.

But hey, it’s good that I’m not still pissed off about it, right? 😂

No VC company is going to come in, look at that, and go “yeah, this is how it should be“……..

 

[Krarl]

Our site recently got sold by our past employer in March

The new company that have taken over of one of the brands here and our site have been amazing. All support staff are based in the UK, we have a couple of networks guys and SRE in Sri Lanka who are actually nothing like Indians which is a massive bonus. I feel like I have purpose again and I'm actually running a Datacentre, not just washing/working on my car at work and occasionally answering questions to senior directors that seemingly have f**k all clue

There's no more middle management between me and our CTO, he is my boss and I'm in contact with the CTO/CEO/MD daily. They pay me well, they're looking out for me, the best interests of the customers (not just saying it either), everyone in the company is sound as they've cherry picked people they have known well over the past 2 decades and they call me a c**t. I mean what more can I ask for

 

[charltjr]

As if all the other b****cks wasn’t bad enough…. “Drop don’t the ball on BAU”…..

 

[mace¬]

We’ve also just merged with another firm. Seems to be a lot of this going on at the mo.

A small handful of admin staff went very early on as they already had those elements. Thankfully they don’t have a department that does what my lot do, so we should be okay .. and they’re very interested in what we do.

Nobody knows. But so far so good. They’re giving us all pay rises and have said there’s no more staff going.

They’re a US firm and decided to buy a successful UK outfit rather than trying to develop it on their own, which makes sense. In doing so they have over doubled their U.K. client base, which still needs managing right ?

We shall see. Thankfully I’m running on sequential 7 month record months and have just had the best month ever for the company.

Fingers crossed. If not, off to new pastures, which tbh, isn’t the end of the world.

I've been in work 25 years and have had the same job, I am on my 7th different company now due to being acquired/sold off.

Redundancy is a brutal business and I survived near on 7 years being told my job was up for review every quarter lol. Been settled in nicely at what was a smaller company <300 staff when I was TUPE'd over from 250,000 five years ago, we have been acquired a few times since then and things are looking a lot more corporate shareholder biased but still good.

Mental really.

 

[Donny_Dog]

When I return home after a bad day of disabling BGP by accident... All I wanna do, is mount our lass for 5 mins, to take my mind off it.

But no

 

[.Joe]

Just what was needed on a friday morning

1500 devices that can't boot

 

[Matt Cup]

View attachment 1702514

Just what was needed on a friday morning

1500 devices that can't boot

Is that related to what @Clart posted?

https://cliosport.net/threads/global-it-issue.850261/

 

[Krarl]

View attachment 1702514

Just what was needed on a friday morning

1500 devices that can't boot

1st line: "Have you tried turning them off and on again?"

 

[.Joe]

1st line: "Have you tried turning them off and on again?"

Current work around to get critical stuff back online

CMD from recovery options

change to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers

Rename Crowdstrike to Crowdstrike_Fucked

Start windows

 

[Naughty Boy]

Chaos persists as IT outage could take time to fix, says cybersecurity firm boss

Airports, banking and healthcare were all hit when a Crowdstrike update triggered huge Microsoft outages.

www.bbc.co.uk

Related?

Company I’m contracting for today is huge and all off line currently.

 

[Donny_Dog]

Microsoft+Crowdstrike f**k up combo it appears.

I'm flying later. f**king w*****s.
I want to see the RFC presented for this change at CAB.

 

[Clart]

What a day.

 

[Krarl]

Thankfully we've faced 0 issues so far

 

[mace¬]

lol, 6am this morning servers started dropping like flies, first thought it was a cyber attack and here we go, then both DCs were out. Cheers Crowdstrike.

 

[Krarl]

Ouch! How are the penguins coping @mace¬ ?

 

[mace¬]

Ouch! How are the penguins coping @mace¬ ?

Quiet today, no planes flying overhead, Less to pick up.

 

[Advikaz]

Always deploy major changes straight to prod and do it as close to the weekend as possible.

 

[Rojer]

Always deploy major changes straight to prod and do it as close to the weekend as possible.

No one has the money for pre prod and testing mate. Just send it, be reet!