[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Ask a grumpy IT manager anything... (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 4/1/2013 9:14:17 PM EDT
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An Equinix datacenter provider houses some very important equipment for the company I work for. The datacenter announced last Wednesday they would be moving our equipment and fiber connections to a new building Friday evening. They changed the migration window and date 3 times and it is now happening tonight. Much to my dismay.
They didn't schedule this with us months in advance. They didn't schedule it on a weekend in the middle of the night as is common. They didn't hold to the scheduled date and time. And now they are going way over the migration window (saw that coming). My staff is on standby to begin testing once the migration is complete. This is now working its way towards a serious business impacting event such that employees may not be going in to work tomorrow morning. Ask me anything... |
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Tell us about the Year 2038 problem. UNIX time is called epoch. Its the number of seconds since Jan 1 1970. Originally represented in a 32 bit signed integer. In 2038 this integer will roll over to a negative value. Not good. But by then we'll be using a 64 bit integer. |
My son is a software developer, currently working for a small company, but thinking of moving on. What programming skills are in most demand? I know he does or has done work in C-based languages, Linux, mobile app development, Java, web development, at least a little Cobol, along with a lot of stuff I don't know about. 
As a career path, would it make sense for him to pursue a Master's degree in CS or a related field? He's young, about 1 1/2 years out of college, and could easily go back if it would benefit him. Thanks! |
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My son is a software developer, currently working for a small company, but thinking of moving on. What programming skills are in most demand? I know he does or has done work in C-based languages, Linux, mobile app development, Java, web development, at least a little Cobol, along with a lot of stuff I don't know about.
As a career path, would it make sense for him to pursue a Master's degree in CS or a related field? He's young, about 1 1/2 years out of college, and could easily go back if it would benefit him. Thanks! I'm not a professional developer. We hire mainly C devs. |
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An Equinix datacenter provider houses some very important equipment for the company I work for. The datacenter announced last Wednesday they would be moving our equipment and fiber connections to a new building Friday evening. They changed the migration window and date 3 times and it is now happening tonight. Much to my dismay. They didn't schedule this with us months in advance. They didn't schedule it on a weekend in the middle of the night as is common. They didn't hold to the scheduled date and time. And now they are going way over the migration window (saw that coming). My staff is on standby to begin testing once the migration is complete. This is now working its way towards a serious business impacting event such that employees may not be going in to work tomorrow morning. Ask me anything... Ashburn? |
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At least you won't have to do as I did many years ago.... Sit on a conference call during our frame relay cut over for three hours listening to one of the project managers from our telecom yell at her kids while the tech drove from CO to CO. One of our sites had the orginial circuit for our PoP, and they had routed it all over hell and back because they did not have the equipment in the closest CO....
BTW - her kids were brats.... ETA - the enviable question from management: "why didn't you plan this better?" Love that question when you are at the mercy of some slack-as vendor. |
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Do you. like I once did (NOT), get compensated for all the extra hours you put in for this change? **Coming from a guy that did 36hrs straight for a planned, poorly, Verizon outsourcing upgrade and got fuck all. One of many for many. We're pretty easy going at my company. We'll flex time the hours. Knock off earlier in the day if theres nothing going on. |
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as an isp manager, the question i always wish i could ask it managers without getting fired is, if it is so mission critical, why dont you have a failover? I was waiting for that question... They are moving the failover equipment at the same time. Again... They didn't plan this with us and I reamed every mother fucker up to the CTO there. Boss won't pay out for the type of failover that would have prevented an outage of this type. |
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An Equinix datacenter provider houses some very important equipment for the company I work for. The datacenter announced last Wednesday they would be moving our equipment and fiber connections to a new building Friday evening. They changed the migration window and date 3 times and it is now happening tonight. Much to my dismay. They didn't schedule this with us months in advance. They didn't schedule it on a weekend in the middle of the night as is common. They didn't hold to the scheduled date and time. And now they are going way over the migration window (saw that coming). My staff is on standby to begin testing once the migration is complete. This is now working its way towards a serious business impacting event such that employees may not be going in to work tomorrow morning. Ask me anything... Ashburn? You win! |
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An Equinix datacenter provider houses some very important equipment for the company I work for. The datacenter announced last Wednesday they would be moving our equipment and fiber connections to a new building Friday evening. They changed the migration window and date 3 times and it is now happening tonight. Much to my dismay. They didn't schedule this with us months in advance. They didn't schedule it on a weekend in the middle of the night as is common. They didn't hold to the scheduled date and time. And now they are going way over the migration window (saw that coming). My staff is on standby to begin testing once the migration is complete. This is now working its way towards a serious business impacting event such that employees may not be going in to work tomorrow morning. Ask me anything... Ashburn? You win! I worked for a company that had equipment in two of the bldgs on Filigree and the one on Chillum. They cobbled a lot of space together very quickly after the first two bldgs. They brought someone into 21715 that caused a huge heat island that caused problems for us. |
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Meh. It's a living. Don't like it, get another job. I hear matress retail is booming. Thats like saying... "I drive a car. I hate mechanics. Don't like mechanics? Don't drive." No, It's like saying you run a mechanic shop, but performing quality work is hard and I have to work a lot to follow through on parts inventory, jobs, and profitability but all of my problems are the fault of someone else. 
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Meh. It's a living. Don't like it, get another job. I hear matress retail is booming. Thats like saying... "I drive a car. I hate mechanics. Don't like mechanics? Don't drive." No, It's like saying you run a mechanic shop, but performing quality work is hard and I have to work a lot to follow through on parts inventory, jobs, and profitability but all of my problems are the fault of someone else. I have equipment at a datacenter. The datacenter is doing things in a manner not in accordance with standard datacenter practices. I am grumpy because of their inability to properly schedule and perform the work within normal procedures. |
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Hey, I"m not too far away, can i come help? Are we moving hardware or migrating VMs to new hardware? They are physically moving our equipment and cross connects to another building. The cross connects are what is taking so much time. ETA - Theres nothing we can do except wait for our equipment to come back online. If it doesn't we'll be making a trip to the DC. I have guys at the offices waiting to test from there. |
| We are in the middle of a Groupwise to Exchange migration. Firewall guy on vacation last week, took off with a subnet mask error in the rule for Exchange load balancer so half of the office network (CIDR 23bit mask network) couldn't access the Exchange servers. Got it fixed, he overwrote the fix today to add two other networks to the ACL. |
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How much equipment do you expect to fail on power up? So in February my gear got moved 10'. 9 racks moved an isle over
We lost an M5000 on the power up. 
We almost didn't care, but we also had storage failures so it turned into 24 hours of hell. 
Anybody who has been in IT for ANY length of time knows exactly what that means. Fuck I hate those. |
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Damn cat made me smile 
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Which degree is best for network admin type stuff, math-heavy CS or business heavy CIS? http://www.ar15.com/forums/newest.html This is, of course, assuming no prior experience in the field. As a network architect who has been in networking engineering/ops for 13+ years and IT in general for 15+ I'm going to be brutally honest with you. The math-heavy CS is going to be better, but for many hiring managers, unless you have spent time on a keyboard beating on the gear, your degree could be in anything. I hired a guy once who had a political science degree with a specialty in nuclear proliferation. The degree says "I can work on long term projects, deal with deadlines and pressure". There is no substitute for experience, and if you don't have any, the next best thing are industry certifications. I suggest you use them to compliment your degree. They're the only "street cred" you'll get, short of genuine experience. |
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Why are you having smart-hands move your gear vs. doing it yourself? They ain't cheap! The provider we buy a little bit of rack space from initiated the move. We don't even have a whole rack of equipment there. Most of our stuff is hosted in house. Let me guess....Internap? ETA: Or Carpathia. |
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Which degree is best for network admin type stuff, math-heavy CS or business heavy CIS? This is, of course, assuming no prior experience in the field. I actually hold a degree in computer engineering which is a cross between electrical engineering and software engineering. But I've been doing computer security work since I was a teen 
I wear many hats in this company. I was originally hired as a computer security engineer. But the group I was in dissolved and they needed help in their IT department so I took that over. I mainly do R&D work and manage the IT staff. If you want to network type stuff there are network engineering degrees and communications/telecom majors. |
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Which degree is best for network admin type stuff, math-heavy CS or business heavy CIS? http://www.ar15.com/forums/newest.html This is, of course, assuming no prior experience in the field. As a network architect who has been in networking engineering/ops for 13+ years and IT in general for 15+ I'm going to be brutally honest with you. The math-heavy CS is going to be better, but for many hiring managers, unless you have spent time on a keyboard beating on the gear, your degree could be in anything. I hired a guy once who had a political science degree with a specialty in nuclear proliferation. The degree says "I can work on long term projects, deal with deadlines and pressure". There is no substitute for experience, and if you don't have any, the next best thing are industry certifications. I suggest you use them to compliment your degree. They're the only "street cred" you'll get, short of genuine experience. Brutal honesty is best honesty. Thanks to your tax dollars, I can accomplish this
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Why are you having smart-hands move your gear vs. doing it yourself? They ain't cheap! The provider we buy a little bit of rack space from initiated the move. We don't even have a whole rack of equipment there. Most of our stuff is hosted in house. Let me guess....Internap? ETA: Or Carpathia. I won't name names. They know who they are
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If we had as many bugs with our cars as we do with our computers,
would the car company go out of business? The basic function for the car is to drive. The computer should just work . 
Did NASA send a men to the moon on less computing power then we have in cars now? |