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I swear If I hear someone tell me how easy I got it one one more time because I am IT I am going to put me fist through a wall.
I got to work yesterday around 9am, and Am still at work.
Comcast just got our new Fiber Connection in yesterday at 4pm, so the boss chose that he wanted to switch everything over to the new connection right then and there, So we I had to call our old T1 service provider and get them to change the MX settings for our mail server, then we had to move the Cisco ASA to the new connection and configure it for it. and we did not get it working until 3AM, apparently Comcast did not tell us that for there Fiber service we had to have a Router that supported VLAN's, and our service on the CISCO did not so we had to upgrade that at 1AM this morning then configure this ASA to talk to the one in our office in Dallas Texas so the VPN Tunnel would work. I have already asked why we did not wait till Friday to do this so we could have the weekend to make sure everything is running before everyone gets back to work, But no the boss wanted it done last nigh. WE pulled it off, but I am burning the candle at both ends off the stick and have arranged for someone to be dropped off at my office so they can drive me home in my vehicle. I just pray I get to rest and relax and not receive calls from panicked Salesmen crying that things are not working the way they are used too. One can only hope.
Comments
Enghhh, THOSE - IT people, all they do is sit around all day...
I hope you are able to get some rest now.
with love,
Hope
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
Well... It is a way of things.
You sit tight reading books, browsing your favorite comics, sometimes even playing games. But when brown smelly substance is thrown you have to be between it and the fan. So once or twice per year you have to work three days straight witnout sleep...
Best thing is - you are paid quite a lot of money for doing what you will be doing anyway :-)
I had recently installed virtualization software and installed Linux onto virtual machine just for the fun of it :-)
Well Said!
Working in IT can be very stressful. If I screw up the upgrade I'm doing on between 02:00-04:00 on monday in Doha then $300M worth of plant will come to an abrupt halt. hundreds, if not thousands of people will be unable to do their stuff.
No pressure then?
just woke back up.
Left the office at noon today from that all night burn, no calls that there is a problem while I slept for a few hours, so I guess they have survived without me for a few hours.
So maybe the rest off the week will be laid back, one can hope.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Feel for you.
Most people do not 'want' or 'care' about the problems involved with setting/changing anything around where they work. There are those that fail to understand the workings that take place by various people. This could be the secretary (they only have to answer the phone), or the sales clerk (they only talk to customers, I'm the one that has to clean up their mess of broken promises) to the IT (just plug it in and make it work are only hear of or portrayed in some unseeing manner such as TV, movies or books (depending). There are managers that don't take an interest in what his lower underlings do as long as it gets done in the manner that he/she demanded.
Others in the office can take on the same manner as the boss. Just get it done in the quickest manner possible but don't interrupt or forestall operations. If you couldn't get it done their way you weren't worth a grain of salt to them. That is till they are forced to realize what really happens behinds the scenes.
I applaud you in being able to pull of that major miracle and I hope that others give you credit where credit is due.
And I love how they ignore instrctions from us.
twice in the last year I have had to clean up infections of Crypto-Locker. You tell the employees do not just look at the pretty icon to determine if they should open it read the name of the file they got in that email. but they do not listen and open it anyway, I am just glad that the tape library is not infected by these infections when they happen. And I remove the infection and restore everything that was encrypted back to original. That is one reason I preach if you have something that is important back it up and keep copies on devises not connected to your computer till you hook them up and if it is really important keep multiple back-ups of said info on as many formats and in as many places as you safely can.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Hah. I set the mail server
Hah. I set the mail server to change the subject line of any email with a zip file to be "Compressed file, option with caution!" - and the other day, TWO people opened them within 15 minutes of each other. Luckily, it wasn't CryptoWall, but just a spambot virus.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
We've all known pressure...
While overseas recently, my company assigned me to a FOB, a Forward Operating Base, in the wilds of Afghanistan to support the US Army's mission. One element of the job there was to keep comms up for the Aid Station, the Forward Surgical Team and the MEDIVAC unit. Which the team did, under some very hostile to IT conditions. (SamanthaMD, since you're working in Doha, then you know how invasive and pervasive the 'moon dust' sand can be.) The three guys in the IT group (we were all civilians) knew that if comms went down for any of those three groups, Aid Station, FST or the MEDIVAC crews, lives were on the line.
A real good incentive to ensure that comms didn't go down.
Have you tried?
Have you tried turning it off and back on?
*Ducks*
Glad you got it dealt with and it sounds like a bear...
Abby
Have you tried turning it off and back on?
Yes. And that actually fixes about 60 percent of the problems we have with our IOS and Android based mobile devices.
But what's really fun is when you get a ticket that has "It don't work" as the problem description, and nothing else.
if only a cold boot fixed it.
It took getting the cisco ASA, DNS server all tweeked and I had help from outside contractors for those areas but, with computers it always makes me laugh and end users at the office become flabbergasted that all I have to do for most fixes is shut the computer down, pull the power plug, hit the power switch to dump the capacitors to purge RAM and turn it back on. and the issue goes away. but that is the desktops and not the servers and networking equipment. alas they usually take more work to fix the issues. The thing that caused the main issues for this job were the fact that our new service provider did not tell us everything we needed and needed to do to really make our new internet connection work smoothly. If it were not for the internet and finding people who have dealt with it before things would still be down. I almost wonder if Comcast was going to pull we have a setup service for that with an extra charge but never found out.
"Cortana is watching you!"
Don't knock it! It works!
That, and contact cleaner if rebooting had not solved hardware problem :-)
I had a boss like that
God forbid you disappoint the asshole. God forbid he would give you any praise when you pull off a major miracle to keep your customer happy.
Praise what is that.
I have never gotten praise from my boss, The really sad thing is he is my father. I constantly have to keep biting the bullet and getting the job done. Its either success or getting gripped at because things don't work. I am actually trying to find another job, one that gets me away from my father. My whole family works in the company and he expects it. But if I can get hired else where it is audios. Family is important but at times they can be real A**H***s. but maybe he will realize that having to pay someone more than he pays me to do the job will make him have more forethought on what he wants. I have not complained about it because of the economy we are in and I get medical insurance with the job. But I also have my limits. I need to go about getting certifications updated and renewed so I can really get away.
"Cortana is watching you!"
It changes everything...
Some years ago my father, after several scandals and several month without communication, admitted that he actually was proud of some things I've done 10 years prior... It is just the way generations born in the middle of the 20th century were raised.
Don't worry. Somwere in the deep place of his soul your father is proud of you. He is just trained that he should never show it to you. Sad, actually. But what we can do?
I'm still 4 years away from my father's acknoledgement of my achievements of 2009 :-) And there were things I'm still quite proud of :-)
IT versus Users
Sadly, IT people are often little respected in their company, other by fellow people in the IT department (who are about the only other people who know what really goes on behind the scenes). I'm sure most users think their IT department do little all day other than to sit in front of their computers, twiddling their thumbs and/or playing games, and they have the skill and capacity to routinely work miracles. They probably think hardware installation is little more than plugging it in and turning it on, while software installation is little more than put in the CD, click Next half a dozen times and possibly reboot. Oh, and the poor sods on the helldesk are expected to be psychic as well, instinctively knowing exactly what is wrong at the user's end and how to (instantly!) fix it without having to give any details of what went wrong or what they were doing at the time...
If you're a real glutton for punishment, try a secondary / high school IT technician - quite often, two separate networks (admin and curriculum), the admin network often holding the most sensitive data but having the least IT literate users whiel the curriculum network has some users (students) who, while being low attainers are very good at testing the limits of the network security (e.g. trying to find ways of bypassing the web filters so they can spend IT lessons on social media when they think the teacher's not looking) and hardware safety (particularly if there's an unloved IT room used for cross-curricular IT or a dumping ground for the "alternative curriculum" bunch, you can saunter in to find missing blanking plates [both the plastic cover and the metal one behind]), flipped voltage selector switches, castrated mice [back in the days before optical became standard, removing the balls from mice was quite common], creative rearrangements of keyboard keys [spelling out expletives, or rarely, moving entire rows of keys one place], or even the keyboard, mouse and monitor for one computer plugged into the adjacent one...). It's also a job where you get very familiar with the server backup tapes ("I accidentally deleted my coursework!" - in one case, after failing to find it on any of the backup tapes [the school had a two week cycle] they admitted they'd deleted it two months ago and had only just realised they needed it - grrr!)
Needless to say, that job carries no praise whatsoever but plenty of condemnation if anything goes wrong. Mercifully, I'm now in a different job (Information Analyst) which carries a far higher ratio of praise to criticism.
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!