IT and Call Center peeps get in here

[jblosser]

...I just wrote some nifty script to parse Squid logs - so if you find yourself in need, lemme know...

(Trying to implement Palo Alto and the router monkeys are in need of some facts/figures).

There are 4 main areas of IT:

-Support: fixing sh*t

-Maintenance: keeping sh*t running/up-to-date (backups, firmware updates, patches/service packs, Windows updates, etc)

-Operations: extending features to new things (e.g. giving a new employee a mailbox)

-Projects: giving the Business new features

The Business will want you doing Projects.

The nature of IT will mean you're by necessity focused on Support, Maintenance, and Ops.

Trying to find the time to do maintenance (which has to be done or else...) when The Business wants all the new "Gee-Whiz" crap implemented is difficult at best, impossible at worst.

IT is a cost center, i.e. you're not making money for The Business, you're spending money.

IT should enable The Business to make more money and/or allow the employees to do their jobs more efficiently.

IT should be a "trusted advisor" to The Business - where they have ideas, you have ways to help them, your ideas are trusted (because of past successes), listened to, and acted upon.

DO NOT over-promise. One missed deadline, they'll be upset. Two missed deadlines, they'll be really mad. Three, you're asking "paper or plastic". If you think something will take you a day to do, muliply that by 2, and then that result by 3 (within reason). Under-promising and over-delivering will keep 'em happy.

[jbot]

and dont forget to have multiple, explicitly documented (filmed) consensual relations with various female higher ups. this will only serve to solidify your "value" to the company, and ensure a express path to stardom and being knee deep in money and bishes and gilfs and kia's.

[Cheech]

This is what I am going for. It may even come down to having a contractor come in for a few weeks to get it initially configured with me helping, then I can run it after that. No idea until I sit down with him and see what his expectations are.

My offer still stands. If you can swing it during a weekend, I can even come up to give you a second set of eyes to scope things out. I haven't come up to Ridgeville to see the parents in a while, so I'll kill 2 birds.

[JStump]

and dont forget to have multiple, explicitly documented (filmed) consensual relations with various female higher ups. this will only serve to solidify your "value" to the company, and ensure a express path to stardom and being knee deep in money and bishes and gilfs and kia's.

Wow, dont know why I never thought of that before?! I tend to stick to the lower levels and kick em to the curb when Im done which doesn't really get you anywhere haha

My offer still stands. If you can swing it during a weekend, I can even come up to give you a second set of eyes to scope things out. I haven't come up to Ridgeville to see the parents in a while, so I'll kill 2 birds.

That would be much appreciated! You guys are a big help and its always a good idea in my book to have a fresh set of eyes find something I may have missed.

Edited October 23, 2012 by JStump

[Cheech]

Wow, dont know why I never thought of that before?! I tend to stick to the lower levels and kick em to the curb when Im done which doesn't really get you anywhere haha

That would be much appreciated! You guys are a big help and its always a good idea in my book to have a fresh set of eyes find something I may have missed.

No worries at all, you know how to get a hold of me. In your case it's absolutely essential that you have someone scoping this out with you, even if they aren't a part of the implementation. The client's going to come at you with a lot of "I want the thing to work with the thing!" statements, and unless you have the experience to know what he really means and what kind of labor that's going to entail to get working, it's incredibly easy to paint yourself into a corner before you even get started.

[RVTPilot]

I agree with jbot to try and work the angle as an employee. If not, and you have to go the LLC route, document every ticking second of what you do. Your time is money, and it should be theirs spent, not yours. Also, regardless of whether you are doing it as a vendor or as an employee, make sure you establish some sort of SLA either to them as your customer, or from the defacto IT department that you become to the business. Ambiguous expectations in service can lead to angry faces and burnt bridges. And if you and Cheech want another outside opinion, let me know. I am a Sys Admin for a software development and web service provider in Valley View, and call Ridgetucky home.

[Oryon]

Been in IT for about 14 years now...specializing in Cisco networking and now focusing on VMware.. I agree 100%. Employee first, Google is your best friend, and don't hesitate to know your limits. Be prepared to always learn, if you stop learning, you will be an epic failure in IT. Ill offer to come help you evaluate the current network, and give advice on theirgoals as well...if I cant get up there, ill still be glad to offer advice, just toss me a PM.

Im very familiar with large and medium environments, and am currently working for CBTS, consulting to General Electric in the commercial cloud environment...

Matt

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk 2

[Cheech]

I agree with jbot to try and work the angle as an employee. If not, and you have to go the LLC route, document every ticking second of what you do. Your time is money, and it should be theirs spent, not yours. Also, regardless of whether you are doing it as a vendor or as an employee, make sure you establish some sort of SLA either to them as your customer, or from the defacto IT department that you become to the business. Ambiguous expectations in service can lead to angry faces and burnt bridges. And if you and Cheech want another outside opinion, let me know. I am a Sys Admin for a software development and web service provider in Valley View, and call Ridgetucky home.

pffft, code monkey. I'll call you if I need a 200,000 line program that outputs the hierarchy of Lord of the Rings, delivered on a CD crusted with Cheeto dust.

[JStump]

Awesome guys, I will definitely be talking with you about all this.

[RVTPilot]

pffft, code monkey. I'll call you if I need a 200,000 line program that outputs the hierarchy of Lord of the Rings, delivered on a CD crusted with Cheeto dust.

Nuzzle my kiwis. I am infrastructure through and through. No way I could or would sit there and pound out code for hours on end. I'd come home and beat the kids and dog senseless. Gimmie a fresh out of box server or VM playground any day.

An' when you comin' back up to see mom 'n pop? I owe ya at least one round of beers, mang!

[JStump]

Anyone ever deal with Oxford Consulting? They are based out of Westerville and just called me about a sys admin job in Cleveland.

[RVTPilot]

Oxford doesn't sound familiar, but there are so many small mom n pop consulting/recruiting firms out there. One of those types was how I got in at Invacare several years back.

[JStump]

It seems like that is how most people are hiring these days. Thats what 80% of the listings are on career builder and monster. I just hate the fact most of it is contract to hire. This job would be 6 month contract to hire.

[jblosser]

It's "rent to own", and it's how we hire anyone in IT.

It costs a lot of money to hire someone ($20k~), and it's worth paying a slight premium to an agency for 3-6 months to ensure the FNG knows what (s)he's doing and that they fit in with the team.

[JStump]

So what do you usually pay them after you hire them on? The same plus benefits?

[Cheech]

So what do you usually pay them after you hire them on? The same plus benefits?

That, my friend, depends entirely on you. My gig before Nationwide I got a 20K bump when I was sucked in as a salaried employee. I negotiated that because I knew what the job entailed, I knew what kind of responsibilities I would have in excess of what I was shouldering at the time, and I knew the travel requirements involved. Every situation is different.

If it makes you feel any better, my current gig at Nationwide is contract, however I negotiated that I would be a regular employee at the firm that signs my paychecks, and made sure (to the best of my ability) that they could afford to keep me on the bench and busy if NW kicks me out tomorrow. It also helps that I have a relationship with my current employer (they are the ones that brought me to my gig before Nationwide) and I don't screw up (that much) so NW re-upped my contract twice.

You have to understand the business you're going to get into and how they use contractors. Honda? Forget about it, you'll be a contractor forever. Nationwide? Half-and-half. Smaller business? Better shot of getting hired on, assuming you mesh well with the current crew and aren't a complete bananahead.

[Cheech]

RVTPilot is right, there are lots of mom and pop's. I get emails about once a month from someone who trolled Careerbuilder and saw my resume. A lot of it is bullshit work. You have to watch your ass with the smaller, less reputable contracting firms, I've had interviews where a) the job location wasn't where they said it was (they told me Honda Marysville, ended up being in Anna, OH north of Dayton) and the job wasn't what was promised either. Just be patient.

[JStump]

Well this place is actually a branch of an interior design firm based out of New York. They were definitely trolling though because they had a résumé from months ago.

[jblosser]

So what do you usually pay them after you hire them on? The same plus benefits?

What we pay to the agency is probably 10% above what we'd pay a "real" employee - but the contractor is probably getting 60% of what the agency is collecting (they have your benefits (maybe) to pay for, their staff, etc.).

Example: I needed a Senior level Windows Administrator. Hiring straight away, the person is going to be getting +/- $85 - 90 large plus very, very good benefits.

Going through an agency I'm paying $48 large for a 6 month stay, and 10% of his starting salary if I want to keep him at the end of the contract. We (my team) just discussed him this afternoon, we're keeping him. My guess is he's getting $35 + benefits (6 months) through his agency.

Our salaries are such that we aim to pay people 95% of the going rate for a job in that market in base salary. Our goal is to make that pay go up to 110% with profit sharing. In a good year you might make 130, 140% of "what you're worth"; in a bad year you'll do no worse than 95%. One of our divisions had a stupid good quarter once (up 90% from year before) and the other division all kicked @ss. My profit sharing check that quarter was 280% of what it was supposed to be.

[Cheech]

What we pay to the agency is probably 10% above what we'd pay a "real" employee - but the contractor is probably getting 60% of what the agency is collecting (they have your benefits (maybe) to pay for, their staff, etc.).

Example: I needed a Senior level Windows Administrator. Hiring straight away, the person is going to be getting +/- $85 - 90 large plus very, very good benefits.

Going through an agency I'm paying $48 large for a 6 month stay, and 10% of his starting salary if I want to keep him at the end of the contract. We (my team) just discussed him this afternoon, we're keeping him. My guess is he's getting $35 + benefits (6 months) through his agency.

Our salaries are such that we aim to pay people 95% of the going rate for a job in that market in base salary. Our goal is to make that pay go up to 110% with profit sharing. In a good year you might make 130, 140% of "what you're worth"; in a bad year you'll do no worse than 95%. One of our divisions had a stupid good quarter once (up 90% from year before) and the other division all kicked @ss. My profit sharing check that quarter was 280% of what it was supposed to be.

aaaand you guys need a network administrator.

[JStump]

So an update on this position. After trying to get something on paper for over a month with the guy at the dealership, I found a job at an architecture and design firm in Cleveland. I am basically the jack of all trades for this smallish (around 90 employees) firm so I maintain their 15 virtual servers which runs on 3 physical machines, 100ish laptops and cell phones, and a number of network printers, plotters, scanners etc. So far I have been working there for a week and have been getting comfortable with their infrastructure and daily tasks and it has gone pretty well. It is going to be a lot of work at times since I am the only IT guy on premise and the 2 people I would escalate issues to work in Columbus and only come up 2 days a month.

Well I have run into an issue I have was working on all day Friday which is when mapping a specific drive from a file server to a users computer, I can map the drive but then get an "W:\ drive not accessible. Access denied please contact your administrator" error. I have tried the following...

-Tried mapping with UNC and IP address.

-Remove the user from the sharing permissions and re-added them.

-Created a new group in AD and added the users to the group, then the group to the shared folder permissions.

-Took ownership of the folder.

-Gave FULL ACCESS permissions to the group.

-Gave FULL ACCESS permissions to the individual users.

-Ensured "Simple File Sharing" was off.

The whole time I have been testing with a generic DOMAIN\Administrator account which I am using as the test user so I don't lock myself out of my own Admin account. As far as I know, all existing users can access the drive, its just new users who have issues. And it WILL map the drive, but when you try to open it you get the error. Will also map other drives that are located on the same share and even the same HD disk so I know they have access to the disk it self, but not the specific folder on the drive.

My next step is to add my generic admin account to the existing IT Support AD group which SHOULD have access since my real admin account, which was only added a week ago, does.

Anyone have any ideas on what could be causing this issue? The machines are Win7, the file server is Server 2008. If they have SCCM, would that change how I give out permissions? I have never worked with SCCM before and I just did a remote session on the DC to find a bunch of groups with SCCM in the name. A quick google search shows its management software but like I said, I have never used it before.

This has just been rolling through my brain the past couple days so if anyone is bored on this Christmas Eve, let me know your ideas. THANKS!

Edited December 25, 2012 by JStump

[jblosser]

on the advanced tab you should be able to check effective rights for that user or group.

you really should only dole out rights to groups, unless you only have one person accessing a share.

you do know that there are two places to assign rights - the 'permissions' is who can see the share, and the 'security' tab is where rear/write/execute etc. is assigned. not trying to be condescending, just making sure you know.

you said you tried unc and ip, stick with unc - that's what dns is for.

as the user, try a Start, Run, \\servername [enter] - can the user see any shares on that box?

*edit - may also want to check if uac is enabled on the server. that can cause trouble.

don't dabble much in the windows arena these days - thank goodness.

Edited December 25, 2012 by jblosser

[JStump]

Yes, I have checked the effective permissions and it shows the group I am trying to add has the appropriate rights, which is pretty much everything minus full control.

There are only 2 people who need temporary access to the share so thats why I was doing individuals. But groups dont seem to work either.

I am doing everything in the Security tab, also tried going to the Sharing tab and Advanced Sharing and added the group their as well.

Yes, Start Run \\Servername does result in all the shares on the server INCLUDING the drive I need, but when I click on it I get access denied, almost every other share listed is accessible though.

Also, forgot to add that I have tried adding Authenticated users AND Everyone, giving each one full control and I was still unable to connect as my test admin account. Something must be going on if Everyone does not give access.

UAC is off on the server also.

Edited December 25, 2012 by JStump

[jblosser]

is all the fail happening from only one machine? gpresult /r (i think), see if the security group membership(s) look right.

you said some users work but new ones don't. maybe try 'no work user' on 'working user's' machine.

if it's only one machine, using the fqdn of the server might work, if so an ipconfing /flushdns might/should fix.

[jbot]

Cook meth in the server room. Sounds like a bag of ass.