What's your occupation?

[Super Kami Guru]

I used to have quite a good working relationship with the network admin at head office - he'd give me under the table access to things I needed (like write-access to Meraki console, and being able to edit group policies). It was under the provisio he trusted me not to touch things I didn't understand (there was a guy at another school who had no idea what he was doing and cause trouble) and that this was pretty much what I was hired to do. He left quietly at the start of the year, and that was my cue that I should probably haul on out ASAP.

He used to give me a lot of inside information, and the way the manager operated was quite bleak. Apparently one thing he suggested was adding a UPS to each phone - not the switches that provide the power and communication - the individual handsets.

Ouch, yeah, definitely seems like you got out at the right time! Don't want to go down with the ship when it comes to a shifting regime!

Yeah it's good. And I already knew most of the department personally before I got hired anyway, so that was a bonus.

I'm getting the ins and outs of a lot of parts of it. The problem is how fractured all of Microsoft's cloud services are, so there's about 10 different web addresses I need to go to in order to access something vaguely related, from Intune to Exchange to Defender to Azure itself.

Definitely sounds like Microsoft logic. Worker harder, not smarter!

 

[Giga Hertz]

Ouch, yeah, definitely seems like you got out at the right time! Don't want to go down with the ship when it comes to a shifting regime!

Oh for sure. And at the local level, the new principal was insisting everyone throw out old crap (which is reasonable), which meant I had to clean out my entire office, which had several layers of computers, switches, cables, and all sorts of fun things. On the other hand, it also meant I got a lot of freebies for home.

Since I left they're starting to remodel the staffroom - they had the library assistant replace me as first line tech support (she knows basic troubleshooting, but she's not an IT person) and she now has a tiny spot in the staff lunchroom. Everything else she has to keep, and all staff resources, are currently being kept in a storage area halfway across the school grounds and they're not allowed to keep resources in the staffroom anymore. Quite honestly, I'm surprised no one else has jumped ship yet.

Definitely sounds like Microsoft logic. Worker harder, not smarter!

Why would anyone work smarter?

 

[Super Kami Guru]

Oh for sure. And at the local level, the new principal was insisting everyone throw out old crap (which is reasonable), which meant I had to clean out my entire office, which had several layers of computers, switches, cables, and all sorts of fun things. On the other hand, it also meant I got a lot of freebies for home.

Since I left they're starting to remodel the staffroom - they had the library assistant replace me as first line tech support (she knows basic troubleshooting, but she's not an IT person) and she now has a tiny spot in the staff lunchroom. Everything else she has to keep, and all staff resources, are currently being kept in a storage area halfway across the school grounds and they're not allowed to keep resources in the staffroom anymore. Quite honestly, I'm surprised no one else has jumped ship yet.

Oh wow, I'll bet that was a fun cleanout! I always wished I'd caught a company right as they were decommissioning servers so I could snag them for home use...I've got a nice, big closet and a penchant for tinkering...I'd have loved a nice server rack and some old servers to tinker with! Guessing you didn't snag any servers during the clear out, though

Why would anyone work smarter?

Right? Only stupid people work smart!

 

[Giga Hertz]

Oh wow, I'll bet that was a fun cleanout! I always wished I'd caught a company right as they were decommissioning servers so I could snag them for home use...I've got a nice, big closet and a penchant for tinkering...I'd have loved a nice server rack and some old servers to tinker with! Guessing you didn't snag any servers during the clear out, though

Nah, I'd just the year before migrated our server from 2008 R2 (and an antique version of VMWare) to Server 2019 running on Proxmox. Also replaced the HDDs with SSDs - that's still there as far as I'm aware. But that hardware is an almost 10 year old PowerEdge, so it's not really worth a whole lot anyway. I'm pretty certain the RAID controller has some quirks that makes it hard to deal with, too.

But I had previously built another server with a Ryzen 7 and 1TB SSD for image deployment (FOG running on Debian, and virtualised in Proxmox). Since I knew that sort of scale would be out of the hands of the new person, the school would be scaling back PCs in favour of Chromebooks, and head office was investing in Manage Engine which could do deployment, I decided it would be easier for everyone if that disappeared with me...

 

[Super Kami Guru]

Nah, I'd just the year before migrated our server from 2008 R2 (and an antique version of VMWare) to Server 2019 running on Proxmox. Also replaced the HDDs with SSDs - that's still there as far as I'm aware. But that hardware is an almost 10 year old PowerEdge, so it's not really worth a whole lot anyway. I'm pretty certain the RAID controller has some quirks that makes it hard to deal with, too.

But I had previously built another server with a Ryzen 7 and 1TB SSD for image deployment (FOG running on Debian, and virtualised in Proxmox). Since I knew that sort of scale would be out of the hands of the new person, the school would be scaling back PCs in favour of Chromebooks, and head office was investing in Manage Engine which could do deployment, I decided it would be easier for everyone if that disappeared with me...

I almost drooled at that one...that's a nice piece of hardware!

 

[Giga Hertz]

I almost drooled at that one...that's a nice piece of hardware!

I'm not going to say anything else, but I am currently typing this on a Ryzen 7.


I had a Ryzen 7 1700 has my workstation there as well, but I left that behind - partially because I wasn't 100% sure what my successor would want to use (pretty certain it's a Surface Book 2 I had been testing because it kept screwing up for another staff member and I couldn't figure out why), and also because the NIC died so I couldn't guarantee what else on the board could go.

I also had a 1700 that I built specifically when Dishonored 2 came out (I had a Phenom 4 and it was on its way out), that I ended up taking to my new job when I replaced the hardware in my main build. Unfortunately I killed the board the other day with a BIOS update.Since I leave it at the office and WFH, I use it as a jumpbox and to quickly throw VMs onto for testing, so my boss said he'd just cover the board for me (a one-off $150 board is cheaper than a new computer or laptop, and I didn't actually get anything new when I started!). So yeah, good place to work for. Love it.

 

[Super Kami Guru]

I'm not going to say anything else, but I am currently typing this on a Ryzen 7.


I had a Ryzen 7 1700 has my workstation there as well, but I left that behind - partially because I wasn't 100% sure what my successor would want to use (pretty certain it's a Surface Book 2 I had been testing because it kept screwing up for another staff member and I couldn't figure out why), and also because the NIC died so I couldn't guarantee what else on the board could go.

I also had a 1700 that I built specifically when Dishonored 2 came out (I had a Phenom 4 and it was on its way out), that I ended up taking to my new job when I replaced the hardware in my main build. Unfortunately I killed the board the other day with a BIOS update.Since I leave it at the office and WFH, I use it as a jumpbox and to quickly throw VMs onto for testing, so my boss said he'd just cover the board for me (a one-off $150 board is cheaper than a new computer or laptop, and I didn't actually get anything new when I started!). So yeah, good place to work for. Love it.

Nice of the boss to cover the cost of the board! Definitely more financially responsible to fix than replace, so good on him for covering it!

 

[Giga Hertz]

I've also got a heap of i3 NUCs from... a certain clean-up process. I was just going to format one of those and put it there as a jump box for the time being. I ain't complaining

 

[Super Kami Guru]

I've also got a heap of i3 NUCs from... a certain clean-up process. I was just going to format one of those and put it there as a jump box for the time being. I ain't complaining

Damn, NUCs are great, but a heap of them?! Geez, that's one hell of a cleanup!

 

[Giga Hertz]

Damn, NUCs are great, but a heap of them?! Geez, that's one hell of a cleanup!

When I started at the school, we had a mix of computer labs. The newest were 18x 4th gen i7s that they'd ordered from the city, but had knock-off power supplies, so the first thing I did when I started was replace 18x power supplies.

We had a lab with 28x Dell OptiPlex 780s (Core 2s with Vista stickers on them) - most of them had covers where floppy drives/card readers would go, but had fallen off. This resulted in crap being shoved in there by students. As soon as I was able, I replaced them with 4th gen i3s (with SSDs). We also had another lab with about 12 computers that also needed replacing that eventually got 6th-gen i3s with SSDs. So in the cleanup, I grabbed a heap of them instead of disposing of them.

The 18x i7s eventually got replaced by Ryzen 5s and then moved into a STEM room where I'd also built a heap of AMD A8s. Those are still there for the time being.

Anything I didn't take or throw, got picked up for recycling. This included about 26 4th gen i5s. Everything on-site also had an SSD when I left because I made sure to replace all of the HDDs.

I know longterm the principal wants it to be only Chromebooks, which makes me glad I'm finally out of there. I know a lot of staff, particularly those that use real programs, aren't impressed. One conversation we had she used the phrase 'engineers use Chromebooks'... that was the point of the conversation where I checked out and started mentally writing my resume.

NOTE: all of these were wiped before I took or disposed of them so there's no data leaks at all.

 

[Super Kami Guru]

When I started at the school, we had a mix of computer labs. The newest were 18x 4th gen i7s that they'd ordered from the city, but had knock-off power supplies, so the first thing I did when I started was replace 18x power supplies.

We had a lab with 28x Dell OptiPlex 780s (Core 2s with Vista stickers on them) - most of them had covers where floppy drives/card readers would go, but had fallen off. This resulted in crap being shoved in there by students. As soon as I was able, I replaced them with 4th gen i3s (with SSDs). We also had another lab with about 12 computers that also needed replacing that eventually got 6th-gen i3s with SSDs. So in the cleanup, I grabbed a heap of them instead of disposing of them.

The 18x i7s eventually got replaced by Ryzen 5s and then moved into a STEM room where I'd also built a heap of AMD A8s. Those are still there for the time being.

Anything I didn't take or throw, got picked up for recycling. This included about 26 4th gen i5s. Everything on-site also had an SSD when I left because I made sure to replace all of the HDDs.

I know longterm the principal wants it to be only Chromebooks, which makes me glad I'm finally out of there. I know a lot of staff, particularly those that use real programs, aren't impressed. One conversation we had she used the phrase 'engineers use Chromebooks'... that was the point of the conversation where I checked out and started mentally writing my resume.

NOTE: all of these were wiped before I took or disposed of them so there's no data leaks at all.

As a total nerd I'm super jealous that I wasn't there to help "clean out" the school! So much tech that would've been great fun to tinker with in personal time!

Yeah, I'd be worried if you hadn't wiped the data before, standard procedure

 

[Giga Hertz]

As a total nerd I'm super jealous that I wasn't there to help "clean out" the school! So much tech that would've been great fun to tinker with in personal time!

It sureeeeeeeee is.

Yeah, I'd be worried if you hadn't wiped the data before, standard procedure

Yeah, I had a cupboard full of the harddisks I'd swapped out over time - a guy from head office came to help take out all the stuff I hadn't managed to dispose of. I'm pretty certain he ended up taking everything, because I explicitly made it clear to everyone involved at the school that the hard disks had to be either wiped or destroyed before they could be tossed. The maintenance guy had been taking several to run through the drillpress and I'd shown him where to find them on the laptops so he could just do those (most laptops where it was accessible I just pulled it myself, but we had about 60 odd Dell Inspirons where you had to physically remove the motherboard to get to them).

 

[Super Kami Guru]

Proprietary hardware designs...so outlandish at times...

 

[Giga Hertz]

Proprietary hardware designs...so outlandish at times...

I mean, until I built that Ryzen my FOG server was an an i5 Dell OptiPlex with a power supply hanging out the back because the proprietary one had died.

I used to work in a repair store, and we had one Dell that was normal size, but we had to drill holes into the case because the screw holes didn't line up with a standard ATX power supplies...

 

[Super Kami Guru]

I mean, until I built that Ryzen my FOG server was an an i5 Dell OptiPlex with a power supply hanging out the back because the proprietary one had died.

I used to work in a repair store, and we had one Dell that was normal size, but we had to drill holes into the case because the screw holes didn't line up with a standard ATX power supplies...

Don't you just love how there are industry standards for hardware and manufacturers just do whatever they want anyway? Got that problem with my current PC. I was dumb and didn't want to build because I didn't have the time when I bought this (was still programming, working lots of hours, but needed a new PC), so I ordered a Lenovo Erazer X700...it's been an alright machine, but it's got some odd proprietary bits and pieces...tried to upgrade some components, it's a mess! Proprietary power supply that can't be swapped out, motherboard is proprietary, wiring in the case is horrendous! Can't wait to build a new one, but since quitting my job to take care of my mother, money's not exactly flowing in at the moment, so a new build is not going to happen anytime soon...

I hear you, though, make do with what you can where you can to make things run!

 

[Giga Hertz]

Oh yeah, I'd never ever buy a computer I didn't build myself for that reason (or if the manufacturer decides to cut corners with power supplies).

 

[Super Kami Guru]

Oh yeah, I'd never ever buy a computer I didn't build myself for that reason (or if the manufacturer decides to cut corners with power supplies).

Yep, I was a total fool to buy it. This was 6 years ago, too, so I could've built a beast of a machine for the money this thing cost. I usually always build, but yeah, I was just struggling to replace my old build and needed something while I was working mad hours. Dumb decision, I regret it badly, but that's life, I guess

 

[Yoshi]

Nothing now. LOL.

 

[Giga Hertz]

Nothing now. LOL.

Well... crud?

 

[Yoshi]

Well... crud?

Not really. I was kind of forced out.