man, people still leave their cars unlocked all the time and get robbed. dont click something you got in an email? thats practically a psychic power

you dont back up individual workstations. you backup documents to/or store them in a shared area and back that up. then you reimage pcs, restore the backed up data and let people have at it. backing up every workstation would take an insane amount of storage.we have 13k endpoints at work you just...dont do that.

now for servers you would have nightly incrementals at least, some places probably do more than that. we have ~2k servers that get backed up, but unfortunately the backup system is not robust. it works, it can restore, but we are looking to replace it. what really sucks in the enterprise sometimes is the speed at which that sort of things happens -- you bitch about it to higher ups for a year or two, then they finally let you get some quotes and allocate some money for the next budget year, then you demo a few products to pick something, go through contract deals, and now...you get to spend a lot of time transitioning between systems.

would it be a good idea to start 2k fresh backups in the same night? its probably not going to finish, and its definitely not going to sync another copy. our biggest datastore is 10s of terabytes and takes days to sync across a 10gb connection to another datacenter. thats all we do with it, its too large to spin off to tape or something. we are sort of terrified of crytpoware, and security has (annoyingly) a lot of tools to try and prevent/catch it. we know we are in a bad place but getting to a good one is a big, big, difficult deal.

i read someone on reddit that was talking about using ZFS for storage and being able to very, very quickly roll back changes. im interested in reading more about it, but its not like we are going to move our datastores for VMs from XIO to something running ZFS, especially something homegrown. i think veeam and maybe rubrik have change block tracking or something to backup vms quickly but i am not sure about the restore.

the irony of asking that at slashdot of all places.

linkedin is relevant -- just keep up with some coworkers and hr people so when you need a job you can reach out, or so that when your friends need a job you can reach out and hope they return the favor

what surprises me is that everyone else hasn't gotten caught doing this. Modern phones can take great pictures but this seems to likely to be the start of a diesel-gate-esque revelation where even apple ends up saying 'ok ok ok ok...we used a dslr, but the ad looked good, right?'

I liked my job ok -- I was a sysadmin at a medium sized manufactuer and was there about 2.5 years. After about 2 years I had automated and resolved a ton of things, so when we didn't have a project to work on, i had 15 hours a week of downtime. I'd play in powershell read IT news, read up on tech we had that I couldn't leverage due to licensing or whatever.

but I had lousy co-workers, and my boss was just...painful and frustrating to work for. I had taken on a lot of random support because a coworker would hem and haw and get nothing done. My boss was terrible -- she was the boss by default because she had been there so long. But she was sort of mean, a decade or better out of practice, horrible at troubleshooting, short-sighted at planning and purchasing, had lousy day to day PC and technical skills, and i just got so tired of being there feeling like I had peaked. So i hit up a buddy at a health system nearby and he got me in for an interview. I got an offer for a 25% raise and way better benefits, so away I went.

That was two years ago -- great decision. My boss is great (not much of a people manager, but a good overall manager otherwise), I work with some really smart, hard working people, have gotten a promotion and more money, and have been able to focus what I work on and increase my skill set.

it is pretty great for one-off scripts at the CLI, depending on your needs, because you can pipe between cmdlets to do a lot of work in a line or two. that being said, for bulk work you will want to dig into loops and functions with the ISE or VSCode or something as piping does not perform very well for large amounts of objects. i could mirror a user group access for just their AD finance groups to someone else with something like this (though it is probably a little bit off)

get-adgroup daveW | where-object {$_.name -like "*finance*"} | add-adgroupmember susanL

or remove someone with something like this

foreach ($group in (get-adgroup -filter {name -like "*human resources*"}) { remove-adgroupmember -identity $_ -members tanyaM -confirm:$false }

there are still some gui tools and powershell components that are not up to part, but really, powershell is where its at. anyone in the *nix world that is complaining about it, or still assuming the windows CLI is garbage, is really not very knowledgeable about what is available. I live in powershell for AD work, reporting events, moving files, monitoring services, manipulating data, comparing data....it can do almost anything these days. some people may not love the syntax, but i like that its verbose (usually, some of the cmdlets are kinda stupid long) because i can see it and have some damn idea of what the cmdlet is for.

I support an app that uses a ton of javascript -- their syntax/apis/functions are not bad, but they are not that obvious in what they are doing without some research. powershell is much clearer.

RE > But honest question: anyone who uses windows at this time, are still using microsoft shells? like cmd and powershell?

yes, i live in powershell. its very robust and functional as well as being well supported by microsoft and the windows powershell community. i cannot speak to powershell CORE, which is the cross platform edition. it has a lot of limitations in what is available compared to v5 that I use because it is based on .NET core. the powershell window in win 7 is not great -- i have to still use 7 at work for a little longer. it is much better in windows 10, based on this article still does not have some features *nix users would be accustomed to.

There are surely still too-many gui-only window admins, but that is probably more likely to be the case with SMB and MSP admins than it is medium or enterprise admins -- you can automate a lot of work and tasks in windows with powershell or group policies. You can do a lot of searching and reporting pretty easily as well once you get the data you want to work with. powershell is sort of great (if you are on v4 or higher). I've got dozens and dozens of scripts for monitoring services, processes, doing routine work, reporting on various events/data/user info, working with the device manager--all sorts of things.

> It's a horrible environment to get real work done on.

this is sort of ridiculous, we are stuck on windows 7 at work and I can get all of my work done without an issue--my last job had 8.1 which i liked better, what do you really get out of linux that is so great? I got frustrated with linux a long time ago and have never looked back--to each his own, right? windows is not perfect, and *nix has had several features MS has been stupid slow to incorporate, but come on, to act like it is worthless is just silly at this point.

> Recognise a Windows admin worth having a conversation with by the fact that he scripts most of his work using VB or C#

powershell. they should be scripting in powershell these days, which is kept up to date, has tons of built in functions and available modules for working in AD and just about anything on a wdinwos computer or server already available, and can take advantage of .Net libraries so you dont have to develop in c# to get something that powershell doesnt have as a native cmdlet. VB still has its uses, but the sort of stuff my coworker does in VB is way easier in powershell much of the time. I'm not saying there is no use for c# scripting, but powershell is where it's at.

I am a windows sysadmin who had a little linux background and uses a ton of powershell in my day to day work. there is some weird stuff MS is still behind on for no-good-reason, serer 2012 and 2016 resolved some of those things, but powershell gets a lot of attention from them

I am so glad I moved to a specialized type of IT Work. There are some thing I miss about being the generalist and the sysadmin-in-charge of how it all runs, but i don't miss the constant stream of everything-electrical-is-my-problem. Some orgs have good policies and people and it's good to be the sysadmin there. If it wasn't for my last boss being such a jackass and control freak I may have stayed there.

but now--now I am in healthcare IT. It is it's own special sort of hell, but I don't have to work on everything under the sun here because we are large, and I have some very, very good people to work with. It has been a nice change.

> If you kill off Javascript, you also kill off medical image imaging

ugh, right? i work with an ECM product holding medical/hr/accounting records and the whole back end uses javascript. I sort of hate it.

hangouts has been around for a while and i have long preferred it but...they really are terrible at this.

that's what apple thought when it came out in the Echo

re: Push a narrative that she is with the people and understand what the common person is going through.

yeah, it would have to be a narrative, because its a load of crap.

but thats the issue with the Dems anyways -- they are just so awestruck at trump and the GOP that they can do nothing but stare. good job, dems, good job. keep standing there.