The reason for the Fifth is known by everyone with the barest minimum of Google Skills and self-awareness.

Go watch Dont Talk to Police and try to pay attention for at least the first five minutes. You can do it.

Why do you assume they aren't as happy, relative to others? You seem to be judging a culture based on your own culture, which doesn't always work so well (to say the least). I mean no snark, but because people from your culture wouldn't like it doesn't mean others wouldn't.

Yes, I have to admit that the DHCP situation you described is indeed quite weird.

*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Tip your waitor and try the fish.

I think the worst part about being in a small and previously questionably-run IT environment is that the expectation is that things will be bought once and work forever. It's not a matter of whether I could have upgraded these seven-year-old machines, but whether I would have to explain myself if something fails on an old machine we just spent money upgrading.

I wouldn't blame it on IT. You see, I have tried here too to make the best of things. I try (but apparently fail) to pass the message that you need to replace old stuff, because of the increased failure rate. Case in point, I have now been waiting for three weeks for our only PoE enabled switch to come back from warranty repairs. In any shop, you'd get the budget to buy a second asap, or even better before such a thing happens. Right now, only two people can use the phone and only because I had two power bricks for their IP phones. I think that's unacceptable, my boss doesn't seem to care. As long as there are no absolutely unavoidable costs that make him look bad in the reports. (Hey, would it hurt to give me a budget for stuff like this? But noooooo!). So, I just stopped asking. If something breaks, it's easier to ask for money.

As best as I can tell, several years ago it was automatically syncing to somewhere, but it had been years since that stopped working...

You can sync Windows machines by both NTP and by Samba (Not sure, it's the "net time" command, it seems to suggets ntp these days but it definitely wasn't in the NT4 days). I'd suggest NTP to one of the first-level stratum servers with your domain controller and make that a second-level stratum machine for the rest of your machines. NTP servers are best not virtualized. Just get a small cheap dedicated machine for this, or so.

"f the cop was singing "Stop Resisting" to the tune of "Happy Birthday", you're still civilly liable for copyright infringement. "

Stop resisting, I'm beating you!
Stop resisting, I'm beating you!
Stop resisting, I'm beating yoooooou!
Stop recording or I'll beat you too!

I hope you get the resources to streamline the mess left behind. It gets doubly hard if there is never money for IT. I know how that is. *sigh*

Vogtle was President/Chairman of Southern Company, Georgia Power's parent company. (Southern tends to name most of their plants after company bigwigs.) Apparently, he was a real POW who inspired the motorcycle dude in The Great Escape.

If it weren't so very complicated to actually sign your own binaries and have a nice keystore... userfriendly and all (within the firmware of course), perferably standardized that once you know it for one machine, you know it for all... Yes, then it would be nice...

Because it causes all kinds of problems. Doesn't even have to be Linux. Talk to people who tried installing 7 on their 8 machine... If you don't know about secureboot (We're at the high end of the tech spectrum here, but just a few steps down there are "Windows reinstallers"... e.g. Windows power users who may not know about secureboot).

I said "it's not so bad, you can disabled it", and then we get many people posting that on their machine they couldn't .... yeah, it is a big problem... Perhaps not for you, perhaps not for me... but for many people... And FSM knows I'm going to curse a lot if I get a machine where I can't disable it completely.

Okay... That's annoying. Isn't there an option "legacy BIOS" or something. The wording is not standardized (typical for BIOS). Anyway, yes, it's terribly annoying if it can't do that. I'll believe you on your word that some manufacturers fucked this up.

Not that I claim it isn't a problem. SecureBoot is a BIG problem, but for now, they let us work around it.

Of course... On x86 you can disabled it with a BIOS setting (okay, technically "EFI setting"). For now I haven't seen one that didn't allow it. It's sometimes pretty hard to get into the BIOS, but hey, once you're in, you're in.

Come on, I really wanted to try it out... Not that I'm a student or going college or so ;-) Just trolling their systems a bit. Besides, a cheap Win8 PC is good for running Linux, isn't it?

Perhaps the older drugs were manufactured for maximum effectiveness and the newer ones for maximum profit.