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Workstations / Desktops / Servers

Discussion in 'Technical Board' started by Nettdata, Dec 1, 2009.

  1. Nothingdoing

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    Those temps are with a Noctua NH-D15 cooler.

    I've seen that the next gen AMD absolutely crushes Intel. I'd just moved to the 3700X when the new generation had come out. So will be a while before I upgrade again I think.
     
  2. Juice

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    I caved and bought a i7 10700K instead of waiting for the AMD stock to replenish. It seems plenty good enough for the kind of games I play and the GPU is no longer being bottlenecked.

    For anyone with one of these cards, I recommend Quake II RTX. It's a lot of fun.
     
  3. redbullgreygoose

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    Just coming back to this board bring back memories of when I was a kid in college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Anyhow, I figured it out: I ended up going into IT, specifically computer networking. The money is great, the hours and benefits are great. And it's a relatively comfortable life. But now our company is expanding and I'm being expected to become more well rounded in my IT skills. We're in home building supply and the IT department has been getting hammered with the endless deployments of new machines and phones alone due to the hiring spree we're on (among all the myriad problems that come along with it). Our server/hardware guy can no longer handle it himself and I've been told that I'll need to start taking up hardware and server side maintenance alongside my typical networking responsibilities. The good news is that it does come with an even more significant salary bump. The problem is, I don't actually know how any of that shit works. And I've been told know how that shit works is a critical part of my new job responsibilities. I know how networking protocols behave and how to enter commands into a CLI in order to get the expected behavior I want. I'm now looking for some sort of material that can help me better understand how functions translate into bits and work to achieve an outcome directly on the hardware. Specifically within a Windows environment. I bought the Windows Internals book but I was overwhelmed after about Chapter Two.

    Does anyone have suggestions for some other material or starting points I can work from?

    Thanks.
     
  4. Binary

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    My education is in network engineering (CCNP) but I have a broad background in security and systems engineering.

    Windows Internals is not a book you need to get you up to speed on actually operating a Windows environment. You should probably prioritize learning specific applications and support tasks that your environment requires.

    If you're primarily a Windows environment, you could start with the literature around the Microsoft certified systems administrator for Windows Server. But to be honest, I'd really recommend just diving in with YouTube and online documentation. If work has a lab environment, take advantage, or you can spin up some virtual machines on your computer and use trial versions to start testing things. You could start with something like this:
    https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Windows_Server_Administration

    Reddit has a Wiki for new sysadmins, which I have not gone through in detail, but you can take a look:
    https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/bootcamp

    I would very much recommend you start by talking to your current server admin and figuring out where you can be most helpful. Prioritize learning those things first. "Learn how to do server stuff" is too broad to be a useful activity, and if your current guy spends 40% of his time in Hyper-V and 30% of his time in Active Directory, but only 3% of his time deploying web servers, and you learn the ins and outs of Microsoft IIS and become a whiz at deploying web servers, guess how useful you're going to be?

    Just my $0.02.
     
  5. Nettdata

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    That is very solid advice. I’m not a Windows guy at all, but also recommend that course of action.
     
  6. Binary

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    One other thing: my experience tells me that the overwhelming majority of IT organizations are pretty inefficient. Often this is due to understaffing, which causes people to get pulled in lots of directions, which causes those people to be unable to sit down and build sustainable solutions to their problems. It's a death spiral: no time to learn how to sustainably automate a task, means that task gets done over and over again, which often builds up tech debt, which means automation now has to cover a broader array of use cases or existing systems, etc.

    Sometimes adding a new person can break this cycle, because the hours are a little unplanned and the new person might have some free time. I don't know how it's going to work in your business because it sounds like they're just saying, "we have two people with full time jobs but more work than they can handle, so we're just going to cross-train and then we'll have two people doing the work of three people." If that's really the case, you're probably fucked and at the very least I would make sure your resume is up-to-date. It can be a recipe for a burnout disaster.

    If that's not the case, though, and the net result is that you'll be able to sustainably contribute time to server administration, it can be a great opportunity to start automating things. Make sure you talk with $currentServerAdmin about this, because he's probably going to be pissed if he says, "go deploy 3 servers" and you take 3 weeks to do it because you're building a new deployment infrastructure or whatever. But it can be amazing to just take some quality of life task that has been on the backlog forever, throw it at someone and tell them to figure it out. For a start, I'd recommend at least working out repetitive tasks in PowerShell.

    Oh, and in case you didn't know, if you're a sysadmin, you should become competent in at least one scripting language (usually PowerShell if you're a Windows admin and Python if you're not) - otherwise you are probably going to be a junior sysadmin forever.
     
  7. redbullgreygoose

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    Okay, thanks for the advice. I'll talk to him Monday and try to find out more about our environment. Right now, I know very little about what the architecture is going to look like. I just found out about all of this last week. I don't know Powershell but I think I know enough Python to conduct basic scripting. I can create a python web scraper, for instance.
     
  8. Binary

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    That's absolutely fine. IMO, you don't have to be an expert, just understand the basic structures necessary to create functional scripts, and approach problems with a "script first" mentality. Not to say you should do everything that way (we have a couple people at work who are dramatically less productive because they refuse to, say, log into a web portal and do 3 clicks for a one time activity), just that it should be the default approach.
     
  9. Nettdata

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    Friend of mine at work just finished his password cracker. It’s a beast.

    62DF4445-B53D-4CF0-A8DC-2C18B6932208.jpeg AFEF503B-1B2C-4088-9F67-FBA687AF9D58.jpeg
     
  10. Binary

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    It's neat, but why?
     
  11. Juice

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    I’m just impressed he got his hands on two RTX cards.
     
  12. Nettdata

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    He's our CSO and likes to keep his hands a bit dirty writing some tools for shits and giggles.
     
  13. Binary

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    Ah. "Because I can" is a reasonable answer. Functionally I suspect spending that money on an AWS rental on demand would have been cheaper but then he wouldn't have gotten to build that badass machine.
     
  14. Nettdata

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    It’s his personal box so he can now play pong at 6k fps.
     
  15. Rush-O-Matic

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    I recently had to purchase a new webcam for the Zooms and Teams. (and my OnlyFans page, ha!) I needed a longer USB cord than the factory one. I had a USB extension cable on my Laser Printer that I've had for about a year, and I didn't actually need the extension the way I've set it up at my new office. So, I just hooked the printer cable straight to my desktop and added the extension to the camera. A few days later, I went to print something, and it was very slow to actually print. I thought it odd, but didn't deal with it at the time. Then, I went print an image file, and it took . . . for . . . ev . . . er. After trying a few things, I ordered a new USB cord for the printer. It is an Amazon Basics USB 2.0 high-speed one. I just printed the same image file, and it printed immediately.

    I'm posting here in case anyone else ever comes across this issue. I always thought that a longer cable might take longer (adding the extension), but not making it shorter (removing the extension). I'm not sure what happened there.

    I'm also posting because I am curious: the connections are the same, obviously. What is different inside the wire that makes it a high-speed cable, or even a USB 2.0 cable? Is it just the resistance / gauge of the wires?
     
  16. Nettdata

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    This does a good job outlining the different usb protocols that can be used over what cables.

    https://www.tripplite.com/products/usb-connectivity-types-standards

    I'd be interested to know what kind of cable you used, and whether or not it was USB-A end with a black or a blue end.

    Odds are your cable was shit, and the response times between the 2 devices weren't short enough for it to negotiate a USB 2.0 standard (480Mbps) so it defaulted to the lower USB 1.1 standard (12Mbps).

    It could also have just failed to negotiate the higher speed protocol for some other reason (driver hiccup, etc).
     
  17. Nettdata

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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#Cabling

    The USB 1.1 standard specifies that a standard cable can have a maximum length of 5 meters (16 ft 5 in) with devices operating at full speed (12 Mbit/s), and a maximum length of 3 meters (9 ft 10 in) with devices operating at low speed (1.5 Mbit/s).[36][37][38]

    USB 2.0 provides for a maximum cable length of 5 meters (16 ft 5 in) for devices running at high speed (480 Mbit/s). The primary reason for this limit is the maximum allowed round-trip delay of about 1.5 μs. If USB host commands are unanswered by the USB device within the allowed time, the host considers the command lost. When adding USB device response time, delays from the maximum number of hubs added to the delays from connecting cables, the maximum acceptable delay per cable amounts to 26 ns.[39] The USB 2.0 specification requires that cable delay be less than 5.2 ns/m (1.6 ns/ft), (192000 km/s) - which is close to the maximum achievable transmission speed for standard copper wire.​
     
  18. Nettdata

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    USB-C can also be problematic when you want high speed transfer for external devices (like a NAS, etc). So many fucked up cables all with different specs, you can't tell just by looking.
     
  19. Rush-O-Matic

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    Oh the old cable was definitely the culprit, and it was 1.0 (White insert) and the new one is 2.0 (Black insert). But, the odd thing was removing the extension made it worse. That Tripplite sheet is good, but I knew most of that. I just can't find anything that explains the difference in the actual wires of a 1.0 versus 2.0 cable.
     
  20. Binary

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    Did you try putting the extension back in and re-printing? I'm guessing it had nothing to do with the extension, and instead there is/was some physical damage or a loose connection somewhere. Lots of things could affect that, maybe you did the damage by unplugging the extension cable, maybe it was just from moving the cables around that was causing an intermittent loose connection, maybe the positioning of the cables with the extension installed was putting less stress on one of the connectors, etc.