The Vent and Rant Thread

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One of the best parts of retirement—I no longer have to deal with user complaints.

Sigh. I'm supposed to be retired! But a friend asked me to take on this one client because he needed help herding the cats and they were in trouble. So I did, and just when we were starting to get things under control, they decided he was too expensive and fired him. But I'm still there, and gawd she knows they need me. So I do it, and I admit, what they pay me adds to some comforti items in retirement, but some days...

[DNSB]

I still have a couple of places that I did some work for before retiring but that don't need a full time IT person so I put in 10-20 hours per month between them. OTOH, one place that was giving me attitude(*), I dropped since I didn't need their aggravation. I like being able to make use of my skill set and having a reason to keep those skills up to date which is more of an incentive than the money at this time.

* The final straw was when they wanted to improve their network security by separating guest, staff and device connections. I did a design document after consultation with management about best practices, etc. and they signed off on the document. The actual wireless AP install and running cable back to the comm closet was done by a third party firm.

I used a pretty basic setup for the LAN with a staff SSID/VLAN, guest SSID/VLAN and an IOT/device SSID/VLAN mostly isolated from each other with some exceptions (guest could connect to projectors & printers on IOT for example). I spent half a Saturday with one corporate officer modifying their switch connections to allow assigning ports to VLANs, setting up interVLAN connection rules and configuring their new wireless setup. After we connected all their fixed corporate devices to the new setup, we killed a couple of hours testing the setup. The last part of the day was spent generating an overly illustrated PDF with instructions on how the staff could connect their devices using the captive portal which was blasted to the all-staff email group plus printing a dozen paper copies while testing the wired printer connections.

Come Monday morning, it turned out that logging in once on the captive portal for each device they wanted to connect was beyond the capabilities of most of the CxO staff who appeared to have difficulty realizing that the wireless had changed from a single corporate name SSID to corp-staff, corp-guest and corp-dev and that the captive portal could not simply be dismissed.

[ApK]

Hey all you supposedly retired IT types still doing work: YOU must be the reason I still can't get a full time gig! You're doing all the work! RETIRE, DARN YOU! RETIRE!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ApK

Hey all you supposedly retired IT types still doing work: YOU must be the reason I still can't get a full time gig! You're doing all the work! RETIRE, DARN YOU! RETIRE!

We are retired. Just keeping our hands in and our minds working. In my case, the places I am doing some work for don't need anywhere near a full time staff member. 10 to 20 hours per month is not going to keep body and soul in the same time zone.

There are several openings in this area for people with experience in network and storage administration, network security with experience with Palo Alto, Cisco and several other firewall models and some general IT support which is about 1 step above help desk. The usual experience/certification trade-offs.

[CRussel]

I'm like David -- just trying to keep my hand in so I don't completely get stale. Brain needs exercise too. Though what I'm doing for this client is a lot more like 2nd level help desk most of the time. That and slowly trying to fix some huge security issues that inevitably crop up in small startups where all the knowledge is in one or two hands and then they grow to 25-30 people. With no plan or thought. Today's struggle is to get rid of Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is almost done now. I hope.

[Quoth]

Adobe Acrobat pro is a terrible solution. Good luck!

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I'm like David -- just trying to keep my hand in so I don't completely get stale. Brain needs exercise too. Though what I'm doing for this client is a lot more like 2nd level help desk most of the time. That and slowly trying to fix some huge security issues that inevitably crop up in small startups where all the knowledge is in one or two hands and then they grow to 25-30 people. With no plan or thought. Today's struggle is to get rid of Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is almost done now. I hope.

Make sure they convey some of that knowledge to others (or at least write it down) so they CAN retire someday. But of course, they don't know what knowledge they have.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Adobe Acrobat pro is a terrible solution. Good luck!

Agreed, completely! Foxit is what we went with and so far it is working out well. About 40-50% less cost, FAR better support, and a very "M365'ish" interface. Which the Mac user doesn't like, but everyone else does. Plus it's dead easy to set up SSO and administer. Except for one flaw -- the admin site is absolutely, and shockingly, unusable with a small screen device. I admit, M365 has me spoiled -- 90% of what I ever need to do as an admin I can do from my phone.