Huge Mistake
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
It likely wasn't. Probably because your school didn't cover all of it. And also because the A+ didn't used to have anything to do with IT, it was garbage. Then it became so famously bad that they did a LOT of work to make it at least passably useful. So the material on it now is 20x better than it used to be. Still not wonderful, but so much better.
Now it covers real networking basics, RAID, drives, etc. It's enough that we make all of our crew go through it just to make sure that they have baselines. We don't make them do the printer stuff and other things that are rarely used or applicable, and we don't make them get the examples, but it's free and trivial to go through the material, so we have them do that. And that's why I took the time to make the guide here, because that's where my team finds it.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
The way it works here is 60% of calls are Software related strictly to Aloha
20% Windows OS issues
15% hardware swaps/troubleshooting .
5% computer hardware (like this one)That's not that uncommon as a breakdown for many industries. Say you worked with dentists...
60% Eaglesoft
20% Windows
15% Hardware Basics
5% something unusual and hard -
@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You probably should take the A+ training on this site shared by @scottalanmiller . Usually A+ isn't recommended for most IT career paths, but what you are doing on a daily basis would match up well with A+.
You have asked about training here several times and then bring up not being able to move up in your career. This is basic stuff and you should really consider building a foundation on something even if its A+ and then branch out from there.
This not to pick on you, but hopefully give you a chance to move forward in your career with tough love. You need to focus on training and follow through. You aren't brand new (2-6 months) in IT anymore.
I'd agree. Don't spend money on the cert, but grab a beer in the evenings and go through each of the video training sessions one per night. Takes 5-15 minutes, tops. There is a thread for each one here. Ask any questions that you have in real time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
The way my company taught me
This is consistently biting you in the ass, or at least leading you astray. You know that you don't have IT people there and they have little to no understanding of IT processes, technology, etc. Not that they get everything wrong, but they clearly don't understand what they are telling you in case after case and are just repeating things that they think that they heard somewhere. Like your boss wanting you to format a drive before adding it to an array, clearly he is missing some really basic drive knowledge. It's not a big deal that he doesn't understand IT fundamentals, but you keep coming back to "they told me" in thread after thread and I know that you are not defending them, but you keep letting them confuse you.
Basically... if they tell you something you need to either ignore it out of hand, or go immediately and research it. Because they are literally moving you backwards.
Yeah, I add that in as a "Hey, so we already know , no one here really has an understanding of Actual IT, as it's only a small portion of our business, and since I work here this is the way they want me to do things"
Not so much as a "well my company said this is how it's done, so it must be right"
I've noticed and known for a while that the way we do things here is no where close to how things should actually be done.
I understand how that could bite me in the ass, though. -
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
It likely wasn't. Probably because your school didn't cover all of it. And also because the A+ didn't used to have anything to do with IT, it was garbage. Then it became so famously bad that they did a LOT of work to make it at least passably useful. So the material on it now is 20x better than it used to be. Still not wonderful, but so much better.
Now it covers real networking basics, RAID, drives, etc. It's enough that we make all of our crew go through it just to make sure that they have baselines. We don't make them do the printer stuff and other things that are rarely used or applicable, and we don't make them get the examples, but it's free and trivial to go through the material, so we have them do that. And that's why I took the time to make the guide here, because that's where my team finds it.
I might not be remembering but what I took was "Cisco's IT Essentials" course, in like 2007. < Side note; Story >
Then never touched it again, at all until 2016 when I had my Accident which took me out of construction type jobs due to back problems, thats when I started looking into IT jobs more. Which is what landed me on ML to begin with -
</ Side Note: Story >
So like you said, it probably wasn't covered in School, cause it wasn't something that was taught back then . -
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
I tried Doing it one time on site, and it was so slow that I had to call my boss before they would let me leave because they couldn't do anything on the PC while it was rebuilding the drive.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
I tried Doing it one time on site, and it was so slow that I had to call my boss before they would let me leave because they couldn't do anything on the PC while it was rebuilding the drive.
Why would anyone expect a PC to be really usable while it's rebuilding a spinning disk RAID, regardless of the drives being identical or not? It's a PC... and likely a shitty one.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
It likely wasn't. Probably because your school didn't cover all of it. And also because the A+ didn't used to have anything to do with IT, it was garbage. Then it became so famously bad that they did a LOT of work to make it at least passably useful. So the material on it now is 20x better than it used to be. Still not wonderful, but so much better.
Now it covers real networking basics, RAID, drives, etc. It's enough that we make all of our crew go through it just to make sure that they have baselines. We don't make them do the printer stuff and other things that are rarely used or applicable, and we don't make them get the examples, but it's free and trivial to go through the material, so we have them do that. And that's why I took the time to make the guide here, because that's where my team finds it.
I might not be remembering but what I took was "Cisco's IT Essentials" course, in like 2007. < Side note; Story >
Then never touched it again, at all until 2016 when I had my Accident which took me out of construction type jobs due to back problems, thats when I started looking into IT jobs more. Which is what landed me on ML to begin with -
</ Side Note: Story >
So like you said, it probably wasn't covered in School, cause it wasn't something that was taught back then .It wouldn't be in a networking course, and Cisco isn't known for knowing IT stuff. And wow, 2007. Yeah, very little RAID was commonly taught then.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
So let me start this off by saying if I hadn't listened to my boss first thing this morning, this mistake wouldn't have happened. but god forbid he say he was wrong.
Edit I took ownership of the fact that I had Moved to fast and didn't verify what I was doing, before formatting the drive- The plan changed and I made the mistake, trying to resolve the issue.
Okay: so, Went and picked up a PC from a customer: the plan as it was said to me was
- Pick up PC
*Bring back to office, put 2 new HDD's in and pull over the information after we image it.
*take it back and install it at the site again.
So, what actually happened?
Brought the PC back, boss told me to stop, he has an idea.
Reformat one of the Hard drives we have here, on that PC and then have the FakeRAID we use rebuild the information, then test the PC to run a terminal and verify it works properly.So I added the other drive to the PC. Little did I know (nor did I check) the Optical drive was set to boot first (which is where I added this Drive to the PC ). It came up as
C:and the PC I wanted to load asC:loaded asD:so when I opened cmd and typed in
format d:and pressed enter, I wiped all of the customer data from the Drives..it wasnt until I noticed a program we don't use on aloha PC's was when I realized what I had done.
My Tuesday Fuck up in a nutshell. -- Let's all take a moment to give me shit for this colossal screw up.
we already downloaded a Software to Recover lost partitions and I have that running right now .
GetDATABack by www.runtime.org has saved me from many a pickle both self-induced and otherwise.
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@Obsolesce said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
I tried Doing it one time on site, and it was so slow that I had to call my boss before they would let me leave because they couldn't do anything on the PC while it was rebuilding the drive.
Why would anyone expect a PC to be really usable while it's rebuilding a spinning disk RAID, regardless of the drives being identical or not? It's a PC... and likely a shitty one.
that was one of my points too...
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@Obsolesce said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
I tried Doing it one time on site, and it was so slow that I had to call my boss before they would let me leave because they couldn't do anything on the PC while it was rebuilding the drive.
Why would anyone expect a PC to be really usable while it's rebuilding a spinning disk RAID, regardless of the drives being identical or not? It's a PC... and likely a shitty one.
Well, someone paid for that functionality from the beginning. So what was sold to them, if not that?
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
So let me start this off by saying if I hadn't listened to my boss first thing this morning, this mistake wouldn't have happened. but god forbid he say he was wrong.
Edit I took ownership of the fact that I had Moved to fast and didn't verify what I was doing, before formatting the drive- The plan changed and I made the mistake, trying to resolve the issue.
Okay: so, Went and picked up a PC from a customer: the plan as it was said to me was
- Pick up PC
*Bring back to office, put 2 new HDD's in and pull over the information after we image it.
*take it back and install it at the site again.
So, what actually happened?
Brought the PC back, boss told me to stop, he has an idea.
Reformat one of the Hard drives we have here, on that PC and then have the FakeRAID we use rebuild the information, then test the PC to run a terminal and verify it works properly.So I added the other drive to the PC. Little did I know (nor did I check) the Optical drive was set to boot first (which is where I added this Drive to the PC ). It came up as
C:and the PC I wanted to load asC:loaded asD:so when I opened cmd and typed in
format d:and pressed enter, I wiped all of the customer data from the Drives..it wasnt until I noticed a program we don't use on aloha PC's was when I realized what I had done.
My Tuesday Fuck up in a nutshell. -- Let's all take a moment to give me shit for this colossal screw up.
we already downloaded a Software to Recover lost partitions and I have that running right now .
BTW, the one time where I made an assumption after setting up a new laptop for the lead partner at one of our client accounting firms, I found out they were storing data in places they should not have been.
Their profile and key data folders were transferred but apparently not the ones where they kept their data. #SMH
The old system had already been repurposed so no chance of getting much of anything off the spindle in it.
I spent a good half an hour to an hour against the outside back wall of the shop breathing. Just breathing. Slowly.
Lesson learned.
We image everything. Absolutely everything before we touch it.
We use ShadowProtect on a dedicated system we call the Data Mule that also has GDB and all of our other utilities such as DoD Erasure.
We fee in the backup time to everything we do.
EDIT: They realized that it was plain dumb to not be copying that data up to the server once in a while so that it did get backed up. If the spindle had died, they would have been in the same position.
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@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@Obsolesce said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
I tried Doing it one time on site, and it was so slow that I had to call my boss before they would let me leave because they couldn't do anything on the PC while it was rebuilding the drive.
Why would anyone expect a PC to be really usable while it's rebuilding a spinning disk RAID, regardless of the drives being identical or not? It's a PC... and likely a shitty one.
Well, someone paid for that functionality from the beginning. So what was sold to them, if not that?
A bag of lies! and what the customer was sold was likely not what was wanted, but what was forced upon them for deciding to go with this vendor.
Sadly - as I gain more exposure to POS systems, most of them are crap and sell super overpriced crap at that.
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@PhlipElder said in Huge Mistake:
EDIT: They realized that it was plain dumb to not be copying that data up to the server once in a while so that it did get backed up. If the spindle had died, they would have been in the same position.
Once in a while? wat? like a minimum of daily.. LOL
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We still haven't addressed the root cause of the issue. What will you do differently next time to make sure this doesn't happen?
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Big mistake I made was over 15 years ago. Was taking out a mechanical hard drive from my computer to put into an external caddy. The plastic wasn't clipped in correctly and the hard drive slid outside the other end of the caddy and hitting the hard floor with some force....hard drive was dead after this....after this always been weary holding a hard drive lol..
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@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
We still haven't addressed the root cause of the issue. What will you do differently next time to make sure this doesn't happen?
I said this earlier in the thread:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
If we were at someplace like Bridgewater, we'd take a moment to post mortem and talk about what actually went wrong...
For example... did the boss' change of plan cause you to rush or get flustered? If so, learning to recognize when that is happening to you and take a minute to breath, focus, and compose yourself can go a long way. Or simply being able to say "I can't handle a last minute change, this is when I make mistakes." Lots of people can't plan for something then change last minute, because if you are like me, certain steps are already verified or checked off in your brain that the new plan might not account for.
In the original plan there were safety measures, did the boss tell you to skip those, too? Or did you skip them by accident?
Was the boss' plan to format the drive meant to be done with both drives in there currently?
Did you let the system do its own format that is automatic, required, and would meet the boss' plan, or was the additional step an assumption that turned out to not be needed?
There's a lot to delve into to try to figure out where and when mistake(s) were made, and how to try to hedge against them in the future.
This is actually something I did on my lunch break.
Before reading it I Took inventory of what happened,
causes and how I can make sure the mistake doesn't happen again:
here's what I found:
The change in plan caused me to shift my thinking which caused some confusion, Cause I had a gameplan with the idea of a backup already in mind.I didn't stop and think about what I was doing prior to hitting enter. I followed the simple steps i put into my head: thinking that The drives on the FakeRAID Promise Card would come up as
C:because that was the way it was before.
I rushed what I was doing, Possibly due to over confidence, of formatting a drive which I've seen done multiple times, but mostly with Removable USB drives (which I've done in the past so i thought " pshh Piece of Cake"So i found what I did wrong above;
My Biggest thing to do to make sure I don't do it again, is Slow down. Check everything 3 times before I even move forward with what I'm working on, and have a plan in place in the future for when we have to do this: Only put on drive on, make a back up of the drive and save it to a different drive. -
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
We still haven't addressed the root cause of the issue. What will you do differently next time to make sure this doesn't happen?
I said this earlier in the thread:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
If we were at someplace like Bridgewater, we'd take a moment to post mortem and talk about what actually went wrong...
For example... did the boss' change of plan cause you to rush or get flustered? If so, learning to recognize when that is happening to you and take a minute to breath, focus, and compose yourself can go a long way. Or simply being able to say "I can't handle a last minute change, this is when I make mistakes." Lots of people can't plan for something then change last minute, because if you are like me, certain steps are already verified or checked off in your brain that the new plan might not account for.
In the original plan there were safety measures, did the boss tell you to skip those, too? Or did you skip them by accident?
Was the boss' plan to format the drive meant to be done with both drives in there currently?
Did you let the system do its own format that is automatic, required, and would meet the boss' plan, or was the additional step an assumption that turned out to not be needed?
There's a lot to delve into to try to figure out where and when mistake(s) were made, and how to try to hedge against them in the future.
This is actually something I did on my lunch break.
Before reading it I Took inventory of what happened,
causes and how I can make sure the mistake doesn't happen again:
here's what I found:
The change in plan caused me to shift my thinking which caused some confusion, Cause I had a gameplan with the idea of a backup already in mind.I didn't stop and think about what I was doing prior to hitting enter. I followed the simple steps i put into my head: thinking that The drives on the FakeRAID Promise Card would come up as
C:because that was the way it was before.
I rushed what I was doing, Possibly due to over confidence, of formatting a drive which I've seen done multiple times, but mostly with Removable USB drives (which I've done in the past so i thought " pshh Piece of Cake"So i found what I did wrong above;
My Biggest thing to do to make sure I don't do it again, is Slow down. Check everything 3 times before I even move forward with what I'm working on, and have a plan in place in the future for when we have to do this: Only put on drive on, make a back up of the drive and save it to a different drive.This is better. Yes. I would add...
Start with.... never trust yourself. Make the backup first, even when you are confident.
Then... yes, slow down and double check and question if what you are told is true. Because often it is not, or it is misunderstood.
And third, consider how things are intended to be done. This isn't an answer, but can be informative.
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@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
and question if what you are told is true.
Isn't there a slogan that is becoming more and more popular now? "Trust, but verify."
Everyone needs to remember..... If you are signing your name on a project, it's OK to confirm all marching orders and procedures.
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@JasGot said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
and question if what you are told is true.
Isn't there a slogan that is becoming more and more popular now? "Trust, but verify."
Everyone needs to remember..... If you are signing your name on a project, it's OK to confirm all marching orders and procedures.
LOL - I find that saying so weird - what is trust without the lack of need to verify? The same can be said about faith.
