@scottalanmiller said in Why Do Recruiters Never Get Involved in Forums Like This:
Of the top 20, only one calls Texas home in any way, and isn't there the majority of the time. The first full time Texan in the list is the 25th busiest poster.
I live in Texas the minimum number of days to claim it for tax reasons (although I'm not sure I make the top 25). He says from Portugal at the end of 6 weeks on the road
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do Recruiters Never Get Involved in Forums Like This:
how can someone effectively recruit if they don't know the position that they are trying to fill or the candidates that they are trying to place?
Couple reasons...
If the learned enough technology they would stop being a recruiter and get paid more doing Technology (I know one recruiter who did this).
There are a LOT of industries where you don't have to know how to BUILD xxx to identify people who are good at it.
A lot of being in a meta position like this is knowing what DOESN"T work out, as much as what does. I would expect recruiters to target online communities who have the following capabilities if they do...
Niche forums are better...
If I'm hiring for a VMware expert I'm going to look at the VMware community forums first. If I'm hiring for REDIS I"m going to hire in forums that focus on REDIS.
Recruiters are going to target communities where higher pay individuals hang out. A forum that focuses on SMB IT is going to get less focus on one that favors enterprise IT or developer positions. Remember these guys get paid a % of the salary for the job. SMB recruiters filling a $40K role need to find 5 people to get as much as 1 x 200K role. In fact, that 200K role is better by definition as fixed overhead part of the conversation is the same for both, and commisions % actually GO UP to the more niche the role. Toss in the candidate pool is smaller making elimination of candidates actually easier, SMB recruitment is just a crap job.
Recruiting by virtue of not paying well until you get to the higher end headhunting, is going to suffer the fate of other low barriers to entry, no education requirement, low skill relationship jobs. GOOD talented, capable people are going to shun it (or move up quickly) while the talent, for the most part, will be.... well what we see.
Another general trend is for larger technical focused companies (who have the better jobs) to refuse to work with outside recruiters. This is a secular threat to the business model. My employer REFUSES to work with outside recruiters.
In short, the dumpster fire that is recruiting in SMB is by design, and there isn't strong enough financial incentive to fix it unless all boats rise and pay goes up a lot.
@scottalanmiller said in I am going to start an ISP:
In rural eastern Europe, 300Mb/s 4G is a reality and has been for years. Plenty speed to handle almost anything.
And yet here I am in Porto with 1.78mbps down on 3G 
Not exactly rural EU and still crap wireless.
@scottalanmiller said in I am going to start an ISP:
That's the biggest risk, the wireless carriers with 5G. TMobile promises nationwide rollout in like one year.
To be fair Sprint and T-Mobile I thought were going to do fake 5G (LTE-A) initially but hey, if they can deliver a 500GB or higher data cap, 10ms to the tower, and 100Mbps connections I think rural WISPS are dead overnight.
@NerdyDad said in I am going to start an ISP:
Looks like I have a potential investor. We've talked about numbers and the biggest concern they have is the monthly backhaul charges. They're thinking that we can negotiate the supplier down if we offer to pay for a year up front
If you're talking about a Fiber/ISP backhaul they will factor in buildout costs on a 3-5 year contract but....
Verizon is offering no caps, 300Mbps service for $50 soon in my city. I expect the wireless carriers to aggressively move into rural WISP business.
@scottalanmiller said in I am going to start an ISP:
SpaceX alone has a "all services like this will be dead" end date of 2024 with most being crushed between 2020 and that time. And that is just one carrier. You've got a dozen or more serious contenders for "making your market go away" playing in a similar time frame, and all of them aware of and racing against SpaceX.
5G in urban, LTE-A upgrades in rural. There is a trillion dollar domestic capital spend happening right now on the ground. SMB's are going to be a niche hobby business very quickly.
@PhlipElder said in HA With switches:
We've deployed a lot of the SG500x series stackable switches with a few weird behaviours depending on how they are set up. Many of them fronted the disaggregate clusters mentioned above.
They didn't implement PVSTP properly.
@dave247 said in SAS SSD vs SAS HDD in a RAID 10?:
I see on xbyte, the PM863a is a lot cheaper, though I can't tell if that's a used/refurb part. What other places would you suggest I look?
It's just a bit long in the tooth at this point (That drives been around 2-3 years since the refresh). It's also low endurance TLC with a smallish DRAM and SLC buffer. It's not going to take sustained write throughput very well.
@stacksofplates said in Discovering FakeRAID in the Real World:
@scottalanmiller there isn’t a software based raid option on ESXi unless you pass it to a VM or use vSAN. The cheapest raid controllers supported are the BOSS modules M.2 mirroring things.
I think that's what our VxRails are coming with.
14Gen VxRAIL and ReadyNodes use's BOSS for the boot modules. VxRAIL keeps the factory re-install image I think on the SD Cards in case you need to factory nuke a node.
@scottalanmiller there isn’t a software based raid option on ESXi unless you pass it to a VM or use vSAN. The cheapest raid controllers supported are the BOSS modules M.2 mirroring things.
@scottalanmiller said in Discovering FakeRAID in the Real World:
Dell and HPE both make some really silly software RAID devices that require hardware dongles and configure through the BIOS, but are NOT FakeRAID.
You talking about the S series, or the Intel CPU ROC functions for NVMe drives (which have a dongle for certain features, or the ability to use non-Intel drives). I thought the OEM's were shunning VROC.
@scottalanmiller said in Discovering FakeRAID in the Real World:
@pete-s said in Discovering FakeRAID in the Real World:
@dustinb3403 No, Broadcom 3008 has it's own integrated cpu, on board memory etc. It's just not enough performance for it to do all kinds of raid. It's the same controller as Dell H330 and a bunch of others make cards with it as well.
From the specs:
The SAS 3008 offered with the Avago Integrated RAID (IR) feature is a
low cost, high performance RAID solution designed for blade, entry and
mid-range servers that require redundancy and high availability but where
a full featured RAID implementation is cost prohibitive or not desired. The
Avago advanced Integrated RAID options include Integrated Mirroring
(IM), which is RAID 1, Integrated Mirroring Enhanced (IME), known as RAID
1E, Integrated Striping (IS), which is RAID 0, and Integrated Mirroring and
Striping (IMS) which is RAID 10. By simplifying the RAID configuration
options, Integrated RAID is easy to install and configure and meets the
needs of most internal RAID requirements.https://mangolassi.it/topic/6375/examining-the-dell-perc-h310-controller/
The H3xx series is hardware. Terribly slow hardware, but hardware.
The H330 is a 3008 based product but it has a different firmware package, and some cut down internals so it has a much lower queue depth, and a bastardized mega-raid capability (no write cache). There is memory on the card, but it's for the queues.
The HBA330 isn't slow it @#%@% flies but it's pass through only. It is the full queue'd (exposes the raw possible queue based on the memory which is crazy high), and has no firmware option for a RAID firmware.
The H310 was a LSI2008 based ASIC package which had its queue crippled to something pathetic like 25.
Dell runs their own trunk for HBA firmware's rather than just grabbing various checkpoints on the tree is my understanding, so beyond these customizations, you will sometimes see different behavior. Sometimes they will selectively ship a fix, and avoid a feature they found problematic or didn't want (Tri-Mode RAID wasn't supported on the newest PERC's at first).
The controller industry is crazy opaque.
@dustinb3403 said in Discovering FakeRAID in the Real World:
Software RAID works across any OS, Linux, Windows and (probably) MAC all include this. It's hardware agnostic and could in theory allow you to mount an array to recover data.
This big thing to be careful of is drive swaps with software RAID. If you can't flag the drive to replace (especially dangerous with SAS Expanders, and JBODs where the numbering schemes sometimes start with 0 sometimes with 1).
@dashrender said in SAS SSD vs SAS HDD in a RAID 10?:
This really does boil down to math, but odds are of course never zero, and someone does have to be the one who suffers the failure outside of the typical odds from time to time.
Human error tends to be the biggest cause. People go to replace a drive while a rebuild is going on and swap the wrong drive.
@dustinb3403 said in SAS SSD vs SAS HDD in a RAID 10?:
OBR5 is the standard if you are going to be using an SSD
A URE isn't the only failure or corruption mode on a SSD. You can have drives that are not dead, but you want to shoot (firmware acting squirrel and you get 500ms). Also, 16TB SSDs that have deduplication and other data services in front of them can take a LONG TIME to rebuild (making that 7+1 a non-fun rebuild).
Throw in people using cheap TLC and QLC (crap write speed and latency after the DRAM and SLC buffer exhausted) and I wouldn't say as a rule RAID 5 for traditional RAID groups of SSDs is always a good idea. If you have an SDS layer that wide stripes across multiple servers, and limits the URE domain to an individual object this is a bit more controlled. If I have a small log file that writes in a circle a lot (My Casandra/REDIS systems) erasure codes may not be worth it has given the volume of ingestion.
I'm a bigger fan of RAID 5 on SSD in systems where I can pick and chose my RAID level on a single object, LUN etc so I can break up the write outliers that are small.
@scottalanmiller said in Which skills is more valuable to you? Hard skills or Soft skills?:
But in the enterprise, so few people need to talk to anyone but other tech people, the interfaces to the outside world are few and far between.
I agree here, but there is a minimum viable product of soft skills where even other tech people don't want to put up with your shit, or your ability to communicate with other tech people is crap and so you don't get good feedback or collaboration. The 10x engineer who belongs in a closet is something that fewer and fewer companies will put up with. Hell Linus recently admitted he needs to stop being an asshole. Netflix has an official policy to not keep them.
Our engineering have an internal-only R&D conference every year where they pitch idea's and their work to each other (it's like an academic conference with papers and quick talks) and there is a lot of value in them being able to pitch their new crazy idea. We have Internal reading groups, and other presentations that are done weekly where people talk about their work. A ton of good feedback on projects comes from this. Technical skills can be advanced by soft skills.
@scottalanmiller said in Which skills is more valuable to you? Hard skills or Soft skills?:
This, HUGELY depends on role. For some roles, I don't care at all. For others, soft is all that matters, more or less.
The problem is roles where you need more technical than soft skills, in consulting end up with that person "fronted" by a project manager etc. If that person doesn't communicate with the PM then eventually that can be a problem. If they only work with other technical team members, eventually toxic personalities cause problems. There are fewer "truly isolated" IT jobs than I think people realize.
@kelly said in Which skills is more valuable to you? Hard skills or Soft skills?:
@storageninja said in Which skills is more valuable to you? Hard skills or Soft skills?:
- Soft skills are harder to teach.
This. Assuming that all other things are equal (teachability, motivation, etc.) I would much rather have soft skills.
We do one soft skills class (1-2 day) a year. Focusing on speaker and communication training. It's not cheap but our team is really good at presenting idea's and content as a result.
@nerdydad said in Looking for firmware:
Looks like I am on the latest version of ESXi that will work with this datastore.
You using VMFS3 or some nonsense?