Promotion!

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:43 pm

Today I got promoted from help desk technician to Level 3 server technician. This is the position I've been wanting, and the opportunity came where they needed another L3 tech, so I was offered it on the spot. This was a few weeks ago, and now today was official.

I'll be dealing with only one customer most of the time, rather then all the other customers. This is a major client mind you, but once I get familiarized with the systems it should go well. Most of the servers are on ESX with an IBM San back end.

There are quite a few complex systems and obscure stuff so it will be challenging at first but I'll get the hang of it. Most of it is familiar as it is a rather standard windows domain environment. Their print setup is the most horrible, as lot of printers are shared on a PC then the print queue points to the share. Hopefully this is something I can take part of fixing as part of a project to improve things.

Funny as today was my first day and the whole spooler kept crashing, taking lot of the ports with it, and had to be re-added. We managed to pin point it to a port entry in the registry that was corrupted.

The best part of this is, no more taking internet calls, or listening to cranky teachers that can't print, or 4:59pm calls from a dialup user. It will be great to be able to actually work on something without being interrupted by customer phone calls. Looking forward to what this new job will have to offer.

Now, the downside of this is I will probably be spending way less time working on the shard as if something goes down, or there is some kind of upgrade, I will have to stay. L3 techs are known for working in periods of 24 consecutive hours during major outages. Conveniently there is also a power switch over in a few weeks so that should be fun. Though, I'm unionized, so I get to put in all that time as overtime. I did lot of overtime at help desk, I'll most likely do more here. I will probably bank a lot of it so I can take days off during quiet times.

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Crawworth · Post by **Crawworth** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:03 pm

What kind of printers are they using?

Where I work we have 9 big printers, using 42 inch spools of paper. We have 4 computers to run the queues on them. 3 control 2 printers and one controls 3 printers. Even then, if we have a lot of jobs to run through, the queues can get so intensive sometimes that it will bog down all of them (sometimes requiring restarts and cancellation of half the queue.)

I think the brand of printer matters too. Our 3 HP printers are fast, but take forever spooling and processing images. They also mess up the most, making us shut them down and call in an HP technician. Epson is much better, although slower, and they have better print quality. (They don't lay down as much ink, so small print like disclaimers doesn't become thinned out and unintelligible)

Of course, this may have nothing to do with the type of printers your dealing with. But I don't see it as a good thing to have a large amount of printers using one PC to handle the spooling and processing elements.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:09 pm

Actually it's weird. Lot of the printers are text/generic zebra thermal printers. Basically, Meditech does all the formatting work and sends it off to the print queue which then redirects to the share on the PC, which then prints. Problem is, this path has more chance of failures. These are not dedicated print PCs, they are just user PCs.

Most of the regular laser printers are Lexmarks. As much as Lexmark is not that popular as far as stability, I think their enterprise level stuff is half decent. HPs suck for enterprise as their drivers are so unstable, I think there's only a few, and I would not be surprised if those are causing the issues.

There's a good 100 or so printers in there. The print server going down is probably worse then the email server going down lol.

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Crawworth · Post by **Crawworth** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:26 pm

Yeah, our print servers going down would cost the company big. Of course, we're a printing company, so that's a given. Our other servers mainly take care of e-mail, employee music files, processes (such as refining, importing/exporting, proofing, sending to printing queue), and probably biggest of all is storage. All of our photographs we use are high resolution. (They average around 150-200 mbs each) So if we have a layout to create that uses more than one photo, that job could be as large as 1 gig. All in all, I'll bet most of our job folders contain about 1-2 gigs of data each.

That's why we have to have dedicated computers for the printers. Sending a gig of data for it to process and spool is intensive, especially when we send more than one file and set it to print 4 copies.

The other day I sent a 4 files to a printer. Each image was 67 1/4 inches by 28 inches. Needed two copies of each. I sent them and left, thinking I'll grab them in the morning. Turns out the computer just got confused, only printed out 3 of the 8 needed copies, and not even in order. Like it just decided which files it was going to print and ignored the rest. Took about 2 hours to get the remaining 5 files printed and ready to go.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 8:35 pm

Wow those are huge print jobs.

The stuff in our environment is fairly small thankfully, though there's lot of it.

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Curiosity · Post by **Curiosity** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 12:40 am

Congrats. I hope its less hassle than the other one. Promotions are always a good thing.

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Kev6872 · Post by **Kev6872** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 3:29 am

Congrats on the promotion Red.
You guys talking about HP's and big printers. I use 2 BIG hp printers where I work. They are about 7 1/5 feet tall and about 20' long.
I will post a pic of them next time I go in.

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Minky · Post by **Minky** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 3:59 am

All I understood in your post was:

Today I got promoted

Not really sure what else you just said, but from the context it sounds like you're satisfied with it, so yay!

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DOCTOR THUNDER · Post by **DOCTOR THUNDER** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:18 am

congrats red!

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ggkthx · Post by **ggkthx** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:37 am

Congrats.
I need more than a promotion, I need to find a whole new job.

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dprantl · Post by **dprantl** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 3:59 pm

Windows domain machines, ESX and IBM SAN backend is stuff I do all day long (we are using DS-4200's here). Let me know if you need help.

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onykage · Post by **onykage** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:08 pm

Thats dope dude! I knew you had it already, just forgot to mention the grats part. I was rather swamped myself the past 2 or 3 days. I found out the hard way that voice recognition algorithms are a pain in the arse! So needless to say no one saw me yesterday outside of my wife who was waiting for me in bed when I got home at 3am

. BUT.. IT WORKS!!! A php voice script.. crazy stuff. anyway ... So it looks like your having fun already. Just think, soon you'll be like me, and you will go to work and get home around the same time.

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Kev6872 · Post by **Kev6872** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 7:12 pm

Here is a picture of those HP printers that I use at work.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 8:11 pm

Wow that's huge. Not your typical office printer.

"Spooling print job 1 of 2, 924267203/934438945 bytes completed..."

*paper jam* "Ahhh crap"

What do you guys print, bill board signs and stuff?

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Kev6872 · Post by **Kev6872** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 8:56 pm

yeah billboards mostly.
The biggest one piece job we do is 14' X 48' , it takes about 45 minutes to print one of those.
The roll you see on the machine is 16'6" inches long. They weigh about 300 pounds.

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Crawworth · Post by **Crawworth** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 8:54 pm

Yeah, those printers blow the hell out of the ones where I work. I thought the ones we had were big.

But mostly what we do is boards and folders and the like for flooring companies. (You know, the thing they glue carpet samples to in the stores)
The biggest press we have at our building is 56" x 40". Although sometimes we'll have some big folders that are a tad larger than that and we'll have to piece them together when they come off the press.

Anything too much larger and we have to either send it to another one of our facilities or to a separate company. We have done banners before, but they've never been bigger than 6-8 feet by 3-4 feet. Can't imagine waiting 45 minutes for something to actually print. I've waited longer than that between when I send it to the ripping computer to start spooling and processing and when it actually finishes printing, but once it starts printing, most jobs take 5-10 minutes max. Takes longer once the art makes it to the presses downstairs, but that's not where I work, so I don't know how much longer.

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Kev6872 · Post by **Kev6872** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 1:24 am

We also do banners and big mesh jobs. It's cool seeing the stuff I print hanging in a stadium at the super bowl, or the all star game. We have even done stuff for some of the awards shows that you see. You know the background where all the stars get their pictures taken that has the shows logo all over it.

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