Fargostreet.com

Please post a screenshot of that, before you spew out nonsense - I think I know my CCIE #

Also, what is your CISCO TAC ID? I want to see how long you been in the industry.

integra_gsr98;179503 wrote:
So you passed in 1999? What was your original number?

Christ, is this an interrogation?

Back in 2001 - they changed the way how Cisco professionals were monitored. It use to be a 4 digit number - and when I recertified in 2002 - I was given my current number - also because I was self employed and we were a cisco partner we came on a different standard.

I am sure I could find my ORIGINAL card somewhere, but really? Wouldn't it be far easier for you just to go on, put your TAC in, type my badge, and pull up the information?

Or rather, call the number I gave you, It really is insulting for people to basically, how I say, undermine your experience when I have gone through much in order to attain my status. I have given you the credentials and avenues to verify, please do so and then get back here. Thank you and have a great day.

integra_gsr98;179500 wrote:
I have no issues with your geographical region except your last IP puts you in Fargo, weird.
Current one seems to be OK though.

When did you pass your CCIE?

Rephrase the question, originally pass my CCIE? Or the most recent time I was recertified?

Originally - 1999

Recertified - 2006

CCIE once again, requires you to do it every 2 years. I am seriously considering not doing it anymore, as I am partnered now and we are streamlining ourselves to be an Aruba partner, my CCIE will be moot point to our vendors.

integra_gsr98;179497 wrote:
So you passed the routing and switching exam?

I'm assuming you mean the 350-001, last time I checked - yep, I did. I just gave you my CCIE #, use your TAC ID and verify for pete's sake.

I don't know what kind of background you have, but after August 15th - CCIE, CCNA, and CCNP (CCDA will be left alone) will be changed dramatically to more alter professional environment, consisting of what the CCIE mainly was (lab environment)

they will be taking a structure, similar to what MS uses - core and supplemental facilities to give greater aveneues, and specialties in particular products.

During your CCIE lab exam, they make you setup whatever network they desire (ATM, now MPLS) could be anything - you do it within the stipulation, bandwidth limitation, etc, of whatever they demand, then they break it. I am absolutely shuddering to see what they will do in any 8500 + Chasis + Sup 720 (seems to be the hot item vendors are pushing) kind of troubleshooting they will expect.

Since were als on topic of, for whatever childish reason, doubting my geographical loaction - if you are a forum moderator, you should be able to take a look at oh say, the last 5 IP's that I've logged on as, and then go to a little known website called http://dnsstuff.com and it will give you all the information you want with their utilities, including a basic trace which should show you the hops I am coming from giving you a rough estimate.

I'm either in Minneapolis, or I got some really really really long fiber out from, Eagan, Plymouth, Downtown, and Bloomington.

integra_gsr98;179493 wrote:
Didn't you say you moved back to Minneapolis?

Correct - that is the number of the dispatch office, that allocates all of our calls. Are we having a misunderstanding here of some sort?

You see, let me explain to you a simple business concept, instead of hiring a monkey to answer phone calls, why not hire a company (that doesn't need to be paid benefits, and on top of that, far cheaper) to dispatch out phone calls, this company also does this for various other companies amongst the north american continent.

Why don't you just call it, and go ahead and give them your information (after collecting your billing information) make sure to ask for a CCIE support, and like magic within 10-15 mins (due to our response time guarentee) one of us will give you a call, as a matter of fact, today is your lucky day - I will be that one.

integra_gsr98;179488 wrote:
What's your Number?

Is your phone call referring to the needs of a CCIE? If so, I will give you the number to our dispatcher, and depending on your situation, Jayan (CCIE #18350) will take care of it, if it is voice, and myself on data (CCIE # 18485)

888-412-5546 is our (outsourced) dispatch office

If for whatever reason you need my personal contact information, feel free to PM me and I shall reply - please keep it confidential. Which I find so far, after reading some various threads, will be quite difficult to do.

tjamz;179474 wrote:
I'll let Irish speak to this, he came up through Volt and now works for Microsoft. My brother-in-law currently works for Volt (w/ a 4 year MIS degree).

Yes, their services are being marketed to clients who pay hefty fees, but you also have to realize what I said before that MOST help desk type calls can be handled by ANYONE w/ an ounce of common sense and the ability to read a diagnostic flowchart. Sometimes people call in with more complex issues. It is at this point in time that the escalation occurs. The people in the call escalation areas are the ones more likely to be certified and have a more in depth understanding of the products they are assisting on. There will be times when even they cannot handle the issue and the call gets escalated even higher...possibly to Microsoft employees who will attempt a more in depth assessment and diagnosis. Like any other CS department there are going to be times when they can't answer the questions OR when their customers just don't have the knowledge to understand what they are being asked and therefore don't do what they are told to do...and then the issue doesn't get resolved. Another possibility is that someone in the lower tiers failed to try a process that they should have done....the tiers above them assume that it has been tried already because it is standard protocol, but for whatever reason it wasn't done. The upper tier people skip over that portion assuming it has already been tried when in reality a Tier 1 person may have been able to answer the question if they had presented it....of course it is still possible that when the client called, they immediately asked to speak to someone higher up so steps may have been skipped there as well. In a perfect world, a flow-chart and the ability to read would be all that is needed at a help desk...but also in that world the help desk wouldn't be needed since everything would be simple and nothing would ever mess up.

I understand how a help desk works, I been in this business longer then you imagine. I been in it before ATM, working for various telecom industries. You do not need to explain to me how it works, I know how it SHOULD work, and volt does not do that. If you want a standard tier 1 call, let us go back to this particular example once again, when the question of "What operating system is it?" and they answered SBS 2003, well obviously the guy has not a god damn clue of anything of the innards of it. He should've chucked it on over, perhaps saving maybe an hour or 2 there, then idiot #2 came in, idiot #3, and idiot #4, sure the REMOTE possibility came that #2-4, ASSUMED that something was covered, but that just shows blatant inexperience, anyone in the IT industry, whether your desktop support, helpdesk, admin, IS manager - YOU never EVER assume, you work from the group up. Hell its the foundation of the OSI layer (However practical that is)

I am sure your brother in law, and irish, are fine employees of the company and represent them well. I myself use to work for a company similar to volt back in the telecom days - until I realized, the only way to make money in god blessed America and its capitalistic ways - is to be in business for yourself. Which was the best decision I have ever made in my life.

I don't stand for particular business models and practicies, and volt seems to be following these off not only this experience, but others, I tried finding a .NET developer several months ago, Volt found and sent me 15 candidates, NONE of them worked with it before, ever. How completely idiotic is that? I payed volt great money for there "excellence in service, dedication, and human resource management" what I recieved was just pitiful garbage. I had better luck posting an add on craigslist.org and reading through resumes myself, which takes my valuable time.

I don't like reading resumes, they bore me to death, that is why I attempted to use volt, and several other agencies, so that bad taste of recruiters are left with me never to be shaken from.

Heard some great reviews about the game, but I just don't have the time for one. Or rather, I'm afraid of what little time I would have elsewhere in my life if I did endeavor in this game.

Graphics look beautiful, gameplay - seamless, and story telling - wowza. Yep, I better stay away from it.

tjamz;179461 wrote:
3D0 was the game counsel I think that you were referring to

That is it! I am getting old!

Upon further reading, and evaluation of your comment Tjamz, I agree with you to a certain extent. They are tier 1, however, they are being marketed as different.

They are being marketed out to these clients whom are paying hefty contract fee's as support professionals, when they are far from that. Either A) Increase the training that Volt recieves, so that the client can feel the blowback of this regiment, or B) Offer different support locale for the clients

Aruba has a done fine job of this in the past including of there streamlined products (Vast cry from what cisco's latest offering is, particularly in the core layer) and as for there support, they are very blunt in what each how you would call "tier" is capable of.

I feel the pain for the client of Northland systems, when they are paying x amount of money for contract and support fee's on top of there licensing. They expect results, and they shouldn't have to pay the firm that I represent on top of what they have already committed to, to solve a problem that is specifically within there regiments.

Hrmmm, I'd like to see the credentials of those certifications then.

For certain the person whom he spoke to (assuming he passed even a basic 270-90 test) would understand certain credentials are on a SBS (IE: All FSMO roles)

SBS Server has a plethora of questions on the 270-93, it would be fairly difficult to pass one's exam without basic knowledge of this.

I will have to doubt that they have to pass certifications, perhaps supervisors, but certainly not the support professionals (or at least once again, these 4)

Certifications mean nothing, I have (had let me rephrase) employees in the past, with no education, no certifcation, and half of them work for AT&T now as a part of an MPLS design team. However, when working with a company's product, and representing them it is vital to recieve those certifications.

I'm a licensed Cisco dealer, therefore, I must keep my CCIE every 2 years, and as a matter of fact they change these tests quite often; August 15th the exam will be entirely different.

Do not try to convince me what volt is and what volt isn't, the highest "skill level" set that they find are .Net developers - a colleague of mine was a recruiter for them for 5 years until he left for Teksystems, and now works with Bucher Christensen Consulting, Cargill, and EDS.

Volt is like every other IT recruiter out there, trying to fill a gap in the IT employment, which is nessecary, however (not all the time) but sometimes, just like any other industry, they tend to over exert themselves, and place the need of the client (in this case Microsoft) before the quality of the candidate.

tjamz;179448 wrote:
you wanna play them on your NES/SNES or do you want to play them on your pc? If you want to play them on your pc, just search for a NES/SNES emulator and once you DL it, let me know, I have the roms for every NES/SNES game released to the USA.

^^^ QFT

Use an emulator, it will get the job done. All kinds of other systems out there too, I think I stumbled by an emulator for the 3dfx box back in the day, can't remember what it was called. I Just remembered it had that terrible Zelda port game that was all done on CD with animation, what a travesty.

Also to add, I don't hate Microsoft, I hate Aruba

MS gets a bad rap for some of their products, but they offer a great streamlined solution (With my only complaint being there push for IPv6 which is, absolutely blasphemous)

I am just upset at the lack of education/training that not only this particular rep had, but 4 others.

thrash;179449 wrote:
Some of the MBS ERP products have support organizations in Fargo, and some slice of the Office support is happening in Fargo as well now.

Sharepoint and SBS are not part of MBS, although the new "MBD" (Microsoft Business Division) does seem to lump IW (Information Worker.. i.e. Office) and the traditional ERP products (Navision, Axapta, Great Plains). Sharepoint historically has been tightly married to the office group, so it is conceivable that some sharepoint support is happening here in Fargo.

Why does it matter? I don't understand what question you are asking.. it sounds like you just want to bitch about Microsoft?

As a side note, Volt provides a variety of people for different types of roles, with different levels of talent. While it may be generally true (although I don't know that it is) that Volt supplies primarily lower-level talent, there are certainly exceptions. Some extremely qualified people choose to not go "blue badge" (i.e. full time employee) precisely so they can take the mandatory 100 day break that contractors are required to take every year

I worked for MS out in redmond for a bit over 3 years before re-locating to the office here. I'm happy to try and help you out if that's what you're after, although in many cases people have domain knowledge in one of our products or technologies that I don't have.

No desire to go over to that side, been consulting for 10+ years now, and wouldn't want it any other way. I was just shall we say, impressed, by the lackluster support and unacceptable knowledgebase that was supported to an MS Gold Partner.

A good chance is the people whom contact your support team are either A) MCSE/MCSA, perhaps even MVP in certain products, or rather B) Have years of IT knowledge. I was far more comfortable with getting a hold of through (Since we are an MS Gold Partner) our support team based out of Redmond, and the knowledge they brought to the table. However - Volt needs to highly reconsider their training/certification regiment after that terrible phone call. 8 hours downtime is unacceptable for a client with support for a trivial matter like they had.

/rant

tjamz;179381 wrote:
They have software support for Sharepoint, and SQL for sure at Microsoft/Volt.

Volt is that over glorified temp agency that works directly with Microsoft, and some other various companies. I didn't know they had an office in Fargo, that would explain everything.

Link;179356 wrote:
Newer BIOS's have options to have your computer shut off if the GPU gets to warm. Mine does at least.

But with an eMachines, Probably not.

Put your hand on the GPU and see if it feels real warm. Normally, they won't be "cold", but they will have a little temp to them. If it feels real hot, It's overheating. You will need to add more fans into your case, but if there is no more room for additional fans, do as i suggested before and put a box fan next to it.

GPU = Graphical Processing Unit, CPU is what you are referring to, unless you have a magical pixie fairy that does that for you via the south bridge controller temperature senor, I however - have not found this magical pixie fairy.

Link;179351 wrote:
in your BIOS, there should be an option to have your PC shut down when it gets to a certain temperature. If you are having concerns of it overheating, go check that out and see what temp its at. If it's disabled, enable it.

Also, take the side of your case off and stick a box fan in it. Thats what I did. I am a big gamer so all my shit is overclocked to beat hell.. which in return gives me very high temps.. So I just stuck a standard box fan right next to it.. and problem is solved

His concern was with his graphics card, I don't think a threshold switch on his BIOS will really care about his GPU.

Like I said please, refer to my previous statement.

Bookem;179341 wrote:
I can ask my neighbor............but I'd have to print off the mumbo-jumbo

No my main question is ALL of MBS software support ouf of Fargo, and are they starting to trickle down native MS product (IE: Sharepoint, Exchange, SQL) to there as well? God I hope not.

Just got a call to a company called "Northland Systems" a Cisco Broker based out of Plymouth (Western Suburb)

Long story short - one of there employees called there support - was on the phone with at least 6 reps (this told me 2nd hand of course) and was on the phone for 7 hours....

Apparently they don't understand what FSMO roles really need to be on a SBS server do they? I won't get in to detail, but I thought one of you guys worked over there. Is sharepoint services and other MBS products (Thankfully I don't have to touch them most of the time) supported over in Fargo? It was my understanding it was all out of Washington.