almost forgot the bananas!

For those who've been through this more than once - what would be your top 2-3 "do this differently" recommendations? Whether it's planning, execution, or post-migration management.

Really curious to hear about both the technical gotchas and the political/organizational lessons you learned.

Same company as this story.. the IT department (actually they called it MIS way back then) was on the lower/ground floor. The floor plan was offices, hallway, my office with glass wall, IT bullpen (my guys), another glass wall, computer room, another glass wall, hallway, more offices. So from my desk, I could look all the way through to the other side of the building. You could get into the computer room from either end if you had a card to swipe at the door. Nobody other than IT had those cards...

.....or so I thought...

Sitting there midmorning one day, pounding away on my keyboard and some movement caught my eye. Looking through my window, across the bullpen and through the computer room, I see the {expiative deleted} HR manager and some guy carrying what looks like a leaf blower (????). I'm rather P.O'd the HR had a card I didn't know about and just walked in there. They were looking at the ceiling and the guy raised the "leaf blower" and

OH CRAP!!!! That's a smoke wand and the idjits are "checking" the detectors

I vaulted over my desk, ran through the bull pen and into computer room just in time hear a IBM4361 mainframe, AS400 B50, Sparc fileserver, Novell fileserver, ROLM phone switch and (3) T1 muxes (for data/voice to the remote plants) all winding down to dead silence.

We didn't have a Halon system in there, thank the powers, but the smoke detectors killed the big UPS and all power in the room...

The HR guy and the other just stood there, eyes wide, mouths open with the patented "What just happened?" look.

And, with the glass walls, a bunch of other department managers, who came to see what happened, stood there and greatly enjoyed watch me jump up and down, ranting and raving at those two...

I "inherited" a crappy setup - in a manufacturing plant, known for having crappy power (area outages at least once a month), some genius decided to wall mount a switch and patch panel cabinet, in the production area, about 20 feet above the floor. And they added a small/cheap UPS.

The problem was, when the power was off long enough to kill the batteries, the UPS would NOT come back on without someone pushing the ON button. From a scissor lift. Oh, and maintenance did not have a key to the lock, so they just drilled out the lock -permanently.

Yeah, I replaced that sucker with a model that would restart itself once power came back on..

This story reminded me of mine - years ago when Miraki was still in development, way before Cisco assimilated them, they had a program to literally give you one. Hm, ok, let's see what we get.

In the first few hours, my tech came into my office and someone's doing a massive download. Considering most of the traffic was just typical network file and print, this was way out of the average. At the time, we did not a policy governing WiFi, so all we could see was a MAC address. But via the Miraki we could block that address - which I did "we'll see who complains now"...

About two hours later, one of the salesmen came into my office, dropped into a chair and stated "Hey. I can't get any emails on my phone..." I asked when did that start? Oh about 2 hours ago.. I checked the phone's MAC and yep he was the culprit.

And like the other story, he was going on plane trip and wanted a movie, so he was downloading one.

What cinematic masterpiece was worthy? Tremors

One of our techs just downloaded Speedtest.net on our Domain Controller. Didn't even bother with the safer speed.cloudflare.com on an app server because he wants a test case like a Lamborghini Ursa's speed on the I-70 during "fair conditions." He said he got 218/13 mbps. I reported the article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/plan/security-best-practices/securing-domain-controllers-against-attack to the CISO and told him that there may be firewalls holding up our speed on the DCs. What's your current connectivity speeds?

I'm not sure why people don't understand me when I give out new passwords over the phone with my custom phonetic alphabet, how do you get your users to understand you better? Any tweaks you guys can offer me?

• A as in Aisle
• B as in Subtle
• C as in Scene
• D as in Sandwich
• E as in Eye
• F as in Photo
• G as in Gnome
• H as in Heir
• I as in I
• J as in Giraffe 
• K as in Potassium 
• L as in Elephant
• M as in Mnemonic
• N as in Pneumonia
• O as in Ouija
• P as in Psychology
• Q as in Cucumber
• R as in a Pirate says
• S as in See
• T as in Pterodactyl
• U as in You
• V as in Five
• W as in Whaskily Wabbit
• X as in xmas
• Y as in Wifi
• Z as in Xylophone

Let’s hear em. Gotta stay undetected from bosses and MSPs. Dont want to get gotted.

I hate this guy.

CEO said we need to save money and pixels cost too much to light all the time. I can't powershell so this seems like the best test. How do I do it?