what did you learn today?
- Thread starter chalex
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I'd be tempted to punch both of you if I hadn't just consumed delicious crab and corn bisque and crab cakes.
Scotttheking":1xglpux7 said:
It's not far away for me.
Kinda rough finding good people, especially since Baton Rouge has been rated as one of the best cities to ride out the recession in.
Das Schwartz":l1ecm1cx said:Scotttheking":l1ecm1cx said:
It's not far away for me.
Kinda rough finding good people, especially since Baton Rouge has been rated as one of the best cities to ride out the recession in.
Good at what is the question that comes to mind...
jahamasa":7oz824fg said:
Blackened Cajun style food!
(Oh come on, you had to see that one coming...)
Please dont hurt me.
A client calls into the org about a trivial issue that is well documented and easy for help desk to resolve. But this fellow bypasses help desk because of a superiority complex, to have his issue resolved by someone he knows in middle-management (that is completely ignorant of said software). Where do they end up? The illusion of assistance, no resolution, and much more frustration.
I intervene in the email chain after it makes it to my inbox, after days of bouncing all over the realm of the org (never sent or cc'ed to anyone who can help, just middle management and the wrong department). I shake my head as I read through the chain - in some parts they reference the people they should be dealing with, but never include them in the communication. No IMs to these folks, cell calls, emails... nothing.
I jump in, and in 10 minutes I get the help desk to take ownership and resolve it. 10 freaking minutes.
I'm not sure which is worse at this moment, the client for bypassing process, or the folks on our side that accommodated them.
I intervene in the email chain after it makes it to my inbox, after days of bouncing all over the realm of the org (never sent or cc'ed to anyone who can help, just middle management and the wrong department). I shake my head as I read through the chain - in some parts they reference the people they should be dealing with, but never include them in the communication. No IMs to these folks, cell calls, emails... nothing.
I jump in, and in 10 minutes I get the help desk to take ownership and resolve it. 10 freaking minutes.
I'm not sure which is worse at this moment, the client for bypassing process, or the folks on our side that accommodated them.
More of a reminder than a new learnin but. . .
Tools that automatically generate documentation mostly just auto generate noise, sometimes in English.
Tools that automatically generate documentation mostly just auto generate noise, sometimes in English.
1 month ago we send out an alert not to fall for phishing scams. A week after that, someone falls for it. This same someone fell for it in June.
2 weeks ago, someone again does the same thing.
And today, about 2 hours ago, someone fell for it. We send out an immediate alert to NOT click on the "click here" emails. And we get 3 more people that do it, "just because".
And then some jackass asks what we're going to do about people who click on stuff "just because". Unless that jackass wants to become the campus email monitor and answer everyone's emails about "hey, do I click here" and then have it ignored anyway, WTF did that jackass ask that question?
ggagagagagagaghhhhahagagaggghhhhh
I'm going to kill someone. Figuratively speaking. GAGagagaggagaghhh
2 weeks ago, someone again does the same thing.
And today, about 2 hours ago, someone fell for it. We send out an immediate alert to NOT click on the "click here" emails. And we get 3 more people that do it, "just because".
And then some jackass asks what we're going to do about people who click on stuff "just because". Unless that jackass wants to become the campus email monitor and answer everyone's emails about "hey, do I click here" and then have it ignored anyway, WTF did that jackass ask that question?
ggagagagagagaghhhhahagagaggghhhhh
I'm going to kill someone. Figuratively speaking. GAGagagaggagaghhh
Danger Mouse":1gx2unyg said:
Is that a rhetorical question? Because it's obvious the "jackass" is frustrated that stupid people get to continue to do stupid things, visibly in front of the entire organization, and face no consequences.
In principle I agree, stupid *should* be punished, so you get less of it. I'm just not sure how'd you go about it effectively in a situation like this. (Couple jobs back, at a small software company, we had the VP of new product development fall for the 'I love you' virus. He didn't last too much longer.)
hutch85":393rum32 said:No, we have to follow the script - logical thought and intuitive troubleshooting are no longer practiced here. Please re-seat your RAM and try again. If that doesn't work, please replace each DIMM with a known good one and try that; one at a time of course. And if *that* doesn't work, I'd like you to try reseating each hard drive... have you tried reinstalling Windows?
Dell support is lucky there wasn't teleport technology when they pulled that crap on me - I'd be in prison several times over. Thankfully, we're no longer a Dell shop.
Dell support really is horrible, and I don't even deal with them on a regular basis.
A server running Debian had a faulty hard drive(which is to say, the RAID controller complained and the drive LED was red(ish)). We called Dell, the server is under warranty, and being used to HP support I expected them to just say something like "Ok, do you have a serial number? Ok then, we'll send you a new drive, have a nice day.".
But no, they want me to install DSET. Ok, I don't fancy doing that just to get a hard drive replaced, but if you insist.
Oh, it's in RPM format. Ah well, Alien to the rescue. Oh it had a bunch of dependencies...ok, I muck around with the installer script until it just disregards the deps and finally get it installed.
So I generate a report and mail it to the Dell support guy. Apparently our drive is defective. Oh fucking really, you don't say?
What I don't understand is, how can this annoying way of doing the simplest things even be good for Dell themselves? All the time their support personnel waste on this has got to cost more than just sending a drive out and on occasion getting a follow up call because it really was the backplane, SCA/SAS connector or whatnot.
Oh and apparently the correct way for a server application to close a TCP connection is to just respond to a FIN/ACK with a single ACK and then kill the thread, and if anyone questions this "It's too complicated for the person complaining to understand".
After repeated such issues, I have my management's full support behind me telling people, "Call the helpdesk, I cannot help you without a ticket number." Even if it's an internal user. I suggest you do the same.
Fire them. They are directly impacting the company, this goes beyond stupidity.
Yup, that's more or less how JCI worked if you called someone directly and the question you asked didn't have a yes or no answer. You were told to call the helpdesk and more or less hung up on.
ranald":2fqkefpd said:
I think you confused my rant with a request for information. That was a venting of frustration. I work in .edu.
I well know and that person well knows what (if any) the disciplinary structure is.
That I shouldn't assume a helldesk at $service_provider that's explicitly labelled "technical" and has a phone number so covert it practically requires a blood sacrifice to get hold of is well.....technical.
Me: Query regarding nameservers and a router acl
Random old and wheezy cockney bloke: Ooh, that sounds like a technical question - I'll have to get someone to call you back.
Me: wtf....this is $service_provider $tier desk right? Not the home-user, I've poured-tea-into-my-dsl-modem and want to blame you desk?
ROAWCB: Oh yes
Me: So why can't you answer my question?
ROAWCB: Oh, they've started staffing it with people from $fucktard_desk because we're short of staff.
Me: Nnnnghh...right. Could you leave a message for $person and tell him to call me back please.
That desk is supposed to be able to deal (while on the phone) with problems affecting whole shires and they've staffed it with someone who sounds like he wears a brown cardigan, drools and has difficulty programming the VCR.
Me: Query regarding nameservers and a router acl
Random old and wheezy cockney bloke: Ooh, that sounds like a technical question - I'll have to get someone to call you back.
Me: wtf....this is $service_provider $tier desk right? Not the home-user, I've poured-tea-into-my-dsl-modem and want to blame you desk?
ROAWCB: Oh yes
Me: So why can't you answer my question?
ROAWCB: Oh, they've started staffing it with people from $fucktard_desk because we're short of staff.
Me: Nnnnghh...right. Could you leave a message for $person and tell him to call me back please.
That desk is supposed to be able to deal (while on the phone) with problems affecting whole shires and they've staffed it with someone who sounds like he wears a brown cardigan, drools and has difficulty programming the VCR.
Danger Mouse":2w6f1xzu said:
I also work in the .edu as well. We have had to deal with the same issue. All I do is shut there account off for a while and then give them a good lashing and then make sure everyone knows what that person did and what not to do. Has worked good in the past.
I just learned that the project I'm working on will be supercomputer #87, as they calculate these things.
Now with useful link.
Now with useful link.
That Shell UK's London offices have eels in the lifts (and presumably in the server room) after the river water they were using for cooling kind of escaped (underground server room next to a river).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/19 ... ntre_eels/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/19 ... ntre_eels/
That should show up in the Shark Tank. He does call sysadmins pilot fish, I wonder what an eel would translate to?
ronelson":kehshs01 said:
did any one notice the links underneath in chronoligical order:
shell cuts 3000 IT jobs in $4 billion outsourcing gig -march 2008
shell forces 12% pay cut on IT contractors - july 2009 (i think)
shell faces massive data breach - feb 2010
i wonder if there's a causal link
Danger Mouse":eh3tq1xd said:
Crumbs DM, i'm gonna change my name to penfold!
so if we switch jobs for a week, you get to stay at my spacious brooklyn loft, and i get to stay with your wife and kids... not sure who's getting the shit end of that stick
i think you've got it worse just on the shear number of BS situations you have to post. Mine are fewer and farer betweener.
But i would love to take you out and get us hammered sometime, i imagine the tales of incompetance and bureaucratic butt-thumberey would bring each other to laughing tears, and force more rounds of shots. Don't suppose you're in the area?
I learned that apparently our virtaulization system doesn't have any sort of node failover. vm1 went down, bringing essentially every production app down. In theory we're load balanced between nodes, in practice that seems to not be the case.
clm100":3vxiv60a said:
You must work for my company.... We had that happen this week and it took them ~16 hours to restore service (down from 6AM to 10PM).
bigmikebrooklyn":1zyzcw3o said:Danger Mouse":1zyzcw3o said:
Crumbs DM, i'm gonna change my name to penfold!
so if we switch jobs for a week, you get to stay at my spacious brooklyn loft, and i get to stay with your wife and kids... not sure who's getting the shit end of that stick
i think you've got it worse just on the shear number of BS situations you have to post. Mine are fewer and farer betweener.
But i would love to take you out and get us hammered sometime, i imagine the tales of incompetance and bureaucratic butt-thumberey would bring each other to laughing tears, and force more rounds of shots. Don't suppose you're in the area?
Brooklyn Loft? Awesome.
As far as wife and kids go, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. It's great, but I wouldn't do it if I had a do-over.
Yeah, we could have beers, but I think we'd both be more sad at the end of the tale. That's just how it goes. It's kind of like finding another PTSD patient, when you're also so afflicted. It's not like you'll share stories that re going to end in rainbows and unicorns.
---
And today, found out the following after yesterday's interesting events:
-Using the Altiris console's logoff commands combined with windows Shutdown command to restart, results in systems that are in a strange limbo.
Fix? Use the Altiris console's reboot commands instead
-Today's version is that DeepFreeze hates the Altiris console's shutdown/reboot commands and can cause a loop if scripted, but will not if not scripted.
The fix will probably be a variant on the scripts listed in the Windows Technical Fora's useful cmd scripts thread. I'll be feeding a text file with hostnames into a script that uses the psshutdown utility to do the reboot on a task scheduled on the same server. I'm thinking that we probably should have a centralized task server for scheduled scripts.
Yes, that would make a single point of failure (even on a VM in our HA VMWare cluster), but at least we'd know where all the damn scheduled tasks are.
Did you know that if you storage vMotion a machine an a host with DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove and DataMover.HardwareAcceleeratedInit set to 1, and you have SANTAP running on an SSM, and the SANTAP is splitting traffic on the SAN you're storage vMotioning on (between datastores, not to a different SAN mind you) the SSMs panic and reboot?
Did I also mention that SSMs have ports on the front of them?
Did I also mention that we had two CX3-80s plugged into those ports?
On two separate fabrics?
And they both rebooted at the same time?
And did I also mention that I got to work the TAC while at a bar last night, had to leave said bar because Verizon sucks, and have been up since 4:30 working on it. And LSU plays Ole Miss at 2:30. And if I don't make the game, I'm stabbing Cisco in the face.
At least the rest of the fabric (and more importantly the VMAX) stayed up.
Did I also mention that SSMs have ports on the front of them?
Did I also mention that we had two CX3-80s plugged into those ports?
On two separate fabrics?
And they both rebooted at the same time?
And did I also mention that I got to work the TAC while at a bar last night, had to leave said bar because Verizon sucks, and have been up since 4:30 working on it. And LSU plays Ole Miss at 2:30. And if I don't make the game, I'm stabbing Cisco in the face.
At least the rest of the fabric (and more importantly the VMAX) stayed up.
Trying to argue technical issues with bean counters is worthless? While most of the folks in my group have this next week off, I'm working on budget stuff and writing business cases because apparently I'm the only fucktard in the mess at work that understands what we need to make this shit work right. My boss thinks a SAN is some sort of USB drive. 
1) Go to hell LSU.
2) I just discovered that malicious people can sign any number up for $10/mo "inspirational text message" services using a web form. It seems ridiculous to me that the cell phone company would allow this without requiring some sort of authentication. But no.
2) I just discovered that malicious people can sign any number up for $10/mo "inspirational text message" services using a web form. It seems ridiculous to me that the cell phone company would allow this without requiring some sort of authentication. But no.
PsychoStreak
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Well, earlier this week, re-learned again that you really, really ought to ghost/truimage the machine you're using to create a baseline image from once you've got it 'just so' before you capture it into a WIM file.\
Also learned that we need to make one additional request when ordering any laptops (or desktops for that matter) from Dell. What's this you ask? Nothing, much; just that the make sure the BIOS setting for SATA on the machines is NOT set to RAID mode, but is set to AHCI or even ATA mode (on a laptop that only has 1 drive no less). Y'know make that two things. We need to request that whoever did that on the test batch of E4310's they sent us be deboned.
Windows 7 runs remarkably well on a ThinkPad R32.
Today I learned, with some amusement, that if you shut down a machine in mid-may 2007, and said machine was running XP SP2 with Office 2k3 on it, if you powered up that machine today, you'd be presented about 105-110 patches by Windows Update, not including XPSp3, which I installed myself beforehand. (It's a P3 Laptop with 192MB RAM, and a 10GB HD, BTW. Just the initial scan on Windows update took two hours.) I think I may get the Win7 installer to laugh when I try it on that machine...
Also, just a few minutes ago, that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales bears a disturbing likeness to NYC Mayor (and hater of cars) Michael Bloomberg. It's like Wales is his scruffy brother who decided to travel the world or something.
Also learned that we need to make one additional request when ordering any laptops (or desktops for that matter) from Dell. What's this you ask? Nothing, much; just that the make sure the BIOS setting for SATA on the machines is NOT set to RAID mode, but is set to AHCI or even ATA mode (on a laptop that only has 1 drive no less). Y'know make that two things. We need to request that whoever did that on the test batch of E4310's they sent us be deboned.
Windows 7 runs remarkably well on a ThinkPad R32.
Today I learned, with some amusement, that if you shut down a machine in mid-may 2007, and said machine was running XP SP2 with Office 2k3 on it, if you powered up that machine today, you'd be presented about 105-110 patches by Windows Update, not including XPSp3, which I installed myself beforehand. (It's a P3 Laptop with 192MB RAM, and a 10GB HD, BTW. Just the initial scan on Windows update took two hours.)
I think I may get the Win7 installer to laugh when I try it on that machine... Also, just a few minutes ago, that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales bears a disturbing likeness to NYC Mayor (and hater of cars) Michael Bloomberg. It's like Wales is his scruffy brother who decided to travel the world or something.
goForth":fefgydal said:Trying to argue technical issues with bean counters is worthless? While most of the folks in my group have this next week off, I'm working on budget stuff and writing business cases because apparently I'm the only fucktard in the mess at work that understands what we need to make this shit work right. My boss thinks a SAN is some sort of USB drive.
Hey, don't feel bad. When we had space constraints on our SAN storage our DBA manager wanted to know why when he could just go out and buy an external 2TB drive and plug it in to get the space they wanted. <sigh>
Previous management here fought the good fight trying to keep folks honest with actually charging for storage used on the SANs. Now it's a free-for all and we're nearly out of space and swamped with silly requests.
There's another kind of hell for folks who won't tolerate a downtime to delete their 2008 R2 4GB hibernate file, but will tolerate one for 4GB more of 'freebie' SAN space.
And I laugh, and I laugh...
There's another kind of hell for folks who won't tolerate a downtime to delete their 2008 R2 4GB hibernate file, but will tolerate one for 4GB more of 'freebie' SAN space.
And I laugh, and I laugh...
Today the new guy started. He is supposed to be an exchange expert. We briefly compared phones, since we both have Motorola Droids and he showed me how he could access his home PC over his Droid. I told him that I'm too lazy set that stuff up. He told me the setup is easy, just add your PC to the DMZ on your home router and open port 3389.
Is this a good sign for a new employee...
Is this a good sign for a new employee...
As long has he has no rights to the DMZ configuration lmao!
Besides.. DMZ? WTF. PF you idgit.
lmao!Besides.. DMZ? WTF. PF you idgit.
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