Best pun of my career Tech Support |
- Best pun of my career
- Why Don't You Leave Early?
- Let me tell you why they call me Firewall
- The IT equivalent of anti-vaxxers. More of a development/devops tale than tech support.
- I’m not a gamer!
- User wants the D:\
- This is why I hate Mondays
- Lemme just encrypt these critical backup keys...
- Asking users to choose might not be a good idea
- Stop that, right now.
- sometimes schmoozing is a Tech Skill - or how I became an "Onsite" and lived to tell the tale
- Have you tried shutting down? No... not your computer.
- New Menu Item
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 09:08 AM PDT Hello all! As the title states I just got to use the best pun in my career! I got a call from one of our receptionists saying that some of the keys on her keyboard are getting stuck. So I grab a spare keyboard just in case and get over to her office. When I get there the first thing I see on her desk is a (mostly eaten) bagel with jelly on it. I bet you can all see where this is going...
I smile and sit down at her desk and start popping off a few keys. Sure enough there was jelly under some of the keys. I look up and I can see the receptionist is already red in the face from embarrassment. That is when I got to deliver my best one liner...
I love puns. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 09:24 PM PDT My boss has to do a lot of extra work during his time off, server/application maintenance on the weekends and such. He uses that off-time work as comp time to leave early on occasion. I, on the other hand, I have nothing better to do. I keep to my schedule and don't use my off time. My boss suggests I take time off every so often, but I honestly just don't want to. I definitely don't want to leave us with no IT department (we have just the two of us there) by taking time off when he's gone. Today, my boss was taking off a couple of hours early. We're at a slow time of year. I hadn't done much in the afternoon today, and my boss suggested I should go early as well. I told him I didn't really have anything else going on, so no reason to use time off to go sit at home and do nothing. When it was time for him to go, this was the silly, sad exchange we had:
In steps a coworker known for his love of old technology.
We've got a multi-function printer with a fax machine, and he wants to see some log from the thing. I'm just laughing at the impeccable timing of this sadness.
Logged into the machine, dug around to find the fax report setting, then carried on about the rest of my unexciting afternoon. Fax machines are the worst. [link] [comments]  |
| Let me tell you why they call me Firewall Posted: 26 Apr 2018 11:35 PM PDT Let me share my misery with everyone. We have an extremely technically challenged CFO. He is the type of person that in his own words have built and designed Data Centers across the world, knows Bill Gates and the CEO of Dell, just to name a few. Now to start of this particular incident, it is important to understand this CFO will not be persuaded once he starts on a rant, he will explode and keep going till he is either dead or wins. We have fairly standard security across our infrastructure, one firewall and a proxy behind it. Now above mentioned CFO tried to do his banking at home two days ago, managed to lock himself out of his banking account. But it's important to note we have nothing to or any influence over what happens at his home and over the span of 4 years he has been constantly shown how to change the proxy settings for his browsers. Now come the following morning, I was off site training a new admin, when my colleague phoned me and asked me to head back to our main office as the CEO is apparently losing it. We head over and what followed is probably best described as awkward and technically painfull. I walked in politely into his office and tried to greet, but at the site of me he just exploded further and said the following. 'ANACRON, I DON'T KNOW WHY YOU ARE ALWAYS FIREWALLING ME, I SPOKE TO A MICROSOFT EXPERT AND HE SAID YOU ARE SCRAMBLING MY PASSWORDS! YOU ARE SCRAMBLING MY PASSWORDS AND BECAUSE OF YOU I CAN'T OPEN BANKING SITE, YOU WILL OPEN IT NOW, IF YOU WANT TO GET PAID, I SPOKE TO BANKING SITE AND THEY SAID YOU FIREWALLED ME' He kept going like that for a few more minutes. It's important to note that it took my CEO and colleague to calm him down. Just walked over, turned his proxy on, opened the site and walked out. The thing I took away from this is that not the people you know, but the boxes you don't tick. [link] [comments]  |
| The IT equivalent of anti-vaxxers. More of a development/devops tale than tech support. Posted: 27 Apr 2018 12:42 AM PDT Some developers came to me for help with an SSIS problem this morning. The absurdity of what has followed has been of so great a magnitude that I have had trouble focusing on my own work. My brain keeps interrupting me with the "how could anything so stupid actually happen?" thoughts.
This isn't the story of a million dollar system crashing, or a use who accidentally deleted their entire work product. No, this is the story of a couple of SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) developers, their "not really all that important in the scheme of things deployment", and the project management office. It's not the grandeur of the context that makes this story so infuriating to me. It's the sheer ignorance and stupidity.
A bit of background for those unfamiliar with the tech: SSIS is a SQL Server product used to move data from place to place. Using a graphical IDE, you build a "package" which defines all the data flows etc. The package itself is actually just an XML file. Since we're dealing with data flows in SSIS, we are also dealing with connections. For example, to databases, FTP servers, web services, etc. Sometimes this means sensitive data might exist in the package - for example, and FTP username and password. So SSIS encrypts this data in the XML file. There are a few ways to do it, but basically only two matter: "Encrypt sensitive data with user key" and "Encrypt sensitive data with password". If you encrypt with a user key then only you can deploy the package to the SSIS server, because on deployment SQL decrypts the XML and re-secures it under a server storage model, guarded by standard SQL permissions.
OK, so the data warehouse SSIS developers come to me today because they have a problem. They can't deploy their packages to the dev server. "What's the error?", I ask. Nobody here - not even the programmers - seem to think the actual error text might be useful information. Oh, it's a protection level error. The server can't decrypt the file. I ask the obvious question: "Did you encrypt with a password, or with a user key?". The response was a bunch of non-sequitur content which basically told me they don't know what I was asking them. Not really having time to do a half hour "SSIS 101" lesson, I provided a trivial solution. "There are a few ways to solve your problem", I said, "but by far the easiest solution is to change your package encryption to be by password. Then when you do the deployment you just type the pasword into the wizard". I showed them how to do it on my machine. It only takes a few seconds. The response was hesitant. They clearly didn't want to do this. Why not? "We have hundreds of packages, that will take a long time". "Welll", I replied, "you don't really have much choice".[1] "Wah", they wah'd. I shrugged. "There are no decisions to make here. Just do it and your problem will go away". Off they trundled, and I went on with my own work.
A little over an hour later I noticed the same two developers were talking with the apps team manager. This is a reasonably technical person (more technical knowledge than the two devs in question, at least), who is somewhat familiar with the technology. I noticed that they had an error message floating above an SSIS deployment wizard window. "Did you change the protection level?" "No". I am immediately annoyed. I don't appreciate it when people come and use up my time asking for help, only to ignore the help that I provide. "Why not?". "It would take too long". "You first came to me an hour ago. Even if you had simply gone into visual studio and changed every package manually, you would have been done by now. And you don't even have to do that. Did you try googling your problem?". I knew, of course, that they hadn't. People rarely do, and in this case it was obvious they hadn't, otherwise they wouldn't have come asking for help in the first place. The solution would have been found on google almost immediately. "Why?" "Because I'm sure there's a way to do this quickly for multiple packages. I haven't had to do it myself because I set encryption by password every time I start developing a package - like the programming guidelines on confluence tell you to do - but I bet there's a way". Non committal response. OK, I walk 10 metres to my desk, google it, and walk back with the way to do it less than 20 seconds later. "Use the dtutil.exe utility. It can change multiple packages at once. I sent you the exact command line you need to use." "OK we'll talk to Charles".
Charles is the project manager. For a brief moment I couldn't understand what he'd have to do with any of this. But then it dawned on me. The developers thought that this was a "change" that would require change management approval. I almost lost it right there. "This is not the kind of change the requires approval. DTUtil is part of the integration services developer toolset. Protection levels are defined by SSIS, and so obviously SSIS knows how to work with both user key and password based encryption. This is not a logic change to your package, nor does it change the way you do your deployment." "Yes, but changing the protection level requires change approval." This makes me furious, but I try to hide it. These people have already professed their ignorance on this subject, have come to me for help, and are now trying to tell me that this kind of change - which they don't understand in the first place - is the kind of change that requires change management approval. They took it to the project management office. The end result of the discussion involving nobody who has any knowledge at all of what protection levels are, the change to protection level was deemed "too great a risk". Of course, the protection level is changed to "server storage" every time the package is deployed to a server. So apparently deployment itself is also "too great a risk". But they don't know anything about protection levels, so they don't know that. These are the IT equivalent of anti-vaxxers, making their assertions about how things work from a point of absolute ignorance, and even in the face of those with actual knowledge on the subject in question who are telling them otherwise. In this case, literally to my face. [1] To be honest they did, but I didn't want to have to explain the "don't save sensitive" option, because that would change their deployment steps, since all config information would have to be entered post-hoc. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 01:04 PM PDT Hey tfts! LTL FTP I'm not sure if this fits 'tech support', so please remove if it's not. Some context: So let's begin the tale to end all tales. Most of our customers are unfamiliar with VR and are trying it for the first time, so some calm guidance is quite important. Whenever a new customer entered, he would cheerfully greet them with the casual attitude of greeting an old friend. Not long after, my colleague came back in his adorable "I sometimes forget I have knees" waddle and started opening a soda. Thump We shared a look. The customer dropped the controller. Thump He dropped it again. Someone this slow to learn was a first. Not to worry though. Waddle to him. Pick up. Place in hand. Waddle ba.. Thump This time the look we exchanged was shorter. And he looked angrier. "I'm not a gamer!" Great answer. My colleague does the whole procedure again, saying "That's ok, if you don't want to play anymore you can just place the controller on the…" "I'M NOT A GAMER!" And of course: Thump That was enough. Co-worker stops the game and takes the VR-goggles of him, while calmly but insistently saying "I'm sorry but if you want to use our equipment you .." There the customer lost his excrements. His girlfriend clearly got uncomfortable, shifting in her seat, looking around. Screaming at us: Happens. Potentially damaging expensive equipment: We'll repair it. But making our other guests uncomfortable was not something he would tolerate. "Look here my friend. (Listen up shithead.) We are doing our best to give everyone a good time. (We usually can deal with a++holes.) But if you do not care to give us and our equipment at least a little respect, (If you have to behave like a c+nt,) we will not be able to provide you with our service. (You can go f+ck a landmine.)" And so, the customer got furious. A mountain of a man, red in the face, stormed out while yelling insults. I would not have wanted to get in his way, I like my teeth how they are. And for us that was that. Everyone was relieved that he was gone, the other guests visibly relaxed, and my co-worker waddled back to me, still slightly grim. But then he came back. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 09:15 AM PDT Tech: Thank you for calling XYZ Help Desk...get initial user information User: I got a new laptop, and it doesn't have a D:\ drive. I need one. Tech: Sure, do you need a HDD or a CD or DVD drive? User: Yes. Tech: Which one did you need? User: I need a D:\ drive. Tech: The letters are arbitrary - they can be assigned any letter. Which kind of drive do you need? User: A D:. Tech: What do you need to use it for? User: I have a C:\ and I need a D:. Tech: What do you want the D:\ to do? User: I got a new laptop. It has a C:\ but I need it to have a D:. Tech: Do you need the D:\ to be an additional HDD, a CD drive, or a DVD drive? User: I'll ask my manager. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 04:01 PM PDT As a bit of background to this, I currently work as an L2 for $MSP but I'm on semi-permanent loan to one of our clients. This works for them because they get someone to fill out their Onsite team but only have to pay 2/3 of what their own guys get paid. So it's Monday morning and I turn up (first as usual) to work to discover two P1 issues on the go. First is a high percentage of people can't logon to Office 365 so they can't get their email or access the company SharePoint. The second issue is that the company's fancy new Papercut service for secure follow-me printing has died as well, no one can get logged into the big MFDs as it throws up an authentication failure. So we get down to investigating and it looks like the VM Host that handles, among other things, the server handling the Federation Services to O365 and the Papercut server has decided to throw a major wobbler. We decided to power the VMs down and migrate the host to a different blade. It takes about three hours to do this because on restarting the VM's the backup routines decided to kick in and send the Load Balancer into a panic attack. We have to make a call to the company that handles the backup service (it's a cloud service) and ask them to cancel the backups for that day so we can talk the Load Balancer off the ledge, give it a cigarette and a new pair of trousers to calm itself down. This is not helped by the procession of people wandering up to the IT desk to ask "Is there a problem with email\printing? I'm only asking because the helpdesk line is just ringing out" (I lost count after the 13th inquiry and no shit the helpdesk line is ringing out what with the entire company blowing up their phones to ask the same bloody question) So we get the servers back up and running but performance Is still pretty crappy and when we checked, discovered the SAN for the cluster we migrated the servers to has a dead battery on the RAID array card so the RAID is running on 'degraded' status until the battery is replaced. A call is duly placed to the company that support services are contracted to and request a new battery for the RAID card. several minutes go by as we haul serial numbers and part numbers from long forgotten databases or dredged up from the depths of HP's hideously designed iLO consoles. Order is placed and we are assured that a battery and engineer are on the way toot-sweet. Meanwhile I am still fighting with the Papercut server and I'm trying to figure out why the server is throwing JavaScript errors. After the 7th person to enquire if I knew if there was a problem with printing and when it would be working again (No, I didn't know there was a problem with the printers, I'm just reviewing these logs because they are an absolutely riveting read that would put Stephen King to shame) I put a sign in front of my desk that reads
It doesn't help. Eventually I get the main Papercut Server back to life after finding, buried in the log file after the umpteenth restart, a line that reads - "Failed to start application, please try deleting the c:\Program Files\Papercut MF\Server\Data\Internal\job-event-store.mapdb.p file and restart the application" So I rename the file and restart the application and wonder of wonders, it fires into life. But we still can't print. I check the site server (Each site has it's own print server that has to sync it's own database with the central server) and it's complaining that it's running a different version of the database application from the main application server. This causes some head scratching as no one has done any updates on these servers since the application was installed. Several attempts at restarting the site application failed and we resort to "Google the error message" and find that the real problem is that the database is actually corrupt. We have two choices according to the documentation. We can restore a database backup or nuke the application from orbit and reinstall (It's the only way to be sure). I take a look at the instructions on how to restore the database backup and decide on the nuke option (5 pages of Powershell commands to restore a backup or 5 minutes to uninstall and reinstall and let it pull a copy of the database from the central server). After ten minutes of reinstall and careful chanting of the IT workers prayer (Work ya cnt, work ya cnt, work ya c*nt) the site server is back up and running. Hooray, useless pie charts can be printed again! At this point the package containing the RAID card battery has arrived, so the engineer should show up shortly. We open the package to discover..... A CR2032 coin cell battery. The type used on motherboard BIOS, not the large Li-Ion battery pack we had been expecting. They shipped same-day from the other end of the country, at great expense, a coin cell battery that we could have bought from the convenience store across the road! The engineer turns up about 5 minutes later as we are all gazing in dumbfounded amazement at this package. On the plus side, the engineer knew some truly impressive swear words so it wasn't a complete loss. And to put the topping on this day? Both the coffee machines in the building decided to break down as well. I had to deal with all the above WITH NO FREAKING CAFFEINE!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Lemme just encrypt these critical backup keys... Posted: 26 Apr 2018 10:39 AM PDT A few weeks ago, we had a sudden power fluctuation of a system, which caused a massive amount of disk corruption, to the point where no data recovery could help. This was a critical web service, since it had all of our internal tools and documentation, along with a password manager and service monitor. Meh, no biggie, I thought. We have a full backup solution, which runs every day. I'll just restore from there. Looking at the backup logs on the server caused my concern to rise. Someone had obviously changed something with backups, since the "daily backups" hadn't run in over a year, each with a "Error: file 'gpgkey' not found" error. Well, an out-of-date restoration is better than no restoration. After accessing the backups, though, my annoyance turned to alarm. All of the backups had been GPG encrypted. Digging around a bit more, I found a script called "restore.sh". Inside, it called the pub/private keys and decrypted the file specified with a password as input. I thought I knew the password, so I ran the script. "Error: file 'gpgkey' not found." Hmm. Could it have been moved? It might have been an NFS mount. Nope, the directory was directly in the root partition. After navigating to that directory, though, I realized what was happening. The file was "gpgkey.aes". Someone had encrypted the private key needed for running and decrypting our backups. After a rageping of our department's Slack and numerous emails to former students (Uni CS Department, students are the staff), I finally found who did it. Except he didn't know the password. "Check the password manager," was his response. You mean the password manager I'm trying to restore from backup? Great. So now we have a worthless backups solution, no internal tools, and a VERY important lesson: If you have to encrypt the backups, do it in a way where they can actually be restored without a single point of failure. TL;DR: student encrypts private key needed to restore and encrypt backups, while putting the password to decrypt in the backup we're trying to restore. Edit: punctuation is hard [link] [comments]  |
| Asking users to choose might not be a good idea Posted: 27 Apr 2018 01:41 AM PDT Hello TFTS, This little story happened a few days ago, and I thought that it could belong here. So to give some context, users here are allowed to have a professionnal mobile phone if their manager request one, and they're then asked to choose what model they want. Currently, they can choose between iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7. User here chose an iPhone 7. After receiving the smartphone and the SIM card, I sent an email to let her know that she can come see us at the IT Office, email in which I wrote in bold that she has to come with her laptop so we can also configure the remote working tools on it. User finally came at the office 30 minutes before my day ends, I still accepted to deliver and set up the phone because usually it doesn't take more than 10 to 15 minutes to do that... usually. $User => You gess it. $ITVarangian => Yours truly.
After a few minutes, $User came back with her laptop and I started the delivery process. In order to use the phone, she had to create an Apple account since the professional apps we have to install on each phone must be downloaded from the AppStore...
So $User finally accepts to give me the phone and actually, the AppStore is allowing her to select no payment method at all... it's just asking for street address, city, and number phone, and since $User here hasn't filled these fields, the AppStore isn't allowing her to proceed. After telling this to $User, she calms down, fills the fields and we can then download and install the apps. At each step, $User asks me at least twice the same questions, and when I ask her if she wants to configure the TouchID because a lot of users are asking for it and actually chose an iPhone for this reason (because a lot of them aren't aware that the Samsung Galaxy S7 is also able to use the fingerprints), she starts to get upset again.
I then spent the next five minutes to teach $User how to... properly use the Home button of the iPhone. It turns out that $User here doesn't like Apple and iPhones, but she still wanted one because she thought that it could be funny or interesting to use get use to one... And with all that, I've finished my day 30 minutes after it should actually have ended. So actually, giving a choice to users might not be a good idea. TL;DR => User chose an iPhone 7, was upset along all the configuration/delivery process and in the end, she actually hates Apple and iPhone but thought it could be fun to get use to one again. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 10:58 AM PDT Hi everyone, I haven't posted one of these in a while, and just remembered a story back from my time spent working at $localisp. Players: $me— yours truly $og— older gentleman ring ring
Uh-oh...
Meanwhile, in the Batca... err, call center, I'd been checking his account notes. As it turns out, $og had a bit of a reputation for being a rude, shouty jerk on the phone, and calling all the time, about everything. (I'm sure some of you already know where this is going)
I'm not putting up with this.
Normal cable troubleshooting begins, you know the drill.
Troubleshooting continues during discussion of various kinds of $sportsball. We wound up on the subject of the local college (my alma mater) football team, which is a fairly big deal in my hometown. We may not be very good, or very consistent, but we make up for it with enthusiasm! Anyway, it turned out to just be that the remote was set to the wrong source and on the wrong input.
$og called in a few more times while I was still working there. I always made sure to take my time so we'd have an excuse to chat, since I figure that he was probably just lonely more than there being something actually out of order. He was a pretty cool guy, all told. TL:DR Sometimes an angry person is just bored and lonely, and may actually be pretty decent. Asserting yourself without being condescending can work wonders on these people (and others, too). Edit: I'm bad at formatting. [link] [comments]  |
| sometimes schmoozing is a Tech Skill - or how I became an "Onsite" and lived to tell the tale Posted: 27 Apr 2018 12:46 AM PDT I was catching up on /u/db_dev's previous stories, and gelled a bit with this one The Blind Leading The Blind I (in this instance) being the (admitted openly in the interview!) "incompetent boob when it comes to coding in C" - the language of choice for the middle-ware I would be helping look after. Turns out though, it wasn't my coding skills that were required - it was my 'people skills' - the art of schmoozing the customer. This was a skill I had been able to hone over the previous decade at a couple of US multinationals including |a|n|a|l|o|g|. I had started working for this small multinational that had created some of the first generation Internet Banking software - which interestingly, we couldn't sell into the US because of the whole "munitions thing" about encryption at the time. And, of course, no one outside of the US was buying the US made software because who wanted 56 bit encryption from them when you could get 128 or 168 bit encryption from anywhere not US? So, it was that the relationship between the company (now defunct) and one of our BigBankCustomers (BBC) was somewhat "dysfunctional" (there were the beginnings of threats of lawyers at 20 paces). Like /u/db_dev's "Onsite", I received a crash-course in the software - it sat as the third tier in a 5 tier environment, and was written mostly in C, but mostly I was brought up to speed on the product over all, the direction it was heading, and the fact that the BBC was more than a little tetchy (read out and out pissed off) with us. After my first week with my new company, I spent the next 4 weeks with the team at BBC. I listened to their complaints, I made notes, I listened to more complaints, I made more notes (repeat a number of times) I sent emails back to try and get things done. And things got done. Not only did I have the responsibility, I had the authority to get things done! (wow! that was a new experience - much different from the "all responsibility, but no authority" in several previous positions). I will admit, in that month with the team at BBC, I went 'native'. I saw things definitely from their side - I saw my company as somewhat 'the enemy'. Well, maybe not 'enemy', but certainly un-friendly combatants. I went 'native'. But I did achieve the main goal - I normalised the relationship. I was someone well known to the BBC people, and I knew them. We had weekly teleconferences, and the first 10 minutes or so would be catching up on each other's families and such. Not very "business-like", but certainly useful in keeping the communications flowing. It got to the point that they could ask for something, I would go and research, and I could tell them "no" - and they would accept it, because they trusted my judgement, that I had their best interests at heart. Not really much of a "tech-support tale" (although there were a few there) - but certainly the 'other side' to having to train someone up to be "OnSite". Oh - and I was able to really hone my C Skills in that place when I got stuck into it. Even custom-tweaked some Open Source code for BBC. Should I mention the non-obfuscated passwords (which I noticed in the logfiles sent to me by snail-mail on a CD) "emergency mandatory patch" I rolled out to all our customers early 2000? nah! - might scare too many ;) tl;dr - sometimes an "Onsite" can actually be a 'good thing'TM [link] [comments]  |
| Have you tried shutting down? No... not your computer. Posted: 26 Apr 2018 11:39 AM PDT You know its close to summer when you receive 5 tickets in the span of a month about the same thing. This is not a tale of woe or my ingenuity or some epic tale of me being some IT hero. These... these quick stories are just sad. Last week I am working a dead support area because things are magically working for once. Random call comes in to me, because I had been idle for over an hour in the system, and the phone call is just... just yeah.
This lady ended up not going on the cruise. Monday.
HE hung up. Last one was a simple ticket in the system.
Ok... maybe his reply went like this.
I closed the ticket then and there as I realized his forwarding was set to turn off tomorrow. He was flying back tonight and griping about not being able to see emails for the last day of his trip. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Apr 2018 11:55 AM PDT Store Manager: Hey our deep fryer is broken.... Me: Let me transfer you to operations. Store Manager: But aren't you IT? Me: Yes and this is not IT related... Store Manager: Well the computer fell into the deep fryer. That's how it broke.... Me: ......... Store Manager: Oh yeah... So the computer is broken too. Maybe I should've started with that one. Me: I have no words... [link] [comments]  |
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