Very hot server room Tech Support |
- Very hot server room
- All hot and bothered in the server room
- Be Careful what you ask for.
- What do you mean my glasses are important!?
- Stupid user breaks his laser printer in the dumbest way
- Damn magnets
- Wrong Place
- The Dragon Lady
- Crazy coincidences on first day of the job
- Give me access to EVERYTHING!
- The Day Sam Blew His Cool
- Financial Director Loses Finances
- iPhones are complicated sometimes
- I didn't put that bullet hole there; you did!
- Ocean heat
- Trust not in your tech lest ye be disabused of your notions.
- The tragedy of Y2k
- Hi, excuse me. Have you lost your hivemind?
- it's just really weird...
- I didn’t know 30 days included weekends!!
- What's the big box for then?
- The day the internet died
- Why the WI-FI doesnt work.
- The Cabinet of Horros - Part III: The Call of Cthulhu
- Oh your internet is down....
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 02:13 PM PDT /u/Tech_Witch's story from earlier today about hot server rooms reminded me of my own ordeal. I worked for a surveillance system integrator as their lead architect, which means that I designed the surveillance systems on paper and then helped during the install. I also was brought in at times for advanced support. Some of our major customers were casinos, which we had 4 under active support contracts. Some important information for this story: -Casinos here get very large fines and have to shut down if the surveillance system is ever offline or cameras not recording. -By law, the surveillance system has to be on an airgap network to the rest of the casino so there is no remote monitoring or notifications. -Each camera is recorded by two completely different servers in different racks. -Each rack has separate A and B power, which is on different breakers and different UPSs for up time. -The amount of equipment in the server room has just about doubled from the initial install. There were about 30 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers and about 14 SCSI connected 24 bay SATA storage arrays. -The server room has its own air conditioner, which was way oversized originally, but still sized properly after the new hardware was added. One afternoon in 2008/2009, I get a phone call that the surveillance system is popping up errors from some of the servers. Multiple errors simultaneously always means a big problem so I'm in the car within seconds of hearing this, being about 10 minutes away. The director of surveillance then opens the door to the server room to look at the LCD screens on the servers and storage to read errors out to us on the phone, as he has been trained to do before. When he opens the solid door, heat billows out of the server room like he just opened a huge oven door. As soon as I hear this, I floor my car and go as fast as it can go, speed limit be damned, and get there within 5 minutes. As soon as I get there, I take charge and start barking orders. I try to open the racks, but the metal racks are too hot touch. Every fan in every server is going full blast and I've noticed that I have lost one leg of power on one rack completely. Come to find out, since so much equipment has been added since the initial design, all of the racks are just about at their power maximum and we have already blown one breaker (the added fan power from spinning so fast was pushing it over the top). I send an employee to the power room with the instructions to find the popped breaker, flip it back over, and do the same for any future breakers that pop during this ordeal. I yell for maintenance to bring all of their carpet drying fans and as they are bringing them in, they also find work gloves which lets me get the doors off the front and back of the racks. The servers and storage arrays are all beeping from errors, and the temperature displayed on the front of the storage arrays said 99'C, which I'm guessing is the highest it would go. As I'm removing the doors, I notice one entire rack of servers go out. The guy in the electrical room has now been flipping breakers back on every 1-3 minutes now and it seemed that both the A and B legs blew at the same time before he could flip them back. Looking over, a small sign of relief as it was a rack of backup servers. The servers start powering back up and are reinitializing as we finally have all of the doors off and we have the carpet fans shooting directly into the racks at full speed. The noise of fans and air moving and heat was actually nauseating. I also have some of those carpet drying fans shooting air in and out of the room to try to normalize the temperature with the hallway. The main server room for the casino is not too far away, so I yell for maintenance to find air ducting that I knew was being stored from the casino retrofit and pipe half of the AC from the other server room into this one just to get some cool air in there. By this point, I have the director of the casino, the director of surveillance, FDLE (Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation), FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement), and countless other people I didn't know asking me for status updates every minute. To the best of my knowledge at that point, every camera had been and still was recording on at least one server. I then sit down at a workstation and start doing a damage report. 3 servers completely offline, not bad considering. I DRAC into each them and they will not post at all. Breakers were still blowing, but at a slower rate. Things were calming down a bit as I started moving record jobs around to handle the 3 dead servers and the AC guys were on site to get the unit going again. The final damage was 3 full servers and about 10-12 750GB hard drives. Since the storage arrays were all configured as RAID60 and the servers as RAID6, there was no data loss and we did not have a primary and backup go offline at the same time. The batteries for the RAID controllers in both the servers and storage arrays all had to be replaced as well since they had all swelled up. Overall, though, I really couldn't have asked for a better outcome. [link] [comments]  |
| All hot and bothered in the server room Posted: 07 Aug 2018 04:58 AM PDT Had a chat with an old colleague yesterday and I was reminded of this tale. It's mid July and the heat has drivven us unlucky few not on vacation to beg, borrow and steal every fan we can get our hands on to keep the office somewhat bearable. Well there i was, sitting in my fortress of fans when the monitoring software threw up a big ALERT notice. One of the 24/7 uptime servers we monitored for a local client was throwing a hissy fit and not responding to ping. After a quick round of rock, paper, scissors that I lost I had to leave my precious cool office and head out to see what was causing the server to misbehave. One car ride across town later and I found myself at a small building in the business park just outside town. I was met by a security guard that told me he had been called out by the client ITVP to let me in, since everyone working there was on vacation. He let me into the building and after some searching we found the server room, complete with a door that wouldn't be out of place in a high-security prison. When the guard opened the server room door it was clear as day why the server was acting up. The wave of heat that billowed out from the server room was like opening an oven on full blast. The cooling system had clearly taken a vacation with the rest of the employees and left the poor server stewing in its own heat. The fans were the kinda expensive (back then) rotating tower type that blew out air in a vertical line instead of the usual circular fan head. First fan in place and I quickly realised this was going to be a uphill battle. The fan didn't as much blow out the heat as just churn it around. As I was moving in the second fan my hands were already slick with sweat and slipping on the smooth plastic covers. I must have bumped the chair holding the door when I was wrangling in the second fan and trying to not bash it up or drop it, because when I managed to get the fan into the server room I heard the door slam shut and lock behind me. And the only one around able to open was the guard, who was out of earshot somewhere else in the building. Well, shucks. Luckily enough I had cellphone signal in the server room so I called one of my coworkers at the office and told him what had happened. After the laughter had stopped he promised to head over to find the guard and tell him to let me out. It was only after I ended the call I realised something bad. The heat was building again, slowly but surely. The fans I plugged it wasn't up to scratch cooling down a open foyer, not to mention a closed server room, and I made a rough guess how long the server would survive in the building heat. The number I came up with was not a not very reassuring number. T MINUS 60 MINUTES TO COMPLETE SERVER MELTDOWN. I shifted the fans to blow directly towards the server and put them on the highest setting. Nothing more I could do now but wait for my coworker to drive over and let me out. T MINUS 30 MINUTES TO COMPLETE SERVER MELTDOWN. I checked my phone. 30 minutes had passed since I spoke to my coworker and he promised to fetch the guard. I was sweating all over now and wished i had brought water with me. In a effort to cool down somewhat I stripped down to my underwear, as my shirt and pants were already soaked enough with sweat that I imagined I could squeeze it out. Bra and panties are pretty much the same as a bikini, right? And bikinis are summerwear, right? So I was still dressed decently for summer, at least in my mind. T MINUS 20 MINUTES TO COMPLETE SERVER MELTDOWN. I felt I couldn't wait any longer. I called the office and got another coworker on the line. I asked if we could break the 24/7 uptime and shut the server down instead of having it melt itself, and me with it, to slag. He said he would text me the commands I needed to gracefully shut it down and he would square it with the client later. T MINUS 15 MINUTES TO COMPLETE SERVER MELTDOWN. PLING T MINUS 10 MINUTES TO COMPLETE SERVER MELTDOWN. I must have looked like every teenage nerd's dream when my coworker and the guard eventually opened the door. There I was, wearing only my underwear, glistening with sweat and smashing in the last commands to gracefully shut down the server before it cooked itself to death. SERVER SHUTTING DOWN. MELTDOWN AVERTED. My coworker later told it took so long because he had to search for the guard. Apparently he had, after searching for almost 20 minutes, found the guard asleep in one of the few offices that had a ceiling fan installed. I was too wrung out to give him a good earful so I just downed the bottle of water my coworker gave me and got dressed again. Once back at the office I was told to take the rest of the day off to recover from my ordeal (and for my coworkers to laugh at the newbie behind her back I guess). Edit: Fixed some spelling errors. Edit 2: Thanks for the gold! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 11:02 PM PDT Note: I know im not a great writer but every now and then i enjoy stretching that particular muscle, so bare with me and my less than amazing skill with written words. Background: I work in a data center, we used to have a problem with customers removing machines from the floor so they stopped having to pay for the space, but leaving cables in place. This caused a lot of congestion and general annoyance for running new plans. From the customers point of view, why bother paying for the cables to be removed when we don't have anything there anymore. So a while back rules changed, now for any machine decommission we have to have a work order to remove all the cables attached to that machine. Generally works great until.... Customer submits a ticket, no idea why they thought this was a good idea, to remove all the cables from some machines they were decommissioning. So our team immediately spots the problem and goes back and forth with various levels of management and even the customer getting a LOT of CYA emails from various people saying essentially 'Do it'. Instead of removing the cables as requested it gets turned into a scream test (disconnect everything and see if anyone screams), everyone moves on with their night and all is quiet... for a few hours... then the screaming begins. The techs, in their peculiar sense of humor disconnected the cables from the server side. This is relevant because the switch side of the cables are labeled 'port 1' 'port 2' etc with the switch name. While the server side the cable goes into onboard ethernet port 2 but is labeled prod (or something equally unhelpful for correlating to an actual port (for some reason we let customers give their ports fancy names that only ever mean anything to the people that have to log into the servers)). So when the screaming started we gave them an email with the equivalent of a blank look and said in order to reconnect the cables we would need a diagram, much frantic searching and waking up of people on the customers end and no diagram is forthcoming. So we had to brute force it, since nobody knew exactly what had previously been connected where, many techs were on a conference call with the customer and would go out in shifts (coming back to the office to charge their cell phones) and plug a cable into different ports until something came up and started working. The ticket was worked around 9pm, the screaming started around 1:30 am, and everything was wrapped up by 5pm the next day. For those that have not guessed what happened, the customer was decommissioning several virtual machines, someone saw the mandate for complete cable remove for decommissions and issued the ticket to remove all cables from all of their servers. Effectively bringing down their production network instead of the virtual machines that were being removed. The result: we were congratulated, not just for the efficiency with which we brought their network down, but with how professional and how hard we worked with them to bring it back up. Amazingly the person who created the ticket retained their job. [link] [comments]  |
| What do you mean my glasses are important!? Posted: 07 Aug 2018 04:37 PM PDT So I don't post often, but it was agreed at work today this one was too good not to post. I work for a small MSP, by small I mean we currently only have two techs. Anyways, I've seen plenty of ridiculous, but today's took the cake. $glasses - this will be the user, the strife of the story $tech - this is our other tech, a level 3 who wouldn't normally be bothered with tickets like this, but I was at a client site and well, when we are short.... $me - three guesses on this one. Level 1. I get pulled into this after returning from the client site. I guess it's a good thing this user is super comfortable rambling about anything and everything at me??? Earlier in the day $tech: hey $me! Do you know what $glasses is talking about? They're saying %software isn't displaying right, everything is too small. $me: well... side pane should be minimized, I upped the font, and after playing together with magnification/resolution we settled on native resolution and 125% magnification as being right for $glasses during initial set up.... $tech: hmmm.... ok thx Couple hours later $tech: $me I have no clue what $glasses wants. Please talk to them, maybe you can figure out out. $me: sighs ok, calls user. $glasses: my savior! I was hoping you would call! I asked for you in the email! $me: ok, why don't we take a look remotes in and begins looking at settings everything is the same as when I set it up... have you changed where you are setting the laptop? Is it father away on your desk? $glasses: well.... do you think it could be my glasses? My dog knocked them over last night and they are bent and not sitting right... they are bifocals and things have been looking weird all day and seeming farther away. I'm planning on getting them repaired.... $me: uhhh yeah.... how about you let me know after they are repaired if you are still having issues... maybe just use your large monitor for now and not the laptop screen if it's causing issues emails that same follow up to $glasses and cc's $glasses supervisor Tl:dr - user breaks glasses, wonders why display doesn't look the same and is difficult to read... [link] [comments]  |
| Stupid user breaks his laser printer in the dumbest way Posted: 07 Aug 2018 03:13 PM PDT Hello guys! This is my first post here and I'm excited that I finally have a story to share! I'm a long time lurker. I work for a third party IT company. We get a lot of service calls regarding printers. Mostly laser printers that we sell and install for clients ourselves, but today we got a call from a completely new client about a laser printer that had a "paper jam". Our boss goes on-site expecting to pull out an accordioned piece of paper from the fuser but he gets something ridiculous instead. The user admits he tried printing on to a transparency film. You know those things teachers would use on projectors and display onto whiteboards? Yea. That. The user thought he could put plastic through a laser printer. So the heat from the fuser just melted the plastic and it, well, fused itself around the fuser roller. sigh So we tell him we don't know if we'll be able to fix it. We take it back to our office and begin taking it apart, but it's one of those cheap HP LaserJets meant for homes, not businesses. We didn't sell this to them. It took is a good 20 minutes to take it apart. We had to completely dismantle the damn thing to get to the fuser. Before we even started we knew the fuser was trashed and we couldn't find any of the parts online to replace it. So we told the client there wasn't anything we could do, but we'd be more than happy to direct them toward a nice inkjet for their transparencies and a better quality laser printer. tl;dr User tried printing a transparency film through a laser printer. That's a no-no. So that's my first tech support tale! I took a picture of the fuser once I got it out. I noticed the rules said no image links so I didn't want to post right away. Just let me know if I can without breaking the rules! Edit: Pics as requested (really hope this isn't against the rules) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 02:30 PM PDT This has happened a few times over the years, but never close enough together for my brain to go there first. Client opens a ticket this morning saying her (just brought back from a vacation) laptop's external monitor was going black and the desktop was bouncing back and forth between her 2nd screen and her laptop screen. Asked her to jiggle wires, make sure the monitor had a solid connection, try it without the monitor for a while, etc... It was still doing it. Updated drivers and bios, still doing it. Out of dumb luck, I had to drop by that site today. It took less than 5 minutes for it to happen and I recognized the cause immediately. Me: "Is that bracelet new?" Her: "Yeah, isn't it cute? I just started wearing it." Me: "Does it happen to have a magnetic clasp?" It did... It had a magnetic clasp and kept tripping the screen switch when her wrist got close. I was ready to replace the damn laptop just going back and forth in the ticket because I completely forgot about the last time someone came to me with that issue. It was a dude that wore his magnetic clasp watch on his right hand the last time this happened. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 03:41 PM PDT As the title says, I'm probably in the wrong place, but I'm new to reddit and if you tell me where to go (the board) I'll delete this and move it over there. So, I work as an admin temp at a large adult beverage corporation (LAB) but I have 2.5 years of tech support at a company with proprietary hardware and software. I was hired to do an office inventory and this job has been growing since then. It's one of those, "You have to do fill-in-the-blank and you don't want to/don't know how? Give it to Ghost! She'll do it!" A lot of the people here barely know how to log in. As soon as they heard I was former tech support they threw all cases at me. Their tech support is terrible. I mean, don't know how to unzip Winzip files, think all barcode fonts are the same, never read case notes kind of terrible. I think the only reason they keep me there is to deal with tech support for them. We were purchased by LAB about 4 years ago. I work at "Site I" and the closest facility is "Site H". I have been working here 2 years off and on and am finally getting an idea of how terrible their tech support is. We have had this issue since I first got my login 2 years ago where all users automatically map to H's server. I have finally figured out it's a security group setting that assigns people to automatically map the server about 4 months ago. We are hiring for our busy season now, so I tell the techs (and why do we have HR if I am the one stuck onboarding every new production employee?) to add them to the automap group....and the problem continues. Maps site H's server, not I's. I keep shouting (I know. I shouldn't, but when you can't read my notes and I have to explain the same thing 5 people reopening cases closed) until I hit someone that tells me that H's automap is overriding I's and that we have to remove them from H's group first and then it will work. I decide I like him (I keep doing that and I keep getting disappointed. Same thing happens in relationships) and so I keep getting cases assigned to him... until he does something that I would bawl my coworkers out for when I was in tech support. He doesn't look up cases, confuses two different cases for two different people, and writes back that I had already asked him to fix it and he had. For the other user. Now cases here have 3 main formats: 1 (most common ticket prefix), 2 (less common, but usually used for new user requests, etc.), and 3 (least common , not a clue what those letters stand for). The one he resolved was a type 1 and the one I asked about was a type 3. They all have different starting letters, and the type 3 have 4 letters, not 3. I know, you can have days when they blend, but I still call BS on that. Anyways, the disillusionment was too much. I decided F it. (I really try not to curse at work. Another hold over from when I was in tech support.) I didn't want to deal with these lowest-bidder idiots any more. So, I had the bright idea that I would have them change the site template. (I am so sorry! I swear, I didn't think!). Every new user is copied from a master template for the site, right? We were getting copied from a clone of site H, so if I had them fix that template, I wouldn't have to call in as often, right? I made 3 major mistakes. I assumed A) most-recent-disappointment cared about his job in some way, shape, or form; B) they were less than 4 years out of date; C) they would read any form of case notes. Now, in my defense, they never read my notes, but they did seem to read the case notes their coworkers put in the case. So, I decided to call in and use very small words (almost all monosyllables!) to explain what I need. I need all new users at site I to be mapped automatically to I's server, not H's. I repeat this 3 different ways until I think I cram it into the tech on the phone's brain. I run off to fix some random issue I found with my supervisor and then I come back. I have short hours, so I leave around 2. I find most-recent-disappointment (MRD) has changed H's user template over to site I's server and closed the case! I call back in and, because tech support is best when no one is able to contact each other (/s) no one can transfer me or do more than email MRD! And then I had to leave work. I'm drinking a beer and dreading the blame that will be heaped upon me tomorrow. We (Site I) are around 40 people. Site H (whose template MRD fucked up!) is around 200. Half of which are seasonal workers. Why do I even try? TL;DR: tech support at my company sucks, but I have a bright idea to reduce the number of brain cells that commit suicide when I have to talk to them. I underestimated stupidity. Fuck. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 12:45 PM PDT So, I used to work for a small MSP, managing small to medium sized networks in the area. We had this one client whom we all referred to as "The Dragon Lady". Now, DL was the most miserable person on the face of the planet, especially to her employees. People lived in fear of this beast, and us lowly support technicians were not beyond her wrath. Her primary form of communication was berating and belittling. This is but one tale of my constant battle with the Dragon.... ::Phone rings:: Me: [IT Company], this is Shanxtification, how may I help you. DL: What have you people done to my system, we are completely down!! sigh... Me: What do you mean you guys are down? What exactly isn't working? We haven't touched your systems today. DL: THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! JUST FIX MY @!#@ SYSTEM NOW! Me: DL, I still don't know what exactly is wrong, can you explain to me what's happening? DL: YOU BROKE MY INTERNET! Me: Your internet is down? DL: OF COURSE IT IS, YOU @#$@#@! BROKE IT! GET SOMEONE HERE NOW AND FIX IT!! Me: Ok, this could very well be an ISP issue, we need to contact them first before we dispatch anyone. DL: WE CANNOT BE DOWN THAT LONG!! GET OUT HERE AND FIX IT NOW!! At this point, she was getting to hostile for my blood, and kept demanding onsite service without even trying to work with me over the phone, so I transferred her my boss (owner of the company) to calm her down while I went outside and sucked down a cigarette. I get back from my much needed nicotine and my boss informs me that he has soothed the savage beast enough that she is will to work with me some more before we dispatch someone..... Me: Ok, so you're internet is down. Has anything on your network changed today? Did anyone plug something in that you know of? DL: Of course not! The only thing that's anyone has done today is [ISP Company] came and replaced some of their equipment. Me:...........wait, do you know what they replaced? DL: The modem. Me: Did they verify internet access after they replaced the modem? DL: Yes! They said internet was working from the modem. But nothing works on our network now! Me: Are they still there? DL: No, they left after replacing it. Ugh...... Me: I think I know what's going on, but I need to contact them, can I call you back in a couple of minutes DL: NO! I don't believe you will call me back. If you need to call them, then put me on hold! Me: Ok, I'll place you on hold..... Proceed to put her on hold and call her every nasty thing I ever learned on the playground..... A quick call to the ISP verified my suspicion that the new modem did not carry over their static IP address. The phone call took all of 10 minutes. I explained what happened to her after we verified her internet had been restored, and she basically just grunted, said "Thanks" and hung up. Ahh, the joys of IT........ [link] [comments]  |
| Crazy coincidences on first day of the job Posted: 07 Aug 2018 01:15 PM PDT Not a user story, but I thought you guys might find it interesting: I started a new job on Monday and there's been some issues getting my accounts set up so I can actually start learning. Partly because my new company is in the process of merging with another and getting various systems synced up, which is understandable. But apparently there was a former employee of one of the companies whose full name (say John Smith) is exactly the same as my first and middle names (say John Smith Jones). And this has somehow caused such a severe issue with creating my account that they've got all the high end admins scratching their heads over it. The active directory account is fine, but all of their secondary systems are freaking out and either showing me the other guy's old info or nothing at all. Best part? Some other guy who started the same day has the exact same initials as a current user, and their accounts have ended up in a lovely snarl as well thanks to an automated account creation script. :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 08:47 AM PDT Ticket submitted by Sales Manager: Need full access to all tabs in [Financial website that is used across all departments and not just sales]. My reply: I can't do that. What are you missing that you need to see? SM: I need [Sales Related Tab] for sure! My manager is supposed to be letting me know what all I exactly need soon. When he gets with me I will let you know! Me: You have [Sales Related Tab]. Its located under [Different Tab]. Has no one trained you on this yet? SM: Not yet! I just wanted to make sure I had what I needed! Thanks! I wonder if I'll get a request next for a personal training session on how to use the site. Since IT is responsible for training users too, right? /s [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 07:13 AM PDT Sherman, set the wayback machine to 1980 ... (tl;dr at the bottom) I was the only person at my small family-owned business (not my family) familiar with computers. I was both a hobbyist and had just worked at a large, multi-state company during its transition to computerized bookkeeping. As fortune would have it, this small business decided to do the same, and I was designated as the unofficial liaison with the computer company helping us into the young but growing computer revolution. The players are myself (your very own Piper) and Sam, Tech Support for Octagon Computers (made up names to protect IDs). One might think Sam and I got along famously, being fellow computer geeks. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Sam was surly, abrupt, and in general thought he was the smartest person in the room. Though this may have very well been the case, he always managed to make me look foolish in front of everyone, but Sam was hardly gracious about it. He constantly sniped at me, never extending even the smallest courtesy and I came to dread having to interact with Sam by telephone. Because his office was a good 2 hour drive from this small business, I was usually stuck trouble-shooting the computer over the 'phone. These calls tended to be rather unpleasant. Then, one day, Sam had no other choice but to make a service call to our business. He grumped around the office snarling about how Piper should have been able to deal with this all by himself, grumble-grumble while working on a CRT (green monochrome, just to let you know how long ago this was). Sam removed a new circuit board from a box, unwrapped the bubble wrap and contemptuously tossed the wrap at me with a grunted throw this away then threw the board onto a desk next to the CRT. Sam then picked up an ordinary screwdriver and poked it into the guts of the CRT. Thus I saw my opportunity for a bit of the ol' petty revenge. "Shouldn't you unplug the monitor?" I asked in my most innocent tone. "Don't need to if you know what you're doing," Sam snarled back, emphasizing the word "know" just to let me know what he thought of my level of competence. What Sam didn't see? I had picked up the bubble wrap while I was asking him about unplugging the CRT. It had big bubbles on it, about the size of a quarter dollar coin. As Sam stuck his screwdriver into the CRT I squeezed the bubble wrap. Hard. It gave a satisfying ¡PATCH! and Sam yanked the screwdriver out of the CRT in a panic. It was the fastest I'd seen the normally laconic fellow move. "Too late!" I chided. "You're already dead!" Red-faced and cursing, Sam lost his cool. I finally beat him at his own game. I still smile thinking about it. tl;dr: grumpy, slow-moving computer repair guy gets the beans scared out of him and finally gets the losing end of the stick. (edit: clarity, duplicate word use, grammar) [link] [comments]  |
| Financial Director Loses Finances Posted: 07 Aug 2018 09:46 AM PDT So here begins my story of a company I was at 2 years ago, and how their ignorance and greed almost cost them everything. So I was the only on-site IT Support with a housing company for people with low-income or low living conditions. Pretty big office, 3 floors with around 50+ people working here. I'd say about 40 of them were incompetent (I had to teach experienced office workers and admins how to print, save files in network locations and rename files) You can imagine the kind of place it is. Anyway, we have remote sites for the actual buildings we have our clients in (block of 100+ flats or so) and employees who work there, but limit it to 4 people per remote site. We use an external company for our network services, exchange, storage, CCTV, etc. Really good company, had a good relationship with the guys there and we always had transparency - anything to do with network passwords, playing with the server rack we have setup in the building, they'd never mind me touching things. Suffice to say I think they trusted me, but I earned that trust. The company I worked for at the time had a really old Oracle virtualisation setup from a previous out-sourced network company that they paid bare minimal for. I was gobsmacked at the fact that they managed to run 37 VM's running Win10x64-Pro on a 128GB memory, 2GHz CPU, poorly-configured server. If we hit 40 VM's shit would start hitting the roof. I mean, they didn't even setup the email routing from the VM properly. They linked it through IMAP AND THEN to the exchange server publically. Why? don't ask. Don't know how it's possible, but they did. Why not just link it straight to the exchange server? It's all on the same network layer. So, after finding this out for the first time I decided to contact our out-sourced company I have a good relationship with, for now I'll call them "coolguys". I told them how they were routing the emails on the VM's, and so they told me they'd been in contact with the previous network company about the virtualisation server, and since it was way out of warranty and we weren't their client, coolguys were able to take the server into their own offices and set it up there (for a small fee, but they didn't mind, you'll see why), this was done on the weekend to prevent work downtime. I receive a call from the CTO of coolguys (yeah, this guy actually does support work too, actually works like a normal employee whilst doing important business sheninigans) How do I know this? I work with him now ;), but I can get into more detail about that in the comments if you have questions. Nonetheless! He said on the phone that this virtualisation setup was horrendous and it needed a complete revamp. The migration wouldn't be hard whatsoever, in fact, the whole process wouldn't be due to the transparency we had and obviously snapshotting. He saw that 95-100% of the memory was constantly being used, the server simply wasn't built for this workload. VM's started to become HEAVILY sluggish. So, first thing we did was fix that email issue and linked it straight to our exchange server. All good on that side. So, I was on call with the CTO (we'll call him coolboi), and throughout this whole process he had underlings to do the emails for us whilst he was on the phone with me, breaking down the whole process and how the server needed completely new hardware in order to keep up with the current usage. Since I was the only IT guy in the office, I handled printer cartridges, the finances for all hardware we had, etc. I had direct contact with the MD and FD because of this. But boy, were the MD and FD ignorant. I broke down the whole situation for them bit by bit (they weren't too clued up about IT lingo but if said right they'll understand):
At this point I ALREADY wanted to launch a chair in her face or something, I don't condone violence but if you were just listening to me you wouldn't have had to ask me that question.
So after that interestingly and uncomfortably short conversation (I don't like how easily it was absorbed by them, usually a lot of ifs and buts) about 2 weeks pass by and I hear nothing about it. During this time I also found out that they are storing files locally on their VM's not on the network locations (which I myself and coolguys ALWAYS advise to do just incase for extra redudancy) and now, this is the part where you should know that MD and FD always use virtual machines; everyday after 6PM, they transfer files from the local office PC's to the VM, go home and continue working. I brushed this off as they don't usually do this, must've had their reasons. Another week passes by and I still haven't heard nothing about this virtualisation upgrade, so I get more focused on it because it's so important otherwise we're going to drop our workload tenfold and potentially lose files. So I recieve a call from a remote site with a woman who is using her VM, let's call her mrstootsie (on the spot names, no relevance at all)
Mfw I login to her VM and find everything is corrupted, I literally, mean, everything. Even opening a word shortcut would return a registry error. I instantly call up coolboi's mobile cos this shit's important.
I realised, at this very moment, my FD and MD are about to recieve the biggest shit scare of their life. Data ranging from invoices to bills, to business transactions, investments, shares. coolboi actually warned us of this weeks prior in a Skype conversation with my manager:
So to run down before shit hits the fan, server\Portfolio is the most used by everyone in the company and is always active with file changes, renames, new files, etc which is why it's the only one effected.
coolboi begins to check the actual accounting drive itself and finds NOTHING since it was MOVED not COPIED. I wonder who did this? So he did some digging and found out it was FD. Surprise! I forgot to mention at this point, in those weeks, we had about 15 new employees each with VM's, which puts us to way over 40 VM's and maximum server capacity. FD decided to move everything from accounts to portfolio, which bang, somehow, don't know how, kicked off the whole corruption. I think the server was handling too much r/W'ing but this wouldn't have happened if she did this in the office with a direct connection to the main network. She did this, on her VM. I still don't know to this day why she did it. I went upstairs to tell MD and FD the situation, and panic broke loose. They started ordering admins to get every bit of financial paper before I could even mutter the words "Don't worry though, we have a backup from 2 days ago". At this point there was so much going on I couldn't even get to talk to them, they weren't listening. Baring in mind, they were warned weeks prior of this happening. coolboi comes in to our office in a meeting with myself, MD, FD and my manager. He has everything, complete list of every single component for a server that can manage 70+ virtual machines with much higher storage capacity on flash storage, I really pushed on moving away from HDD's for VM's. He gave pricing, dates, future expectations, and on top, the support for the server will remain 100% free. Nonetheless it all came to £8,000 for a whole new virtualisation setup. DEDICATED. Thought that was a steal. MD and FD, in summary, denied the whole thing. Stupidly enough after that whole experience, didn't feel the price was justified. But then 3 days later spend £20,000 on buying gifts for the guys on the 3rd floor, go on holiday every two weeks and buy themselves the most expensive clothes and brands you'd not even think they'd be buying. TL;DR - FD caused all VM's to corrupt and a whole shared drive to completely corrupt which had all finances and important business data that should not be getting lost and shouldn't have been there in the first place. Still won't upgrade the virtual server. After that I left the company about a month later. Don't know what's going on there. Edit: Won't let me add a long flair :( [link] [comments]  |
| iPhones are complicated sometimes Posted: 07 Aug 2018 01:09 PM PDT Obligatory LTL, FTP, obligatory "I'm not IT, just family IT", and obligatory "I'm on mobile, what is format?" This story happened back in 2013, when I was in high school still. My mother wants to go with her cousin to see a famous spirit medium and wants to record their conversation on her phone. I show my mother how to use the voice memos app, she's able to record me a couple times, all is good. She goes to see her medium, I go to bed. Next day at school, my class is given free roam of the campus so we can work on some project. I decide to chill out in the library (maxin' relaxin', all cool), when I get a phone call from my mother. Pretty weird, partly because it's only about 9 in the morning and she knows I'm at school, and partly because she's one of those kinds of parents that values education above everything. Not sure why she'd choose to interrupt my (and the class's) dreadfully important lecture on globalism, but I happened to be chilling in the library, so alright, I answer it. Cast: $me : somebody I met once or twice $mother : Stella 499 (for both of you who get the reference)
I hang up the phone and go back to my textbook. Ten seconds later I get another call
The best part, to me, is the cousin (who was with her this entire time, and also has an iPhone) owns a private business where she works from her home computer, taking in a lot of money while doing so, and she wasn't able to figure it out. I understand the older generation's fear of playing around with (and thus learning about) new technology, but I didn't realize that extended as far as being afraid to press what was, unmistakably, a play button [link] [comments]  |
| I didn't put that bullet hole there; you did! Posted: 06 Aug 2018 03:52 PM PDT So this happened a few years back. It was technically before I was full on tech support. I was more of a hardware engineer at the time. I was working for a company that did third party repair of POS for food chains and a few other random retail locations across the country. This particular retail was based on the west coast, and our facility was in the midwest. $Shady- Me $Broken- Client $Idiot- My manager $Wraith- My lead/subtle genius The phone in our workshop rings one day, and it's $idiot. She calls to tell us that she just got of the phone with a client and that they had a POS that had a broken screen and needed repaired ASAP. She assured them that if they overnighted it, we could have it done the next day, and back on a truck within 24 hours. Keep in mind, we have no idea what they are sending us, how bad it is, or anything else. She was infamous for doing this to us, as she had no tech background what so ever. Fast forward to the next day, and there is a giant box waiting for us in our workshop. $Wraith and I break it open, ready to get to work on this thing, and we just stand there in utter disbelief. What we saw, was a POS that was broken in 3 pieces, with a screen that not only had a boot print on it, but what looked a lot like a bullet hole, too. We immediately call, $Idiot to the back to look at this thing. She comes back and take s a look and asks us what the problem is. We gently explain to her that it isn't something we can fix, as all the mounts are broken, the screen has a thru and thru hole, and the base looks like it took a good old fashion beating, too. She goes off the rails, as she often did, and started ranting about how we had a contract with the client and if we broke the SLA, that we'd have to pay out a bunch of money, etc, etc. She then told us that we would have to talk to the client when they called back in and explain to them that we couldn't do it. She locked herself in her office for the rest of the day, and wouldn't talk to us, or the client when they called, so it came to us. We put him on speaker, and talked to him about how it was beyond broken, with boot prints, bullet holes and who knows what else. we also mentioned that it was packed poorly, with no package protection. It was literally just tossed in a box and sent to us. He went on about how we did all that damage, and he wasn't going to eat the cost of it, etc, etc. Eventually, we got the Company owner involved, and there were some legal things that happened. Long story short, we didn't pay for it, and $idiot was moved to manager over shipping, while my buddy $wraith became the manager over repair. No moral or anything here, just a reminder of how stupid people can be. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 11:30 AM PDT LTL; FTP I spent about 15 years of my adult life working for a survey company. A lot of that time was spent riding various boats/ships providing IT support and data processing for geophysical, bathymetric, and seismic surveying offshore. I was reminded of this story by the "All Hot and Bothered in the Server Room" story... I arrived to the ship to prepare for a bathymetric ( multibeam ) survey. We had a few technical problems before we were able to leave the dock. The first among those was that the ships controls were down ( throttle, steering, navigation, etc ), but that's a tale for another time. The 2nd problem was some sort of electrical fault that resulted in a very loud hum coming from the electrical room near the wheelhouse AND a complete lack of air conditioning on the upper deck. The rest of the survey team was in a data collection shack on the back deck where geophysical surveys happened and I was in the multibeam lab... on the upper deck... For reasons unknown, the lights were also out, but all of the power outlets in the room had power. We reported the issue to headquarters and were told in no uncertain terms to "go out and make it work", so off to work we go. I spent several hours sitting in the multibeam lab running the bathymetric survey and running out to an air conditioned conex during line turns to cool off. The multibeam lab got up to about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Our data collection computers were old Sun UltraSparc II's and they held up admirably... until they baked at 115 degrees for a couple of hours. After about 6 or 7 hours of work, the data collection machine and the file server both shutdown due to overheating. Somehow, the main office still wanted us to continue working. We eventually managed to convince them that trying to proceed would destroy $$$'s worth of computers and that the upper deck was no longer habitable for any amount of time. Surprisingly, none of the hardware was damaged in this adventure and we were able to go back to work about 24 hours later with a functional air conditioner. [link] [comments]  |
| Trust not in your tech lest ye be disabused of your notions. Posted: 07 Aug 2018 09:23 AM PDT LTL. Rare poster due to being sidetracked halfway through writing up most of my tales. We recently got a glowforge laser cutter. This is not our first laser cutter but our old epilog was pretty much dead at this point. Our previous workflow was corel draw and then print to the epilog using a special print driver. The glowforge on the other hand uses a web interface that accepts several file types but not corel's .cdr filetype. So my current workflow has been corel to .SVG . Well yesterday I found out that trusting the output file was a bad idea. In the web interface most things are drawn kinda small because all you are doing is positioning them. (you can zoom in but this is not the editing stage so you rarely do.) I kept getting odd glitches on my engraves. After spending an hour messing with settings and then cleaning the laser lenses I finally decided to open up the svg file and look at it. It seems corel has a draw like a drunken 5 year old option buried somewhere in the export settings. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2018 05:05 PM PDT In the year or so leading up to the millennium, it was all over the news about Y2k. Lots of people were afraid we were going to be thrown back into the dark ages, because most computer programs at that time only coded the date as 2 characters instead of 4, and some other math that I'm sure much more intelligent folks than me can explain. Suffice to say, people were doomsday prepping left and right. New Year rolls around, and, thanks to the heroics of some amazing folks (I know a few of the coders who worked to keep the dark ages away) nary a peep was heard except... The date was January 2nd, 2000. I was fresh out of high school and working in the Service Center of a bovine inspired computer company. In walks a man with his tower, sets it down on the counter, and says his CD isn't working. No problem, we are here to help. I grab the serial number off the back, and turn the tower around so the front faces me, when I see it. The front of the plastic case is shattered. Turning the case to look at the "left" side (the side that opened) I saw a hole, right about the right size for a bullet holes. I looked up at the customer, back at the computer, then sweetly asked home to wait a min. I ran in back and grabbed the techs, swearing it would be worth it, but not saying anything else. We arrive back up front, my three techs look on in wonder, and we all look at the customer who has gone very quiet. He explained he thought the end of the world was near so he stocked up on food water and about 30 Russian SKSs with sundry amo. His son, who had some mental health issues, had gotten one of his possibly illegally modified SKSs and sprayed the whole living room down. No casualties, except the walls and the tower. Took it back, cracked the case. The bullet had missed everything except it nicked the IDE cable. We replaced it on the spot, buttoned it back up, and that ladies and gents, was our only Y2k issue. [link] [comments]  |
| Hi, excuse me. Have you lost your hivemind? Posted: 07 Aug 2018 03:55 AM PDT This was my first IT/tech support job, about 10-11 years ago now. This is also my first actual post here so if you must murder me, be gentle. I was working night shift for the company next door to Hell. Well, I say working, but I don't think I'd had any actual work in about 45 minutes so I was mostly routing around the company's not very well configured proxies. Which probably meant I was in the perfect mood to receive the one call I can still remember in particular today for its overall general weirdness. I have never had a call like it since. I also may or may not have foregone the booze when I got home. $Customer: Are your computers offline? To this day I cannot possibly tell you how it is I managed not to say something to the effect of "resistance is futile". Edit: I fail at formatting. sorry for the wall of text. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Aug 2018 04:30 AM PDT this happened about an hour ago. I shall be me, and the user will be Edith. Me: Hi, this is silvryphoenix. Edith: Hi, i';m having trouble printing from the bypass tray for a will im trying to print onto engrossment paper. It used to be that I could put the paper in either way into the bypass tray and it would print. Now, it will only print if i put it in with the short end first. Me: ok...so does it print the document ok? Edith: Yes. It's just really weird that it used to accept the paper no matter which way we put it into the bypass tray. But now i've got to put it into the tray with the short end first. Me: So there is no problem with the end product. It prints out fine? Edith: Yes, it prints out fine. It's just really weird how it's changed from accepting the paper both ways to just one now, *Me, internally*: why is she ringing up? Me, externally: Edith, this isn't a technical support issue. you are able to print ok. There is nothing technically wrong with the printer, aside from a minor issue with the bypass tray which you've already worked out. I deal with stuff that doesn't work, and your printing works. Edith: I know, it's just weird that *repeats herself again. i get the impression she was trying to be helpful in reporting something that she thinks may become a problem in the future, and also wanted me to join her in saying it was weird* Me: Edith, again, this is not something I deal with. Everything works. I do not need to get involved. Edith: Ok, thanks I'm a bit taken aback that she would try to report an issue that wasn't an issue. [link] [comments]  |
| I didn’t know 30 days included weekends!! Posted: 06 Aug 2018 07:57 PM PDT Hi all been a while since I posted. Here's a short one. $Me: me $user: User So one of the things I get to do as tier 1 is sending tickets for account unlocks on software we don't have access to do. Today was one of those calls. Standard practice with most accounts is 30 days then disabled and after 45 days it gets deleted. Here comes my next call....(dun dun DUNNNNN) $Me: Thank you for calling IT. How may I help? $User: yeah my account is locked. $Me: I'll be happy to put in a ticket. Out of curiosity how long ago did you last log in? $User: July 5th. Why? $Me: I see. The policy for this account states that after 30 days it will be disabled. $User: that's crazy! $Me: I'm sorry? $User: Well yesterday was Sunday I didn't think that counted. $Me: ........ I explain to her that weekends are included in the policy and advise her to login every two weeks aka payday if she doesn't regularly use the software as a reminder before putting in the ticket and sending her on her way. TLDR: User didn't think weekends were part of days and as a result her account is disabled. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2018 06:30 PM PDT Im visiting my fiancee, and her mother asked me to take a look at the internet. They live in the middle of nowhere and they get maybe 500kb/s on a good day. The tech told them that they could plug it directly into a computer to get better speeds, they thought that meant for all devices. (They're not the most tech literate) The computer they had it hooked up to died and they got rid of the monitor, but kept the tower. They didnt realize that the tower was useless without the power and just left the modem hooked up to a lone tower. I had to explain to them that leaving it hooked up to a tower is pointless and definitely doesnt increase the speed of the wifi. They all laughed and felt silly afterwards, and I got steak as a reward. Twas a good day [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2018 04:42 PM PDT It was a lazy Thursday, about 1 pm in the afternoon, and I had just come back from a delicious taco lunch. One of my duties is to chase down TSM backup failures from the night before, figure out why they didn't run, and run a one-time, just in case. I had a list of 5 and had worked my way through 2 already. Fired up the 3rd. I'm happily reading um... training materials, let's go with that, as a one time runs, when the senior VP of IT ($SVP) comes to my desk. Now, at my company, it's a pretty nice place, and I have had a few pleasent conversations with $SVP, so I took off my headphones and gave him a smile. He did not return the smile...uh oh. $SVP: Are you running any TSM stuff right now? $me: Well, yes, there's lots going on right now...what's up? I trailed off and looked at him expectantly. $SVP: Are you running anything in DMZ? Now, we have a DMZ zone that keeps our outside customers from accessing internal resources. TSM is one of the few applications that can get to both areas. $me: Well, let me check. I looked up the server I was running a one time on and low and behold it was a DMZ server, and so was the previous one as well, but I still had no idea why that would matter. I confirmed for $SVP that yes I was running a backup on a DMZ server. $SVP: Stop that immediately. Why would you run those during the day??!?! Nothing should be run during the day!! $me: Well, I can stop what I'm doing but this is standard procedure for us, and up until today, have never had an issue. What's going on? $SVP: Come with me! Well, I'm fairly certain I'm not going to get fired, but I still had no idea what the heck was going on. He takes me to the network wizard area, and the wizards are all in an uproar. Outside internet access has been unavailable for the last 45 min, and they had just narrowed it down to TSM traffic taking all the bandwidth. The SVP was adamant that we never do another one time backup during the day. I asked that we not be so hasty and let's figure out what happened first. The head network wizard finally looks up from his frantic casting, I mean typing, and explains: In order for traffic to get to the DMZ, it had to leave our Network at 10gb, go through the 1gb PAN, through the 450mb Blue Coat to the DMZ, then back. All traffic, including outside access to the internet was routed this way. In kicking off a 20gn and 6gb backup respectively, I had wiped out the pipe, company wide, for the last 45 min. We are a bank so outside access may be important for things like wire transfers, loan applications, YouTube surfing, you know, important stuff. The $SVP again tried to say no more backups during the day. I said fine, but what happens when I have to restore that 6tb production database that's vital to the feds? I actually heard his brain do a record skip. I explained that the backups were just the symptom, and to avoid this in the future, I won't do any one-time DMZ backups during the day, but if I have to restore production, I'm taking the pipe down again and I don't care for how long. He is a good $SVP and listened. He turned to the Networking Director and asked why this was an issue. Turns out the director didn't want to put new equipment on this year's budget for whatever reason (it's not like we have budget issues, still don't have an explanation on that one), and things were slated to be replaced next year. Net, net, no moving of files, or backups during the day, or messing with DMZ at all during business hours unless it's a restore. $SVP apologized for not waiting for the whole story, and for jumping in to say it was my fault before all the facts were in. I can now put on my resume that I encreased employee productivity by 75% by removing outside distractions, company wide. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2018 04:08 AM PDT So,i live in a small village which is mostly populated by older people,so most of the time i am often asked with help from them. Now going to the story: There is a 60 year old lady who just bought a laptop and made a contract with isp cause she was a teacher. So i come to her,i help her set up her laptop,router everything.However wi-fi doesnt work,as it would connect to laptop but wont go farther.I start playing with router settings,unplugging sim and plugging back.After half an hour i ask her:"Did you called them to validate the sim so you could use it?"(Here you have to call the isp to start the connection beetween sim and server when setting up the router) "Did i have to call them?" Another story would be: Same person,calls me 2 days latter that wifi doesnt work.I ask her if she disconected if she is connected bot network doesnt work,if she changed router setting's and the answer was "no".I go to her home just to find she unplugged the router from electricity.I couldnt stop laughing while heading home.Poor lady thought router's dont need electricity. Note:In our village,cable isnt present since there are few people who use internet,so all we get internet by using special SIM. [link] [comments]  |
| The Cabinet of Horros - Part III: The Call of Cthulhu Posted: 06 Aug 2018 10:49 AM PDT Part three of the quest to fix the unfixable. Today: How not to support. Everything written happened a few years ago and I have left behind the workplace for (somehow related) other reasons. The first part can be found here. The second part can be found here. After the hassle and subsequent crowding of the $boss's office with old prototypes everything was back to normal. The old server did indeed serve. The co-workers were pleased with a set of second monitors (seriously, who is still programming with only one [not ultra wide]?). The interns did their best to get rid of the corporate junk and I could start working again and finished a cost sheet for the new server and installations. Monday morning before my first tea my company provided phone rings. Nobody would ever call that since I am quite new. On the display some weird foreign number. Preparing to waste time of a scammer I picked it up:
After that weird call I got and email matching the name from the phone with a corporate provided email adress. Huh? No scam? Somebody must be playing a joke? Not the first of April either. Shouting to boss he denies any involvment and confirms the buy out story. My week was going to get intersting again but not in a good way. So you might suspect where this is going. In this first week the Eldritch Gods tried to purge all sanity from the office. Not only did I lose all the admin accesses (at least officially, of course I made spare accounts beforehand and nobody bothered to check...), the server project got pushed back and as the icing on the Cthulu shaped cake that little Linux server was abruptly shut down because "it was reachable from the outside". That's the whole point of a server but I digress. As first meaure I got a remote root server I was not intending giving the support guys any access (or even knowledge of the existence) and tried to keep on networking as if nothing changed. Because I am a nice person I tried to make it work full knowing it will end up in an epic supernova of networking FUBAR. Any mentioning that for some work somebody has to be present was ignored and the whole support was plastered with guidelines, tickets and restrictions. The change of some alias email adresses on the SMTP took them the better part of a week and it didn't even work. The engineers started to get unhappy and always diligently pointed to the support sitting in another country and after a couple days of ticket ping pong did it myself as support support. I also logged all the wasted hours I spent, faults and wrongs they did and instances where they could do nothing (restarting a network switch. Still no telekinesis?) and readied myself for the final blow. On the following week Tuesday morning I informed my co-workers there might be network connectivity problems and instructed them to rely on the networks stuff as little as possible. I logged in a provided some critical points with static IPs (except for $boss's laptop of course). From the depth of the abyss then rose a little network switch. Drawing my runes and symbols I connected it to the network. I stirred the sleep of the thing that should not be. I took another network cable, plugged it in and in my satanic ritual plugged it in again. What followed was a evil storm of stray DHCP packets. The hail of new and not so new device information kicked and reconnected all DHCP devices in a endless downward spiral until the end of time. I imagined the control dashboard of the supporters I supported like a infernal christmas tree where all lights started blinking red and green and maybe yellow too. My colleagues were warned and I sat back and played the waiting game. About 20 minutes later I get a frantic call from the other office.
Feigning ignorance:
Smirking I went back to work. $boss came around and asked what was happening and all the pieces of my plan fell together.
After lunch (4 hours of outage so far) I get another call.
I really wanted to see that since the storage cabinet had barely any reception but I gave it my best shot. After setting everything up $SP went to work and after a few hours of agonizingly slow debugging went home after calling and telling he found nothing (no, really?) and we should all tether our phones. I waited another 30 minutes and put Cthulu back in its slumber. The deed was done. The storm was over. Sluggish DHCP packeges oozed back to their place. And none of the remote support where any wiser what caused the outage. I readied my weapons for the full frontal assault and got the accesses back and the renewals of the plans for the new server in about 2 weeks of discussions and my biggest backer was $boss after I calculated (in management calculations) what that outage had cost us and will in the future when the server follows Cthulu and loses its mind. And of course that was not the final part since that little server that could still served and now also the parent parent company wanted to play ball. But that is another story for another time. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2018 02:33 PM PDT I was covering the phones for a bit today, its quiet but I get a call, I introduced myself and the company, the voice on the phone announces that 'the internet dunt work' hmmm, funny because we are not an ISP... :D I try to help though; 'we don't do internet like that, who do you pay for internet?' 'I dunt, someone else pays' they say. 'Ok, how did you get our number though?' I'm just curious at this point. 'i googled it on me phone..' I think a light bulb went on some where and I confirmed that they should indeed Google Virgin media's number on their phone and ask them all about their lack of internet. [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Tales From Tech Support. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment