Scooby-Doo and the curse of the phantom DHCP server Tech Support |
- Scooby-Doo and the curse of the phantom DHCP server
- Oh, so they were marked?
- So you are a computer boffin?
- No ma'am, I did not take your icons.
- The case of the mysterious extra page
- "You guys are magic"
- I found a unicorn teacher where I work
- Why yes, you do need a page to go with that template.
- Tales from university IT (in a public library)
- The intelligence level is dropping
- Can I get some love for those who feel with end users who talk over their technicians?
| Scooby-Doo and the curse of the phantom DHCP server Posted: 27 Nov 2018 06:48 PM PST I work for an MSP (outsourced IT) that has a weekly rotation of who has to be on-call for after-hours and weekend work. This week, it was my turn to be in the barrel. Normally we don't get a ton of calls or alerts, but this time I did. I got an alert that the DC (their only server) was down at $Client. I logged into my cloud-based RMM tool to check it out. Sure enough, it was offline. Not to worry though, usually this just means that our monitoring software crapped out so the RMM thinks the server went offline. In that case the easiest thing to do is use the RMM to remote into a random computer and then RDP into the server from there to start the monitoring service back up again. So I connect to a computer named "Manager-2" and try to ping the server. No response. Shit, it's really down. So I email the manager and owner, asking if they want me to take further action or wait until Monday. They say "don't worry about it, Manager will be in the office later today and she'll reboot it then." The manager goes on-site. Cool. She powercycles the host, and I don't get a notification that it's up. Odd. I log back into her computer again. Still can't ping the server. Still can't even ping the host. What the hell? So I have her double check the cabling. I walk this poor lady through looking for activity lights, pulling and pushing patch cables back in, and reading the status from the monitor next to the host. Hold on, lemme try from another computer. Unexpectedly, the Sales-4 computer can reach the host just fine, and I'm able to quickly fix the issue that brought down the server. So now the server's back up, but what was up with Manager-2? I should preface this next part; they are a small shop with only one network and only one router (a Sonicwall). Its LAN interface is at x.x.1.1 and it acts as their DHCP server. Some smartass probably found an old router and plugged it in. Weird.. well let's double check your wiring just in case. I feel bad doing this because she already double checked the cabling of the server, but it's gotta get done. She traces the ethernet from her computer all the way behind her desk, finds the outlet and its equivalent on the patch panel, and then verifies that it was patched directly to the switch. No weirdo routers in between! Her saintly patience has to be admired! First thing in the morning, I go on-site. Management is curious. With a fresh outlook, I revisit my work. The problem is me. Why? I should've spent the 5 seconds of my time to check for this 48 hours earlier... but it's too late for that. I finally figured out when I looked more closely that Manager-2 is at a different WAN address. It's not even in the office. It's her home computer! That x.x.101 network? That's all on her home network! That "second" sonicwall? It was her home router! Why was she able to work just fine while she was in the office? Because she was using Manager-3, not 2! And there's no site-to-site VPN so no wonder she couldn't ping the server. I go meet with my manager, tail between my legs, and fess up. He finds it way more funny than I do at the time! He cracks up, gets a kick out of the story, and doesn't give me too much shit about it. We won't bill the clients for the time, and I'm not in trouble. After all is said and done, I feel a lot better about the mistake. But I'll use this as a personal reminder the next time I think the sky is falling! TL;DR: Forgot to check some basic facts and ended up thinking there was a rogue DHCP server, wasting hours of my time and the clients as well. Nobody was injured though [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2018 06:02 AM PST This one happened a few weeks ago. Preface: I work in a homebrew shop, and I usually handle products that needs to be evaluated for refund policies or repair eligibility when noone else got time for it. It was a rather slow friday afternoon when the customer comes in with a somewhat expensive all-in-one brewing unit, called a grainfather. $C: Customer. $A: Yours truly. $C enters shop $A: Hi! how may I help you? $C: I have a faulty Grainfather! It doesn't do what I want it to do, and my students are angsty to get to try this machine! $A: Yeah, I can see how that's a pickle. Can you describe the errors? $C: Yes! It heats up as I want it to, but it doesn't stop when it reaches the proper temperature. It also doesn't want to pump when I tell it to, as it just keeps heating up! I haven't touched it since, as I don't want to break it! Can you please take a look at it? (I already know at this point what's wrong with it(/him), but wanted to get the point across) We lug the unit out from his car and into our production room for equipment test and brewing classes. I pull it out of the mesh bag he used for transportation and look at the unit. The main control box contains 3 cable inputs, one for the power main, and two for the pump and heating element respectively. The two cables are, as suspected, attached to the opposite ports. $A: Can you see these cables? One controls the pump, while the other controls the heating element. $C: Yes, I got that far. $A: You also noticed how each cable has a silver sticker attached, proclaiming its function? $C: I didn't see that, but it makes sense. And so? $A: Care if I detach the control box? $C: Go ahead. I pull the cables out of the box, and detach it from the brewing unit. I flip it around and show it to the customer. $A: Can you see how they are labelled "pump" and "heating", respectively? $C: ... I wired it in reverse, didn't i? $A: Yup. $C: I'm an idiot. He then proceeded to tell me his students waited for half a year to get the problem fixed. He bought a few beers to take home while we joked about the scenario for a few minutes, and couldn't wait to show off the machine. Probably one of my more memorable tech support scenarios. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Nov 2018 01:01 AM PST Preface: I'm a software dev, but i did do 6 months of tech support a few years ago. People: Me - yours truly. Mech - older mechanic, not good with computers. So i was having an issue with my car the last few weeks and finally took it in to get looked at this week. This morning while waiting for them to finish up with my car, i start talking to Mech.
So now i start thinking back to a few stories i have read here in the past about disappearing emails and make a mental list of things to look for. So i sit down and take a look at Outlook (more email tabs open then the max number of tabs that the task bar can display). I start with looking through Outlook to see if there are any rules that could be moving the emails and i dont find any and his inbox is still showing +1400 unread emails, so they are definitely still in the inbox. As a precaution i check the Deleted folder and i that it is basically empty so he isnt "storing" read emails in there either. Next are the settings, i take a look through them and cant see anything out of the ordinary that could be causing this. So everything seems to be fine, so next thing to try is Google the problem. I open chrome and its defaulted to Ask.com, This is going to be fun. Anyway i do a few searches but nothing really comes up. So i take another look at Outlook and i see that there is one tab called "View" and out of other things to try, i click on it and take a look through the options. Then i see it, a button named "Change View" with drop down options. I click it and i see it has the "Last 7 days" option selected and a few other options. Great this looks promising. So i select one of the other options and it immediately reloads the email list with all the emails! So i try a few of the options and choose one that looks the easiest to use, and just as im finishing up Mech walks in to give me the keys to my car.
So i proceed to show him the button and its options, but to be honest, he probably forgot everything by the time i finished showing it to him. So he thanks me and as he hands me my keys he says:
After that we say our goodbyes and i head off to work feeling better about myself knowing i was able to fix a tech (specifically email) issue for somebody. Edit: Spelling. [link] [comments]  |
| No ma'am, I did not take your icons. Posted: 27 Nov 2018 06:08 PM PST I work at an msp. I had just helped a user do something forgettable. me: (insert greeting) User: (sounding somewhat apprehensive to speak in a "I think I sound crazy" tone) Hey its user, you just helped me. Did... when you just left my computer, did you take my icons? Our users have their home drives on a NAS. Sometimes they disconnect and all of a user's icons will disappear. User: Haha, no, that happens sometimes and it is easy to fix, give me a moment. tappity tappity me: you know, I'm not a huge fan of desktop icons,I keep my desktop totally blank of icons generally and there's not really much I need yours for, so you can definetly keep them! User:starts laughing I'm glad you knew what I meant! I thought I was going crazy! Tl;dr: A user thinks her icons were stolen [link] [comments]  |
| The case of the mysterious extra page Posted: 27 Nov 2018 05:50 PM PST A comment on another post reminded me of a situation I had a while back. I work for a copier and network management company. In this episode we sold a customer a desktop laser printer. Unfortunately technology is not his friend... One day he calls up and complains that the printer we sold him was printing an extra blank page on everything he printed. I went through the standard set of questions making sure that it really was happening on every print job and he assured me it was. Email, office docs, PDFs... After not being to help him over the phone, mostly due to the fact that he wouldn't give me any helpful information and would get completely lost when I tried to walk him through the most basic of steps and then would argue and complain that it was our machine doing this, I decided that I'd have to go on site which, thankfully, was only a couple minutes away. When I got there he proceeded to print out several emails, successfully and without bonus pages. Needless to say, we can't reproduce the issue. Few days later he calls back, same issue however he's telling us how he's so busy that he might be in his office but if he's not to go ahead and come in anyways as his for is unlocked. I go by right away but he's not there and I opt not to try anything as I'm not in the habit of going into people's businesses without someone there. Too many things to go wrong. A few weeks later calls back and you guessed it, same issue. Drive over as he says he's at the office. This time we make some headway. He has found a particular document that gives him the issue every time. He shows me a printed sample and rather accusingly tells me that 'my' printer (that he bought, not leased) is printing extra pages and proceeds to show me four pages, three of which have text on them, the fourth blank other then the fact that all four are printed on letterhead, it so I thought. Turns out he had Word set to put his letterhead on each new page in this document. He opened the Word document and starts scrolling counting the pages aloud. 1 page of text, 2, 3 and finally scrolls to page four which is blank, aside from the automatically added letterhead graphic, and I thought "AH HA! You've just proven why there is another page!" But then scrolled back up to the third, and last, page of text and says "See! There is only three pages!". Now, it is not very professional to face palm or bang your head on the desk in front of the customer but boy did I want to. I had him scroll back down to the fourth page which he adamantly refused exist. I had him click on the page, which revealed the culprit. Someone, and we won't point any fingers, added a few extra enters causing Word to think he wanted a new page. I had him press backspace a few times and Lo and Behold! The last page disappeared! Printed the document out and sure enough, there were only the three pages! Now I must admit that I failed in one way. I did not insist that he save the file right then and there. He closed it without saving and sadly that came back to bite me later on down the road. I think this was the most difficult customer I've ever dealt with. I've had similar experiences where the end user believed it was the machine but when it was obviously, and politely, pointed out to them that they were there cause they would typically admit it one way or another. Edit: words... I plead forgiveness for any mistakes found. I've been attempting to write this while taking care of my 5mo and making dinner... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2018 03:04 PM PST Simple story, just a normal password reset. These are always super easy or super frustrating. This is an example of a later one. User: "The password you gave me isn't working" Me: "What does the screen say?" User: "You must change your password before logging in." Me: "Does it prompt you to change you password?" User: "Oh, yeah. I see it now. Hahaha, I'm so bad at technology." User tries to change the password for the next 10 minutes User: "I tried to change the password, but it's still not working" Me: "...Is it giving you an error?" User: "No." Me: "Sign in with the password you just made....." User: "It's signing in now, you guys are magic" Seriously though, is reading comprehension that hard? [link] [comments]  |
| I found a unicorn teacher where I work Posted: 27 Nov 2018 11:00 AM PST Recently I got a request for a loaner laptop for a visiting professor at my university. The full-time professor, let's call her $D, requested a Mac laptop for visiting professor, $M, because $D would be using her Mac laptop while teaching abroad at one of our campuses. I bring the laptop over to $M and get it set up for her like I normally would with anyone else. She said that all she really needed was to be able to Skype with $D at anytime, so I had installed Skype for Business and showed her how to login. She asked what to do if there were problems, and I let her know that if there were technical issues on the call I could troubleshoot. While not the most technical person, and she seemed like English wasn't her first language, she followed along easily with basic instructions that I've seen other users fail at, like logging into each service with email credentials. I've been seeing some emails that I was copied on between the two professors, but it seems to be more training or not knowing how it works from $D's end, and I haven't been asked for assistance until today. And even when $M asked me what she was doing wrong, there was a chain of emails that came before it that $M wrote up on her own, including screenshots, of how $D can find $M on Skype, and listing off everything she tried to do when calling $D over Skype. While not the most exciting tale, I wanted to rave that a customer actually tried basic troubleshooting with the instructions I gave them before coming to me with an issue. [link] [comments]  |
| Why yes, you do need a page to go with that template. Posted: 28 Nov 2018 02:53 AM PST Two months ago, I quit my job, the one where they let clueless newbies delete Windows. My boss hired someone part-time to replace me, and she has occasionally contacted me for help with stuff (and you bet I billed for that time). Her most recent issue happened two days ago. She contacted me asking how to test an SQL query on Wordpress. I told her to use a test environment, and back up the database before proceeding. Pretty simple stuff that she really should have known. She replied the next day, saying yes, she was already doing that, but she didn't know where in the code to add the query so that it would run on the site, since she didn't know how to run it from the command line. Because apparently she didn't know how to run MySQL from command line? I don't know. Finally, she called me and told me what she was trying to do. She was tweaking a set of two pages, a form page and a thank you page. The PHP template for the thank you page was processing the data from the form. She had made a copy of the thank you page's template, and inserted her query into the copy. Then she attempted to have the form page redirect to her code on submit. Except that she hadn't grasped the fact that in Wordpress, you need to apply your page template to a page. She had changed the form action to go to "test-thank-you.php" or whatever, and it was causing a 404 error. In theory, if she had written the link correctly, she could have linked directly to the file, but that would have caused other issues. I explained what she needed to do, and that was the end of it, and I was once again so very thankful that I had quit. [link] [comments]  |
| Tales from university IT (in a public library) Posted: 27 Nov 2018 08:58 AM PST (EDIT first time posting, how do I do the little indent thing to indicate people talking. Please don't tell me to call the help desk....) A quick collection of some of my favorite things that happened to me while working for my univserity's help-desk (which happened to be based in the school library, which happened to be the public library for the entire town.) --- $me: obvious $will: very old guy, I forget his actual name. calling him 'will' will become apparently. $boss: supervisor. Had just graduated from said university. This job was pretty cushy, but paid like nothing. Since I was still a student, I had weird shifts, and tended to spend a lot of time doing nothing while waiting for calls. I regret nothing. Anyway, at around 6pm, $will comes up to the laptop counter. Dude is old, like OLD old. Like, easily 90.
The nuerons in my brain fire. Somewhere, a thought is completed in my hungover brain. He needs his will TYPED, so the changes can get notarized. Aha. I.... did not want to do this. I went to $boss for help.
I go back to the counter, and start typing as he dictates. I legitimately do not think $will has ever used a computer before. This is not hyperbole. He said he went to college for sailing. FOR SAILING. This man went to college for BOATS. Had a lovely conversation with $will. At some point I asked him about his life, he had no heirs, never married. Didn't even go to my university, but had donated thousand dollars worth of art, just because. He had settled in [state] in his old age because he liked it there. I finished typing his will, printed it for him, and he thanked me. When I went to print him a second copy, he winked at me, and put some money in my coat pocket (Which was hanging on the seat). He waved goodbye and left the library. I checked my pocket, and it was something like 43 dollars in fives and ones. I get the impression it was all the money he had on him. This was several years ago, I looked up obituary records about a year ago to try to find him. He died, can't have been too long after I helped him. Certainly a humbling experience. --------- Story 2, this one is more funny than depressing, like the last one. Same job, different year. In addition to all IT calls, we also handled the university switchboard, so anytime anyone called the university, they talked to us. Note that these phones do NOT call out. $me: me $CD: Crazy Dude. Probably a serial killer. Switchboard phone rings.
We only have one switchboard line, so we're not supposed to have people on longer than a few seconds.
At this point, my boss is in the room, very confused, asking me if I need help. I indicate no, but I'm trying to get this dude off the phone.
I transferred him to university police. [link] [comments]  |
| The intelligence level is dropping Posted: 27 Nov 2018 10:47 AM PST I work in Q&R (quality and regulatory) for a big name healthcare product company. We make fun things like SW, MRI machines, defibrillators, etc. I see all the calls that the call center takes and I have to code them appropriately and determine if there is a safety issue. This a call I just reviewed: CUs Problem Description: Assistance with study type (this is a SW call) Call Center Notes: Troubleshooting Action: instructed customer on selecting from the study type drop down Guys- the people that the call is referring to are DOCTORS. A doctor with an MD needed help using a drop down that was labeled! Calls like this make me question how people get to where they are in life.... [link] [comments]  |
| Can I get some love for those who feel with end users who talk over their technicians? Posted: 27 Nov 2018 07:41 AM PST Recently on a call with a lady of an organization I support. She's in another state. I was charged with provisioning a laptop for her, which admittedly took more time than necessary due to the DC being 2008 R2 and it not conforming with my best practices protocol. Anyway, ever since she's recieved the laptop she's supposedly has been experiencing problems. Such as her email not working or her not having administrative access and her computer taking a super long time to log in. She hired some guy to change the local administrative password in fact but yet couldn't get in control panel to make changes. evil grin Well, it turns out yesterday she submits a ticket about how another part of the company cannot modify the firewall settings in order to allow her to connect with a remote computer. Turns out she or someone else managed to delete the vpn access her computer had which basically synced GP. This was a five hour process of trying my best to restore the settings without triggering the admin login prompt. All while she rages in tangents about how it's not her wifi because and how she wouldn't have a problem if... Talking over my calm instructions, even having to repeat myself many times over because she wouldn't stay on track. This would have been so much faster and painless if she were much more patient. [link] [comments]  |
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