Oh dear Tech Support |
- Oh dear
- 12 Port Splitter...
- Rough Night Part 3......
- Please respond to this do not respond email...
- The AV Saga Part 8: The Final Push
- The Open Door
| Posted: 28 Jan 2019 08:34 AM PST Not your typical tech-support tale but I think it fits this sub. I manage a software support team, most of us work at home - I have an office in the back of my garage and keep a tight schedule - usually in the office by 7:30. My morning ritual is to make tea for myself and my wife, she gets to sleep in most days because of her work-schedule. I woke up in my own bed this morning, it's not unusual for the wife to kick me out of bed in the middle of the night - usually because of snoring. I just brought her tea and she said "Do you remember what happened last night?" I was scared it was something horrible that I blacked out, but I remembered a bunch of things from right before we went to bed & recited a few, and I'm not particularly hung over this morning. She said "you were talking in your sleep" - oh, OK, of course I wouldn't remember that. That's a new one though, I've never been told I talked in my sleep before. Now the fun part: apparently I was using my work-voice, saying "Go into your email and find the job number" - yep, I was sleep-talking a support-call with a customer. Apparently I was also flailing my arms around, gesticulating wildly. My team says I should record my sleep & make a webinar out of it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jan 2019 08:03 AM PST ME: Thanks for calling support. How can I help you? EU:Something is wrong with my internet, I can't get to 'website' ME: Ok, let me see if I can see your PC from my location - Pings PC, PC doesn't ping. ME: Ok, can you check to make sure your Ethernet cable is plugged into the back of your PC and the drop point (Wall). EU: It's plugged into my PC and it doesn't plug into a wall, it plugs into a 12 port splitter. ME: A 12 port Splitter? Do you mean a switch? EU: No, there aren't really any switches on it, just a bunch of internet ports and lights flashing. ME: I think you're looking at a switch, but can you tell if your cable is plugged in? EU: I just pushed on it and it clicked. ... Oh it looks like its fixed. ME: Awesome, glad we found the culprit to be the 12 port splitter. TLDR: Switches are now called 12 Port Splitters. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jan 2019 08:50 AM PST I work for a Small MSP servicing around 100+ clients with 5-20 employees and our largest client being 50+ employees. I am generally regarded as the "printer admin" at the office. Mainly because I don't stop until the printer is working (minus hardware issues). I'm Level 1-2 HelpDesk/Onsite Tech. We just take care of our clients. This is a story about one of those clients. Note: Very lite Tech things in this story Characters: $Me – self explanatory $Bossman – Owner/Boss of MSP I work for. Great guy and great boss all around. $Brains - Cubicle mate who can retain any all information somehow. I don't know how he does it, but he puts all of us other techs to shame. 2 of us have College Degrees (not that this means anything really) $Money – Client who does work with money (great client and great people who work there) $JankyUser (Read my pervious story here and here $MoneyLawyer ($ML) - $Moneys Lawyer $CompLawyer ($CL) – Competition of $Money's Lawyer We left of with a full onboarding of the client and replacing workstations. They are setup and secure. That's it for that part. The computer from $JankyUser was sent off to a company we use for forensic IT. $Money essentially had a data breach and had to contact all their clients to inform them of the issue. Typical things happen with data breaches. We do our job keeping their network secure and up to date to help prevent issues like this. $Money is suing their competitor for purchasing confidential information. $JankyUser has multiple charges against him. Out forensic guys give us the finding and they are quite interesting. Months go by and client is happy with our service. Then $Bossman, $Brains, and I are summoned as witnesses in court. Me being label as expert witness. As I was the one who found the issue and was in contact with the forensic guys, I'm the go to guy I guess… Court is in a month, I go through the normal "training" with the lawyer to make sure I'm ready for the questioning and my answers for the jury. The day of court arrives, and we see $JankyUser and his lawyer (turns out it was one of the Competitions lawyers, we found out about this a year or so later) $MoneyOwner is there and hey eyes show a burning rage able to cripple the cutest puppy stare. The rage inside of this woman was compelling enough to turn any gang banger into a saint. It was scary. Surprisingly enough she kept a cool head and her composure through the whole trial. Trial goes normal. $Bossman get called and he is questioned about his role with $Money. He explains we are the external IT provider and what we do and how we came about helping/finding the breach. He exits the stand and $Brains is called. $Brains is asked his questions and he answer them but with more technical jargon. He is also asked harder questions as he fully found the issues with the computer in question and stopped the data transfers. Nothing special went with his questioning. Then I get called. I'm sweaty, I've been in a court trial before (see this and this, but this is different. I shot someone.
$ML was done with me and $CL had some basic questions which is answered nothing interesting. Court ruling found in favor of $Money and award an amount that made me cringe. Competition was required to have a company come in and wipe any and all information they received from $JankyUser. Company came in and took back/deleted all data including attempts at selling their services to $Money's clients. A few months pass and Competition goes out of business for undisclosed reasons. (We know the real reason). $Money is thriving as they are the only company in town with good reputation and personnel who do their type of work. $JankyUser went to prison for an extended period. Come to find out he was also on drugs during his last 3 months employee at $Money and it was some hard stuff. Part 4 soon……. My court case for the shooting! See Part1 See Part2 Edit: I cannot spell CSV. Sorry. [link] [comments]  |
| Please respond to this do not respond email... Posted: 28 Jan 2019 03:12 PM PST So this is a new one! Noticed today that a user sent an email to our queue asking us for help with another email queue managed by a different department. Apparently somehow external people assumed that a slightly different email address (one with just the first two letters removed) as well as a "DoNotRespond##@companydomain" would work. But wait not just external, the person who emailed told me that their supervisor was mad because they sent something to that do not respond email and it never hit thier queue! So I was basically asked to add an alias that literally had do not respond in it so if someone emailed it then they would still receive it. My manager said to just do it. The person requesting it wouldn't be convinced. [link] [comments]  |
| The AV Saga Part 8: The Final Push Posted: 28 Jan 2019 12:38 PM PST Previously: https://redd.it/ahb8go Part 7 ended with a plan in place to upgrade everything to a new version of AV Agent to stop unwanted scans. Surprisingly, there weren't any issues with the upgrade. The only issue was our inability to package the new AV Agent in an .exe for new installs. It kept failing. For now we're using the previous agent install, and once it checks into the AV console for the first time it'll get the upgrade. And this has fixed our random scans issue. Last week, the CTO decided it was time to make sure all devices have antivirus software on them. We started Tuesday morning with a list of 102 devices either missing AV Agent and Software, or just missing AV Software. All of Desktop Support was given the directive to get this list of PCs down to zero by Friday. This was to be our main objective unless we were working on an emergency issue for a VIP. The group listened. By the end of Wednesday we were down to less than 30 left. I had one left on the list, and of course it was special. It had both the AV Agent and the AV Software installed, but they were such old versions, they hadn't updated or communicated with the AV Console since November of 2016. I wasn't able to uninstall either without errors. So I tried installing the new version of the agent, even though it wasn't working. That apparently installed the new agent, but it wasn't working. It did however, allow me to uninstall both it and the AV Software. That allowed me to install the older agent and run the upgrade itself, then push the AV Software. By the end of Thursday we had 3 PCs left on the list. One was a laptop for one of our VIPs. He was currently traveling with it, so we agreed to fix his first thing Monday morning. Which was just completed. The 2nd was also a laptop of one our remote users. She had ignored multiple emails and phone calls from us, including the ones that threatened to disable her user and PC accounts until she contacted us. Finally, Friday morning she responded only after we had her manager call her. She stated, "I'm driving right now, we can do it Monday." That didn't go over well with us, but cooler heads prevailed and we agreed. She did in fact call in this morning and she is now properly protected. The last PC is an XP box running a database to allow a specific function to print to a network printer. The AV Agent will not install DeskAdm spent a few hours trying to move this database to a Win7 box but failed. We called in a Server guy to capture an image of this box to set it up in our virtual environment, which also failed. As of this Monday morning, we have just this XP box left. It is the last physical XP PC in our environment (We're still doing some development on XP VMs). We're figuring out our options so we can office space the thing. If there is an update to the AV saga, I will keep you all informed. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jan 2019 09:30 AM PST This isn't a "tech support" problem in the strictest sense, but I still feel like it fits here. So, this happened a few months ago, back before I was in IT (I started at my current company in Customer Service and bided my time until I could weasel my way into my current department). Currently, our IT department consists of myself, my manager, and another remote database administrator / support technician. But, at the time, the remote DBA / support technician was our sole IT professional. Our network is VERY old and we're currently working on completely replacing it. All of our on-site infrastructure lives in our server room, and only the IT staff and the VP of Operations have keys. On this fateful morning, everyone came in to find the server room door wide open, the main office door unlocked, and one of the IT keys missing. As one of the last people to leave the building, I know that everything (especially the server room) was locked up. So, something must have happened during the night. Myself, the executives, and the DBA set out on our own separate investigations to figure out what happened. All employees have building keys, including some past employees (we're pretty sloppy about building security), so that was our first thought. However, every single on-site employee denied having come in overnight, and I believe them (all are fantastic people who don't even know about the server room keys), and I can't think of any past employees who would do that, although of course I have no proof. Another thought was that our industrial park sends cleaning people at night, but they don't have keys to the server room, and whoever did it most likely stole the key from my colleague's desk. The creepy part is that whoever did it knew where we stored the server room key (which is unusual because I didn't even know its whereabouts at the time), and they were careless enough to not bother closing the door. So, at that point, the investigation ended — we are fairly certain that no hardware was tampered with, and there's no evidence that anything went missing. Still, the story bothers me to this day, and I am especially uncomfortable that we never changed the locks. I'll have to bring it up this week. TL;DR: Server room key goes missing and door is left open overnight, but no explanation was ever found [link] [comments]  |
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