Users apps weren’t opening due to three inputs Tech Support |
- Users apps weren’t opening due to three inputs
- Apparently, I have led a charmed life before now
- On Linux/Unix file names......
- Why can't you AV techs break the laws of physics for us?
- Let it crash!
- As much as this would be preferable sometimes, I don't think it's in our job description
- Rolling out (Hopefully part one of god knows how many)
- The case of the missing toolbar
| Users apps weren’t opening due to three inputs Posted: 22 Nov 2019 10:31 PM PST Hello team, A user came up to me and complained that whenever she opened outlook, nothing happened! Oh no what could be the problem Well my first thought was maybe explorer is forked so I forced explorer to close and relaunched it, no dice. Nothing changed after a reboot I started an sfc scan to repair any fuckery in the os. But then I had a thought. The applications are opening, I can preview them, start menu works. It's almost like they are launching onto another screen Sure enough, I opened display settings and found 3 displays to her 2 monitors This was weird so I checked her monitor and found not only a displayport cable, but I VGA and a USB-B cable all running to her laptop dock. I fixed the problem, hooray, and I kindly asked why she had all three plugged in, and her response was that she had always done it that way, and that it usually worked. She had cables available so she went for it. TIL: woman uses three inputs for one monitor and loses outlook. [link] [comments]  |
| Apparently, I have led a charmed life before now Posted: 22 Nov 2019 02:48 PM PST And been blessed with users who mostly have half a clue, and can often follow instructions if I use small words and short sentences, and send them pictures. Recently got a panicked (and literally crying) call from the marketing person at a store we recently bought about her 20+ year archive of "important emails" having disappeared. The folders they were neatly sorted into were empty, and it was The End Of Human Civilization With Hellfire Raining Down From The Heavens And Dogs And Cats Living Together!!! Remoted in, discovered she was using a newer version of Outhouse than I was familiar with, and typical of Microsloth, it was "improved" the point of being almost completely unusable without a software engineer and a Boy Scout to help find basic functions like Search. But OK, I can figure that out. It turned out that she had managed, somehow, to: 1) Move all the emails from several folders to the Inbox. 2) Move those now empty folders to the Trash. 3) Without the slightest realization of having done so, and 4) Have a sh*t fit at the faintest suggestion that the physical laws of the universe could possibly allow the slightest possibility she had made a mistake and Somebody Must Have Been Fooling With My Computer (in an office behind a locked door that only she and her immediate boss have the key to). And literally crying the entire time. Once I explained it was all there, in the inbox, and just needed to be resorted back into the correct folders (which I had moved out of the trash), she was, well not happy (there were thousands of emails there, maybe tens of thousands), but at least stopped sounding like I needed to call 911 over someone having a stroke. I'm beginning to understand why their old IT guy is so hated. He doesn't deal well with idiots (and has the social skills of a syphilitic pit bull on crack humping your pantleg, apparently), and they have some real gems. I guess I've gotten spoiled with better than average users over the years. [link] [comments]  |
| On Linux/Unix file names...... Posted: 22 Nov 2019 02:02 PM PST This just happened. At work, we allow our developers to have root access to the QA servers using sudo. This allows them to do whatever they need without bugging us. Yes, it's a mixed bag, but since there isn't customer data on them, and since we give them a tutorial on what you *never* do ( rm -rf / anyone? ) we haven't had many problems. However, once in a while we get an unusual result. A developer sent me a file and asked me to copy it to a particular directory on our document server. He does this from time-to-time and I have to do this for him because the developers are *not* allowed on production servers due to client rules. ( It's a good idea even if it weren't a customer rule. ) Then I noticed that it was on the QA doc server. I replied and reminded him that he had the permissions to do this himself. He replied and said that he copied it, but when he tried to access it through the application, it gave an error. My guess was that he had the permissions/user/group wrong or that he had the wrong filename; it happens quite a bit. What I found will be forever etched in my brain due to the hilarity of it. In the directory there was one file. This is the actual directory listing. Cue drum roll....... He had copied the file to the completely legitimate Linux filename of star-dot-star. *.* I started laughing out loud in a big way! My co-workers thought I had lost it, until I explained. The poor Windows admin didn't understand. [link] [comments]  |
| Why can't you AV techs break the laws of physics for us? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 07:12 AM PST A tale from my time working sound and lighting for a university dance show. Apologies if my title caused anyone to twitch and reach for their leatherman. I was part of a volunteer duo working sound and lights for a university dance show (all medical students, doing extra curricular performing arts). It's the night of final dress. The dancers have practiced. The sociopathic choreograpghers have finally been reigned in from making last minute changes to costumes. The director's housemate who is around for some inexplicable reason has been given a menial task elsewhere so we can get the actual work done. The backstage crew has sobered up. The stage has been built. Alas! Calmity! The crew building the stage had muddy trainers. They swept the stage, however there was still a fine layer of muddy dust which would ruin the costumes. So they mopped the stage. Will take 10-15 minutes to dry then we can crack on. Problem solved! Nope. Not solved. Not one bit. The director promptly burst into to tears and screamed that a 15 minute delay would ruin the whole show. Enter the director's housemate again!
Following rehearsals, which of course ended at 4am, I drank heavily and reflected on what life decisions led to these situations. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2019 06:30 AM PST One day I walked into my office building, up the stairs to my office where I was the first to arrive. I stuck my key in the lock and turned the key. The lights went out. That was unusual. I looked out the hallway window and noticed that all the lights were out. Given that I was first in, I thought I'd make my way to the central server room to see what was happening there. Nobody else around, herd of VAXen churning away, UPS screaming in the corner. Sun servers still going and the NetWare servers and network still appeared to be up. I did notice that the VAXen didn't seem to be shutting down and the power indicator on the UPS was draining pretty fast. I looked around for someone to call, since I was in the PC support team, rather than central services. Phoned the shift supervisor who told me in no uncertain terms that I should let it crash. I phoned the head of networking, who said exactly the same, as did the Sun systems manager. Each of them was insistent that I let it all crash. At the rate that the UPS was beeping and draining, that was going to be sooner rather than later. At that point Jim comes in. He's the Head of Operations. I tell him what I've been told by the heads of two departments as well as his most experienced operator, the shift supervisor who's also second in charge. Jim ignores the advice and commenses the shutdown process on the VAX cluster. If you're not familiar with servers and clusters, they take some time to actually shut down in an orderly fashion. Can be as quick as 10 minutes, or as long as an hour. Either way, 4 minutes was all he got. At that point the room went silent. A few hours later, power was restored and the process of turning everything back on could commence. The NetWare servers powered right up, did some disk housekeeping and were ready to go in about 15 minutes or so. The Sun cluster took a bit longer, an hour if I recall, it had much more disk attached and it needed to deal with loads of backlogged Usenet news as well as all organisational email. The VAXen took a little longer. They wouldn't start up because one of the first things that happens when you shutdown a VAX is that it sets a flag for all processes that it's in the shutdown phase, so that no new processes are started. This part of the shutdown was completed in the 4 minutes of power remaining, just before the UPS died. Normally that flag is the last thing that's removed when shutdown is completed, so you can turn it back on again. It took eight days, involved getting DEC engineers in and lots and lots of hard work. During this time, payroll, accounting, business systems and all other "essential services" were unavailable. Had it crashed, there would have been some file corruption, but the VAX filesystem is versioned, so rollback is essentially built-in. Had a $4 cable been installed between the UPS and the VAX, there would have been enough time for the VAX to shut itself down once the UPS told it that it was running on battery. Had the diesel generators been tested regularly, they would have started up within a minute and run for 12 hours. Much egg on face. Moral of the story, don't stick your key in the lock early in the morning and let a VAX cluster crash if it's running on a UPS that's dying. [link] [comments]  |
| As much as this would be preferable sometimes, I don't think it's in our job description Posted: 22 Nov 2019 04:05 AM PST Just a short one. I was browsing tickets that have been assigned to my department when I saw something with a fairly simple description, the kind of thing that the Tier 1 service desk is supposed to be able to handle. So of course I'm curious as to what's outstanding, and I have a look. It's a really simple problem based on a miscommunication between the client and the service desk team member, and I'm able to sort the problem out, but I do a double take when I see the work notes added by the service desk:
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| Rolling out (Hopefully part one of god knows how many) Posted: 22 Nov 2019 01:44 PM PST Hello people from tfts, it's me, someone that no one knows or cares, and that it is also working it's first job on tech support... Kinda. (Ltl, ftp, mobile, all the shenanigans) Recently, I've started working on a car manufacturer for the rollout of about 800 machines, between notebooks and desktops. It has been almost a month, so, here you have a few short stories: (Note, during the rollout, we are also upgrading their machines from win7 to win10, along with getting rid of all crappy model 1 notebooks and giving the users either a model 2 or 3 if possible) "WHERE IS MY MAIL?" User calls me between appointments, claims she can't find her emails. I go to her table, because, well, our mail service is dodgy to say the least. Turns out she just had everything collapsed after the migration, nothing was lost, just hidden. I excuse myself and go have a coffee. "My phone is blinking!" User claims her softphone is not working, blinking as she said. I go to her table and that is actually true, it is freaking out completely. Turns out she had her phone set up in another machine as well, and that made the software go nuts. Queue quick reconfiguration. Happy user, satisfied tech. "I just have a few confidential files" Note to self, never try to change a supervisor's computer at the end of the day. We started at 4 pm, it didn't seem like it would be a problem. Surprise, it was. She had like, hundreds of little presentations with confidential information, which wouldn't go through our Network or external drives in order for her backup to be done. We spent about one hour the next day trying to figure out a way to do her computer, until I discovered something amazing. Zipped files go through. So, we spent the rest of the day zipping all of her folders and backing it up, no way we are doing this again. "Oh, it's you again?" To finish up, a sweet one. There is a team in the office that is like, really cool. After I finished their appointments, they were super chill, helped me find other users, even explained how some of their stuff works. Hell, they even invited me for their secret friend thing, I am really shocked. I think those are the best users I've found. They even offer me some snacks whenever I'm close. And that's about it for this, I am just really hoping for more interesting things to tell you all. For now, may your users all be unicorns and all of your tickets be a simple case of "Open, Resolved." [link] [comments]  |
| The case of the missing toolbar Posted: 22 Nov 2019 08:44 AM PST This is my first post so, please, be gentle. TL;DR: at the bottom. Cast: Me/$El Cuadrado = Me Jane = Denver office manager My boss = My boss Back in 1996 I'm at my second full-time job after graduating from college with a degree in Computer Science. My boss is really cool and he's the reason I'm working there as I followed him from my first job. It's a step up for both of us. My official title is Systems Analyst/Programmer. There are only three of us in the IT department including my boss so I get to handle most of the tech support. My boss helps out when he can but if he's busy or it's non-trivial then I have to take care of it. I'm also in charge of the servers. I've always had a knack for sysadmin work so most of the time it's not that big of a deal. We have three offices. There's the Midwest office where I work, one in Denver, and another in Atlanta (or as a few of the locals called it: <Southern accent> Hot-lanta </Southern accent>). One day I get a tech support call from the office manager in the Denver office. Let's call her Jane. Jane was generally nice and easy to work with. Her tech support problem? *Dum dum duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummm* Her formatting toolbar in MS Word was ... missing!!! <cue scary-movie, teenage-girl scream/> This is apparently a HUGE deal for her. At one point, if I remember the conversation correctly, she said, "I NEED my toolbar." Me: Okay, I think I can help with that. Me: Are you at your computer? (she is) And is MS Word is open? (it is) I figure the setting to display the toolbar somehow got toggled off or something like that. I have her go through the menus and she tells me there's a checkmark next to the "display the formatting toolbar" option in the menu. I instruct her to click it once to toggle it off and then a second time to toggle it back on. And the problem is solved. The toolbar is back ... not. Wait. What? That's not possible. I instruct her to repeat the process again. No bueno. I have her repeat the process but for a different toolbar. Works perfectly. Hmmm. I'm thinking to myself, "Where'd it go? If it had nipped off to the pub for a quick pint it would have been back by now." I tell Jane that the toolbar, while helpful, is not critical. All the commands in the toolbar can be reproduced by selecting the individual commands from the menu and/or by using hot keys (Live long and prosper, Control-C. Peace and long life, Control-V). This is where she says, "I NEED my toolbar." She says it in such a way that, even with my minus 50% lack-of-social-skills computer-geek-character-class penalty, I sense we will be finding her lost toolbar or ... die trying. <cue scary-movie, teenage-girl scream again/> I tell Jane the only other thing I can think of trying is to reinstall MS Word and that will take a while. I ask if she's willing to do that. *sigh* She is. I had been out to the Denver office at least once or twice at that point. When I was there I took time to organize the server room and I remember what it looked like and where everything was generally located. I instruct Jane to go to the storage cabinet in the server room (she's the office manager so, thankfully, she has a key ). I have her look through the CDs until she finds an MS Office CD. I instruct her to go back to her PC. I wait while she walks back. Me: Okay, go ahead and put the MS Office CD in your CD player. Jane: I don't have a CD player in my computer. Me: *silence of the none-shall-pass type* Her: *silence but it's not a give-up type of silence. It's more like a once-more-into-the-breach-I'm-committed type of silence.* This is back when CD players were still new-ish and considered a luxury rather than an of-course-my-PC-has-a-DVD/CD-player;Are-you-from-another-planet standard feature. My left ear is starting to hurt from holding the phone next to it. I switch sides. Me: Okay, we can use the CD player on the server. Me: Go to the server room *wait*, go to the server *wait*, put the CD in the CD player and close the tray. Jane: Done. Me: Okay, go back to your desk and let me know when you're there. *wait* We were running Windows NT back then and I distinctly remember creating a CDPlayer$ share on all the servers in our company. For you non-IT people that means on any PC in any of our offices I could connect to the CD player on the server and access all the files on whatever CD was in the player. Me: *Instruct Jane how to open an MS-DOS command window and map a drive on her computer to the server's CD player using the "net use" command* Me: *Instructs Jane how to uninstall MS Word.* *Wait* Now my right ear is starting to hurt from holding the phone next to it. Switch back to left ear. Me: *Instructs Jane how to reinstall MS Word.* *More periods of waiting punctuated by instructions on what to click/do next* I switch my phone from side to side one or two more times. Me: *Instructs Jane to start MS Word* Me: Do you see the toolbar? Jane: No. Me: *I feel the Klingon battle lust start to surge through me and instinctively I reach for my bat'leth. Today IS a good day to die. Oh, wait.* Me: Uh, let me think a minute. Jane (in a half-pleading voice): I need my toolbar. I had developed a habit of moving the mouse pointer around in circles when waiting for a task to finish. Like most IT people I've waited a lot for computers. I usually say something like, "Come on, you slow computer. Hurry up." At that particular moment I was moving the mouse in circles on my computer BUT I'd also clicked on the formatting toolbar and was dragging it around. I had MS Word open because I had been mirroring everything on my PC that I was telling Jane to do. And then at just the right moment God had mercy upon my poor soul. As I was dragging the toolbar around, my finger got tired or there was a glitch in the mouse or something and a mouse-up event fired. I kept moving the mouse but I had stopped dragging the toolbar around. The toolbar was on the right side of the screen (3-o'clock position) and it was half on the screen and half off. The right half of the toolbar was sticking out past the border of the screen and only part of the left side was visible. It was in the perfect position to show me what had happened to the missing toolbar on Jane's PC. <Gru> Light bulb! </Gru> A little back story is required. When I had been out to the Denver office I noticed that every PC had an anti-glare screen on it. I personally can't stand the things but Jane loved them. Okay, whatever. As office manager she had made sure every PC had one. They hung on the front of every monitor using L-hooks with Velcro. I remember that they were not quite large enough to show the whole screen. They cut off about 1/4 of an inch all around the border of the screen, which was a big part of why I didn't like them. Me (calmness filling me as I already know the answer): Jane, do you have an anti-glare screen on your computer? Jane (with obvious affection in her voice): Yes, I love them. Me: Do you have any other applications beside MS Word open? Jane: Yes. Me (with a sense of imminent victory): *Instructs Jane to close all applications but MS Word.* Jane: Okay, done. Me (setup for the death blow): *Instructs Jane how to minimize MS Word - still running but only as an icon in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen* Jane: Okay, done. Me (a slow, knowing smile crosses my face as I deliver the coup de grâce): Jane take off the anti-glare screen and look around edges of the monitor and tell me if you see anything. Jane: OHHHHH, THERE IT IS! My [beloved] toolbar. You found it. Oh, thank you. <General Martok voice> Victory is Ours! </General Martok voice> Me: *Instructs Jane how to drag and dock the toolbar back onto the menu bar of MS Word.* Me: *Instructs Jane to go to server room, remove CD from CD player, put back in case, and put CD case back in cabinet.* Me: Anything else I can help you with? Jane: No. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Me: Goodbye. *hangs up* *Ding* <Missing Toolbar Quest completed: +500 reputation with Denver office manager, +200 reputation with Denver officer users, +500 grateful points with my boss. /> *Ding* <You have gained a level in tech support. You have gained +2 skill points./> Total time was like an hour and a half. My boss in the next cube: Nice going, $El Cuadrado. Me: *rubbing my ears* I think I'm gonna go walk around for a little while. Later, not sure when, I learned that MS Word saved positioning information and other user specific settings in the user's profile and/or registry. The end. TL;DR; office manager of remote office had undocked her formatting toolbar in MS Word and somehow had moved it to the right edge of screen so that only a small part of the left side was visible. She had an anti-glare screen that was blocking about 1/4 inch of the border of the monitor which effectively hid the small part that was visible. Took 1.5 hours to figure it out. Was back in 1996 so remoting in was not an option. [link] [comments]  |
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