Field Tech Can't Ping Our Equipment Tech Support |
- Field Tech Can't Ping Our Equipment
- 3-headed dog (Kerberos issue)
- That Time I Did !Cover Myself with Glory
- Dev vs support - The adoption
| Field Tech Can't Ping Our Equipment Posted: 28 Feb 2020 09:33 AM PST I'll try to keep this one short but sweet. I work for a telephone company behind a desk. Most of my job boils down to configuring Centrex/Hosted-PBX phone lines and helping Field Techs with installing them. One piece of equipment we sometimes provide is a sort of IP-based PA system. It's assigned a phone number, ethernet in, speaker-wire out. So that phones can direct dial their overhead speaker. Now, these devices need to be manually configured by the Field Tech on site. We don't have any sort of remote access to them. They do this by plugging the device up to ethernet and a speaker and pressing a button on the device that will speak, out loud, the IP address of the box. We can remote into the router on-site to see what IP the device pulls if we have to. I get the following message from the field tech: "Hey can you look in [Customer]'s router/switch and see what IP is assigned to the PA? When I connect a speaker to it, it's telling me it's 198.168.30.800. But for some reason I can't ping it or browse to it to configure the dang thing." Emphasis on the IP, my own. I was grabbing coffee at the time so I guess the 2 minute wait was too much and he tried elsewhere. By the time I sat back down and asked if he had a MAC address I could reference I got this. "No worries, [other tech] got in it and it is 192.168.30.200, I just misunderstood the voice LOL." Who knew that 198.168.30.800 was not a valid private IP. Hmmmm. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Feb 2020 01:40 PM PST Today I had a request that a user wasn't able to access some file shares. She had JUST been given permissions to access them, so I assumed first line support had messed up adding her to the right group. Wait a second... everything looks okay. Weird. Maybe the issue was with either the permissions structures or AD replication? Nope. She still had permissions to access other shares on the same server. Maybe her "reboot" wasn't actually a reboot. I watch the reboot this time. No change. Alright, let's dig into this thing... I run a "whoami /groups" but it also doesn't show the new groups "klist purge" to manually kill and refresh the Kerberos ticket, but no change. But wait! The "klist tgt" command shows an error! "No credentials are available in the security package" Oh my! The computer isn't generating Kerberos tickets? There's your problem right there! Remove and re-add the PC to the domain and magically everything starts working again! ...and somehow the user is still upset because she only has an hour left to get all her work done and I cut into that time. It literally took 10 minutes start to finish. Oh well, at least it's Friday. [link] [comments]  |
| That Time I Did !Cover Myself with Glory Posted: 28 Feb 2020 06:52 PM PST Actually, this is just one of several times I have failed be showered with kudos.... Be advised that this is long and the text contains a link to Actual Gore. My form of Tech Support is aircraft maintenance, working on fixed-wing aeroplanes and helicopters with a value ranging from mid-five-figures to mid-eight-figures. They usually can be divided into airborne aluminium pit-ponies or their owners' pride-and-joy; even a business jet worth more than ten million dollars can be treated as a workhorse, while a 45-year-old 40-thousand-dollar bugsmasher may be pampered by its owner. The events recounted here took place around the turn of the century/millennium, before I conned some of my colleagues into thinking that I knew what I was doing. I had been working on a Piper Cheyenne, a twin-engine turboprop. The RH engine inlet anti-ice system wasn't working. "What is engine inlet anti-ice?" I hear you say? To quote Deane from The Curiosity Show, "I'm glad you asked". [Technical information: turbine engines, of which turboprops are a subset, have things inside them spinning at tens of thousands of RPM. These things tend not to like being hit by foreign objects, be it birds, bolts, bits of ice or (in one case I was told about) a key left in the lock of a nose baggage compartment door. If a foreign object hits the spinny-fasty things, Bad Things can happen, such as this, (famously) this, or this; WARNING: GORE, VERY MUCH NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH. Ice can form on aircraft because it's cold up there and sometimes it is wet enough as well. To protect the spinny-fasty bits from ice (it's not possible to protect them from birds, keys or unfortunate people), the air inlet of a turbine engine is heated to prevent ice from forming and building up, then breaking off in chunks and going into the engine. Usually the inlet is heated by hot air tapped off the engine itself; next time you look at a jet aircraft you might see a shiny ring around the air inlet - this is the bit that heats up. Many turboprops have the same arrangement.] The Piper Cheyenne engine inlets have a different system; they have a shaped rubber boot on them, with an electric heating element impregnated in the rubber - like a rear window of a car, but rubber instead of glass and in a ring with extra flappy bits to cover the inside and outside of the inlet instead of a flat sheet. The boot is glued on with an excellent adhesive made by 3M called 1300L. It turns out the RH engine anti-ice inlet boot on this Cheyenne was cactus and needed to be replaced. This is a pain-in-the-arse job - for one thing, 1300L is a really excellent adhesive, it will keep rubber attached to aluminium at a speed of several hundred miles an hour (most aircraft are manufactured in the USA, so in aviation we use imperial units, except in Russia and (I think) China); so good, the boot is often ripped to pieces during the removal process. Adding to the pain-in-the-arsedness of the whole thing is the shape of the boot itself - it's a ring with compound curves (kind of looks like a moulded-plastic dog food bowl turned upside-down with the middle part of the bowl cut out, leaving just the rim part). Anyhoo, after waiting several days for the new boot to come from the USA, I got the old boot off, cleaned off the residue of bits of rubber and 1300L, and glued the new boot on - this taking much of the day. It was now time to test that the boot heated up. This is supposed to be done with the engine running so that there is some Nice Cool Air being blown over the boot by the spinning propeller. I decided that turning the system 'on' for a few seconds would be okay, so I arranged for a colleague to get in the cockpit and flip the necessary switches while I stood outside and monitored the boot. I wiped the boot down with a wet rag (you know, to keep it cool) and called out to $Colleague, "ON!" [Ron Howard voice] It did not go well. In less time than it took for my jaw to drop, pick back up to the rest of my face and for my mouth to form and shout the word "off", all of the moisture evaporated off the surface of the boot, a bubble the size of a tennis ball appeared (like a kid blowing evil, black bubble gum) and promptly burst with a soft 'pop'. The brand-new boot - that cost about $8800 in turn-of-the-century dollars - was fucked. Enter the guy whose job it was to internally-investigate Jim: "So Gert, you felt like you were under a lot of time pressure, didn't you [Aldis lamp flickers, semaphore flags flutter, a Morse key taps, flares issue from flare guns and hang from the ceiling of Jim's office - Jim is very busy for a few moments (dramatisation - may not have happened)]?" Me: "......yes, Yes I did!" I then changed the boot a second time. TL, DR: "look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?" No, it's Jim! Slower than a speeding echidna! Able to lift self-inflicted buses off hapless aircraft maintenance engineers with a few strokes of a pen! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Feb 2020 01:24 PM PST Some time after the email sent from $userDirector from the last time, $boss called $coworker and $me.
After not having other option that leaving $boss take his vacations, some days passed and $coworker was summoned to a reunion with $userDirector and $Boss'sBoss, so $coworker went to it and returned with dead eyes, what he told me was that when he came to the room $userDirector, $Boss'sBoss, $devLead, and a lot of high directors were there (ok, that wasn't a work reunion it was a slaughter), I wasn't there but the interaction was something like this:
Oh crap, now I'm the father of a bastard child... Edit: Some formatting and adding a link to the previous post [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