TFTS Top Tales - January 2020 Tech Support

So I help a medium sized company.. all the time I've helped them they have said of their tech purchases.. "We want all the bells and whistles but we don't want to pay for it!"

Naturally this has led to some compromises. Anyways. They needed a larger storage array (50TB). So I got them a big Synology storage box and large enough disks to meet the brief. (The compromise was large storage but really poor IOPS)

I'm transferring their old data to this new array.. However we don't have a backup big enough for their data at present (didn't want to pay.).. The old array will be the backup once we get the data to the new one.. So I'm slightly nervous..

Thinking of transferring this data as fast as possible.. I created a virtual disk and put the data in that. My thinking was 1 file.. faster transfer rates.. Anyway very quickly the team started getting data errors and I was called to site.. Slightly worried now..

As I started my investigations.. Everything I was doing was leading me to think something had gone awfully wrong with the virtual disk and I had corrupted this companies data..

My mind was racing.. I wanted to admit nothing until I knew 100% what the situation was..

I was thinking.. Is my insurance going to cover this.. I don't think this companies going to survive.. My I.T. life is over.. These people are going to be out of a job.. My reputation is ruined!..

Nothing was working.. every file i opened from the mounted virtual disk was corrupt.. the stress was getting too much..

As a last ditch troubleshooting step.. I moved the network cable to the spare LAN port on the old Synology box... I updated the IP addresses.. I waited.. the disk re-appeared..

Everything was o.k.!! No corruptions. I was saved. Oh.. thank goodness!! It was a dodgy network port! The company was none the wiser of the pearl that nearly befell them.

From that moment on I didn't take no for an answer when it came to backup security.

submitted by /u/scratchthebelly
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The Drivers License Beeps

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 02:43 PM PST

First post here, apologies for shitty formatting.

A family member came to me with their phone, a Galaxy S6 complaining that the phone beeps all the time.

What

Beeping like, a happy beep, not a message beep or a notification and with nothing on the screen, just the occasional "Success" beep which I've admittedly never heard before. Happens randomly every time she uses the phone, but not when it's locked.

First thoughts go to malware, some dodgy free-movies app running in the background updating itself and making noise or something. After clearing Samsung-ridden bloatware and any apps other than Facebook and Candy Crush (and an NFC reader app that she uses for the bus stop timetables) the problem still persists.

After at-least twenty minutes diagnosing the problem I notice again how NFC is enabled, not something hugely out of the ordinary but worth noting. She says she uses it for contactless payments, alright. A thought hits me about her fold-over envelope style phone case with pockets for cards.

She uses her phone with the case folded back around the phone, and always carries her license in the phone.

The beeping was from the phone reading the RFID chip in her Irish driving license. Her NFC app runs in the background reading cards but doesn't respond unless there's a link or known message wrote to the card; Other than a damn beep.

TL;DR: Phone beeping continuously but randomly just enough to irritate you. Drivers license triggering an NFC app on the phone which provided no other feedback other than a beep.

submitted by /u/Cduggan101
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The Gordian Knot of IT

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 08:22 AM PST

$Boss: The Boss. Newly Promoted and eager to show off what he can do

$Me: Me of course.

$NewTeamlead: A brand new fresh teamlead, just promoted today.

English is not my first language, yadda yadda, not on mobile.

----

After Clocking in like Clockwork am I making my way to my desk, only to be intercepted by my Boss.

Boss: Hey, you are being assigned to a new project.

Internally am I jumping with joy, but since it had been raining outside like all the angels were taking a piss at the same time, was I looking more like a wet angry poodle.

Me: Cool. What Project? And what will we be supporting.

Boss: We will do support for an Automobile company.

Me: Cool. I take it they have specialized Programms and everything.

Boss: Yes.

Silence reigns through the floor, only to be broken by the clicking of mouse buttons and the hammering of keyboards from the other office spaces as he looks as happy as my dog that just threw himself down into dead eel without my notice and is now coming up to me to get headpats.

Me: I take it we will get some Documentation for that as well as them preparing Training to teach us the basics of them?

Boss: Oh yes. Of course.

The dead eel scent suddenly vanishes and the headache that I felt coming in is gone.

Boss: Also we will be doing support for all of their Windows.

And there it is back again.

Boss: And their Office.

I don't even dare to ask, but I have to.

Me: Which... Versions?

Boss: I don't know.

I flinch internally and externally.

Me: Will there be any training for anything non-standard? I haven't touched XP in a while and Win10 is still rather new to me.

Boss: Don't worry about it. Anywho, you have to move to a new office. I already got the people there moved to other places, so that there is a dedicated room just for them as they want to do an inspection of our facilities today.

Its rather short notice, but thats fine.

Boss: Also you may need to do some minor recabling.

Thats fine. When we moved into the offices we had a company do all of the cabling for us. I wasn't presented when it was done, but I have been often enough under my table and plugging cables around to know that they did a damn good job. And while they hadn't bundle all of the cables for a single computer together for easier identification, was it not all that hard to identify the cat5 computer cable (Grey), Cat5 Phone cable (Yellow) and of course power cables.

Me: Can do boss.

I unplug my gear, say goodbye to my room mates, and transport it over to the other room down the hall. There I meet the new Teamlead. Recently promited from within. I barely had any contact with him, so I can't tell what kind of person he is.

We say hello and everything as I place my laptop on the table, plug the grey cable in, boot up and... no internet. Oh great. Please don't let it be the fucking Rack again.

Me: Does anyone else have internet? Or not for that matter?

Coworker#1: Net works fine for me.

Coworker#2: No net.

Coworker#3: No net either.

Coworker#4: Mine works

But since other people had been working here before us couldn't it be the rack, so maybe we are plugging something in wrong. With a hunch I begin to trace the grey cable. I follow it down under the table. Underneath the cable leads down the table chair, alright, and back up again to disapear into the channel.

Not my first rodeo, so I lay down, scoop under the desk, unhook the cable channel on the back to pull the cable out and... nothing is budging. I give it another tug and dig my fingers in. There is a lot of cables there, and its pretty dark, so I can't see a thing, but it feels something is stuck there.

Maybe the cable is wrapped around some other cable on the other desk, who knows, that shit happens. So I unhook the channel of the other desk as well and if this were a horror movie the oncoming Cronenbergian monstrosity would have eaten my face while my coworkers only heard my screams.

Now, for the record, the room is outfitted with 5 desks, each of them is 5 feet long. And this mutant monstrosity that fell down on me, was reaching all the 10 feet down from one end of the fist table, to the end of the second Table, and was around as thick as The Rocks biceps.

Cables are wrapped round each other and interwoven, cable and zip ties are added seemingly randomly into it and burried underneath more cables and even more zip ties. Some zip ties are locked to other zip ties. There are loops around each other, I think I might even spot a cable tied into a bow to keep other cables locked together, only to be burried under an avalanche of more cables and then be zip tied over. Some of the zip ties even were hooked into the holes in the channel and around it as well, with some more zip ties, and cables, wrapped around these as well.

My startled scream must have notified my Teamlead.

Teamlead: Are you alright?

That was a good question and right now I was still staring at this monster dangling over me Mission Impossible style.

Me: You have to take a look at this.

+1 Sin for movie cliches.

He kneels down and looks at me laying there and the cable monster hovering over my face. I can see the gears in his mind churning.

Me: This is what is wrong.

Teamlead: Thats not good. What do you suggest?

Oh god. Finally someone that sees reason.

Me: In my professional opinion I say we nuke it from orbit and just cut it all away with the largest knife we can find andlay all new cables, but since I know for a fact that we do not have any other cables laying around to plug it back in before the peeps are coming in for an inspection, I'd suggest that I just cut it all open and see that its all laid down properly. On that note, do we still have the tag printer?

Teamlead: I think so, but I'd have to ask $Coworker#7 .

Me: I would be very grateful if you could organize it, because I will tag every cable and write down if its for the computer and to which port in the ground its attached to, as well as to which table it leads.

Teamlead: And I will document it in an excel sheet.

Fine with me as it won't be much more work and he will have to do. All the tables and ports are numbered, so he just has to write it down again.

Me: Alright everyone else, you can leave and get yourself a coffee or tea, but if you want to stay all I ask you to do is to pull out the cables once I cut open the mess.

Getting out my trusty Leatherman knife I begin to cut the first zip tie.

1 hour later.

I have managed to pull out the cables from the first two computers and untangle them from the mass that this absurdity is. Mind you, this is still only 4 Cables by now and the rest is all wrapped up around each other and I quite literally have to pull each cable out single handedly.

Turns out that instead of laying a 3 feet cable to connect the computers and the IP phone they used 30 feet cables, 15 feet, and anything inbetween. I didn't even know they had used such long cables when doing this initially because the guys that did the initial cabling were reasonable peeps, at least judging by the other work I had seen in the other offices.

2 hours later

By now I have discovered several cables that are buried inside of the Cronenberg monstrosity which are not hooked up to anything, and as I fillow them to where they originate I make a discovery.

There is a router glued under the table. But no. Its worse. Its two routers. Both glued to each other. With cables running and out of them, but because of the huge knot I can't see what cable leads where.

My blood runs ice cold and for a moment I imagine the worst case: Somewhere down the road they added some sort of backwards routing here for reasons I don't know and they didn't document shit and now something here in the office is not working anymore because its not connected to the router and net anymore.

I'mfuckedimfuckedimfuckedimfuckedimfuckedimfucked.

But since I had already unplugged all the cables from the boxes, and they haven't had internet for the 2 hours I have been working on this, and no one has come storming in, am I relaxing a bit again because then it can't be that bad. Still, I want to know what the fuck the routers are doing there.

Some asking around with the former occupants of the office reveal that Boss and some technicians from Headquarters did a nightly visit months ago to install the switches. And had removed all the old cables and rewired everything and created this Monster.

No documentation of course.

On my way back and fuming angrily before my boss intercepts me.

Boss: Hey, I got the Info which Windows and Office version we will be supporting.

Me: Oh great.

Boss: Windows 7 to 10 and Office.

I stare at him and clench my hand. The urge for violence is rising like in the Shining.

Me: Which Office?

Boss: Just Office.

Me: 97? 98? 2000? 2007? 2010? 2012? 2016?

Boss: I don't know yet, but in every project things like that become clearer while we offer support for it.

I want to yell at him that only in badly managed Projects you don't know what you are supporting, and only in badly managed projects you have such a broadly defined subject of what you support. But I keep my mouth shut.

Me: Whatever you say, Boss.

And back I go to the desk to continue my work in the dark. However, Teamlead is there now and I inform him that there are two routers and that we should just unplug them since nothing is burning yet.

Teamlead: No.

Me: Excuse me?

Teamlead: No, if they are there then they must be needed. There is probably some forward routing on them so that packages are send to the computers so that software on them can run. We need them.

I stare at him as if he had just grown a second head. Or a third. Words fail me as he nods sagely as if he had just dispensed some great Wisdom to me and has that smile of 'Aren't you glad that I thought of this?' on his face. We all use the same software in the Office. If I do not need a router, then neither does this office.

Teamlead: Also need to write down to whom you have assigned the various ports.

Me: I have assigned them to the tables. Not people.

Teamlead: They need to be assigned to the people, so I want you to write down the name of whoever uses it at end of the cable.

Me: Its far easier to write down the table, and which side they come out from. People change. Tables not so much.

Teamlead: My way is easier.

And there goes my hope of him being reasonable. Or anything else.

Me: Its not. Really. Just let me do my job here. I am the one that does this professionally.

Yes. I might have been a bit pissed of and snippy there. But can I be blamed?

Teamlead: I have done some cabling in my time too.

And I am the only one of us five in the room that is a certified IT Specialist.

I don't even care enough to answer that though and just crawl back under the table. Around two more hours later have I plucked out all the cables, managed to sort them according to their length, and have started rewiring them. Cable ties are used to bundle them up and then let them split at the end, each computer gets its cables tied to gether for easy identification. The bottom end of the cable in port gets a tag that reads the desk number and side where it comes out from (Right or left), the top of the cable is tagged with the port Number.

Its the end of the day, I have been the only one working on recabling it, my collegues haven't done jack shit, not that I blame them because they haven't no IT experience in this regard, and I am covered in sweat, dirt, and more than enough half molten glue from the routers when I finally clock out. At least my day was spent well and productive and I didn't need to take any support calls in the other project.

Cue Monday.

After I had clocked out on Friday, had Teamlead decided that he'd redo the cables in a the way he envisioned.

The routers are back. The tags have been replaced with names instead, at the top. My old stickers are glued over or torn away at the bottom. More cables, of the 30 feet variant, have been used to connect the two routers, which are glued together again under the table.

Oh, and all of the computers and IP phones are now running through a single router. They also added a total of 5 more machines, one for each user, connect them all to the second router.

All of it has been zip tied haphardously together and the cables have just been stuffed back into the channel in a wild fashion and zip tied into a big ball of yarn again. Fortunately they didn't make a bow this time. All my previous zip ties have been cut open and tossed away, and they zip tied the mouse and keyboard cable to the bundle as well because they obviously couldn't differentiate between them.

In total? Now there is one router being fed by a single 1 mbps connection, connecting 5 computers as well as 5 IP phones to the internet, before another cable connects it to the second router, and feeds 5 more computers into it.

The other 9 ports on the floor are not in use anymore but are still active in the rack.

It is time to update my resume.

submitted by /u/HellScourge
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The Camel Stool story

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 08:13 AM PST

I wish this was my own story, but it happened to my coworker in tech support at an ISP I've worked at. It happened soon after I started working there, and was still referenced a lot before I left 2 years later. It was that hilarious.

This country (The Netherlands) is pretty tiny, so it is not uncommon that if there is an ISP outage, it goes nation-wide. Several (if not all) customers would be without internet, television, and/or landline for up to 2 hours on average. Working in tech support during such a time was a breeze. You'd tell people that the issue has been reported and is currently being fixed. End of story.

One time, our ISP had a nation-wide outage for about 20 minutes. No internet, no television, no landline. Customers who expressed their dissatisfaction were compensated for the entire day (which was a 30th of their total monthly fee so... not much, but it's mostly on a principle basis).

The day after that short outage, my coworker, not named Sven, received a call from a very distraught customer. I was sitting right next to him and soon noticed that he was not his usual aloof self with this customer. He looked genuinely confused and later even amused. He had to occasionally mute his mic to let out a chuckle or a "What *is* this guy?". At one point, he was too late in muting his mic and that apparently ticked the customer off enough to hang up the phone because the conversation ended abruptly.

I asked him what on Earth that was about. He told me that this customer had been in the middle of a weird business deal where he had to log in to Skype the day before, exactly between (I can't remember in full detail but very specific times were given so I'm just throwing some random times in here) 10:43 and 11:02, which just so happened to be the exact moment our services were down, or else the deal was off.

Apparently it was a 1.2 million euro purchase of one of his 'creations': a stool, shaped like a camel. And now that the deal was off because he couldn't get online in time, this customer actually demanded our ISP pay up the full 1.2 million euros he had to miss.

Never mind the obvious BS of his 'appointment' being at the *exact* brief moment he couldn't use his internet, this man genuinely expected us to pay up.

We both laughed it off, Sven logged the call, and we went on with our day.

The next day, when I came in, I saw people slowly flocking towards one computer, and heard some hysterical laughter. I walked up to this jolly huddle of giggling coworkers, looked at the screen, and immediately shouted: "NO WAY!!!". It was a picture of the so-called 'camel' shaped stool - and I use the word 'camel' very lightly here. If I hadn't heard about the conversation beforehand, I would not have guessed that it was a camel. It looked like some unholy amalgamation of melted creatures and objects. It had the droopy eyes of a Basset Hound, its nostrils almost started between the eyes, its lips looked like a deflated balloon, the ears were surprisingly on point (have to give the guy that at least), its knees looked like female private parts, its toes curled upwards, and the seating was between the humps, which did not look comfortable in the slightest. Then again, it probably wasn't meant to be functional.

The photo was an attachment to an e-mail in which the customer explained, in detail, the deal he had been about to make but *we* had completely thwarted with that 20-minute outage. He had given his bank details to which we were to wiretransfer the 1.2 million euros. If we did that, he wouldn't press charges.

Sven was working the late shift that day so when he arrived in the afternoon, he was immediately called to that other coworker's desk (he had left a separate window open so that he could immediately show it to Sven). Sven was beside himself with laughter, and I was even driven to tears with laughter at his reaction. The picture, without the original e-mail of course because privacy, was forwarded to everyone on the workfloor with just the notion that it was one of our customers' creation, and that was all that was given. So many people still had it in their inbox when I eventually left the company.

Of course, the customer was compensated the same amount the others had been: roughly €1. The customer had never actually pressed charges or anything, so I guess even he realized his story was even harder to sell than that abominable stool.

(Edited for spelling.)

submitted by /u/KrazeeLadee2
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Can’t do what???

Posted: 03 Feb 2020 09:32 AM PST

Just had a frantic phone call from a repeat offender of technological illiteracy. Pardon the formatting, I'm terrible on the phone.

"Hello, it's TECH."

"I just got off the phone with our testing support and they said I have to turn off the IPad, I can't do that."

"You're pressing the button on the top right? Not the one underneath the screen?"

Too add to the complexity the testing program disables the normal power off prompt the iPad gives.

"Oh let me try that".....presses for 3 seconds....."that didn't work"

"N....nooo, you have to hold it for a lot longer that that."

"But it's a power button, you just press it right?"

"No, like I said, you have to hold it longer that that."

"Hey that worked! Thanks!" hangs up phone

Me looking at the phone "I....just....what?"

TL:DR - lady doesn't realize there's a button and more than 1 way to turn off an iPad.

submitted by /u/imjustatechguy
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Read the error message? pshaw.

Posted: 04 Feb 2020 03:27 AM PST

The backstory: exchange migration 2013 to 2016.

So my guys are migrating people piecemeal from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2016, and because we've had some "email" issues... *glares at load balancer*... we're taking extra care to update people as we move them.

I send off some suggested text for our notification email which ends "if you are shutting down your computer overnight as you are supposed to you will see no issues - but if you hibernate or sleep your computer then you will receive an error message which states 'The system administrator has made a change which means you need to restart Outlook'. If you see this message, please restart Outlook."

I am asked by senior management; "Do we really need to tell people to restart Outlook if the error message tells them to restart Outlook".

My response; "Do you not remember when you were on the helpdesk?"

"Good point..." they reply. The communication is sent unaltered.

First batch of users moved overnight. First calls of the day... yes, you guessed it;

"Hi, I've got an error message telling me to restart Outlook. What should I do?"

...users, eh?

submitted by /u/mkaibear
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