Customers that just won't quit... Tech Support |
- Customers that just won't quit...
- These Chargers Are Universal Right?
- I have never been able to get into this
- Remotely upgrading OpenWrt is easy, right?
| Customers that just won't quit... Posted: 27 Jun 2020 02:57 PM PDT Cross-posting this on r/idontworkherelady This happened after the POS company I was Service Manager at went belly up and I was between jobs. So, the Company had been around since the '50s and its clientele was a mix of companies that had been around forever and being run by old codgers who "Knew the Founder" and new businesses who needed it up and running "NOW" and usually were back out of business before the second payment was due. This particular client was one of the former. We'll call her Mrs K. She was a 40's something Asian woman running a market in an upscale part of the area. She had bought her digital POS system back in the '70s and had seen no need at all to upgrade. Seeing as it was now 1989 this meant that we "meaning "I") were the only company who could or would service them. And yes she was very much a Karen in the wild. I had worked for the company for seven years until that one fine day I was asked to hand in my pager. The company had gone under and I was out of a job. I was also warned that I should not try to find another job in this particular field as they were listing the customer list as part of the companies assets and if I took that knowledge to a potential buyer it could open me to litigation. Probably BS, but fine. I was done with customer support. Customers really are the worst. I was looking to shift to a new field (eventually finding a gig in Telecom, but that's not relevant to the story). I'm sitting in my apartment looking through the want ads and then my phone rings. I answer hoping its an interview offer, but no. Its Mrs K. Her registers were down and she wanted me to come fix them. Right. I was and still am speechless. She found out the company was no longer, and somehow in the pre internet days found my HOME phone number! It wasn't even listed in the name I used at the company. Best guess is she called everyone with my relatively common surname in the phone book for the city the company was in. So after some unpleasantries I decided this had to be the end of it. But I knew she'd never stop calling me unless I put a nail in it. I agreed to come down to her store. It was and still is a nice drive and a day on the shore of the bay would be nice anyway. I told her though, if it was programming I could fix it, but anything that required parts and they were dead and going to stay that way. And I would need cash payment at the companies old after hours rate. I got there and it was a mix of issues on her three machines. I got one machine frankensteined together using parts from the other two, but I told her that was the end and I could no longer support her machines.. well, machine. Asked for my companies bill rate in cash and to her credit she did hand me $250 in cash. Nice. Much better than what I had been making an hour. She did try to get me a couple more times but I always politely refused. A few months later I moved and got a new phone number and that was the end. I don't think she ever replace that poor machine. The store is now owned by a high end chain market so I'm hoping Mrs K is enjoying her retirement and won't come back to pester me again. [link] [comments]  |
| These Chargers Are Universal Right? Posted: 27 Jun 2020 08:53 AM PDT I'm the Apple Systems Administrator for a decent sized school district with a huge Apple deployment (hence why they need a dedicated admin). This also means if any of our VIPs have problems with ANYTHING Apple related I get a phone call, Help Desk be hanged. CIO walks into my office and says we had to head to the Superintendents office because his MacBook just crashed during a Zoom meeting and "Apparently he's livid". He and I rush off to the meeting the Superintendent is in and find the 2016 MacBook Pro is totally dead. Then I see how it's being charged. He has a 10w iPad charger, with a USB A to Type C cable connecting the power brick to the MacBook. He is refusing to look at me as I hold up the charger, unplug the laptop and say "this doesn't charge it. The battery ran out". Since he still refused to acknowledge I was there, I go get a spare MacBook charger and bring it back to his assistant. She explains he keeps losing his laptop charger and just had the other one handy. I explain to her the difference between the iPad charger and the MacBook charger and asked her to encourage him to call us if he loses his charger because I intentionally keep spares. TLDR: VIP says MacBook crashed so I am summoned. Turns out VIP was charging MacBook with an iPad charger. [link] [comments]  |
| I have never been able to get into this Posted: 27 Jun 2020 08:50 AM PDT The business I work at isn't -in my opinion- big enough for a ticketing system. We have 3 guys supporting about 100 users and we do all the network stuff for corporate and the branch in England and the one in China (England has about 50 people total and their own IT guy, China about 20 people total and their own IT guy). So we work solely off phone calls and email, and since recently, Teams. We communicate between each other in our office about issues and we divide our work load between us 3. Anyway, yesterday I received a phone call from a user who couldn't get into Teams and was late for a meeting. I sent him our record of his credentials and he calls me back saying it didn't like it. So I reset his password and made my way over there to enter it for him. The password took, all was well, and the user was happy. So the lady in the cubicle next to me walks up very irate and goes: Lady: "I need help also. I have never been able to get into this. I need into the same meeting." She then walked away. So I say to her quickly receding back: Me: "Ill be right back, I'll have to go fetch your credentials." Didn't get a reply. Expecting a similar issue, I walked back to my office, performed a password reset on her account, and walked back with her credentials printed on a piece of paper, so I could hand it to her for her future reference in case stuff decided to log itself out again. — So our situation is a little weird, which arguably makes it a bit confusing for some people; we have Office 365, but we are still hosting our own Exchange server, so the log in for all of Office (including Teams) uses a different, separate email address for each user than what all our users email addresses are they use for work, if that makes sense. That means, in our case, that meetings can't be set up or joined from Teams, they have to be set up and joined from Outlook, because otherwise the meetings don't show up in the correct box. We've explained this to all our users ad nauseam in several emails, over the phone, and face to face, and continue to do so because it doesn't stick. — I get back to her cubicle, and she's gone. Other than her cryptic "I've never been able to get into this either." I don't have anything to go on. So I double click on her Teams icon and Teams comes up, it's logged in, I sent myself a chat message to test and it went through fine. Not knowing or seeing any issue, and her being gone, I just left. I was in the middle of something when my earlier user called and only because he was already late did I get up right away. By the time I get back to my office, I see an email from Lady that says "I still have problems getting into Teams." Completely confused I decide to walk back, and it takes about 2 minutes to get there. Me: "Okay Lady, show me what you're trying to do because I was just here and Teams works fine." Lady: "Well, first of all, what's taking you so long, my meeting is over now, so thank you very much, and why didn't you fix this problem when you were just here?!" Me: "....I'm sorry? I was here and you were gone, and I didn't know what your problem was other than you said Teams didn't work. I verified that Teams was in fact working, so I left. I have a bit of a busy morning." She's bristling at this point Lady: "Well, go to my calendar in Outlook and you'll see." So I maximize her Outlook screen and her list of inboxes and calendars is such a cluster I can't find shit, so very annoyed, she almost pokes her finger through her screen to point where her calendar is. She's got multiple repeating meetings every week so I just click on one so I can find the link for Teams that's embedded in it and click on it. Lady: "That's not gonna work, that meeting isn't even started yet. That's not till next week. The one from today is over so that doesn't work anymore." Me: "You can join next week's meeting now if you want to. It'll be lonely, but the link works. So I'm trying to see what's wrong here." Turns out her Office 365 was logged out and her Teams was logged in. They use the same credentials but obviously if one of them is logged out, the other one isn't gonna work. So I log her 365 in for her and try again, and surprise surprise, it works. Lady: "That's ridiculous. That should have been fixed a long time ago." Me: "I agree, this wasn't necessary. It only took a minute to fix." Lady: "Exactly! I've been dealing with this for months!" Me: "Well, next time something is wrong, if you'd just send us an email or call us, we can help you straight away so you won't have to wait until it's too late. We can't fix issues were unaware of. You have a good one now!" Users will forever be the bane of my existence. Fucks sake. [link] [comments]  |
| Remotely upgrading OpenWrt is easy, right? Posted: 27 Jun 2020 01:22 PM PDT Note: Long time lurker, first time poster. Apologies if it's a bit on the technical side; I originally wrote this for my website, but I think you people might enjoy this, too. Some time ago, I was tasked with upgrading a few dozen Routerboards without physical access. You'd think, "well, that sounds like a routine job"—but ooh boy, you're in for a ride! Here's the thing: When the LEDE project split off from OpenWrt, they, among other things, changed the file system used for flash based systems from yaffs2 to UBIFS. yaffs2 isn't mainline, so I fully understand why it was switched out. But LEDE didn't just switch over the default filesystem, they also completely removed yaffs2 support simultaneously. So OpenWrt 15 speaks yaffs2 but no UBIFS, and later versions speak UBIFS but no yaffs2. So how do you upgrade such a system? Well, the manual just tells you plug in a serial cable and reinstall locally from scratch. Not so easy when you have dozens of devices, scattered all around the state. Now seems like a good moment to talk more about the Routerboard 450g: It's a small embedded Linux system based on the MIPS-powered ar71xx chipset, with a custom proprietary bootloader and a single SLC flash chip. This flash chip has a few partitions, most notably a 3.4MB "kernel" partition and a larger one for the "rootfs". The bootloader looks at this kernel partition, and expects an ELF file to boot from there. Guess what filesystem the bootloader expects? Correct, yaffs2. To this day I haven't figured out how OpenWrt's sysupgrade(8) tool manages to install its kernel onto this partition without support for the underlying filesystem, but at this point I honestly didn't really care any more. There are some extra challenges, like OpenWrt 15's sysupgrade tool not supporting NAND flash, and the wget2nand utility keeping the existing filesystem intact (meaning I can install OpenWrt 19, but the new kernel can't read the (yaffs2) userland, and won't boot). We also didn't want to deploy a custom kernel with yaffs2 support patched back in, since that'd just complicate further upgrades, so we'd have to deal with the whole thing again in a year or two. At this point, after chasing a bunch of dead ends, I recapped what I found out:
Oh, and did I mention that there's no DHCP on the target network, so you better not fuck up the network config? Getting desperate, I for a short while contemplated just grabbing a kernel image with an initramfs from openwrt.org and just using that flashed to the "kernel" partition without ever touching "rootfs". But that won't work, because with this image will forget any changes you make to it on reboot. Not just the configuration of the software we need on the device, but even basic things, like the static IP its supposed to have. But with this idea in my mind, some gears started turning. Maybe it clicked already for some of you. So here's what we ended up doing:
well, i tried my best to get this to display properly. :/ Success, finally! This solution actually worked flawlessly for all but one device: As luck would have it, this device was manufactured with a MLC flash chip, which UBIFS can't handle and refuses to use. There's an interesting thread in the OpenWrt mailing list about that, where the vendor admitted to have swapped out chips for a "short time in 2010". Lucky for us (for real this time), this is the one device that is in the basement of our office and not one of those out in the field. So we just binned it. [link] [comments]  |
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