Localised Public Address fault Tech Support |
| Localised Public Address fault Posted: 02 May 2021 04:24 PM PDT Travel with me back through the mists of time to a younger, gentler age... ...Oops, too far... Set year to 1995. Mobile phones were around but resembled house bricks and were decidedly not smart. Working in Building Maintenance was a Younger, Healthier, Handsomer me. The Facilities helpdesk assistant passes on a call, the Building manager is asking why no one has fixed the Public Address system (Henceforth PA) fault yet. We look around, confused, "What PA system fault?". "He says there's an intermittant beep..." Well, maybe it's just his floor, not the entire building, so off I trot to find the boss of bosses, our ultimate client. Arriving at his floor and heading to his office I listen intently for any intermittent beep... Either it's really widely spaced or the problems solved itself. Arriving at the Bosses domain, I knock and when approved enter. The Boss is irritated, "will no one rid me of this incessant noise!" My protestations of ignorance are heeded, the boss magnaminously explains that he can hear a noise everywhere he goes within the building. Once more I listen and indeed, now even I can perceive an infrequent faint chirping noise. I turn my head on the side, one ear pointed to the heavens, the other to the floor. Another Chirp, from there! I point excitedly at his desk drawer. Together we inspect the contents, a calculator, some pens, a ruler, nothing of note. The calculator Chirps. Revelation! 'Tis not a calculator but instead a personal organiser, clinging desperately to life as it's battery fails, calling for help in the only way it knows how. Medical attention was rendered, slightly delayed by the need to visit the nearest shop to aquire suitable batteries. Exit hero, stage left. Tl;dr: foolish knave, I'll not pander to your whim! If thou desirest to know the secrets hidden within this treatise thy shall have to suffer the reading of it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 May 2021 05:40 PM PDT So for some very short backstory, I work as a data centre technician for a fairly large ISP. So a few months ago I was sent out to the data centre as one of our older mail relay servers went down. By this point the server had already been rebooted by remote hands, who verified that they could see a Cent OS login screen, so the server itself was up, leading us to believe it was a network fault. I arrive in the DC and head up to the cabinet and the first thing I check is the NICs at the back of the server; link lights were solid, and the activity lights were blinking away happily, so I got to work. Some of you might already see where this is going. I grabbed a caddy, logged in, and started running some tests. First tried a ping test: Not a great sign, so next was a traceroute, but the connection died on the very first hop, which made me think it might be the switch it was connecting to. Now, we hadn't had any other complaints about anything else being down, so I knew the switch was likely not dead, but it needed to be checked. I started a continuous ping before jumping on the phone with one of our network guys who tried finding the switch (using our aggregation switches) on his end to no avail, (truthfully, one of our best networking wizards, one that likely would've found the switch simply because of how well she knows our environment, wasn't available) so a fair amount of time was spent trying to find said switch, before he eventually gave up and told me that I needed to trace the cabling to locate the switch, made worse by the fact that whoever had installed the equipment (long before my time) had decided to label nothing. If any of you have ever worked in a data centre, you know how much of a headache this can be, especially when you have multiple switches across three rows of cabinets, twenty two cabinets per row. Fun. So I dutifully grab a ladder, but before I proceed to trace this cable to the ends of the earth, an idea hits me, one that probably should've smacked me in the face when I first walked in. I walked back over to the server, disconnected both Ethernet cables, and reconnected them and went to check the monitor. I proceeded to facepalm hard enough to leave a nice red mark before packing up and heading home. Turns out the reboot that our remote hands did fixed what was actually wrong. But when they connected a display to check for login prompt they'd bumped the Ethernet cable just enough that we had link and activity lights, but without a functional network connection. To add, we did improve our network diagrams and DC layout a lot in the following weeks to make sure we could find any of our switches with relative ease going forward. Moral of the story: Never ever skip the basics. No matter how much the blinking lights try to convince you to. [link] [comments]  |
| The Printing Issue That Wasn't Posted: 02 May 2021 09:12 PM PDT I am an on-site tech for the stores of a retail chain. This day I was working at a store where the employee computers had recently been "upgraded" (can confirm they got newer computers, can not confirm they got better computers). As soon as I walked in, an employee came up to me saying quote "My computer hasn't been able to print since the upgrade." I performed the upgrades for many stores, including this one, and can say some of the new computers were slower than others, but "I can't print" was not an issue I had seen. In my head I figured it was a printer mapping issue, computer image issue, or user error. Considering I can only help with the last one, that's what I was hoping for. The first two options require waiting on hold for an extended amount of time and maybe your issue gets fixed by the end of shift, or maybe next week. I asked her to show me the issue and we walked back to her computer. She proceeds to show me a report in a company program, hits "Print Screen", opens a new email, and attempts to "Ctrl+V" the screenshot into the email, but nothing appears. She tells me this is how she used to add screenshots to email and I honestly don't know if there is a better way to do so using the company program on the company workstation. What I do know is this is not a printer problem and for that I am thankful. Having watched her process carefully, I asked to try and proceeded to do the same as her only I hit an extra key along with "Print Screen" and voila, screenshot embedded in email. As you probably guessed, when we upgraded the computers we also upgraded the keyboards. The new keyboards have the "Fn" key and I later confirmed the old ones did not. I did not grow up with a keyboard that had an "Fn" key and remember the first time I saw it thinking "when did they add that?" Turns out it existed before I was born, I just never saw it as a kid, and I was still surprised she hadn't seen it by now. I try my best to assist the day's lucky 10000 politely when I get the chance, and she was happy to learn she could add her report like she used to, just with one extra key press. [link] [comments]  |
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