First IT Job - They never wanted to spend money on anything... Tech Support |
- First IT Job - They never wanted to spend money on anything...
- The longest tech support call I ever took - by a large margin
- Dont use me to lie for you.
- The screams from the server closet~
- is DHCP your friend?
- "Is that burning smell normal?"
- User needs “a new email address”
| First IT Job - They never wanted to spend money on anything... Posted: 28 Jun 2021 08:50 PM PDT So, my first non-internship IT role was the sole actual IT person for a small community clinic. The layout was like this: Main building had a 10Mbps/5Mbps connection. Office building had a dedicated fiber run from it to the main clinic building. Small satellite clinic had a dedicated T1 to the main clinic. One domain controller on the entire system. One. It was a pizza box system, because VMware was new and expensive (not really that expensive, but that's what they kept telling me). Server 2003 R2 (2008 was a new thing at the time). This was right about the time Windows Server 2000 SP4 went EOL. The issue? Slow login times at the satellite clinic. Five people worked in that clinic, and every morning, at logon, it would take the users anywhere from 15 -30 minutes to successfully log on to their systems. Continually received help desk tickets on the issue. Every time I went to test with the user who submitted the ticket, login time was long, but not 15 minutes, more like 5. Finally, I got fed up with it, and I put an old desktop computer in between the router and the switch at the remote clinic, running wireshark. Surely there was something amiss here.... Next morning, come in and check the logs. Well, that's weird... Why is SMB pushing a ton of traffic when they logon? Check the domain controller - Well that'd do it. Roaming profiles. Every morning, those users would login at the same time, and try to push MASSIVE amounts of user documents across that 1.5Mbps T1. Every morning, those users would call help desk "It's taking forever to log in." And every morning, I would work with a user, and the login time would be far less, because the system wasn't powered off, and therefore the profile would stay cached. Alright, go to my boss, who's the Director of Finance: Me: Hey, Boss, I figured out why they take forever to log in every morning. Boss: Yeah? What's that? M: They're using Roaming Profiles B: What's that? M: *sigh* *proceeds to explain roaming profiles in as close to an orange crayon method as I can* B: Ok, so what's the fix? M: We either disable roaming profiles, or they need a local domain controller. We should have two anyway just in case something goes awry with one or the other. B: We don't have money for that, and we can't disable their profiles being backed up to the server. What else you got. M: A lot of unhappy users, that's what we've got. I'll explain what's wrong to them, and then you can explain why we can't fix it. B: Can't you just do it? You're the IT guy. M: Sure, but I'm going to tell them who told me we couldn't fix it. Next step: Go to her boss, the clinic director. That conversation goes as well as the previous one. Same response: No money, and we can't change settings. Ok, so back to the drawing board.... Go to our Boneyard (a room in the basement of the Office building where we store old, washed up PC's before they get recycled.) Find an old PC with a half-way usable processor. It's an AMD Athlon XP 3200. Bioware motherboard with four memory slots. Manage to dig up 4 2GB DDR DIMM's (yes, they were old then. Ancient now.) Dig around and find four 250GB 5200RPM 3.5" hard drives. Motherboard has SATA on it, and a built in RAID controller (life saver). Set up the four drives in RAID 5. Continue digging, trying to find a Server 2003 license. Unable to locate. Find Server 2000 SP4. Screw it. Install that. Promote to DC, replicate remote user's profiles to it, change their targets. Take the server to the remote site, install it. Call from that site the next day: User: Oh, wow! You fixed it! It took almost no time to log in today! Thank you so much! M: You're welcome. Let us know if you have any more issues with it, ok? U: Will do! Call boss: M: I fixed the satellite office. B: How? M: Using old equipment that should've been recycled years ago. It's a band-aid fix. We need to have a new server in the budget, period. B: I'll forward your request on to Big Boss Budget time rolls around: No server. Justification? "It's working now, so why do we need it?" Left that place within a month after that. TH;DR: Small community clinic had massive login problems, and refused to allocate ANY legitimate resources to fix. It might still be running this way, I am not sure.... [link] [comments]  |
| The longest tech support call I ever took - by a large margin Posted: 28 Jun 2021 10:58 PM PDT This happened many many many years ago. I did level 1 tech support for Earthlink for dialup customers for about a year. For the most part, most calls ended up with us setting up a new local area connection, or transferring them to billing because their account was suspended due to payment issues. There were usually around 200+ tech support people employed with high turnover, and I was usually in the Top 5 as far as metrics that they used to track us, mainly average call time. Here is the longest call. An 85 year old man called in trying to get the internet working so he could email his kids/grandkids. After verifying his account was still active, I proceeded to setup a new local area connection for him. On average this would usually take 6-7 minutes, but could be done in 3-4 if the caller was more tech savvy. The problems started from the very beginning. He had very poor vision, and he didn't know how to use the mouse. Every step I had to repeat to him slowly 10 times. At one point I told him to right-click on an icon, and he thought I was asking him to click with his right hand. After about an hour my supervisor started listening in, which they did on occasion to audit us. Around hour mark 2 he walked by and patted me on the shoulder and apologized and laughed at the same time. Shortly after we finally got the connection setup. Usually this is where I could stop the call and tell him to hang up and then try to connect, but this guy was one of the 10% of people who actually had a second phone line installed in their house. If they had questions after getting connected we were supposed to answer them. We got connected and of course I had to tell him where his web browser was and where he could send his emails. In the end it was a 2 1/2 hour call compared to my average of around 6 minutes. Luckily it finished about 15 minutes before they closed for the night or that guy would have had to call someone else in the morning. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jun 2021 11:33 AM PDT Got a call this morning regarding outlook. The first phonecall was basic and easy fix. Nothing major or exciting. User states her email shows the paperclip of an attachment but when she clicked the email, no attachemnt. I get connected and see the Delta indicating her email is sorted into conversations. I expand it and show her it was an email in the conversation chain that had the attachment. She asked me to undo show as conversations. An hour later. Buddy on teams asked me to take a call as this lady's manager was mad at me for undoing her show as conversations.
It is at this moment I realized he was not talking to me, but talking down to $User loudly so I could hear it.
Teams message comes in from him. "Just agree to it." Well my sound was muted so no ding came over the phone. I didnt actually click on the message so the eyeball did not appear on his side in teams.
Teams popup "Is this the same $Me I have on the phone?"
I waited an hour before replying on teams on my phone. "Apologies. I guess Teams crashed in citrix before you called. I did not see these popups until I checked my cell phone just now." He didnt reply. [link] [comments]  |
| The screams from the server closet~ Posted: 29 Jun 2021 12:46 AM PDT Today, TFTS, I have a story of horror, of haunting wails from within the depths of a gas station! I recently was hired to work in the Petrol industry doing tech support for a payment processing hardware manufacturer. I'm fresh out of training, but I have a lot of general IT/Tech/Netsec background, so I hit the ground running once I got all of the proprietary learning done. Our stuff sits between the site's internet router and their payment processing network. We do everything from managing some aspects of the fuel pumps, the payments done at said pumps, inside point of sale machines, and the command servers that make them function. Call comes on the line and I can immediately hear a shrill and shrieking noise. A woman is in the background telling customers that she can't process any orders that aren't cash because her computers are down. I introduce myself and we go through the steps where I pull up her site, verify some info, and then I ask what's going on. I already know what's going on, but I want her to say it because the callers often give much needed context without knowing it when they explain why they're calling. She says they had a power outage and everything was offline, but power is back on and when it came back on a shrill scream began to echo out of the back office's equipment closet. She is VERY concerned about the noise, and makes a joke about ghosts. I've long since determined the issue, but I don't know how to describe what an Uninterruptible Power Supply looks like to a cashier when almost all of our equipment is "boxy with lights on it." I eventually manage to get her to the UPS and she says "Oh there's a button." and presses it before I can ask what she's seeing. The UPS reboots and the batteries begin to charge. The site comes online. The otherworldly screams stop. All is peace. I verify she can run a debit card transaction and that all of the pumps are talking to the site's server. All good. I let her go, having exorcised the haunting of the petrol station. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Jun 2021 04:20 PM PDT Guys, you liked the the last so here is another from the same place. Large bank data center/server admin bla bla bla. I some in after the weekend and have an alert on system that the DHCP server has an issue. I go to the server and its nothing big. Server logs full server hung. I restart the server. All is good. 30 min later reports start coming in of DHCP conflicts all over the site. Affecting all the users and not the servers. Ok, servers are static. But why the users. Check the DHCP server and it running with no issues. Entire work the issue all shift. It doesn't make any seance. About one hour before the shift change the sole weekend tech come in and says whats going on? I say we have had DHCP issues all day and he responds with "odd, it wasn't working this weekend so I made a new one." I responded with "did you check the DHCP server?" and he said naw i just made a new one. I said "Show Me!" He took me to one of the comm closets where he took a workstation and installed the DHCP service on it and plugged it in. Now. Keep in mind. nobody works the weekend, hes there to just watch the place. Servers are static so it only affected him. Back to the story: I said unplug that now and asked why didnt you just check the DHCP server. He responded with "I just got back from class and wanted to try out what I learned" Needless to say, hundreds of data entry personal did nothing for 24 hours. Moral of the story: Great you went to school but exercise what you learn in a lab not in production. [link] [comments]  |
| "Is that burning smell normal?" Posted: 28 Jun 2021 04:00 PM PDT This happened back when desktop monitors were CRTs and LCDs were limited to laptops <=13" because the corners were already exceeding the maximum viewing angle. A coworker and I were doing a lot of PC installs that quarter and this was maybe the dozenth site we had done. Most of it was just physically removing the W98 era PCs, setting each user up with all new everything, install printers, and make sure they could login. Simple stuff, on-site for less than an hour. We're at a smaller site, I think it had a whole 4 users that were getting new PCs that day, 2 in one room and 2 more in an adjacent. The first 2 were finished and users were back to work. We're in the next room working on the second pair when one of the user from the first room calls out to us. Like most of the users at these sites, she's an older women who was likely a few years from retirement, also courteous and grateful for the new equipment. {USER}: "Is that burning smell normal?" she asked in a completely calm and innocent tone, as if was something like the desktop being a slightly different shade of blue. Both of us in unison: "No! No, burring smell is not normal!" We can't see her or the computer, but we can smell it too. One of us goes for the fire extinguisher and the other jumps back to the other room to see what we're dealing with. The new-out-of-box Compaq monitor was faintly smoking from an internal high voltage arc. Unplugging the thing was all it took to stop the incident. Since we we had other sites to do that day, we had another monitor to swap with back in the truck. Supervisor-AssHat wasn't too happy since instead of hitting the other sites, we came back to the main office early to get another monitor and leave the toasted one with him, and he had to update the asset tracking changes for both, then also had an RMA to deal with. For the rest of that PO batch, we started taking an extras, which was a good idea as we ended up with a few more DOAs in the following weeks. That final era of Compaqs before the HP buyout were garbage. TL;DR Completely clam and near retirement age user asks "Is that burning smell normal?" as-if it might actually be normal for their brand new Compaq CRT to be arcing and emitting smoke. [link] [comments]  |
| User needs “a new email address” Posted: 28 Jun 2021 06:13 AM PDT Short one: Had a comment on our Outlook page saying "I couldn't find out how to get a new email address" Ended up reaching out to the user and their reply was I need newgeneric.shared@company email address, but also need a personal one. As the form is a bit fiddly for exact email requests (got a ton of shared mailboxes that are office.office team rather than office.team) I ended up submitting it for them to approve. Then got on to the second part of the user needing a personal one (bearing in mind I was contacting them on name@company) After some questions user just said they need to keep the one they have. Realised they took the "you only can have 1 email address" a bit too literally. User called me a saviour for getting them sorted and we add 1 more shared mailbox to the list we need to license. Tldr: user thinks requesting a bee shared mailbox will delete their personal account. [link] [comments]  |
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