Is a Kraken in the budget? Tech Support |
- Is a Kraken in the budget?
- It has to work! We already sold it and it's being loaded on the truck now.
- Large company has speaker issues. Solved in 5 seconds
- Tales from Field Support VI -
- When UPS Won't Deliver (Automation tale)
| Posted: 02 Jul 2021 06:53 AM PDT Like a few people in this sub I'm not actually tech support but de facto support because I can plug a USB in first time (ok I lie, no one can do that), and because I know enough to get myself into trouble and some fancy google search terms to get myself out of trouble. I don't actually have a budget for IT equipment, but I can pretty much buy what I need (and occasionally want) if I have reasonable justification for it, I just need the owner to sign off on it, and to be fair he rarely says no because he knows I do things on as small a cost as possible. Everyday I need to print just over 100 pages to a printer at the other end of the office (only a handful of meters away) but as the printer has a maximum of 150 pages I need to check it's got paper each time. The young lady who works right next to the printer tells me to just ask her to check the paper level. Asking to check the paper level each day gets boring, so I rename the printer 'Kraken.' Now instead of asking her to check the paper level I can ask her to 'Ready the Kraken' (we're weird and it makes us smile). Owner overhears us one day as I yell 'Ready the Kraken.' The owner has a good sense of humour and sends me an email: "I don't remember signing off on a Kraken. Please can you send me the initial outlay, running costs, and justification for a Kraken. Please also remember to submit the VAT receipt for a Kraken." [link] [comments]  |
| It has to work! We already sold it and it's being loaded on the truck now. Posted: 01 Jul 2021 03:10 PM PDT I'm going to use a fun analogy in place of equipment details as my industry is very specialized. I'm aware that I'm a stereotype and I don't care. I am on a team of technicians who provide technical training and troubleshooting support to my company's dealerships nationwide and internationaly. Through a mix of giving polite greetings to the wrong people and solving riddles nobody else could, I have become the nation's leading expert on a product we will call The Rings of Power. A few years ago I was sitting at my desk minding my own business and doing absolutely nothing unexpected like the good hobbit I am. Then Gandalf decides it's time for an F-ing dwarf rave. Gandalf is the head of another department that does all of the custom design and sales for The Rings of Power. He is very tall, always wears a hat, and is exceptionally competent at what he does. He has a decent understanding of how the Rings of Power work, but doesn't know all of the technical subtleties. However this was the day he decided to trust Saruman. Apparently a customer wanted to mash two receivers into one system and control them from a single control panel which we will call The Lesser Rings and The One Ring which rules them all. I thought for a moment on this and determined that it would technically be possible, but it would be difficult to do as you would have switch a lot of files and transfer power all in a very specific order while waiting an unspecified amount of time between steps. Otherwise there would be chaos everywhere and war would come to Middle Earth. This whole process would have no diagnostics or confirmation that it actually worked until you turn everything back on again. The Rings of Power simply weren't designed to work this way. This maddening process was all so we could make the One Ring switch it's attention from one Lesser Ring to the other while making sure the unmonitored lesser ring didn't just start going crazy and attracting Dragons while it was unsupervised. I said "For the love of the Valar, don't sell that monstrosity." Gandalf gets a funny look and says it's already been sold and is getting loaded onto the truck now. After some internal screaming, I ask him which dealer gets to install the abomination. To make the day even better, it's going to a guy we'll call Gloin. He is about as patient and easy to anger as any dwarf in an elven dungeon. At the very least he is competent with the technical stuff. I spend the rest of the day drawing up the diagrams for power switching relays and instructions for the whole switching process. I document it, make physical copies, and generally try to make this as understandable as possible as I'm the only person outside of Celebrimbor, the original creator of the Rings of Power who can make this work. I sent it all to Gloin so he can finish the installation. This fix is pretty janky and is going to be a pain whenever troubleshooting time comes someday in the future. As you can expect there were issues with the initial start up. They had to move a single wire and then it worked perfectly. (Ha! Made you suspect the worst.) The down side was that I now had to spend a few hours about once a month running the owner through the complicated switching procedure. My department isn't supposed to speak to end users at all but I'm the only person East of the sea and West of the Lonely Mountain who knows how this thing works. This goes on for a few years before Sauron rises again and pitches the world into war. The Lesser rings are no longer responding the One Ring. This didn't make a lot of sense as I had talked to the owner a few days before for another operation lesson. It had still been working flawlessly. Sure enough, the Ring of power wasn't able to bend it's full will on the lesser rings individually any more. So I call up Gimli the son of Gloin to go check things out. Gimli doesn't have the technical expertise of his father, but he is still fairly competent. We end up finding a very important fuse was missing. Not a bad fuse, a missing fuse. It turns out the owner thought it was an extra and borrowed it to fix something else. One fuse replacement later and The One Ring is back to Ruling them all. It's only a matter of time until the One Ring goes into Mt. Doom, blows up and kills us all, but that's not today. [link] [comments]  |
| Large company has speaker issues. Solved in 5 seconds Posted: 02 Jul 2021 02:05 AM PDT Nice short story from me today. Obligatory mobile format notification. I work in a tech repair store which mainly focuses on businesses as our primary clients. I had a client come in a few months ago with their laptop and a 2.1 external speaker system. They were having blue screen issues which stemmed from that Windows update a few months ago. That was an easy fix. They also said they have had these speakers and have never been able to get them to work. I take everything back into the workshop and fix the laptop issue as that was an urgent issue to get the business running again. I then took a look at the speakers and saw that every cable was in the wrong place. I called them up and asked if this was how they had them plugged in, to which they replied yes. I told them that I had fixed all their issues and they could pick up their laptop and speakers. The client arrived and I turned on their computer to show them that was working, before opening up YouTube and going to a random video for the explanation as to why their speakers wouldn't work. I removed the subwoofer cable from the headphone jack in the speakers, plugged it into the headphone jack of the computer and plugged the speakers into the subwoofer. Sound started blasting from the speakers. Whoops I forgot to turn it down before showing them. It took them a second to process what happened but we all had a great laugh when they realised the speakers they have had for years didn't work because someone placed all the cables in the wrong sockets. Also turned out that the 'techy guy's in their store was the one who put it together and couldn't figure out why it didn't work, so gave up on them and threw them into a cupboard. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Jul 2021 05:50 PM PDT Do not repost or reuse on other sites or subs. Edit: This is actually VIII. I forgot I posted more already. Previously on "Field Technician watches multi-billion dollar companies lose thousands trying to save hundreds while shrugging his shoulders and cashing the check" The Wifi is Frozen! : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Wifi nonsense part II : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Tales from Field Support III : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Tales from Field Support IV : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Tales from Field Support V : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Tales from Field Support VI : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) Tales from Field Support VII LEC SUPERCOMP : talesfromtechsupport (reddit.com) And now that you're all caught up- This is the one that almost killed me. Maybe. Possibly. At the very least I considered it rude. So this customer was a clothing store commonly found in American malls. They used a set of sensors above the doors that keep track of how many people enter the store. Employees aren't responsible for getting people in the store, just selling them crap once they are. So, employee metrics are based on how many people actually walk into their location. It's a good system! But those sensors are suspended from the ceiling and need to be powered and networked somehow. Except they cheaped out, and bought sensors that weren't meant to be ceiling mounted. They had normal power cords, and couldn't be powered over their ethernet (networking) cable. Or so you'd think. An ethernet cable has 4 pairs of twisted wires, orange, blue, green, and brown. You only need two pairs to make a 100mb/s connection, three for 1000mb/s, and one for what's called "Power over Ethernet" - which sends DC power down the brown pair, letting you run small network devices that support it. This was not one of those devices. I was sent to troubleshoot these devices, and as there's a first time for everything- I wasn't aware of their "Implementation Standard", which was essentially a macgyvered power over ethernet system. If Jerry rigging electrical connections isn't enough of a pucker factor, imagine not being told anything about it. So I open what seems like a fairly normal biscuit jack, a plastic housing that contains female ethernet plugs with cables on the back. The wiring inside looks- weird. The jacks inside are wired to each other, but not 1-1, but I figure- hey, lets try easy stuff first. So I take out my punch tool, and go to re-punch each jack. It's a little spring loaded tool you press into the recesses in the jack- each recess holds and clips onto one of the wires in the ethernet cable. The spring suddenly releases after you compress it enough and PUNCHES the wiring back into place. With the sharp, metal, tip. You do this when you originally install the jacks at the ends of the cables, but sometimes the wires come loose. Quick repunch is a good 'screw it, see if it works' In a standard POE system this is never a problem. Except- in a standard POE system, only the brown pair is ever live, and is wired to a computerized system that uses very specific voltage and amperage limitations and multiple smart safeguards. In this "System", both wires of the blue pair were positive, and both wires of the brown pair were negative, daisy chained to power one jack. Never before or since have I seen an ethernet cable adapted to an AC wall outlet. So when I punch down the blue pair- I see a quite alarming quantity of sparks. This, I considered highly unusual. Tracing out the system, I start swearing as I see how it's wired. Dial up my remote support who knows all this. "________, level 1, this is ___ speaking, how may I help you?" "Yeah, this is Armwulf on ticket ________ for _____" "Logging out?" "Nope, I need level 2." (Level 1 does the paperwork, level 2 provides advanced support. They have the documentation on what is where and why. If such documentation exists, at least.) "What for?" "Answers." I get forwarded, wait a few minutes- "This is ______." (There were only about a dozen level 2's for the whole company. All of us subcontractors knew them on a first name basis. I'd still pick their voices out of a crowd these years later.) "Yeah, this is Armwulf on ticket ______ for _______" "Troubleshooting the entry sensors? What's going on? Should just be a cable test, some patch cord swaps." "Why the hell is the blue pair LIVE?" "Oh yeah, this is a wild one." "I would have appreciated a heads up." "Did it bite you?" (Electrocute) "Damn near, but I'm fine. Didn't feel comfortable proceeding without some info. You're telling me this is NORMAL?" "We told them it was a bad idea. But they have a contract with the manufacturer, so this is the implementation. There's an AC adapter in the wall outlet with two bare contact posts. Blue pair is on one, brown is on the other." "And at the other end, let me guess, the blue and brown pair are spliced onto a the end of a cut power cable with electrical tape." "Bingo." "God that's stupid. If I plugged my fluke into that I'm sure it'd fry." (Popular brand of cable testers. $600 model in this case, they can detect POE- but, that aint POE) "We've actually had that happen." "You guys need a disclaimer or a warning on these tickets, it'll save us billing you for damaged equipment or technicians." "I'll make another note of it." after that, we worked together to find the problem. Turns out something about their terrible wiring had shorted and the surge protector damaged itself when it popped. Because they can't even buy nice power strips. I used a multimeter to confirm there wasn't still a short between brown and blue, good to go- checked the output on the AC adapter in a new/spare power strip, matched it's regulation on the label. Wired everything back up and confirmed function. Charged extra for making me do electrical work. I'm a telecom tech not a sparky! Just because I can doesn't mean I'm willing or insured to! In the future, the tickets included a link to a PDF file explaining the implementation. Each jack was also color coded to explain how it was wired up. Safety procedures and disconnect lists too. Was pretty nice. I still don't understand why they didn't just wire the sensors to the security posts that scan for the security tags on clothes. Why do they have to be on the ceiling? [link] [comments]  |
| When UPS Won't Deliver (Automation tale) Posted: 01 Jul 2021 12:15 PM PDT I work in automation in a machine shop, which means my users are mostly salty old blue collar dudes that hate computers. This story is not really about their mistakes, but mine. I had one machine that has internal PC based controls on it(runs off 24 volts), and every once in a while, the windows install would be corrupted. I have good backups, so this is not a huge issues, but I come in an hour or 2 after production does, and higher ups get really upset with machine down time(I'm also the only one that actually knows how to restore it). I decide the solution is to install a UPS into the system. I talk to my guy from the controls company who is super competent and he gives me an option for a battery based or capacitance based solution. I know that the battery based solution will be forgotten until the battery explodes in the cabinet and does a tremendous amount of damage so I opt for the capacitor based solution. This means it really only has enough juice to make sure the machine is shut down gracefully if there's a power outage, or someone impatient shut the main breaker off too soon. I plunk down 800 or so of the company's hard earned money and in a few weeks I have a nice new shiny in my grubby little hands. This is where everything starts to go poorly…I finally get 2 hours to install it(gotta get that product produced) and I pop it onto the DIN rail and boot the machine up. The ups lights up and says charging…1%, 20 minutes later it says 5%, 2 hours later it says 35% and I pull it back out and put the machine back to production. I call up my guy and we decide I should ship it to him for testing. A week later I get an email with a video of it booting up perfectly after taking a whole 15 seconds to charge. He can't find a single fault with it and sends it back. I stare at it reproachfully on my desk for a few months hoping that maybe a stern talking to will solve all my problems, and finally there's a few days break in the production schedule and I now have sufficient time to work on it. I re-install the known good and working UPS give it a lecture on behavior and exactly what dumpster it will end up in should this malarky continue. This fixes nothing…It blinks at me balefully charging 1 meager percent every 10 minutes or so. I am this close to ripping my hair out in frustration, I try every stupid thing in the world I can think of spending almost a full day messing with this thing. Then I put my ear right up to it and hear a tiny click like a relay every time the display blinks at me. I grabbed a multimeter and figured it out…See this pc is inside the operator control, and the 24v power supply is almost 100 feet of 18 gauge wire away. Big capacitors grab big amps when they charge and the ups was pulling the 24v down to 21v, tripping it's internal low voltage alarm. The UPS was caught in a stupid loop going "Oh hey there's 24v let me charge" to "OH NO! low voltage better not charge anymore" The final solution was just to put a 10 amp 24v power supply in the operator panel, and as there was ample space and a 120v line already in there it took me longer to grab some tools than to install the stupid @#$@#$@# power supply. After that it booted after about 15 seconds of charging, I configured it, tested it, and haven't had to bother with it again. TLDR: If you can't deliver to UPS what it wants UPS can't deliver to you. [link] [comments]  |
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