f13.net

The IS department I work in is very small, less than a dozen people for 500 users. So, we all talk alot obviously. The helpdesk guy comes into the office of a coworker which I happened to be in. He is laughing so hard tears are running down his cheeks and he can barely talk. Here is the conversation he'd just had:

Female User: "My printer's not working."
Him: *logs on remotely* "I don't see one installed. I'll need to reinstall the drivers. What kind of a printer is it?"
User: "Ummm.." *pause* "It's a Daystar *rattles off a string of numbers.*"
Him: *confused because we typically use HP or Dell printers and he has never heard of a Daystar printer* "Daystar where did you get it?"
User: "Circuit City"
Him: "Hmmm..."
User: *awkward pause* "Ummm...my printers an HP, the Daystar is my mini-refrigerator. Sorry."

Sure, sure, users are idiots, but tech support guys can be just as bad.  Here's something that happened to my wife recently.

Her: My remote login isn't working with the user ID and password we set up.
Him: Hmmm don't know - maybe the system is down.  Can you call another user and see if they can log in?

If I told any of mine, your heads might explode.

Oh, Do Tell.

I've had the "this program isn't printing", "have you turned on the printer?", "oops" before.

I didn't mean in a good way.  I am currently trying to figure out which one of 11367 tracefiles from circa March 4 is the one I need in order to reconstruct the control files in a database I just restored onto a system it did not originally reside on.  My lack of Oracle knowledge is possibly hampering me, but the real irritant is how someone decided it would be a good idea to compress the files first, then delete them.  This means that about half of the trace files end in .Z and are otherwise the same fucking file as some other trace in the huge, unsortable stack.  My question in the email was more-or-less why are you compressing files that you delete the next day after the incremental backup runs?  Durka?

It's going to be even more funny when someone here posts a "why don't you do X" comment.  However, I do welcome any suggestions, no matter how asinine.

Other ones include a question I got twice this week, paraphrasing "what's that 's' for in the permission string". and my favorite one this week: "You should add a colon to the end of the line in /etc/exports".  Dumbasses.

EDIT: speeling

If it was Oracle 5 I would've been able to help you in my youth.

I could do all your jobs if I had enough matches.

Ok, Now you lost me.

I've successfully avoided being first tier tech support for most things, so far.  Good thing about being in the dev side of the house I guess.  What I have had problems with though (at the last job - my current gig has kickass tier 1 support), was the first tier tech guys who would kick tickets up to me.  I honestly think that they filtered out information provided to them.  I would get a phone call at 2am (we were 24/7), and the guy would try to relay to me the person's problem.  Sometimes, the information would be as little as "they can't log in".  Now, the software that the end users were working on was their job, and they go through a reasonably detailed training process.  There were still stupidiots, but not of the "I broke the computer's coaster" variety.  They were, in most cases, more intelligent than our own tech support.

On another occation, I was in a conference room with a vendor who provided one of our key server software packages.  They were running through a live demo (Edit to clarify: new features, new version, existing product), on our system.  Half way through the presentation the server quit responding, and then the remote desktop poofed out.  Odd.  I went back to the computer room to investigate, only to find our techs had decided it was a fine time to pull network cable.  Out of my server.  My production server.  I literally locked the rack shut and kept both keys, to which it remaind that way for months.  

I coined a phrase while there that I frequently pointed out to my boss; The Wife Test.  Now, my wife isn't a techie but is computer literate.  She can install software and fuddle around with simple macros.  Works with both Access (but not T-SQL) and mainframe apps, but is fuzzy on the point of defrag.  If I was asked something stuid by our techs, or they looked at me with blank stares when I explained to them what they needed to do, I would repeat the problem/instructions to my wife and see if she could come up with a probable solution or repeat the instructions back clearly.  If she got it, and they didn't, I would take that as a sign that they were retards unfit for guest access, and send a (written) request to my boss that the lot of them be fired.  She passed the test far more often than they did, and many letters were sent.

They still work there, but I now have a job with a great tech support staff and a boss who doesn't think a turnip garden is suitable for tech support.  Much less stress, and no more 2am calls.

I ended up just restoring every file from March 4 (lots), grep sapdata200, got one hit (yay) and proceeded to execute the raw trace inside sqlplus.  Durka, indeed.  I was saved another restore of the DB (about a terabyte) mostly due to the fact that I had changed the DB SID during the restore and the SQL commands failed horribly.  A little viming and viola, recovered database.  Now for pie.

EDIT: Actually the backup log says the DB is 4436666.231 MB, so yeah.

For those of you who know where I work, you know damn well I could slaughter any tech horror story you all could come up with. Fielding 50+ calls a day from people who shouldn't be allowed on the internet and working with just as many that shouldn't be allowed near a computer, well, yea, it can yield some goddamn issues. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Briefly worked in a small firm, about 10 people and only 2 tech guys that mostly spend their time on development. All testing was don by user complaints...

Internal release of new version, web based database application everything done through browser

Me: New feature A gives incorrect results if B and C is also true
Programmer: It worked for me when I tested it
Me: Well try it yourself, its repeatable
Programmer:  You are not doing something right, it worked for me when I tested it

I used to work with that guy.  He would work from home, at night, after taking a bong hit.  He would check code in at 4 am.  Generally, that was the first sign that we would need to undo whatever he just did.

He thought we were deliberately sabotaging his code, "Dude, it worked last night.  I tested it!  You fuckers don't know what you are doing."

The worst part of it?  It was his start-up and he was the boss.  Of course, it (the start-up) failed miserably, lawsuits rage on to this day, 7 years later.

The only reason that guy kept his job is because code was undocumented spaghetti Open Source-based abortion that mostly worked and was too expensive to replace and start over. I hear he eventually left giving company 2 weeks to replace entire system. Speaking about costly... hiring 3 more guys to document everything he did would have been cheaper.

This conversations not funny.

I'm sitting here reinstalling my Server 2003 after a bad disk on the Raid seems to have spread to the rest of the drives.  It's our SQL box which contains the last 10 years of Financial Data.

And, for the inevitable chap who asks me where the backup is;  Don't.

:(

Yeah, RAID.  It's supposed to be redundant.  Sorry to hear it.

Are you going to get blamed when recovery mostly going to fail? I hope its not your job to make sure there are backups.

To be honest, I've never seen this problem before.  I would never have imagined that any controller would allow a failed or bad disk to overwrite shite onto a good one.

I am kicking myself, because I reactivated the failed drive personally.  I've done this so many times before, it's almost routine.

I've never before seen a Recovery Console or a Fresh Installation FROM CD blue screen.  That's almost worth the price of admission.

Fuck.

Dude, I work for a company that makes software for Realtors... I put two years in to the trenches before I worked my way in to the sales side of things. I've lost count of how many realtors I had to walk through the process of locating the power button on thier PCs. I also always loved the ones that would backup thier databases for thier multi-million dollar business on to one stack of the same floppies, over and over again.

Pre-software days I worked for a scale company and was sent on a repair call at a grain plant for a broken printer. Ninety minute drive to plug a power cable back in.

My favorites are when the IT guys install software upgrades for a program they don't use, have no idea how to support and really haven't clue one about other than "you draw stuff with it."(AutoCad)

 See what happens is they get a shitload of errors and settings not migrating because of the ultra-lockdown they have the server and user PCs on.  Then when trying to register the software, they can't do it because there's too many old versions on the same machine. They then withold the check to the Vendor because they got errors on the install and figure it's the vendors problem. 

 :-o :roll:   The punchline is, I was able to fix all the crap myself, and we wouldn't HAVE these problems if they'd simply hire a CAD manager.  However, that's deemed too expensive, because we have 3 programmers already on staff writing commercially available shit like scheduling & timecard software and build management software. 

Abstract that a bit and I think you just described every company's IT problems since the beginning of time.

I'm going to echo that tech-support isn't generally too much better. I once spent 45 minutes on the phone with my DSL provider, begging to be put through to Tier 2 because all I wanted was their freaking DNS IP address.

Instead, I got a Tier 1 flunky who wouldn't elevate me until he'd gone through their script, and there apparently WAS no script for "User has no plans to use your crappy client when he can just configure his router like a smart monkey".

That's pretty dumb.  At the end of any script should be a "Toss the hot potato to This Guy".

Try getting a Teir 3 tech that hasn't a clue what tracert/ping are and how they're telling me one of their routers is glitching every 10 seconds or so.

Sadly, the Teir 1 lady knew exactly what I was talking about, but didn't have the tools or access to do anything about it.

My tech support organization has only a single tier and we all pretty much have full access to everything.  So although I have a few "stupid customer" stories (they're not as funny to people outside the field since our end users are software developers for the most part and know a disk drive from a coaster), the organization-level nightmares pertaining to systems of tiered incompetency are largely foreign to me.

There's a reason I'm still working in tech support after seven years despite having had numerous opportunities to move to other areas of the org chart.   :heart:

This thread explains much of the site's barely controlled anger issues to me. 

This happens at our work. We're expected to install and configure programs we've never been trained on. It's very frustrating and gets brought up in meetings.

So, long story short: the IT guys are probably just as unhappy about it as you are.

Dude, I don't know shit about anything I install except the OS.  Actually, I don't full-install much, I just execute things that require root access.  Knowing what the process is and troubleshooting application errors?  That's what vendor docs, support contracts and SAP consultants are for.  Maybe some Google, too, for when I'm working a pilot and it is apparently up to me to figure out why I can't back up Oracle 10g in online mode.  Being the first to do something ever only sounds cool.

Controlled? I'M GOING TO FUCKING SHOVE YOUR KEYBOARD UP YOUR ASS THEN TURN IT SIDEWAYS. AFTER THAT I WILL SHOVE YOUR MOUSE AND PAD DOWN YOUR THROAT UNTIL IT SITS NEXT TO THE KEYBOARD. AFTER I'M DONE WITH IT YOU WILL HAVE TO ANAL FIST YOURSELF WITH BOTH HANDS AT THE SAME TIME EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO USE YOUR COMPUTER.

Yes, because you haven't done any of that yet.  You just keep saying you will, you tease.

That unfortunately is pretty common. You simply just can not be hired in to an upper tier in tech support in most cases. Instead, you get to trudge away reading scripts in tier one and actually getting in trouble for fixing the customer instead of "doing the basics" - all the while waiting for someone in the tier above you to get promoted or fired, to make room for you.

There was a reason I stepped sideways in to sales when the opportunity came up.

I had a very aggravating experiance with Netgear a few months back. It went like this.

First make sure you read "Her" comments in a very strong Indian accent.

Her: Welcome to netgear tech support, what is your problem?
Me: Hello, I have one of your routers here at the office, and its really messed up. When I plug it in, its spamming my network with packets, and bringing down my network. Its also not passing packets through. I need to RMA it and get a new one.
Her: Ok, please plug the router in to your network and see what happens.
Me: I just told you what happens. It is bringing down my network and not working at all. I cant plug it in again, because I need my offices network to stay stable during opperating hours.
Her: Ok, got it. Please plug the router in to the network for me and tell me what happens.
*Long pause by me*
Me: Ummm, I just told you. I cant do that, and I told you what would happen and is happening.
Her: Ok, I understand now. Your router is messing up your network. Please plug the router in to the network for me, and tell me what happens.
*Another pause by me*
Me: Ok, I just said I CANT plug it in right now.
Her: Ok, please plug the router in to your network.
Me: Look, I cant do that, this thing is broken. Could I RMA it please and get a new one.
Her: Ok, first can you plug it in to your network please.
Me: Can I have your manager please.

The manager talked to me for 2 minutes and RMA the router.

The suspense is killing me, did you plug the router in to your network?

You're a better man than me.  The desire to say "I'll plug my foot into your ass" would have overwhelmed my feeble will.

I would have said, "Okie, it's plugged in and just crashed two million dollar machines.  Can I get an RMA number now?  And where should I send the repair bill?"

Yeah, fuck scripts.

When Dell tell me to 'plug it into another keyboard', or 'plug it into a different monitor' or, 'plug it into your mother's vagina', I just pause for a minute and then say 'Yup, did that, no change.'


My mum was well upset tho.

Wait, she was upset that you did not plug it in?

She doesn't get out very much anymore.


(Seriously, what does that colour denote anyway ?)

Well, if green symbolizes sarcasm then maroon must symbolize shocked incredulity.

Well.  Obviously.

I've thought for a while about going with RAID, but I always rethink it because the idea of one drive failing throwing everything into chaos terrifies me.  I tend to go with three drives, one of which is small but fast, and I use that as solely my OS/Utility drive.  The other drives are dedicated to video & audio on one, and games & downloads on the other.

It's not as good as RAID, but then I'm comfortable knowing that one point of failure doesn't destroy everything.

I agree.  After I had a RAID array die due to 1 disk going out at work back when I used to be a network admin, trying to recover the data from the others in the array was so much fun I decided that the benefits of RAID outweigh the hassles of the occasions when you compare the two (having a douchebag for a boss's boss who insists it get done THAT DAY but you aren't allowed to put down any overtime for it didn't help matters either).  I went back to single drives with a tape backup system and never looked back.

I think it really depends on the type of raid you get. I've had one raid system that automatically detected a new drive and offered to join it to a pre-existing raid5 array. That was awsome. Other raid systems, not so much.

It also depends on wht type of IT department you're in. If you're like me and have an under funded department with a parsimonious and largely ignorant boss, you don't want raid, simply because if you leave, and she hires someone from the Geek Squad to replace you, they ain't gonna know shit about redoing an array.

If on the other hand you have a larger IT department that's got several competent hardware personel on staff, raid 5 can be the right solution, provided everyone has taken the time to be familiar with it.

It depends on what you're using it for too.  RAID 5 is very robust but very slow, so it's a poor choice for high-performance applications.  RAID 0 is speedy, but it has zero redundancy so if you lose one disk you lose the entire array.  RAID 1+0 is a good mix, since it gives most of the performance benefit of RAID 0 but it can also survive a disk failure.

Very slow? In software perhaps. A modern hardware RAID controller won't deliver what I'd call "very slow" performance. Array rebuilds excepted.

"Very slow" may be too strong a term if you're talking about the best case scenario.  Even with a hardware implementation, though, maintaining the parity information gives you an unavoidable and non-negligible performance hit on every write.  Reads not so much, so again, depends on what you're using it for.

I'd say that's an advantage of RAID...  Doesn't everyone want to be indispensable?

No.  Then I can't be promoted.

Bingo. Or leave to another job with the blessing of your boss.

Blessing?  What?  Is that a Scottish thing?

In the IT sector, you should always be so competant that you ALWAYS leave with the blessing of your boss.  This is due to the fact that he KNOWS that there'll be a tick box or a setting or something that your successor won't know and will require a polite phone call to you to fix.

If the boss is a classless act, you hang up when he calls.

Head a pleasure of doing it before. Will pay money to do it again, its that good.

If you're getting head at your work from your boss, there's summat wrong.

It was MM pre coffee post...

Let's not be sexist, now.  I know of several female managers.  However, none of them make me happy in the pants, but I guess everyone has their fetish.

?

Sexist ?  Even if your boss is female, it's wrong....

I never know if you are serious or not.

Alas, all too serious.  Which was why I agreed with Roac in some retarded thread or other that Clinton Doing Monica was Bad.

Don't fuck work colleagues in any way shape or form.  I did.

I'm now married.

Be warned.

Next time I'm in Glasgow, I'm buying you a round.

Frankly, it's not the IT guy's job to know every piece of software unless it's something that's critical and company-wide.  Dealing with the OS and normal computer/network foibles alone is enough to give someone a full plate, and companies aren't usually in a hurry to issue copies of multi-hundred-dollar software out to their IT guys to use and become familiar with.  If I was faced with AutoCAD, I'd toss in the CD, tell it to install, and if something fucked up, would search for the problem on their site and on Google.  If that provided no answers, I'd call their tech support.  I can't possibly learn every application-specific glitch on the market and fix everyone's computer like Scotty.  I can guarantee that the desktop is working, the server is working, and the network is working.  Anything beyond that I can promise my best effort, but no guarantees.



That sets my diagnosis sense to tingling.  Whenever a CD-boot bluescreens, that points to a hardware failure.  Check the memory, processor, and motherboard.  Something may have blown on there that's making it look like the hard drives are fucking up, when in reality it's another part that's causing the problem.

I was expected to in my previous IT life.  We locked everyone's accounts down in the main computer lab to stop people from installing games and virii that would try and crash the network.  Unfortunately things like AutoCAD and other expensive high-end civil engineering software packages did NOT like being run as a guest.  I had to spend a few days hunting down registry settings and file\directory settings and specifically granting certain permissions before the software would work.  The software's tech support was great as their answer consisted of "just run it as an administrator."  Yeah.  In a lab with 10 computers that saw 30 people moving in and out of it every day.  No thanks.

As much as I would have loved to say "sorry, I just maintain the OS and the network" the professors in charge of the funding told everyone that I was expendable and could easily be replaced (technically true, idiots with a pulse are easy to come by but that doesn't guarantee your problems are fixed).  And it did give me something to do in between surfing various web boards all day...

When the app is central to your buisiness doing ANYTHING, you should probably know the software.   AutoCAD doesn't work, no houses are drawn, no prints can be run and we can't even access standard plans.  That's kind of problematic when all you're doing is building houses.  So yes, it's kind of critical.  Outside of Office 97 and the Crystal Reports stuff it's the only company-critical software.

Instead of having one guy trained and knowing what to do, they hire programmers to code timecard & workflow software.   If any of us who already KNOW what to do suggest that; perhaps we should install & maintain the software instead, we're told no, it's IT's job and they're not going to give us the ability to.

I'm a political science major in law school.  I believe that computers were built by good wizards and that problems are caused by evil wizards.  If you are in tech support in any way, you should be able to detect the evil magic and fix it INSTANTLY.  That is all.   

Evil magic is spun by evil wizards.  See SAP, AG and Oracle, Inc.

I think everyone knows that computers run on magic blue smoke. If for some reason you let the blue smoke escape, through damage or misuse, your computer will no longer work.

I second this... SAP is the devil's tool.

I refuse to group with rogues without improved sap.

Thank you for that. It brings back great memories of the department manager grabbing the wrong leads off the power supply and putting 112V in to a 12V weight meter. I still love the smell of the magic blue smoke.

Ah, memories.  Power supply on one of the station's VTRs goes bad, engineer's assistant doesn't have time to repair the power supply so he grabs a spare and swaps it in.  Connects it backwards--*poof*.

He yanks it out, goes and gets the other spare power supply.  Hooks THAT one up backwards too.  Naturally, same results.

Winds up fixing the original power supply after all.

Security auditors came in to check our network out; They send two trained monkeys in to hit a big green 'go' button on some software that trolls around and doing port scans. They brought in a fluke and two desktops running something similar to nessus to scan our datacenter. They go to plug the desktops in and their power cables won't fit.

You see, our datacenter racks run 220v power, as opposed to your household 110v. The 220 power cables use the same connector that plugs into your computer, but the other end uses a different kind of connector, not your standard 3 prong wall outlet. This confused them briefly, but they were smart! They just found some 220 cables lying around, plugged them into our racks and then into their computers.

Then they flipped the power switch. BANG! Magic blue smoke. I stood watching, agape -- these guys had already thrown their weight around, hassled us into dropping all of our ACLs, so I'd be damned if I was going to lift a finger to help them. They look at the ruined power supply, shrug, and plug in the SECOND desktop. Then they flipped the power switch. BANG! Magic blue smoke again.

Then they look at me. I walk over, and as casually as I can, point to the 110<->220 selector switch on the back of the desktop power supplies.

It's a good thing they didn't set off the fire supression system (assuming you have one). In their defense for the first mishap most laptop power supplies and a lot of desktop ones are auto-switching so I can understand them not realizing what was about to happen. Of course the second time they did it...

See, in that situation I would not have even pointed out the problem, particularly if they had an attitude.  It would have been even more awesome if they set off the halon system.  Everyone hates that, and I know where the exits are.

Port scans are fun.  They can drop an HACMP cluster in short order if they hit the right port, which I know because we experienced some port scans that did exactly that, dropping our biggest production servers.  Every time after that, we were informed beforehand that the auditors were going to be doing port scans and which ports.

A few years ago, we installed a plastic dome over the Big Red Button in our main datacenter.  Someone mistook it for the button that opens an automatic door.

At least that's something.  The last place I worked at had a cardbord box cut just to the right side that was over it - held together and attached to the wall with gobs of tape, and a sharpie note that said "DO NOT LEAN AGAINST THIS".  Because apparently a few years before I arrived, someone did.

Reminds me of the sign posted on one of the glass windows in the tech booth in our university's football stadium: "DO NOT PLACE BUTTOCkS AGAINST GLASS."

I'll leave it to your imaginations to visualize what prompted that one.

*snort*. I've had to ask about a few of the more interesting ad-hoc signs around. (My personal favorite, written in sharpie on the bottom of a paper tray: "DO NOT PUT PAPER IN THIS TRAY! IT JAMS PRINTER!"). I found that while trying to clear a paper jam on that printer. Apparently, someone can't read.

One of the more fun parts of our new-hire orientation is the "DO NOT MOUNT TO THE /tmp DIRECTORY!" lecture. Someone caused a 20+ hour downtime because he mounted the entire user partition to the /tmp directory, forgot to unmount it, and hopped a plan to Russia. Sometime around 3:00 AM, a cleanup job got kicked off -- including a recursive delete of the /tmp directory.

Got to be more stingy with that root password.  Why would someone do that anyway?

He wanted to copy some data, and he was stupid. It got worse -- since he was a contractor, root access got restricted to insane levels so that ANYONE (and mind you, contractors did ALL administrative tasks for the entire network) needing root had to go hunt down the two vaguely Unix-literate folks who now had root, and had to have them type in all commands.

That lasted about two weeks.

After that, they just disallowed mounts to the /tmp directory and made the cleanup-script a little more intelligent.

There was also the guy who had an app lock up on his workstation -- during a flight -- and almost had to be physically restrained from hard rebooting the app's server. Of course, he was a user. He didn't have root access, so he went for the plug.

I am really glad I work for a regimented bureaucracy when I read stuff like that.  I won't act like our environment is tight like a military operation, but we do have plenty of regulations for preventing ding-dongs from doing bad things, or at least providing us some CYA in that we are not responsible for certain things... such as security, which includes all user administration.  Hard to explain to people that I am not supposed to go around resetting passwords or handing out server access like candy even though I have root.  Besides that, such things are beneath me; we have robots to reset passwords.

Oh, we have that. We just have people who don't understand it. They don't understand hardware lockdowns, software lockdowns, and most don't even grasp the concept of "administrative privaleges". I spend most of my support time (about a week every three months) either explaining how Word works, or explaining that I'm there to support our software and cannot reset their laptop/network/workstation passwords. Oh, and saying things like "I don't care how badly you need to get to work. That laptop hasn't been virus-scanned in two years. Come back with an up-to-date definition file and a completed full scan, then we'll let you plug in".

Major-grade screwups like I mentioned above are fairly rare. Mostly it's users plugging in unvetted laptops, pestering the wrong person for software support, or being totally unable to remember to lock their workstation if they're getting up.

Ah, yes, your problem is that you are interfacing with the end user.  Truly a special hell.  I tip my hat.

I do try to avoid that. I keep getting asked whether I have an urges towards advancement. I keep saying "No, because then I'd have to go to meetings and write shit down and talk to customers. NO NO NO. I'll take any technical lead positions, yes. But if I have to write performance reviews, cajole customers, or attend more than two customer meetings a month I don't want it."