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Moey posted:This I had a similar thing at my previous job. Two departments who worked closely with each other were moved during an office renovation now they wanted an easy way for individuals from each department to communicate with each other (one of the depts shared a single phone extension so that was out). I setup an Openfire server on a test machine then installed the Spark client on the relevant desktops. They tried it out with just the text messaging and loved it. I went to go to the next stage and get the voice working. I got denied the request to purchase half a dozen or so headsets. Shortly afterwards I was forced to cannabilise the test machine for parts (spare parts what are they? sounds like a waste of money to just have things sitting there not doing anything). For some time afterwards I still had some users ask "What happend to that Spark thing? It seemed really useful". And of course the same boss who vetoed the headsets and made me scrap the test server kept asking for me to find a way to increase the efficiency in the communication between the two depts. I eventually moved on from that company after stacking up a few more stories like this which I will share in this thread as I find time to post.
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Feb 11, 2011 02:22
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rolleyes posted:How did they pull you in for the interview, if you don't mind me asking. News channels always have expert quotes on tech subjects and I've often wondered where they find their experts. From what I have seen of some of the apparent 'experts' they just grab the first person they see on the street who looks like they are the stereotype they want.
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Feb 11, 2011 09:03
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Bardlebee posted:Does anyone else not answer their phone when the network goes down? Being the only IT dude I tend to not answer my phone when the internet goes down, because I see no point in telling people over and over it is down when the company is small enough the word can spread by itself. Last time it happened I just phoned up our ISP and sat on hold. If people tried to call me they got a busy signal, if they came to my office they saw I was on the phone so assumed I was working on it. Of course you always get at least one person who comes in  My email isn't working Yeah, the internet is down, I'm currently on the phone with our ISP to resolve it ok, may as well get a coffee thenThey leave, then return a few minutes later I can't seem to access (google/youtube/facebook/whatever site they visit during a coffee break) Yeah, the internet is still down oh do they need that too?Of course when I do talk to someone at the ISP they confirm it is a system wide fault and they are working on it and there is nothing I can do but wait until their techs have fixed things. But it is more acceptable to the bosses for me to look like I was doing something even if I was only holding a phone to my ear.
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Feb 14, 2011 01:38
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Hoborg posted:Being a company client of your ISP, do you have an SLA with them? What kind of compensation do you get for an outage like that? (Or are you stuck in a bad monopoly situation?) Yeah, we had an SLA but no compensation as I think it was only a 2 hour outage (I think we had 2 similar outages in the 18 months I was there) so the outages were only a small fraction of the time it was online over the time period in question. And they are a monopoly so they get to dictate terms of any SLA to some degree. Fortunatly it wasn't that critical for the business that the DSL was online. I had previously suggested we get a secondary connection using a different method (wireless or sat based) but it was shot down for cost reasons and they didn't feel a 24/7 connection with no downtime was absolutley vital. Shortly before I left they were going to start looking at hosting more stuff offsite at the parent company and would install a second link then but that was still at least twelve mnonths away.
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Feb 14, 2011 02:05
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Maggot Monster posted:
The reason for this is probably because when you deal with the big company you are dealing with a 9-5 employee who just needs to do their work and go home. If there is an outage they just need to log it with you so their boss knows they are doing something about it and move on to another task. For the small customer they are probably one person running their own half baked business plan and every lost sale is money out of their pocket or food out of their kids mouth etc. So to them every minor glitch is a major personal attack.
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Feb 17, 2011 03:11
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I was around at a client site yesterday afternoon swapping a router. They are a travel/accomadation booking place. Anyway while I was there a user noted she could access everything on the internet but the booking site for a small shuttle bus company. This company is based in Christchurch NZ. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake Of course they were really busy in the travel centre with people trying to reroute their travel and change hotel bookings all afternoon. I should add that most of the suppliers we deal with are based in Chch. Not to mention things like groceries and fuel come to us from warehouses there and in the port of Lyttleton.
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Feb 22, 2011 22:50
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I would say check first with what distro is used most where you are. If it is Redhat then set up a test machine/VM of Fedora or Centos and dive in. There are some slight differences between how each distro does things and organises files. Learning all about emerge and compiling your own distro from scratch may not transfer so well into solving issues with yum. You can get your hands as dirty as you want with any distro really so it is probably best to get stuck in with one at least similar to what you would be supporting.
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Apr 6, 2011 05:32
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Not a ticket, but still relevant to this thread But a Ticket is coming in. On Friday two of our clients are moving from their existing offices to a new 'business park' which is being completed this week. Perhaps I should bring in Moey as an outside consultant on this.
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Apr 11, 2011 02:08
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Stonefish posted:One. He'll move your fridge to his Fixed A few tickets today. This morning we had a powercut lasting about 10 minutes for our entire region. Had 4 PCs at different client sites this morning wouldn't boot afterwards. Got two going with a bit of work, reseating RAM etc. But two are looking like needing replacements. Why do people get so angry with you if their work PC fails due to outside influence (crappy power) and you tell them you need to take it away to work on it. They look at you as if you just shot their dog.
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Apr 12, 2011 03:58
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afflictionwisp posted:A senior helpdesk tech had to ask a sysadmin if it was possible to create a DHCP reservation. Was he asking if it was possible from a technical perspective or policy/local setup or was he asking him to do it in a weird way. e.g go in to McD's and ask if it is possible to get a Big Mac.
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Apr 17, 2011 02:21
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XarsonX posted:Install anything on an iPad other than ios . Windows 7 on an iPad would be....interesting. I could freak the gently caress out of some apple fanboys I know. Windows 8 is supposedly going to run on ARM so maybe next year.
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Apr 18, 2011 00:28
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enotnert posted:He started getting a bit demanding and the HP guys got one of the co-founders of NVIDIA on the phone so Professor iPad could tell him directly he wants a tesla card with 24 gigs of ram by winter. We may laugh now but what is the bet this is the kind of stuff which probably drives product development. Remember Professor Ipads and cluesless CxOs are who make the big spending decisions. So who should nVidia et al. look at when they make/design their products?
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Apr 18, 2011 05:17
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Ok, which of you guys denied a request and had it escalated to Slashdot? http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/04/18/1538251/Ask-Slashdot-Do-I-Give-IT-a-Login-On-Our-Dept-Server
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Apr 18, 2011 21:34
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I think in Windows 7 Outlook 2010 stores its pst files in Documents\Outlook Files\
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Apr 19, 2011 05:06
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More on ticket systems mostly for the guy who asked earlier for his one man shop. Just recently here I setup OSticket (http://osticket.com/) for our small PC consulting business. (Just myself and my boss currently, looking for another tech if we can find someone suitable.) Previously my boss had been just using his Outlook calendar to track his own work and then putting the details into Quickbooks for billing. I joined him mid to late last year replacing a previous tech who tracked his work in a similar way on an ancient phone running Windows Mobile. OS Ticket was a very simple install and seems pretty good for a small business like this. Has a few limitations which stop it from being perfect. One thing is it lacks inventory management and tracking of client data/documentation etc outside of the tickets themselves. Also doesn't have enough status settings for tickets and it looks like you have to get knee deep in php code to alter that, not being a developer rules that out in the short term but I would like to add a 'closed' status and a 'closed and billed' status to it. That way I don't have the queue filled with open tickets that just haven't been billed yet. Another thing I don't like is all the layout of the web interface is in the .php files themselves, not a single .css file in sight (compared with when I worked with Drupal to setup a website at my previous employer pretty much everything was handled by editing a few .css files.) Other than that it is a fairly good system for a small shop, and maybe for internal helpdesk for a larger entity. Our current install is just a Centos 5.6 VM running inside VMware so it was simple to setup and play with.
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Apr 26, 2011 00:37
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potato of destiny posted:Did someone get an ad network hacked or something? I've noticed a distinct uptick in this crap over the last week or so. I don't think it is ad networks being hacked as much as them failing in their due diligence when accepting ads to put into rotation. Or them accepting something which then gets switched to the nasty. Does any virus scanner actually catch these before they run? It seems most I have encountered so far will slip by the active monitoring of AV products I have seen in use. However sometimes if you boot to safe mode and run a full scan Nod32 or Symmantic can identify the file as suspicious and deal with it, and if you scan with Malware-bytes it will cleanse them. Sometimes scanning it with Malware-bytes will trigger Nod to then identify it as bad, but not when the file itself runs. Not much seems to stop them from running initially.
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Apr 27, 2011 02:25
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A PC came in. Client reported that there was some smoke and a nasty smell coming out of it. Now it won't turn on. It is an old Slot 1 Celeron, the PSU looks to be filled with 12 or so years of accummulated dust. Apparently the hard drive holds some critical software which they don't have the install disk for. First thing to do is pull the disk out and Ghost it, then look to actually resurect the PC.
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May 5, 2011 03:53
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este posted:A client is migrating their website, and we control DNS for them. They want to have us re-point it to the new IP. In a similar fashion we had a client change ISP recently, the day before the switchover they ask us if we need to do anything. No real problem, just let us know your new IP so we can update the MX records for your mail and the DNS record you use for remote access. Naturally when setting up their new account they set up one with a dynamic IP address.
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May 11, 2011 03:54
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Crowley posted:I spent all of two minutes removing "MacProtector" from a production tech's private Mac today, and then I spent the next five trying to tell him I can't accept money from him for helping him - even if I "saved his daughter's exam tomorrow" and are evidently "the man". It's not that I would mind an extra $20, but when I spend company time fixing it it's just not cricket. So, what is the procedure for removing this crap from a Mac? I have dealt with a number of Windows PCs with similar but no Macs yet, but I want to be prepared just in case one comes in so I can look like a saviour.
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May 23, 2011 22:34
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Kyrosiris posted:Yay, I made a customer happy by showing him how to lower his iptables firewall temporarily (at least until he can learn to manage it himself). He called me a genius.
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May 25, 2011 22:32
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Bonzo posted:Working with a one of our resellers today on an install. We were getting database errors so I requested the SA password for the local SQL install to do some troubleshooting. If someone called me up and asked for the password to a server I'm looking after I would also refuse. If they did actually prove that they were doing it legitimately I would set up a new account with the access they would need, which would then get disabled once they had finished.
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Jun 14, 2011 22:44
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Doctor Zero posted:CFOs hate IT because all they see is tons of money going out and none coming in. Drives me loving batshit they don't get it. Internal charging. If you start to charge sales for each time you remove Windows Antivirus 2011 premier edition or whatever they get. Then suddenly IT is a massivly profitable department and sales is a cost dragging the company down.
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Jun 15, 2011 00:06
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First Ipad request today. The head of a non-profit education provider we do support for went away to a conference where apparently Apple had their marketing people out in force. Bottom line, they want Ipads, but don't exactly know what they want to use them for or why. Although I am tempted by the Acer A500 or W500 series tablets, I might try to steer them in that direction if they are really set on a tablet toy to look important with at conferences.
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Jun 17, 2011 00:54
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Swink posted:Email came in: I wasn't aware that Nigerians made pizzas now.
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Jun 24, 2011 04:04
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enotnert posted:Also a lot of the poo poo printed doesn't need to be printed, was a big beef at my old job. Like graduate students who keep needing print quota increases because they can't stand to read a pdf on a nice 22" monitor. They need to be able to sit on the couch in their office and do it. Have you ever tried to do some real reading on a computer screen for a long period of time? If you are reading a long detailed scientific paper you just can't do it on a computer screen. Besides it is also good to be able to scribble notes in the margin or outline certain sections of text. You just can't do it the same on a computer screen, no matter how nice it is it will cause eye-strain. Maybe you should give them e-ink readers as well to reduce printing costs  . Also some of it will be learned behaviour from their thesis advisor, e.g told to always print a hard copy of any important articles.
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Jul 28, 2011 00:17
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serewit posted:iPad + GoodReader. You can do annotations and scribble in the margins and you get to eat up grant money! Everyone wins. Ipad still has the same issue of a back-lit LCD screen. It may work with a Kindle or a Nook but they weren't around back in my grad student days. Besides the amount of printing you could do for the purchase price of one of those is simply huge.
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Jul 28, 2011 02:36
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A newspaper didn't come in: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5373494/Computer-fault-halts-newspaper-production Having worked in a small independent newspaper and the amount of backup/redundant systems in that small operation. I can only imagine how much they *should* have in place. Does anyone here work with Fairfax or have any other knowledge about the fault?
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Aug 2, 2011 00:09
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Speaking of fake AV I'm surprised I only had one machine to clean this off so far http://www.techday.co.nz/netguide/news/virus-invades-metservice-website/20859/ This week would have been one of the busiest for the metservice site as our country just got hit by a "Once in a generation" snow storm. It really is at the stage where adblock plus is as necessary as a virus scanner for browsing the web.
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Aug 17, 2011 04:48
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Having an issue with printing from a terminal server which is really annoying me at the moment. Basically I have one user who when she tries to print some emails in Outlook the body comes out in odd symbols rather than what it is meant to be. The headers and footers etc come through fine, and if you copy/paste into Word it prints fine. Other users working from different remote sites have no issues. I tried putting cutePDF on her local machine and printing to PDF and it is the same. Printing to PDF on cutePDF on the server works fine and printing the resulting PDF to her local printer is also fine. Thought it might have been a missing font but her machine seems to have the same fonts as the server and the other remote clients. Just not sure where to look from here.
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Aug 19, 2011 00:55
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Get a complaint from a client that their server is making a horrible beeping noise. Check it out and it appears one drive has failed on the array, no big issue remove dead drive and wait for it to rebuild on the hot spare. That is fine, however there are no more spares to replace the hot spare so need to order some in. Next day server is playing up again, check out the RAID and the drive which was the hot spare failed a couple of hours after the rebuild finished. Apparently it had previously been in the array but after a power glitch marked as failed, the person who dealt with it then assumed the drive was fine and that the controller had erroneously marked it as failed. So he let it rebuild on the original hot spare and reset the drive's status assigning that to the hot spare. So now we have a server running on a degraded RAID6 with no spare drives until the couriers come. Oh I also just found out that the backup server is being rebuilt. I am feeling a bit nervous about this.
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Aug 23, 2011 23:57
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synthetik posted:This is the bane of my existence, and one of the hardest to justify IT helpdesk timesinks/expenses. Do you bill by the hour for your support time? If so pop them on hold and then call up their other vendor and listen to their hold music while those sweet billable hours add up. Bonus points if you can get an intern to do that part while you do something actually productive. If you don't bill them by the hour then show the additional cost of this out of scope support and use that to counter the sales people when they complain. If a client ends up costing you money is it really worth keeping them as a client?
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Aug 25, 2011 00:07
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PirateDentist posted:We have a few systems around here that have an error message that says. "An Error Has Occurred. [OK]" then it just closes. Start->run->eventvwr Maybe you will get lucky and it will throw a bit of information into the logs there. Sure the non-informative error may be a sign the developers didn't bother, but still worth a shot. I have been pleasantly surprised like that before.
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Sep 6, 2011 01:47
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What did the error say?
An error has occurred.
What did the entire message say? 
There has to be more.
... Ok then. I'll have to get back to you.
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angrytech posted:That entire exchange is par for the course for an .edu. The amount of poo poo that we support just because one phd decided to bitch is staggering. I remember seeing part of an exchange about some issues the university I attended was having with a freshly rolled out win2k3 domain. Basically before the domain was rolled out I think some of the old Unix admins and the younger linux guys wanted to go with a *nix backend but HP and Microsoft came in and sold them a solution which they were told would run it all perfectly and would save on hardware costs. Of course the domain was rolled out over uni and was woefully underspecced for what it needed to do and there were accusations flying over the place from various people involved. The local guys blamed HP, HP and MS reps blamed the local guys every so often one of the unix people would pop in and say  Told you so. I think in the end the university had to wear the cost of doubling the number of servers.
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Sep 9, 2011 05:27
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serewit posted:If you use ACT! you hate yourself. Can someone tell me what is so terrible about ACT!. My boss is currently looking at getting a package based on it called XACT! http://www.xactsoftware.co.nz/ I would like to know what we are getting ourselves into before we stumble into a wall of pain.
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Sep 13, 2011 00:24
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Did Norton put out an AV update which broke stuff? I have two machines here today, both running Norton 360, both were fine until last night apparently. Now One is XP and is slow to start, can't select anything on the desktop start-menu is also very slow and bthen it eventually luescreens (Traced it back to a Norton related dll). Second is a Win 7 Laptop, also running Norton 360, although this is a bit quicker but slower than is should be and the start menu is responsive you can't select anything on the deskop. [edit] Just heard from a mate who is being asked about Norton playing up on another machine. I think I am going to uninstall Norton and pop MS Security Essentials on these.
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Sep 19, 2011 04:30
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angrytech posted:My god... they found Dick Trauma's old employer! Just how much overtime did enotnert get back-payed?
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Sep 19, 2011 22:37
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Yaos posted:If you have weird problems on a PC that are not caused by spyware and you have McAfee installed, it's always McAfee's fault. You can replace McAfee with Norton in that statement and it is still true.
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Sep 27, 2011 02:42
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Billy the Mountain posted:No known passwords accepted on the server. Looks like we get to backup data and wipe and reconstruct the server. Yay. Before you go through all of that, you can boot off a disk to change the administrator password (doesn't do the AD password but the local one). Then boot to AD restore mode and use this new password. While in there you can replace the program that runs the login help pop-up window with a copy of cmd.exe (can't remember the filename off the top of my head). Reboot to normal mode and invoke that help command. You now have a command prompt with system priviledges on the machine, have fun.
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Oct 4, 2011 23:58
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couldcareless posted:A ticket came in: FROTHY MILK IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION You're good with computers, fix the coffee machine.
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Nov 2, 2011 00:04
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Volmarias posted:Did you point out to him that the drop in performance correlates directly to your vacation schedule, or would he not even care? The only change I see that making is for them to stop anyone on his team from taking any vacation ever again.
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Nov 8, 2011 01:46
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