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dorkanoid posted:Cryptolocker scares me. I know we have backups of everything + shadow copies enabled, but the cleanup would still be horrible. We've been hit by it twice so far because our users are unjunking the emails and then opening the attachment. We've eliminated individual access on a large percentage of our files and use AD groups to control as much as we can, so our detection method has been: 1) user notifies us that a file can't be opened, 2) we check the file permissions to see who has Full Control granted to their account (the only individual in the ACL) and then rip their computer off the network. Since I'm sure we'll end up getting it again, I'll try the group policy fix.
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Oct 24, 2013 12:22
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Why not give them a BLAST URL and be done with it? Horizion 5.2/5.3 really made this loving good so long as you look at your GPO's and understand network traffic flow. Hell I believe Win7 is now MMR capable. That's pulling your desktop over a remoting protocol - which, you're right, is rather effective. All of my remote users run entirely off XenDesktop, which compresses fabulously and can redirect just about anything nowadays. Heck, we've had OpenGL redirection set up for well over a year now. Still, even with a similar environment to yours, I wouldn't go anywhere near a BYOD initiative. One area where we do offer support is helping users get their home desktops connected, which is a big enough pain in the rear end. If I had to do that at the enterprise level I'd probably kill myself. Specifically, I've seen quite a few quirks pop up in the factory images on users' home PCs which affect their ability to run an ICA or RDS session. Maybe the HP wireless utility is causing session disconnects for some crazy reason, or the Symantec Antivirus trial's network threat protection keeps crashing the Receiver client. (Bear in mind, this is all crap we would find and fix when building a new corporate image.) And naturally, those users call in and say Citrix isn't working, and you can't just write them off until you prove it's client-side. Now, when I'm burning time trying to prove a problem is client-side, I've effectively entered the same-old-same-old client-side support time sink. If I started letting users bring those home PCs to work as their primary workstation, I'd be in pretty bad shape. Point being, XenDesktop and View could be a million times better than they are now and I still wouldn't consider a BYOD initiative; the performance of the VDI platform is not the issue here.
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Oct 24, 2013 12:55
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Che Delilas posted:Hmm, clearly a conference staffed by people who have never been developers in their lives. Which means it's probably all cargo cultists and people who read an article about <thing> one time. Oddly enough it was scheduled by a dev (it's an internal "by devs for devs" thing), we just apparently have that many talks that need to be fit in
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Oct 24, 2013 13:05
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Pissing me off: Financial Institutions that think it is OK to CC instead of BCC to all their clients  ISPs you have been waiting 6 months for a connection from knowing full well that every excuse they tell you is a drat lie...Then claiming your order is for ADSL1 ^ The real reason for the lack of connection (due to telephonic shenanigans on a slow day I found out): some genius tech completely fried half a DSLAM due to incompetence and the ISP has been too cheap/lazy to repair Considering all calls and interactions (read: lies) with this company have been logged and recorded into a nice report with fancy graphics, the State Wide Area Manager is in a world of poo poo as it has now hit his desk and just happens to be in my remote part of the state trying to promote the latest bullshit federal broadband rollout. Fake Edit: is there a general 'poo poo that pisses you off thread' that isn't purely IT related? I feel I skirt the edge of off topic with each post and I sure have more un-IT related poo poo that pisses me off everyday I would like to vent.
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Oct 24, 2013 14:07
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Humphreys posted:Fake Edit: is there a general 'poo poo that pisses you off thread' that isn't purely IT related? I feel I skirt the edge of off topic with each post and I sure have more un-IT related poo poo that pisses me off everyday I would like to vent. I think this thread has wondered off and on topic so often by now that it may as well be a general rant thread. It's like a whole little community in and of itself. Failing that 
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Oct 24, 2013 14:32
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luminalflux posted:Oddly enough it was scheduled by a dev (it's an internal "by devs for devs" thing), we just apparently have that many talks that need to be fit in
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Oct 24, 2013 14:33
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Things pissing me off...my manager thinking of scheduling mandatory meetings for both days this weekend despite about 75% of the team literally having no work to do this week because all of our poo poo is already fixed and no more bugs are being found in it, and repeated offers to help others have been ignored. Because I love having to wake up early on a weekend to call in to a meeting where I will say nothing because I have nothing to say.
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Oct 24, 2013 16:09
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Bottle-opener chat has moved to http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3576580
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Oct 24, 2013 18:02
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Khisanth Magus posted:mandatory meetings for both days this weekend Time to go.
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Oct 24, 2013 18:29
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Khisanth Magus posted:Things pissing me off...my manager thinking of scheduling mandatory meetings for both days this weekend despite about 75% of the team literally having no work to do this week because all of our poo poo is already fixed and no more bugs are being found in it, and repeated offers to help others have been ignored. Because I love having to wake up early on a weekend to call in to a meeting where I will say nothing because I have nothing to say. I always seem to have plans involving me being out of town and unreachable when mandatory unpaid meetings on off time are scheduled.
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Oct 24, 2013 23:47
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Inspector_666 posted:BYOD is fine for phones but holy poo poo I would never work anywhere it applied to laptops and poo poo.
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Oct 25, 2013 00:08
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teethgrinder posted:Oh god. My old job did this. Everyone involved cheaped out and so I was futilely stuck supporting netbooks and bottom-rung big box store desktops. The company gave them like $200 to buy their own, and they naturally just bought poo poo. "It's slow"
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Oct 25, 2013 00:14
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theangryamoeba posted:That schedule sounds suspiciously like my last sysadmin job. Was your office above a liquor store and several bars? Centennial Tower in downtown Atlanta, so we were over a (very overpriced) bar, but no liquor stores. I'd imagine that shift is probably pretty popular at 24x7 places that run lean on staff, though, since it lets you cover a full 24x7 week with just four people using a fixed schedule. We had two night guys and two day guys in the sysadmin department on that schedule, plus a few more who worked normal M-F schedules to help cover the busier parts of the weekdays and who would get shuffled around to cover for us 3/4x12 folks when we took vacations. Also: Rhymenoserous posted:Oh god gently caress iMail. although I will say that iMail wasn't even the worst email platform I've worked with (and I've never really worked with Lotus or Exchange...  )
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Oct 25, 2013 00:55
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Currently pissing me off is Google Apps and the Outlook sync tool. It was always a bit flaky but a necessary evil for people who wanted to use Outlook (meaning most staff who have learned by rote how to use it), and as long as you didn't push the boundaries too far with the size of the mail cached locally it was OK. Then along comes Office 2013 which overwhelmingly seems to be delivered as a click-to-run app (unless you're a VL customer, at which point why would you be on Google Apps), and the sync app doesn't play ball with it at all. Google pretty much have a "won't fix" attitude to it, and if you use some convoluted workaround then you end up with the chance of emails addressed using Outlook's autocomplete appearing to send as normal but not actually going anywhere. It's like 2010 was the peak of interoperability between these large services and since then all the effort has gone into making it as difficult as possible for people who don't fully buy into one system.
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Oct 25, 2013 01:24
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Paladine_PSoT posted:"It's slow" I read this post and my heartrate involuntarily doubled. gently caress I get so many of those calls. Yeah, you know what might make it run faster? How about not running loving AutoCAD on a midrange Dell laptop.
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Oct 25, 2013 03:05
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The absolute worst for me is getting "It's slow" tickets escalated to me from support with absolutely no other details. Outlook is slow. Citrix is slow. Internet is slow. This is why I'd be a bad manager. If I was having a bad day and one of these landed in my queue, I'd probably storm over and fire someone. Seriously, if you're going to just parrot whatever the user tells you without drilling into the issue, then why don't I just cut out the middleman? CatsOnTheInternet fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 03:41
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CatsOnTheInternet posted:The absolute worst for me is getting "It's slow" tickets escalated to me from support with absolutely no other details. Outlook is slow. Citrix is slow. Internet is slow. In my experience, the laziest employees are usually the ones who know their jobs are bullshit, so you might have some luck finding them something to actually do besides acting like a secretary.
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Oct 25, 2013 04:01
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Why the gently caress would someone only put some of the full-time, permanent, salaried staff in Active Directory ? Shouldn't you hit yourself in the head with a hammer when "gently caress it, I'll just stop here" crosses your mind ?
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Oct 25, 2013 04:35
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 Just gotta pass the medical (which is the same as the yearly one I have been passing the past 5 years.I remember Pegasus WinMail used to piss me off royally!
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Oct 25, 2013 10:46
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Sick of this guy from sales marching in with "every time I look at one of our datasheets, it's WRONG Look at this one!! This is wrong, that's wrong, the system's terrible" Every time I look at your face it's wrong. Look, I'm sorry that neither I nor my datasheet production system have developed clairvoyance. It's a bit of a shortfall, I know. I'm still trying to learn how to read minds and make guesses in an accurate and consistent manner, and unfortunately it's not one of my greatest skills. In the interim, instead of expecting it all to Just Work and storming in every week or so to berate me on how terrible it is, I have an idea. You could form these things called "words", preferably written (meaning with a pen or keyboard - annotated on the current datasheet with a date and signature would be nice) or verbal (meaning you pick up that thing that goes "ring ring" or calmly walk into the office) and tell me about what's wrong. Then I will do the needful and get straight on fixing that up in the system code and/or the data tables so that it's correct. As it's a bulk generation system, in many cases it'd correct all of them at once, giving you less to rant about. It's a little old fashioned I know, but I think I'm going to have to wait for Google ESP before I move past communication via the usual two senses.
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Oct 25, 2013 11:07
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Misogynist posted:What is your front-line support doing all day? Really, I think it's bad enough to warrant a staff refresh except for that one guy. (If he doesn't ragequit before then, at least.) We've tried training, we've tried step-by-step manuals, we've tried extensive documentation. Last year around half of my replies to questions from support were attachments of memos and documentation I had previously sent them containing the answer. CatsOnTheInternet fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 12:07
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Misogynist posted:What is your front-line support doing all day? Are they trying to get users off the phone as fast as possible so they can get back to anime forums As a front-line support person (insofar as higher-level support is the engineering team), yes, this is exactly what I do every day. That said, slowness problems are a pain in the rear end to troubleshoot. Something outright not working is pretty easy to demonstrate and can usually be traced to some obvious point of failure even if the reason for the failure isn't immediately clear; trying to find the root cause or even evidence of a subjective problem by looking at encrypted packet captures is much more difficult.
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Oct 25, 2013 13:09
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CatsOnTheInternet posted:Talking about cars and their kids
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Oct 25, 2013 13:12
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Misogynist posted:What is your front-line support doing all day? Are they trying to get users off the phone as fast as possible so they can get back to anime forums, or are they so saddled with calls because of bad product experience that they have no time to take down more information and still get to everything? Do they know the questions to ask in order to troubleshoot a performance problem? If not, why not? Can your group work alongside their group on some of these problems, so they actually feel some sense of autonomy and get to know how these problems are constructed end-to-end? ... Have you ever worked at a help desk? I can't recall a single one I worked at where management actually encouraged this type of activity. The focus is always on having a low ASA (average speed of answer) and a low call handle time. When the choices were make numbers and keep my steady paycheck or actually give a poo poo and get bad schedules, management riding my rear end, or laid off, guess what I did?
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Oct 25, 2013 13:52
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Raven457 posted:... Have you ever worked at a help desk? I can't recall a single one I worked at where management actually encouraged this type of activity. The focus is always on having a low ASA (average speed of answer) and a low call handle time. When the choices were make numbers and keep my steady paycheck or actually give a poo poo and get bad schedules, management riding my rear end, or laid off, guess what I did? This is true. This is also unfortunately a short-sighted thing to do, usually suggested by super-smart "business consultants" with MBA's who've never really had to interact with a helpdesk. They miss the point. When I call a helpdesk, I'm not as concerned about with how long I had to wait (within reason). I'm more concerned with, once I get someone, getting my problem solved effectively. The overall user experience is what's most important, and getting rushed into an unsuccessful conclusion (oh hey wait for a desktop person to get there because I have to get off the phone immediately okthxbye) isn't the way to get there.
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Oct 25, 2013 14:42
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Raven457 posted:... Have you ever worked at a help desk? I can't recall a single one I worked at where management actually encouraged this type of activity. The focus is always on having a low ASA (average speed of answer) and a low call handle time. When the choices were make numbers and keep my steady paycheck or actually give a poo poo and get bad schedules, management riding my rear end, or laid off, guess what I did? Trying to run a helpdesk like a grist mill is not only representative of bad organizational attitudes towards knowledge workers, it's also bad for the organization because the burnout and churn rates end up costing more than just keeping the staff minimally happy. Metrics-driven cultures can work great if you're measuring the right things. Companies should be focused on customer satisfaction and revenue as organizational KPIs. Anything else is just fluffy bullshit to make executives think they know what they're doing, because math. wintermuteCF posted:This is true. This is also unfortunately a short-sighted thing to do, usually suggested by super-smart "business consultants" with MBA's who've never really had to interact with a helpdesk. They miss the point. The incredible thing about management is that it really isn't very hard to do well if you understand your employees as people instead of data points in the organizational psych paper you wrote as a freshman.
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Oct 25, 2013 15:00
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Misogynist posted:Trying to run a helpdesk like a grist mill is not only representative of bad organizational attitudes towards knowledge workers, it's also bad for the organization because the burnout and churn rates end up costing more than just keeping the staff minimally happy. Unfortunately, the "IT management certifications" like ITIL preach just this thing, so IT management practices are moving that way. 1st level support (helpdesk) takes calls and puts in tickets. Unless it can be fixed quickly over the phone, it's just escalated to level 2 2nd level support (sys admins, technicians) do the majority of the troubleshooting and fixing. If they can't, they escalate to level 3 3rd level support is calling vendor support, which is a hell where sys admins go to when they die It's been a while since I went through the ITIL cert, but that's the gist of it. Unless you're getting paid well, "take calls and type tickets" is a crappy job.
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Oct 25, 2013 15:06
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QPZIL posted:Unfortunately, the "IT management certifications" like ITIL preach just this thing, so IT management practices are moving that way. As a guy who's pretty aligned in the DevOps movement and the web startup space it occupies, it might surprise you to know that I don't completely disagree with ITIL on its face. Even back a whole decade ago, Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and the other Visible Ops guys did a really great job of enumerating how to implement ITIL in a book that was all of 90 pages, and they did it in a way that's remarkably similar to what most people call DevOps nowadays. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 15:35
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wintermuteCF posted:This is true. This is also unfortunately a short-sighted thing to do, usually suggested by super-smart "business consultants" with MBA's who've never really had to interact with a helpdesk. They miss the point. And this is one of the few reasons I haven't quit my job. We're happiness-measured not solved/hour measured. So although we're a small, I guess pseudo-startup (7 years old in a fairly competitive market with one 800lb gorilla in the corner, so any market we take is well earned), people love us. Our support is kick rear end, we have no "Tier's" - although if we have a problem customer, we'll get one of the other guys to be "Tier 2" or "Insert x Specialist" to get them to listen. I worked at one job that was completely metrics-driven. The average length of employment was 90 days. Your first 10 days are training. So less than 3 months of "productive" work per employee. That place bled money and pissed off customers.
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Oct 25, 2013 16:04
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Well, poo poo. Today was the day when the team parsed the results of the annual work satisfaction survey. And the boss did not take the criticism well. The survey is technically anonymous, but there's only 30 members in the team. So the hunt is on. We've been in the middle of perpetual "personnel negotiations" for a few years now, and the boss promised more. My personal problem is that the boss has been giving me internal projects and other busywork, which already look horrible on my personal stats. Especially in the middle of a cost-cutting spree. But now even those have been drying up, and any real work the boss has promised has either not materalized or would have required me to work at 150%+ utilization. Incidentally, the union has had an overtime ban in effect as a pressuring tactic in those "personnel negotiations". Of course, I did have a choice back in the day. I could have been doing maintenance work instead of new development in those internal projects. And the guy who got that maintenance work? He quit today. So why don't I  ? Because our legislation offers near-salary-level unemployment benefits only when you're laid off for "production and/or economic reasons". I thought I could tough it out before, but now I'm not so sure.
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Oct 25, 2013 17:00
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Siochain posted:if we have a problem customer, we'll get one of the other guys to be "Tier 2" or "Insert x Specialist" to get them to listen. This is probably why Miso's techs just escalate the ticket. The callers probably won't listen to "Outlook is slow because your mailbox is 18GB" from the level 1 helpdesk monkey.
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Oct 25, 2013 17:08
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P.S. STILL COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MERIT
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Misogynist posted:...isn't very hard to do well if you understand your employees as people instead of data points... This is the problem with pretty much every lovely job I've ever had. It all stems from this. At the last terrible place the CIO literally said "we do not have to consider the human factor in our decisions." I thought he was kidding and said "But you have to. The human factor doesn't make your decision for you but you have to consider it or you'll get terrible results. You're managing human beings, not robots." He looked at me like I was stupid and said "No we don't." It was chilling.
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Oct 25, 2013 17:29
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Dick Trauma posted:This is the problem with pretty much every lovely job I've ever had. It all stems from this. At the last terrible place the CIO literally said "we do not have to consider the human factor in our decisions." I thought he was kidding and said "But you have to. The human factor doesn't make your decision for you but you have to consider it or you'll get terrible results. You're managing human beings, not robots." He looked at me like I was stupid and said "No we don't." Exactly this. This also applies to working for the public sector. When people who make the adding/cutting jobs decision (a la a City Council) don't even work 8-5 with any of the people affected, they tend to see the people as "positions" that you move around or remove like those cut out slot puzzles.
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Oct 25, 2013 17:37
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Dick Trauma posted:This is the problem with pretty much every lovely job I've ever had. It all stems from this. At the last terrible place the CIO literally said "we do not have to consider the human factor in our decisions." I thought he was kidding and said "But you have to. The human factor doesn't make your decision for you but you have to consider it or you'll get terrible results. You're managing human beings, not robots." He looked at me like I was stupid and said "No we don't." Well, they do say that it's not uncommon for executive management to exhibit psychopathic tendencies.
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Oct 25, 2013 18:31
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Grrr. Setting up a new server that will handle backups of our Juniper switches whenever a commit is made. The "network" guy is demanding that we use SCP instead of FTP. I personally don't care as I am not thinking of our configs as top secret (and no one here would ever know how to sniff that traffic). Does anyone know if a good SCP server that can run on Windows Server 2012 (datacenter licensing and idiot co-workers makes me not want to use a linux box)? I tried one free one from SolarWinds, but it crashes any time I try to create a user.
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Oct 25, 2013 18:35
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Humphreys posted:I remember Pegasus WinMail used to piss me off royally! loving Pegasus. loving Mercury. One of the few freeware email servers available for Windows once upon a time. Horribly intermittent spam detection stuff, kludgy administration... Eeeesh! I just flashed onto the little red logo of theirs and had to go look it up. Imagine my surprise to find it still being developed: pmail.com posted:The Mercury Mail Transport System is a full-featured mail server for Windows and Novell NetWare systems. It is extremely fast and robust, feature-rich and extensible, yet consumes very little in the way of system resources or bandwidth. Edit: Hah hah hah 800 downloads in the last 13 years for the NetWare NLM version. Hell yeah.  Agrikk fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 18:36
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Seeing Pegasus gave me flashbacks to Quickmail. 
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Oct 25, 2013 18:38
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Moey posted:Grrr. Setting up a new server that will handle backups of our Juniper switches whenever a commit is made. The "network" guy is demanding that we use SCP instead of FTP. I personally don't care as I am not thinking of our configs as top secret (and no one here would ever know how to sniff that traffic). Couldn't you just set up SFTP? Isn't that made specifically to solve the traffic-sniffing issue? Just set up an SFTP server on the 2012 box, and then make an access list so that only traffic to and from the router is passed. Boom, secure. Moey posted:SolarWinds, but it crashes any time I try I feel like this could be a mantra for me. At least in my home lab environment  - our setup at work makes it all look so easy!
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Oct 25, 2013 19:40
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QPZIL posted:Couldn't you just set up SFTP? Isn't that made specifically to solve the traffic-sniffing issue? That's what I was hoping for. Either my googlefoo is failing today, or Junos only supports FTP and SCP.
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Oct 25, 2013 19:46
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Moey posted:That's what I was hoping for. Either my googlefoo is failing today, or Junos only supports FTP and SCP. Yeah I should have googled first. Apparently SCP is the de-facto secure backup avenue. Oh well!
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Oct 25, 2013 20:06
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