Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Arquinsiel posted:

Is it admin rights? I bet it's admin rights.

Look, step one is disabling antivirus real-time scans, because that slows things down an order of magnitude. Don't like it? Budget for dual processor systems with 64+GB of RAM so devs can have a usable environment.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

The Macaroni
Dec 20, 2002
...it does nothing.

AlexDeGruven posted:

Gods I can't describe how much the "its been like this for a while" bullshit infuriates me.

If your poo poo is legit broken, it'll get fixed, and with appropriate urgency. If you say it's been hosed up for a while and there's no record of you taking a moment to contact support: gently caress you.
From the other side, though: I file a ticket, get a courtesy call from the infrastructure folks to confirm that things are generally working, even if they're not to my satisfaction (i.e. slow as gently caress), then the ticket gets closed with "Working as intended." Then next month I get a nasty call from InfoSec asking why I'm accessing my Google Drive at work, and I get to say "Because my laptop VPN runs like poo poo and the last ticket I opened was basically closed with a smiley face, and I'd rather get things done when I'm offsite than stare at my computer weakly trying to copy files over."

mehall
Aug 27, 2010


The Macaroni posted:

From the other side, though: I file a ticket, get a courtesy call from the infrastructure folks to confirm that things are generally working, even if they're not to my satisfaction (i.e. slow as gently caress), then the ticket gets closed with "Working as intended." Then next month I get a nasty call from InfoSec asking why I'm accessing my Google Drive at work, and I get to say "Because my laptop VPN runs like poo poo and the last ticket I opened was basically closed with a smiley face, and I'd rather get things done when I'm offsite than stare at my computer weakly trying to copy files over."

Nah, gently caress it.

If IT won't get the VPN to work better, I'll work at the speed of the VPN, and inform my manager of the issues, in an email.

If an issue ever comes up regarding my productivity while I'm on VPN, I'll just refer back to that email, over and over till it pisses someone off enough to sort out a better formal process.

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy
Yeah, to be fair, it's a situational thing.

If you say "this started happening last week" then at least I know I can check our change management for something from a week ago instead of last night.

But lol gently caress you if you expect special treatment because of it.

angry armadillo
Jul 26, 2010
When I order a laptop it comes with a power supply.
When I order a dock I order the one that comes with a power supply.

I don't want a cupboard full of spares so here you go user have an extra one, aren't we great


How is that even a problem :D

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

angry armadillo posted:

When I order a laptop it comes with a power supply.
When I order a dock I order the one that comes with a power supply.

I don't want a cupboard full of spares so here you go user have an extra one, aren't we great


How is that even a problem :D

Users here want a third. That's not even a spare because people aren't removing the dock power supply to take it places.

wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?
It's really nice to have a "permanent" power supply that just lives at your desk, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for users who actually work at home to want another one to leave there.

rafikki
Mar 8, 2008

I see what you did there. (It's pretty easy, since ducks have a field of vision spanning 340 degrees.)

~SMcD


wolrah posted:

It's really nice to have a "permanent" power supply that just lives at your desk, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for users who actually work at home to want another one to leave there.

Correct. I managed to snag a third one for traveling, but that was far less important than one I could leave at home.

The Macaroni
Dec 20, 2002
...it does nothing.

Renegret posted:

But lol gently caress you if you expect special treatment because of it.
Most def. :hf:

I get it on my side too, but in my position I'm able to gleefully respond with "If you were experiencing problems, why didn't you start a paper trail before the deadline contact us sooner?"

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

GreenNight posted:

Users here want a third. That's not even a spare because people aren't removing the dock power supply to take it places.

We have vending machines full of power bricks, mice, keyboards, headsets and whatnot. Just swipe your badge and take what you need.

I can get behind the mindset of “please don’t let a $30 power brick interrupt your work in any way.”

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

That would be pretty god drat nice.

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



wolrah posted:

It's really nice to have a "permanent" power supply that just lives at your desk, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for users who actually work at home to want another one to leave there.
This is what we do, but also a third one because people want to work off a desk but leave their spare cable at home, and also a fourth because they don't know where their cable went to, and a fifth because someone took their power cable off their desk while they were at lunch and they'll return the spare when theirs is returned.




Reception say they have not clicked on anything untoward, and yet...

oh rly
Feb 22, 2006
oh rly ya rly no wai

Agrikk posted:

We have vending machines full of power bricks, mice, keyboards, headsets and whatnot. Just swipe your badge and take what you need.

I can get behind the mindset of “please don’t let a $30 power brick interrupt your work in any way.”

I am trying to get vending machines at my org for the same type of consumable equipment.

Do you have any issues with people hoarding?
Is there someone who periodically reviews what groups/users are consuming the equipment excessively?
Do you ever reload the vending machines with returned equipment?

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




wolrah posted:

It's really nice to have a "permanent" power supply that just lives at your desk, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for users who actually work at home to want another one to leave there.

On the one hand, at work Fridays are known as "$BIG_PHARMA Saturdays" because the place is a ghost town. On the other hand, I've had people beg for a working laptop that they can take to Hawaii and do work during their vacation. We have a box of spare power adapters left after moving recently, anyone who needs one more can have one.

HP gets mixed credit for their new machines. A plus for keeping the same docking connector since 2013, that saves us a ton of hassle on deployments. They get a minus for changing the power plug to a smaller size, partially mitigated by adapters being a measly ten bucks. I can't speak to their reliability over time yet, but the HP Elitebook 8x0 G5s are really nice machines. Lighter than the early ones at the same size, good performers at a reasonable price, and not absolutely stupid to work on like the Touchbar MacBook Pros.

e.

oh rly posted:

I am trying to get vending machines at my org for the same type of consumable equipment.

Do you have any issues with people hoarding?
Is there someone who periodically reviews what groups/users are consuming the equipment excessively?
Do you ever reload the vending machines with returned equipment?


In order,

Vending machines are awesome. We have power bricks, Bluetooth keyboards and mice, thumb drives, 1 TB USB drives, and a surprising amount of phone connectors in ours. We pay attention to what needs to be in them as the installed base evolves. Right now we're loading up on USB-C stuff.

No. We actually - unofficially - encourage group admins to have a drawer full of cables, dongles, and a couple of machines configured as loaners; in our case that last bit means adding "Domain Users" to the local Administrators group and some GPO changes like "no Crashplan".

No. Some people keep an eye on it, but there's no formal oversight of spending against the General Ledger code for computer stuff. We'll deploy anything a given cost center is willing to pay for. Sometimes that means a machine with 16 quad-core i9s and a terabyte of RAM, sometimes that means someone who makes a big enough stink about the machine he spilled juice on ends up with a brand new (and newer) machine.

We budget for one person, one machine. If you need more, the individual cost centers pay, otherwise it's on the budgeted "it costs this much in equipment to hire someone" cost center. The "worst", assuming my group actually cared, case was a group admin exploiting the tech refresh policies. We budget to replace half to 2/3rds of the machines in a specific generation when they're out of warranty and got to go. That fraction is arrived at by estimating the number of machines sitting ind drawers versus machines that are someone's primary computer (SCCM gives good data for this).

The exploit was a group admin calling in one ticket after another, about 20 in total, for either battery life issues or just not turning on. The systems all came out of drawers or labs and wouldn't have been picked up in the proactive tech refresh (aka 'get this old poo poo off my network') program. By reporting a hardware issue, my team just sees an old system that is eligible to be replaced. We request a system from refresh stock, and a few days later she opens a ticket to have this mysteriously unassigned, brand-new system redeployed to someone with an old and busted, but not eligible for refresh, machine. A few days later, she called in a "make this machine a group use or lab machine" ticket, got the user's old machine made into a group loaner, and stuck it in a drawer. We expect a repeat performance in 2 years. My immediate supervisor is infuriated by this, because she's the sort of person who wishes that we were refresh cops. The techs all think she deserves a cost-savings award for getting all her people new machines years before they otherwise would have. Hate the game, not the player.

mllaneza fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Oct 3, 2018

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


Arquinsiel posted:

Is it admin rights? I bet it's admin rights.

If I still worked in end user support, probably.

No, mine is the devs that have the balls (or complete lack of self-awareness) to push code on a Thursday night and then ask why the system is running like poo poo on Friday morning.

Bigass Moth
Mar 6, 2004

I joined the #RXT REVOLUTION.
:boom:
he knows...

AlexDeGruven posted:

If I still worked in end user support, probably.

No, mine is the devs that have the balls (or complete lack of self-awareness) to push code on a Thursday night and then ask why the system is running like poo poo on Friday morning.

Is it the network? Or maybe DNS? Is the server running slow? :smug:

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

AlexDeGruven posted:

If I still worked in end user support, probably.

No, mine is the devs that have the balls (or complete lack of self-awareness) to push code on a Thursday night and then ask why the system is running like poo poo on Friday morning.
Back when I did desktop support it was in a dev house, so all end users were devs. And they all needed admin rights. For to install malware with.

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


Developer desktop support has to be the absolute worst. Just some of the ridiculous version-locked bullshit I have to install on dev servers ("it has to be widgetforge-0.95.32-100.14-beta3r2 or my app won't compile. This is going to prod next week") drives me up a wall.

But pushing code that cripples 16-core 4.15GHz boxes with 256GB of RAM is the worst.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
I once spent an entire day trying to convince a dev that his CRT monitor wasn't flickering, and he didn't need admin rights to install Nvidia control panel apps, because we had physically removed the graphics card from his machine.

Fucker was just sitting about six inches away from the screen...

Eventually I solved it by putting my hand on his shoulder and manually moving him back and forwards until he accepted that it was that and not a tech issue.

nominal
Oct 13, 2007

I've never tried dried apples.
What are they?
Pork Pro

Arquinsiel posted:

Fucker was just sitting about six inches away from the screen...
A guy at my last gig was like this. He'd take off his glasses and put his face right on the screen, but then he couldn't see the keyboard, so he'd have to back away and one-finger peck at each letter, then face-screen again so he could correct his numerous and inevitable typos, then back to the keyboard, then back to the screen, etc etc etc

It would have been hilarious except for the fact that we were both on help desk and he'd end up wrapping 8-15 calls a day vs the rest of the teams 40 or so because he was sooooooo slow.

ugh I'm getting the creeps even thinking about that job anymore

The Claptain
May 11, 2014

Grimey Drawer
That reminds me of a former coworker thanks to whom we found out that our ticketing system has one hour idle session timeout.

Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks
So we had a report from our other location that one of the security camera feeds there kept going down. They’d come in in the morning and the camera monitor screen at the back would have one blank feed and the controller would be beeping about a downed camera. But it seemed to fix itself by the time they opened. They eventually figured out the camera was only working during their open hours of 9-6. This makes no sense because not only are the cameras clearly meant to run 24/7, I don’t think the fairly primitive control software even supports time profiles. We can’t find any reason for it in the config. Finally I get sent over to look at it physically today...

That camera was replaced recently. Whoever installed it powered it by plugging it into a conveniently located power plug in the ceiling. The same one that the “Open” sign in the window is plugged into. The one on a circuit that has a light switch toggle for it on the wall that they hit to turn the sign off and on.

minusX
Jun 16, 2007

Say something hideous and horrible jumps out at you. Something so disgusting that it simply must die.
Ah! Oh!..So tacky! I can't...look...directly at it!

Entropic posted:

So we had a report from our other location that one of the security camera feeds there kept going down. They’d come in in the morning and the camera monitor screen at the back would have one blank feed and the controller would be beeping about a downed camera. But it seemed to fix itself by the time they opened. They eventually figured out the camera was only working during their open hours of 9-6. This makes no sense because not only are the cameras clearly meant to run 24/7, I don’t think the fairly primitive control software even supports time profiles. We can’t find any reason for it in the config. Finally I get sent over to look at it physically today...

That camera was replaced recently. Whoever installed it powered it by plugging it into a conveniently located power plug in the ceiling. The same one that the “Open” sign in the window is plugged into. The one on a circuit that has a light switch toggle for it on the wall that they hit to turn the sign off and on.

Sounds a lot like our locations that would just flip the main breaker when they left for the night, taking down the whole computer system. No one was there so it wasn't that bad but man that's a weird issue to try to find sometimes.

Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks

minusX posted:

Sounds a lot like our locations that would just flip the main breaker when they left for the night, taking down the whole computer system. No one was there so it wasn't that bad but man that's a weird issue to try to find sometimes.

I think I posted here once about the site where the “light switch” for the network closet was a breaker switch on a breaker box where the other switches controlled the power to PLCs running multi million dollar industrial equipment in a processing plant.

Asmodai_00
Nov 26, 2007

Entropic posted:

I think I posted here once about the site where the “light switch” for the network closet was a breaker switch on a breaker box where the other switches controlled the power to PLCs running multi million dollar industrial equipment in a processing plant.

Entropic posted:

The lightswitch controlling the wireless reminds me of this "light switch" I saw a while back:








Those first three switches control the power for the PLCs that run the large, important industrial equipment in a multi-milllion dollar malting plant that produces a significant fraction of the malted grain used by some of north america's top breweries.
The fourth one controls the power for that light bulb that's whiting out the frame in the first picture.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

Ghostlight posted:

Reception say they have not clicked on anything untoward, and yet...



NOT AS DISCREET AS ADVERTISED :mad:

MF_James
May 8, 2008
I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

Ghostlight posted:

This is what we do, but also a third one because people want to work off a desk but leave their spare cable at home, and also a fourth because they don't know where their cable went to, and a fifth because someone took their power cable off their desk while they were at lunch and they'll return the spare when theirs is returned.




Reception say they have not clicked on anything untoward, and yet...



One of our clients got an email compromised and the emails looked exactly the same, started today though, got at least 1000 messages out (probably double or triple that) before Microsoft blocked sends from that address.

MJP
Jun 17, 2007

Are you looking at me Senpai?

Grimey Drawer
Got a bit of a networking question that's out of my vein. I've been tasked with seeing if it's possible to connect to two different VPNs - Chicago and Secaucus. Chicago is a Cisco SSL VPN, the other I'm not sure the details about but we use Anyconnect and pre-existing connection profiles.

I'm connected to Secaucus and it's a Split Include IPv4 tunnel, IPv6 is Drop All. Transport protocol is DTLS, cipher is RSA_AES_256_SHA1, no compression. Secure Mobility Solution is unconfirmed/status not available.
Chicago uses Duo for two-factor authentication.

Apparently we used to use Shrew VPN to connect to Chicago but there's concerns about its security given that its last update was 2013. OpenVPN is possible but some googling shows that it doesn't work well with Cisco SSL VPN.

I'm basically backing off and looking at the larger "can this happen" question. Chicago and Secaucus are separate environments with their own AD domains with AD-integrated DNS. There is no AD trust or WAN link between them nor can there be due to PCI compliance requirements. We're using Windows 10. Eventually we'll have 5 or 6 people connected to both VPNs basically at all times.

So, is this possible? If so, any suggestions? I can get access to the VPN appliances themselves if necessary, for what it's worth.

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Just got an email from marketing saying that they're buying our sales team a bunch of Surfaces and that we need to set them up when they come in.

Yeah that's not how poo poo works, god drat it.

ilkhan
Oct 7, 2004

I LOVE Musk and his pro-first-amendment ways. X is the future.

GreenNight posted:

Yeah that's not how poo poo works, god drat it.
Yeah it is. See, I have this email saying that's what we're doing right here...

PirateDentist
Mar 28, 2006

Sailing The Seven Seas Searching For Scurvy

GreenNight posted:

Just got an email from marketing saying that they're buying our sales team a bunch of Surfaces and that we need to set them up when they come in.

Yeah that's not how poo poo works, god drat it.

"What do you mean you can't install office suite on our new chromebooks? These were only $200 instead of those expensive Lenovos! THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION."

Ugato
Apr 9, 2009

We're not?
I :yotj: ‘d recently and actually moved up the chain a bit. My official title is services engineer but I’m basically doing msp work. Thankfully I’m now front line for sysadmin stuff - backups, vcenter, hosted exchange and so on.

The bad thing is one of the places is a pet client who likes the cheapest thing every time. I can relate to this more than ever.

PirateDentist posted:

"What do you mean you can't install office suite on our new chromebooks? These were only $200 instead of those expensive Lenovos! THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION."

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

GreenNight posted:

Just got an email from marketing saying that they're buying our sales team a bunch of Surfaces and that we need to set them up when they come in.

Yeah that's not how poo poo works, god drat it.

MS is pushing the Surface line at a level of desperation that's really off-putting.

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy
Heck yeah time for another great individual customer ticket, aka there's no issue but the call center wanted to get him off the phone.



Customer unable to telnet into home server.

1) We don't support that.

2) If you wanna telnet then why the hell are you forwarding port 80 ya dingus.

3) See 1)

tactlessbastard
Feb 4, 2001

Godspeed, post
Fun Shoe

Entropic posted:

I think I posted here once about the site where the “light switch” for the network closet was a breaker switch on a breaker box where the other switches controlled the power to PLCs running multi million dollar industrial equipment in a processing plant.

My plant has a light switch in the warehouse that has a little sign affixed to it that says 'do not turn off EVER!!!!!'

The sign predates everyone that works here and nobody knows what the switch is connected to.

Thinking about turning it off now.

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy

tactlessbastard posted:

My plant has a light switch in the warehouse that has a little sign affixed to it that says 'do not turn off EVER!!!!!'

The sign predates everyone that works here and nobody knows what the switch is connected to.

Thinking about turning it off now.

I'm surprised nobody's thrown it by now.

Honestly I would've done it by my 3rd day on the job

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
The three way switches that control the bank of lights above my desk is wired such that if either switch is up, the lights are on, regardless of what the other switch says. So I just put a post it over the switch furthest from my desk telling them to leave it alone since their solution to "the switch doesn't work" is to lodge it in the middle so there's no power flowing at all.

MF_James
May 8, 2008
I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

tactlessbastard posted:

My plant has a light switch in the warehouse that has a little sign affixed to it that says 'do not turn off EVER!!!!!'

The sign predates everyone that works here and nobody knows what the switch is connected to.

Thinking about turning it off now.

You should! Part of the fun is not knowing 100% what's going to happen and pushing buttons.

One of our "T1" guys that I really lean on to help out is someone that's not afraid to push a button (within reason) and then deal with the aftermath.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Kurieg posted:

The three way switches that control the bank of lights above my desk is wired such that if either switch is up, the lights are on, regardless of what the other switch says. So I just put a post it over the switch furthest from my desk telling them to leave it alone since their solution to "the switch doesn't work" is to lodge it in the middle so there's no power flowing at all.

This sounds like a common/live reversal and would take seconds for an electrician to fix properly.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

PirateDentist
Mar 28, 2006

Sailing The Seven Seas Searching For Scurvy

MF_James posted:

You should! Part of the fun is not knowing 100% what's going to happen and pushing buttons.

One of our "T1" guys that I really lean on to help out is someone that's not afraid to push a button (within reason) and then deal with the aftermath.

A key part of troubleshooting at some point.
*push button* *thing starts working*
:v: "How did you know that would fix it?"
:yarr: "I didn't, but it's not like it's gonna get any more broken."

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5