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Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


Kyrosiris posted:

I did IT support for a medical college for a couple of years, that's child's play. Call us when being unable to access Facebook is impacting patient care. :v:

Once, long ago, I was asked by the work floor supervisor to suspend access to MSN while he was away for a couple of days, with the inference that it was to stop his staff goofing off. Whatever, I don't care, so I do it.

Next day I get two of said staff asking me why it's not working, and telling me that it's critical for them to communicate between the layout floor and the print floor. I pick up the phone on their desk and dial the print floor. "Still seems to work". Oh but what if it's noisy or we're away from the desk? "Wait, your email isn't working?".

They dropped the subject.

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ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


Kyrosiris posted:

I did IT support for a medical college for a couple of years, that's child's play. Call us when being unable to access Facebook is impacting patient care. :v:

A significant number of people I know seem to have their medical training from facebook, so that's hardly surprising.

Dirt Road Junglist
Oct 8, 2010

We will be cruel
And through our cruelty
They will know who we are

Jaded Burnout posted:

Once, long ago, I was asked by the work floor supervisor to suspend access to MSN while he was away for a couple of days, with the inference that it was to stop his staff goofing off. Whatever, I don't care, so I do it.

Next day I get two of said staff asking me why it's not working, and telling me that it's critical for them to communicate between the layout floor and the print floor. I pick up the phone on their desk and dial the print floor. "Still seems to work". Oh but what if it's noisy or we're away from the desk? "Wait, your email isn't working?".

They dropped the subject.

When I worked for the state government, they managed to block most chat apps of the time, including their web-based options (1999-2002, for context, and none of us had mobile phones). I had two friends in another building, so we’d use email like IMs. I guess the Exchange admin didn’t notice or didn’t care that three people were blasting several hundred emails a day at each other with maybe a sentence or two apiece in the body.

Life...finds a way.

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've done that. I also spent much of 2003/2004 using net send to throw messages back and forwards around the labs in college because people refused to use IRC. Messages like "Hey 192.168.0.7 are you Bob or near Bob? If not Bob tell Bob to reply to 192.168.0.69" all day every day, until the network administrators ended up disabling it. Not sure if it was due to sheer volume of stupid traffic, disrupting lab exams, or that one dude who liked to "anonymously" send misogynist abuse to whoever he noticed.

larchesdanrew posted:

Anyways, point being I am powerful and unstoppable and I am flourishing.
This entire post is great and I am very happy for you.

stevewm
May 10, 2005

Arquinsiel posted:

I've done that. I also spent much of 2003/2004 using net send to throw messages back and forwards around the labs in college because people refused to use IRC. Messages like "Hey 192.168.0.7 are you Bob or near Bob? If not Bob tell Bob to reply to 192.168.0.69" all day every day, until the network administrators ended up disabling it. Not sure if it was due to sheer volume of stupid traffic, disrupting lab exams, or that one dude who liked to "anonymously" send misogynist abuse to whoever he noticed.
This entire post is great and I am very happy for you.

I did this as well, but in middle/high school and it was the Novell Netware equivalent on Windows 3.1/NT3.5 in the mid/late 90s. Much fun was had until some dumbass sent a nasty message to a teacher. I remember seeing a group of people standing around one of the library computers figuring out how the function worked. They eventually disabled it.

All the teachers did allow us to openly play NetWars though, so that was a plus. Some of the computer lab teachers even held NetWars tournaments.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
It was a bad idea in hindsight, but we used to play Doom on the shipboard network when I was in the Navy.

It ended up being pretty good for communication, because it had chat that people were always paying attention to.

Dirt Road Junglist
Oct 8, 2010

We will be cruel
And through our cruelty
They will know who we are

Arquinsiel posted:

192.168.0.69

Nice.

PirateDentist
Mar 28, 2006

Sailing The Seven Seas Searching For Scurvy

Antigravitas posted:

Due to vacations I'm currently doing end user tickets. But it's slow thanks to nu-SARS and vacations…

Ticket came in: Printer on a non-networked lab PC doesn't work anymore.

I answered, with the full might of over 10 years of experience in the field: "Have you tried turning it off, and then on again?" :eng101:

They user did as instructed, and the issue was solved.


And that, my friends, is why they pay me the big bucks.

They really don't :negative:

I've been cursed with doing phone support for about six more months until we spin up some type of tier 0 helpdesk. I've been getting better at not insinuating the problems are all caused by the user. When I need them to turn stuff off and on, but they're not the cooperative type, I'll usually go:

:yarr: "Give me just a minute here." *does unrelated password reset ticket with lots of typey noises*

:yarr: "Okay, try turning it off and on agaaaaaain.....now."

:haw: "Whatever you did worked!"

Shugojin
Sep 6, 2007

THE TAIL THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...


PirateDentist posted:

I've been cursed with doing phone support for about six more months until we spin up some type of tier 0 helpdesk. I've been getting better at not insinuating the problems are all caused by the user. When I need them to turn stuff off and on, but they're not the cooperative type, I'll usually go:

:yarr: "Give me just a minute here." *does unrelated password reset ticket with lots of typey noises*

:yarr: "Okay, try turning it off and on agaaaaaain.....now."

:haw: "Whatever you did worked!"

Low level help desk is 99.9% tricking people into doing stuff they think is too dumb to do.

My favorite one was a guy who worked for the ISP asking me to unplug both ends of the cable, flip it around, and plug it back in. (The actual problem turned out to be, inexplicably, "modem refuses to connect at speeds greater than a 56k connection if its power is coming through a surge protector of any kind")

TheHomerTax
Dec 26, 2012

That's a high quality avatar right there.

Shugojin posted:

Low level help desk is 99.9% tricking people into doing stuff they think is too dumb to do.

My favorite one was a guy who worked for the ISP asking me to unplug both ends of the cable, flip it around, and plug it back in. (The actual problem turned out to be, inexplicably, "modem refuses to connect at speeds greater than a 56k connection if its power is coming through a surge protector of any kind")

How is that even possible?

GnarlyCharlie4u
Sep 23, 2007

I have an unhealthy obsession with motorcycles.

Proof

PirateDentist posted:

I've been cursed with doing phone support for about six more months until we spin up some type of tier 0 helpdesk. I've been getting better at not insinuating the problems are all caused by the user. When I need them to turn stuff off and on, but they're not the cooperative type, I'll usually go:

:yarr: "Give me just a minute here." *does unrelated password reset ticket with lots of typey noises*

:yarr: "Okay, try turning it off and on agaaaaaain.....now."

:haw: "Whatever you did worked!"

I'll admit I've been spoiled as gently caress doing real work until just lately.
I closed like 40 dumbass tickets this week because my protege is on vacation and our most recent hire quit.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Arquinsiel posted:

I've done that. I also spent much of 2003/2004 using net send to throw messages back and forwards around the labs in college because people refused to use IRC. Messages like "Hey 192.168.0.7 are you Bob or near Bob? If not Bob tell Bob to reply to 192.168.0.69" all day every day, until the network administrators ended up disabling it. Not sure if it was due to sheer volume of stupid traffic, disrupting lab exams, or that one dude who liked to "anonymously" send misogynist abuse to whoever he noticed.
This entire post is great and I am very happy for you.

I know most places I have been disabled net send shortly after someone discovered net send * was a thing

that was a frustrating day working at the call center

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
My father in laws works in computer science and his boss just got suspended. Appears he had a side job as a bouncer. And just got arrested for credible allegations of sexual misconduct and worse at his bouncer job.

Well I think my fil has a great chance of getting promoted.

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

RFC2324 posted:

I know most places I have been disabled net send shortly after someone discovered net send * was a thing

that was a frustrating day working at the call center
Sadly I did not discover that prior to it being disabled, or else I would have been forwarding that ascii bunny signature thing to entire labs on a script.

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


RFC2324 posted:

I know most places I have been disabled net send shortly after someone discovered net send * was a thing

that was a frustrating day working at the call center

When I first worked at First Job™, all of our desktops had public IPs. Net send got disabled after a spammer found our IP range and hit the entire Class C block.

NAT also became a thing shortly thereafter.

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


When I was at uni, both as a student and an employee, all campus computers had public IP’s

At least networking was competent enough to firewall stuff.

And friendly enough that I was able to get ports opened up to run a counter strike server

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.
I just bought a supermicro motherboard off of eBay. It’s IPMI port had a public IP address configured.

Of course its credentials were the default ADMIN / ADMIN.

I hope it was firewalled somehow, but I like to think that the reason I got the Xeon / mobo / ram combo for such a steal is that they couldn’t figure out why it was mysteriously shutting down and/or rebooting all the time, and decided it was faulty somehow.

Agrikk fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Aug 1, 2020

Shugojin
Sep 6, 2007

THE TAIL THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...


TheHomerTax posted:

How is that even possible?

not a loving clue but it was completely reproducible, just some bizarre poo poo

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


What does the WHOIS say the IP belongs to?

nexxai
Jul 17, 2002

quack quack bjork
Fun Shoe
If you happened to make a note of the IP, you should check it on Shodan

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

The Fool posted:

When I was at uni, both as a student and an employee, all campus computers had public IP’s

At least networking was competent enough to firewall stuff.

And friendly enough that I was able to get ports opened up to run a counter strike server
You just reminded me that when I went back to university in 2015 the campus wifi network for the "school of computing" for some reason gave every device a public IPv4 address, but allocation was limited so only the first however many people to connect in a day got one. Get in too late and good luck getting wifi for the day! I have literally no idea WTF they were thinking there, and happily there were plenty of other schools AND a university-wide network you could use instead. :psyduck:

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Arquinsiel posted:

You just reminded me that when I went back to university in 2015 the campus wifi network for the "school of computing" for some reason gave every device a public IPv4 address, but allocation was limited so only the first however many people to connect in a day got one. Get in too late and good luck getting wifi for the day! I have literally no idea WTF they were thinking there, and happily there were plenty of other schools AND a university-wide network you could use instead. :psyduck:

I hope they weren't firewalled

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 never bothered to check, I was that irritating poo poo who used pen and paper and would go do computering at home instead of in there :shrug:

LethalGeek
Nov 4, 2009

TheHomerTax posted:

How is that even possible?

This has been wracking my brain for a bit. Given how surge protectors work they're not altering the voltage out of its sine wave like a crap UPS can be built to do. I'm assuming this is a home modem that isn't gonna pull 20A either.

So I searched for the drat answer like a good computer janitor

quote:

Power bars usually contain Metal Oxide Varistors to protect the connected equipment from any over-voltage spikes.  They can operate without any problems for years, but, when they start to fail they can emit a large amount of RF noise into the RG-6 cable and power cable.  This can cause problems as the noise can overpower the cable signal.  Its not a typical failure, but when it does happen it can be difficult to detect..
Yeah that would absolutely mess up a cable modems ability to tune. Of course the thing that smooths with the signal then does the opposite when it breaks, duh.

Now why none of them worked at all is pretty weird. All bought at the same time?

LethalGeek fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Aug 2, 2020

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




LethalGeek posted:

Now why none of them worked at all is pretty weird. All bought at the same time?

One bad bath would do it.

And if you like that kind of signal interference, USB 3 ports emit noise on channels Bluetooth uses. The strength and frequency of the noise varies so it can be really hard to isolate this as a cause. In 6 years on a campus of 12-15000 people I'lve seen this twice.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

Shugojin posted:

Low level help desk is 99.9% tricking people into doing stuff they think is too dumb to do.

My favorite one was a guy who worked for the ISP asking me to unplug both ends of the cable, flip it around, and plug it back in. (The actual problem turned out to be, inexplicably, "modem refuses to connect at speeds greater than a 56k connection if its power is coming through a surge protector of any kind")

It's kind of a lovely request, but it does actually check a lot of good steps. It reseats both ends of the cable, ensures that it's the same cable on both ends and not cut or damaged.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

mllaneza posted:

One bad bath would do it.

And if you like that kind of signal interference, USB 3 ports emit noise on channels Bluetooth uses. The strength and frequency of the noise varies so it can be really hard to isolate this as a cause. In 6 years on a campus of 12-15000 people I'lve seen this twice.

I had a work laptop with this problem. All the ports were usb3, which caused interference with my mouse and keyboard. Sucked balls and no one actually believed me til i found the Logitech article saying "yeah, this can happen"

Shugojin
Sep 6, 2007

THE TAIL THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...


Dr. Arbitrary posted:

It's kind of a lovely request, but it does actually check a lot of good steps. It reseats both ends of the cable, ensures that it's the same cable on both ends and not cut or damaged.

Yeah it's a great one and I noted it because it checks off so many possible issues.

Also I just did it because when interacting with bottom level tech support from a vendor I just cooperate so they can check boxes to escalate it faster :shrug:

Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

LethalGeek posted:

This has been wracking my brain for a bit. Given how surge protectors work they're not altering the voltage out of its sine wave like a crap UPS can be built to do. I'm assuming this is a home modem that isn't gonna pull 20A either.

So I searched for the drat answer like a good computer janitor

Yeah that would absolutely mess up a cable modems ability to tune. Of course the thing that smooths with the signal then does the opposite when it breaks, duh.

Now why none of them worked at all is pretty weird. All bought at the same time?
That's some impressive Sherlocking.

My dashcam will stop my satnav from getting a location if you mount them within 6" of each other.
That's not an intuitive issue, especially as my smartphone manages to combine both technologies on a single, tiny board.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

It's kind of a lovely request, but it does actually check a lot of good steps. It reseats both ends of the cable, ensures that it's the same cable on both ends and not cut or damaged.
Of course, the main reason for doing it is to check that one end of the cable isn't lying on the floor, despite the user swearing on their mother's life that they checked it was plugged in.

Moo the cow fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Aug 2, 2020

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


My favorite was always

"My computer won't come on"

"What color is the light on the power button on the monitor?"

*click*

"Nevermind, it's working now."

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


Moo the cow posted:

My dashcam will stop my satnav from getting a location if you mount them within 6" of each other.
That's not an intuitive issue, especially as my smartphone manages to combine both technologies on a single, tiny board.

My dashcam has a GPS pad on it also. Perhaps yours does too?

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





RFC2324 posted:

I had a work laptop with this problem. All the ports were usb3, which caused interference with my mouse and keyboard. Sucked balls and no one actually believed me til i found the Logitech article saying "yeah, this can happen"

My kid’s desktop tower has this issue. I had to move the wireless receiver to the front USB2 ports because the interference from the USB3 ports on the back made his mouse behave oddly and erratically.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

ConfusedUs posted:

My kid’s desktop tower has this issue. I had to move the wireless receiver to the front USB2 ports because the interference from the USB3 ports on the back made his mouse behave oddly and erratically.

It made me understand why fullsize boards still always have "dedicated" k+m ports using older usb spec

Moo the cow
Apr 30, 2020

Jaded Burnout posted:

My dashcam has a GPS pad on it also. Perhaps yours does too?

Nope. Just a simple camera module.

It was a real puzzler. It seems that the internal circuit produces some kind of RF intereference - enough to stop a Garmin working, but only when right next to it.

E: it wasn't even a signal from the power cable or the battery charging circuit.
Only happend when the camera was on

Moo the cow fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 2, 2020

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Moo the cow posted:

Nope. Just a simple camera module.

It was a real puzzler. It seems that the internal circuit produces some kind of RF intereference - enough to stop a Garmin working, but only when right next to it.

It can happen with an improperly insulated circuit, and those electronics are such low power the interference wouldn't transmit far.

Shugojin
Sep 6, 2007

THE TAIL THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...


LethalGeek posted:

This has been wracking my brain for a bit. Given how surge protectors work they're not altering the voltage out of its sine wave like a crap UPS can be built to do. I'm assuming this is a home modem that isn't gonna pull 20A either.

So I searched for the drat answer like a good computer janitor

Yeah that would absolutely mess up a cable modems ability to tune. Of course the thing that smooths with the signal then does the opposite when it breaks, duh.

Now why none of them worked at all is pretty weird. All bought at the same time?

Actually at different times! I didn't live there or have to deal with that connection for very long so it was ehhhh. The connection did also drop in and out during thunderstorms. I ended up assuming the apartment building was just a giant shitpile of weird wiring and moving, it just sticks in my head as "that was such a weird problem" :v:

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


RFC2324 posted:

It made me understand why fullsize boards still always have "dedicated" k+m ports using older usb spec

That happens when a USB spec is new enough for the drivers not to be bundled with the OS - if you used a USB3 port to connect a keyboard and tried to install Windows 7 you’d probably struggle to get it detected.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Thanks Ants posted:

That happens when a USB spec is new enough for the drivers not to be bundled with the OS - if you used a USB3 port to connect a keyboard and tried to install Windows 7 you’d probably struggle to get it detected.

I thought at this point your k+m was handled by the bios? I know i can use my wireless k+m in my bios long before the os loads, I would think it just hands off as whatever the os will take?

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



RFC2324 posted:

I thought at this point your k+m was handled by the bios? I know i can use my wireless k+m in my bios long before the os loads, I would think it just hands off as whatever the os will take?

Generally when the OS loads its HAL, it evicts all the I/O code the BIOS supplied and begins using its own drivers entirely. That's why if you try to install an old Windows NT on a system with USB keyboard you will lose the keyboard ability soon after it begins loading its drivers. Unless you supply a USB driver for it too.

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RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

nielsm posted:

Generally when the OS loads its HAL, it evicts all the I/O code the BIOS supplied and begins using its own drivers entirely. That's why if you try to install an old Windows NT on a system with USB keyboard you will lose the keyboard ability soon after it begins loading its drivers. Unless you supply a USB driver for it too.

thats dumb, tho I can see it making sense on older OS/hardware setups.

also, thinking about it, modern, since I bet the handoff segment would be a shitshow of hardware manufacturers refusing to stick to the standards

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