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Dick Trauma posted:Dick: "Ok, now just log out and right back in and that should take care of it." I swear every time I ask a user to log off they either choose Shutdown or ask me "Shutdown or Log Off?", right after I said "Log Off".
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May 20, 2010 00:25
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For me Monday is always "my printer don't work" day. Since it's a holiday today and 4 day work week, that means Tuesday will be "ZOMG I CAN'T PRINT" day.
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May 31, 2010 20:21
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Rolling with about 2/3rds P4(Celeron) 1.7 GHz here. I finally got them to put replacements in the capital budget over the next 2 years. Fortunately they're all running XP but still slow as poo poo with 384 MB of RAM. Once we get those retired then I can start looking at a Windows 7 migration. I'd like to use shadow copies, but we've got a Samba 3 DC. With My Docs redirected to a network location deleted files don't even go to the Recycle Bin. We do nightly snapshot backups to disk with rsnapshot so it isn't too hard to recover a file, but if it's something they created today then it's just gone. I guess I'm pretty lucky because despite the incompetence of most staff here, I hardly ever have to recover files.
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Jun 3, 2010 20:01
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WPKG works great for deploying and upgrading software but the documentation is absolute poo poo. I've been contemplating writing a proper manual for it, but I just never seem to have time.
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Jun 18, 2010 06:06
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Dick Trauma posted:Goddamn it Avaya Office Manager, what part of "Unconditional Forward" do you not understand? Ahahaha, Avaya software is horrible. It took me about 2 years to figure out that I needed to check "Forward Huntgroup Calls" along with Unconditional Forward. We're on an older version that has all kinds of problems from needing to reboot the entire system for minor changes to management software that crashes unless you do things in a very specific order. All of that is probably fixed in later versions, but the process to update the software is way more trouble than it should be. I don't want the extra work, but I hope someday the white box voice mail server our vendor gave us dies and I can use it as justification to start the phone system over from scratch on the latest software release. To contribute ticket related content: We just implemented mandatory password protected screen savers. I'm now finding out just how many staff don't log out of their computers. The other people they share it with are coming in to find a locked computer now. Are there any good ways to do automatic log outs on XP?
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Jun 28, 2010 21:51
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EoRaptor posted:Are shift changes at regular hours? Adjust the users logon hours setting and use group policy enforce logoff at a certain time. You'll need to manually adjust logon hours per user, but it's scriptable. Not even remotely regular. It looks like MS provides a screen saver with this feature in one of the resource kits, so I'll look into that.
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Jun 29, 2010 01:55
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Lum posted:IIRC That one just logs you off, no warning or anything. Winexit.scr provides a configurable countdown window with customizable message before the log off: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314999
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Jun 29, 2010 17:18
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Octoshape, a P2P streaming video flash plugin, offered on CNN's homepage that can be installed by a user without admin rights. What could possibly go wrong?
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Jul 15, 2010 23:45
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coyo7e posted:While this is a good point, the most likely point of failure on a computer monitor is the power button. I've seen a couple of bad ports and my share of dead pixels, but I swear to god every 90 lb old lady in the organization turn their monitor on and off each day - religiously - with a goddamned hammer or something. My users either never turn the monitor off, or they turn everything off at the power strip to "save electricity" meaning I can't turn them on with wake-on-lan. I've never seen a broken power button on a monitor yet though.
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Jul 19, 2010 18:03
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Citizen Z posted:There are 10 people in this office and 11 multifunctions+ a check printer. Obviously they need high availability and redundancy for their MISSION CRITICAL print jobs.
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Jul 30, 2010 00:59
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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day! I bought myself some mini cupcakes to celebrate. frozenphil posted:Other fun things at the office include having no budget, no control over what stuff people buy other than making recommendations, no ability to manage the network past the walls as the university's IT manages that, every department is on a separate vlan and everyone uses static, publicly routable IPs, because of the static IPs and no ability to manage the network or control purchasing we can't do any imaging of any kind so I end up doing bare metal installations a lot, and we only get a raise every 3 or 4 years. There's more but this is already a wall of text. You can still take advantage of clonezilla without imaging over the network. It will copy between local disks, and since it understands the filesystems the copy will go much faster than plain dd.
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Jul 30, 2010 17:11
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frozenphil posted:Is that with the live CD, because the live CD sounds like the exact same thing I'm doing now, just with Clonezilla instead of Knoppix and dd. Yes, with the live CD. Clonezilla is better because dd is reading and writing every single sector. Clonezilla understands the filesystem and reads and writes only the stuff it needs to recreate the filesystem, resulting in dramatically faster imaging.
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Jul 30, 2010 18:38
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frozenphil posted:I'm just not seeing how it will significantly simplify my workflow over using Knoppix and dd. I'll still have to drag out the external hard drive, boot to a cd, and copy the image over. Time spent on the actual imaging doesn't matter to me, having to physically setup each machine with the external hard drive, boot to the cd, and image does matter to me. I don't know how you're doing it exactly with dd, but Clonezilla does have a fairly quick wizard menu system. I find that reduces mistakes typing the same commands over and over. That and the increased imaging speed are the only benefits. Why haven't you repurposed an old shitbox to run your own private network in your office for imaging? I'd bring in something from home or even buy something myself just for the time it would save over messing with external drives. That along with Clonezilla would make a huge difference for you.
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Jul 30, 2010 19:27
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Dick Trauma posted:I'll try for the brief version: If they really wanted you back they would've called you instead of jerking you around.
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Aug 6, 2010 03:13
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Spermy Smurf posted:Speaking of USB... I see this on my XP machines. It creates a copy for each USB port the printer is plugged into.
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Aug 11, 2010 22:27
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quote:Good morning, I have a couple of pictures that need to be placed on the At least she's polite about it.
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Aug 17, 2010 17:12
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Our Samsung color laser does an automatic "registration" alignment every time I replace a toner cartridge. Check the manual, maybe you can force it to do one.
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Aug 24, 2010 17:34
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kensei posted:stubblyhead, coyo7e, fishmanpet are a couple more that I know of off the top of my head. I'm out in the boonies of Western Washington. My workplace is quite nice compared to the rest of you so I never have much to contribute, and I just enjoy reading the thread. But since I'm posting... We contract with another similar company for access to a piece of software. We access this software through Terminal Services. Initial passwords all follow the same scheme: #, intials, static string. Everyone knows or can easily guess everyone else's passwords. We can't change our own passwords. What's their plan? "We're looking into setting up a website for external users to change their passwords." I'm really not sure why our accounts can't just change passwords like any other domain account. Having dealt with these people for several years I'm sure it's some kind of collosal fuckup that I'll never know about, or just plain incompetence. Oh, both companies are subject to HIPAA.  edit: I forgot to mention the software's audit feature is not used because "it takes up too much system resources".
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Sep 23, 2010 01:10
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RedMagus posted:I do have a question though, do any of you deal with those aircards from AT&T, or Verizon? How often do you have to deal with users breaking them? It seems that ever day, someone's snapped off the connector, or broken them, or is complaining of bad signal, or even just the drat thing stops working. Are they just that bad, or do we have a crop of people who just don't take care of state equipment? I insisted on getting laptops with the embedded aircards for exactly those reasons, and I never get any problems reports for them.
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Oct 7, 2010 17:43
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RedMagus posted:Did you have any issues with encryption on them? The main issues they disabled the internal aircard was because it wouldn't automatically sync with our encrypted network. Not sure what encryption you mean. We use OpenVPN running in the background so it's all automatic once the Internet is connected over the aircard.
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Oct 7, 2010 18:17
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Fortis posted:I shouldn't have told him to elaborate on what he FELT was relevant. You aren't alone. I have several users that insist on putting the entire request in the subject, and then don't respond when I ask what the problem is since I can't read the whole subject. Of course this is balanced out by most of the other tickets having one word subjects like "help" or "printer" and if I'm really lucky they have a message body with actual details.
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Nov 3, 2010 17:58
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What is it about Mondays that causes so many printer problems?quote:Ticket subject: having problems printing
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Nov 15, 2010 20:11
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Is there any finance software that doesn't suck? Our finance guy was looking at getting Sage MIP something or other, but that might not happen due to budget cuts. I think the only other option at our size is MS Great Plains stuff. I'm OK sticking with QuickBooks Pro because I never have to touch it except for the occasional update every few months. I sent a ticket in to a supplier for a broken signature pad and got a phone call back from them inside 5 minutes. They asked a few simple questions and then got the address to ship out a replacement. I'm still in shock at how easy it was.
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Nov 16, 2010 19:41
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Farking Bastage posted:Has anyone had a good experience with any AV vendors lately? I don't think we can afford Kapersky, maybe the Microsoft one, but it has no admin utility and I would have to figure out how to script the install. Thoughts? NOD32 is good as a product, but to actually buy it you'll have to deal with a reseller, and they can be a crapshoot if you don't already have a good one. We got a deal being a non-profit with 100-200 licenses of about $10/seat for the initial year, and $7/seat for yearly renewals. I have no idea what the regular rate is. I don't think the MSE license allows for commercial use since they offer the enterprise version called Forefront. The WPKG wiki has an entry for it if you really want to try scripting something: http://wpkg.org/Microsoft_Security_Essentials
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Nov 17, 2010 18:45
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^^ There's a new version of Reader out today... Adobe Reader X. The X stands for extremely sandboxed I guess.HandsomeBen posted:I refuse to believe this is true This is part of the reason why everyone hates HR. They act all outraged and shocked when told of something not being done correctly, but then they never actually start doing it correctly. Suggestions to improve their hiring and firing processes are warmly received and then disappear into a black hole. I consider myself very lucky to get somewhat timely info on new hires, but that's mostly happening because HR pawned it off on the supervisors to do. I still only get notified about staff leaving about 5% of the time.
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Nov 19, 2010 18:20
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TomBosleyExp posted:Thing is, it actually is a slight security hole in that you are allowing everyone to see everyone else's username. Accessing an account requires two parts, a username and a password, and you're letting half of that be visible to anyone (who already has access). It takes less time than you might think to brute force a windows password. Shouldn't the authentication backend be locking accounts after X wrong passwords in Y minutes?
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Dec 1, 2010 18:17
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Our primary business application was upgraded last week. One of the dialog boxes is too tall to fit on a 1024x768 screen. A substantial number of our screens are 15" LCDs. The response from our vendor: "We don't support screens smaller than 17 inches."
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Dec 15, 2010 18:42
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We're one step removed from the actually vendor, and can't switch to anything else due to incredibly frustrating political reasons.Monsoon posted:I'm curious how many people work at companies that are really lax about password security and their experiences with it. I work on an helpdesk that also provides after-hours support to a few client companies. One of them finally decided to give us admin accounts on their system and the security setup is atrocious. We all have separate NT accounts but a common password. Also from what I can tell, it may be possible to reset the NT password and hard drive encryption without proper verification that you're not talking to a thief. Another client has a common password from the top 50 list. We're paying another company (not the vendor) for access to our main business app which is running on Terminal Services (wrapped in some lovely client). It's been well over a year and we still can't change our passwords. All the user accounts are firstnamelastname and all the passwords follow the exact same pattern using the user's initials. The system also doesn't have any sort of audit log enabled because of "performance" reasons. We're all subject to HIPAA regulations. Their latest solution to the password changing problem was not to uncheck the "User cannot change password" flag in our accounts, but rather to hire a consultant to setup some sort of website where we can register and change our passwords through it instead. I'm fairly certain that what they're really setting up is a password recovery system and they still don't understand that we just want to change our drat passwords occasionally. Convenience trumps security until you get audited or publicly embarrassed. Then things are done just well enough to satisfy the auditors, and slowly erode until the next audit.
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Dec 15, 2010 19:41
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So a ticket came in... User says the relatively new laptop won't hold a charge. Over the course of several days I suggest things to check and nothing works. It won't turn on unless it's plugged in. The battery charging light doesn't come on when it's plugged in. The user finally has time for me to look at it and there's no battery in the laptop. Apparently it fell out while inside the laptop bag and the user didn't notice. 
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Jan 13, 2011 20:22
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So we're getting a retarded password management website to reset our passwords for an app hosted on a terminal server. The site doesn't have a domain name, just IP address, and isn't protected by SSL. I sent in a ticket about sending our usernames, passwords, and security questions and answers unencrypted over the Internet and got this response:Vendor posted:While the connection is not https the data actually is encrypted between the user and the software so it is fine. I showed them the packet dump of the connection with the HTTP POST and username/password in the clear. Now they're adding encryption to the site. A ticket came in yesterday that a network printer wasn't working. Every other printer works fine through our print server, even the same models, just not this one. It works fine when installed to print directly, bypassing the print server. I have no idea what's wrong with it. When I try to print a test page it just says "Test page failed to print." There's a reason why the printer scenes were in Office Space.
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Feb 3, 2011 18:31
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Biowarfare posted:^^ 140? We'll see. They claimed to set up HTTPS, but it isn't connecting so they must have forgotten to allow the port in the firewall. The next fun part is going to be seeing what kind of cert they used. I don't think you can register a cert for an IP address, so we'll get the big scary warning page if it's self-signed, or a warning that the domain doesn't match. Then they'll have to figure out how to get a domain for this site. The site is going live next Wednesday, when everyone will be forced to use it to change their passwords. In testing the site I managed to lock my own account because the reset password feature doesn't work right. Next week should be fun.
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Feb 4, 2011 00:16
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notwithoutmyanus posted:edit: VVV: what exactly do you do to clean that other than use a can of duster while wearing a facemask? You'd probably want to start with a vacuum to get the bulk of it, and then keep the vacuum running while blowing the rest out and sucking up the clouds of dust. Facemask is a great idea unless you like black boogers.
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Feb 4, 2011 17:39
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A ticket was resolved today after several months! User reported all files in a shared folder were read-only. I checked permissions and ownership, everything was correct. User refused to provide an error message other than the files being read-only. In fact, user didn't respond to any questions until the ticket was closed. User reports same problem months later. Does not respond to questions, does not provide detailed error message. I gave myself access to the group and tried to open the files myself. Hmm, that's a weird message. Someone saved all the files with the Remove Hidden Data tool, which sets the "Recommend read-only flag", which asks you every time you open the file if you want it opened read-only. Most of my users are great, but there are a few like this that struggle to type out an intelligible sentence, and never answer direct questions asked of them.
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Feb 7, 2011 18:54
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Moey posted:There is now one hanging in my office. People who barge in with problems will hopefully notice it. I wish I could get away with posting it on the outside of my door. I made this one for your door:  Click here for the full 600x700 image.
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Feb 9, 2011 20:15
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A ticket came in at 4:59 PMquote:I'm unable to get on Internet Explorer, and I need to be able to do Nice enough request, person is in a department that works 24/7 so I figure I'll try to help even though I was just about to leave for the day. Load up IE, works fine. Load the site, works fine. Respond to the ticket that it works fine, is there an error message? No response.... after about 15 minutes I check the server to see that they logged off right after sending the ticket.  It was a really appropriate end to a lovely Monday.
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Feb 15, 2011 17:35
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Goon Matchmaker posted:I had some guy put in a help-desk ticket this morning whining because he can't change his homepage and everyone else can. Why are users so petty? Arrgghh. Ticket Closed: Disabled changing homepage for all users.
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Feb 22, 2011 18:41
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mono posted:Why the gently caress do people do this poo poo without asking first? I had a similar situation with a particularly difficult user. Sometimes I think it's a case of "better to ask forgiveness than permission" but usually it's just a case of wanting to fix something NOW and not thinking it through. User A sent in a ticket that says they swapped printers with User B and now neither of them can print. The intentions were good enough, but the execution... User B is a more prestigious user, doing lots of work that we bill highly for. They were having trouble with the printer. Instead of contacting the Help Desk and getting a new printer installed within 30 minutes, User B complained to User A who helpfully suggested trading printers and just went ahead and did it themselves. User A does other strange things like purchasing a lovely HP inkjet printer at Walmart and asking me to install it, instead of complaining that the printer they had wasn't working and get a free, non-lovely replacement. A number of staff also decide to rearrange their office, or move to a new office without giving me any warning. Then they call to complain that their phone or computer doesn't work. When I arrive at their office nothing is plugged in. But it could be worse, like Movey's situation. 
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Feb 23, 2011 23:19
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bbcisdabomb posted:I have the opposite problem of posters in this thread- I never get donations. I volunteer at a charity, why are people on the east coast just throwing theirs away What kind of stuff are you looking for? We've been giving away old PCs (think 7 year old P4s with 256 ram and 40 gig drives) to needy clients. The only feedback I've heard so far was a request for a modem, which I was happy to part with.
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Feb 24, 2011 01:30
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ValhallaSmith posted:I think I'm just going to start pressuring them to break down and buy some powerconnect 2824s or Procurve 1810-24s. I need cheap. Anyone know how much I can talk dell or HP down if I buy a couple? It's worth mentioning over and over: if you're a non-profit (or public library) look into TechSoup. You can get extremely cheap software licenses and reasonably cheap new Cisco hardware.
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Feb 24, 2011 07:52
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wolrah posted:Out of a few thousand users on one switch, nearly two out of every three had expired, likely still default, passwords on their voicemail and less than 100 had even tried to log in to their web access portal. Our wonderful PBX (Avaya IP Office ) has a feature where you can log in to voice mail without a password (Menu / Menu / Msgs / Voice), and it can't be disabled.A call came in this morning from a panicked user. The police were asking them who had this user's company cell phone before they did. It's a brand new phone for someone who just started working less than 2 months ago. How the hell should I know who had the number before them? Told them to tell the police to call Verizon. I love the easy tickets.
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Feb 24, 2011 18:16
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