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Had a fun one to deal with recently. Our ticket system decided it was going to be all  and just log in users as the 1st user record in the database instead of the correct user (yeah, argh). So one day we accumulated about a dozen work orders for someone who had no idea what we were talking about when we arrived to fulfill them. We have yet to figure out who any of these people are because the work orders are as descriptive as you would imagine they would be, and without being tied to the correct username, there is no identifying information.
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Dec 3, 2008 20:04
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Griz posted:I have to dispatch hardware cases to a company that does this at the last place I worked the highest priority was "as soon as possible" gently caress
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Oct 22, 2009 04:22
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I think sometimes the techs can be as bad as the users, if not worse due to their higher level of authority. I started a new IT job (yay computer janitor!) and I was totally blown away by my new employers password management. In *nix, you can go from the root user to any unprivileged user with the su command and no knowledge of their password. This is a great feature. As far as I know Windows lacks anything similar, and they decided to work around this by assigning users' passwords. There is a share that is full of word docs, each doc full of passwords. This seems totally retarded for a number of reasons, from pure security to user accountability, but it has been super convenient. Got to stop by a users desk and do something but they're gone and their console is locked? Look 'em up and log in! User is complaining that they're getting weird behavior with their login? Drop in and login as them after hours! Previously I've worked at places with workarounds (reset the user's password to some personal information and check the "change password at next login" box), but nothing has seemed ideal. I'm afraid that this is going to get more and more convenient and no longer seem weird and wrong, which it is. What have you guys done to solve similar issues?
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Dec 31, 2009 19:42
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Dick Trauma posted:And... my boss once again did not notify the CEO's assistant that he was taking a half day. I can understand not asking the CEO for permission if it's "a plumbing emergency" but after last Friday there is no possible excuse for his not notifying the assistant. I think this thread needs to be renamed "Dick Trauma's Lessons in Pushing Your Luck For Fun and Profit"
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May 7, 2010 23:22
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Here is how it will go down: Wednesday, your boss will be fired. Thursday, they will promoted to fill his giant gaping shoes. Friday, the BSA will show up and make your life a living hell. At least, that's how things have been going so far...
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May 11, 2010 05:50
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See, what you have is an overabundance of trucks, and not enough pipe... It sounds like they're bullshitting you - I've never heard of an ISP letting you go over your maximum bandwidth and it not being a conscious decision on their part.
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May 19, 2010 21:46
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Also, keep in mind whether you are a 1099 contract employee or not - if you are, your paycheck may not be as big as you think! 
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May 26, 2010 04:45
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With goatse it isn't really much of a 'pop,' but more of a tear.
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May 28, 2010 06:17
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Syano posted:What do you guys do with tickets that never get responses? I'm about 5 minutes from just closing about 10 tickets that are open in the system that we cant get resolution on because the end user refuses to respond. I don't understand how this happens. Sure, if you have issues and you want help, you put in a ticket. If you legitimately want help, why wouldn't you help the person servicing your ticket by answering questions? When you're not helping me help you, I start thinking you don't actually want help with your computer. If you don't want help, why are you putting in a ticket?
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Jun 7, 2010 22:02
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Argh! The way my company does updates is about to give me an aneurysm. We've been using Autopatcher, and while it works okay for XP it doesn't work at all for our older clients running w2k or the newer ones running win7 (we've been steadily moving the w2k people over to win7, at least). We have been pretty much going on site to every client and manually installing patches and it is such a gigantic pain in the rear end. I think a WSUS server would be a huge step forward, but I'm getting some pushback from my boss. We have a ton of tiny clients (<10 computers) that I thought it would be great to set a single WSUS server hosted on our site, and just point the tiny ones to our server. I've been told that WSUS won't route over layer-3 networks and that you need to be in the same forest (or at least trusted domains) for it to work. I'm not MCSE genius, but it seems like I've done IP routing to connect to WSUS, and I don't recall there being any need for the server and clients to be in the same domain. However, I'm no MCSE and I don't think I could argue that with my boss. Am I way out in left field? Or is this do-able? Is there a better way to keep a bunch of external clients (different domains, different locations, etc) up to date?
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Jun 8, 2010 18:27
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Dyscrasia posted:What is the benefit to having a remote WSUS server? Why not just get the Windows Updates from Microsoft? All WSUS does is give you a local Windows Update host and the ability to approve updates. As far as users on the client side are concerned, its the same thing. All of the settings for configuring the clients is group policy stuff. I would have thought WSUS would give you more reporting - admittadly most of my experience is with SCCM which sits on top of WSUS and gives you TONS of reporting. Does vanilla WSUS not give you feedback on which computers have installed updates and which ones haven't? I think there is the odd update we don't push out to clients here and there, it would be nice to be able to administratively control what gets pushed out.
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Jun 8, 2010 18:43
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Dyscrasia posted:It sure is. Yeah, admittedly it doesn't help with bandwidth use. I was hoping that over the course of a month, the downloads would be spread out enough not to be a huge concern. The big boss was proposing hiring Indians to log in remotely in the middle of the night to run updates manually. There has got to be a better solution 
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Jun 8, 2010 18:47
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Rohaq posted:An external, foreign organisation logging onto your computers in the middle of the night to run updates? What? Thats the killer, they're not even our computers - we do contract IT for OTHER people! At some point in the past, WSUS was used but has since been removed. In it's place has been a nightmare of mishmash solutions. I don't think running automatic updates is the solution, it seems like we have been running into a lot more poisonous updates lately - for instance, Office Compatiblity Pack Service Pack 2 totally breaks the compatibility pack on windows 2000 - thanks for that extensive testing Microsoft! So we couldn't install that update on any client sites without totally breaking things. An ideal solution would allow us to easily select which updates get installed, and easily see which computers are not up-to-date. I don't really care where the updates come from.
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Jun 8, 2010 20:02
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fishmech posted:Microsoft is frankly not going to care whether a security update breaks an optional program on an OS that'll be dead in about 40 days. I don't disagree, but we have clients running windows 2000 and the compatibility pack and they are relying on their computers to work so I feel like I should do what I need to keep them running. In this case that means not enabling automatic updates and hoping that the critical updates are all good. As far as I can tell WSUS was abandoned because the big boss doesn't like it. It "doesn't cross layer-3 networks" (what) and you need to be in the same domain or at least trusted (wut) which SBS won't do. I come from a pretty heavy SCCM background, and these hands on updates are retarded. I'd rather spend my time chasing down a couple stragglers that won't install updates than installing them by hand on hundreds of computers. It sounds like the dam broke though, and I will be in charge of setting up a WSUS server for a test. Nevermind that it isn't part of my job description, I just want to get out of doing updates manually however I have to.
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Jun 8, 2010 21:15
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Rohaq posted:Won't.. cross layer 3 networks? What? Is he referring to the OSI layer model? I really don't get it. He is undoubtedly referring to OSI layers; I think what he meant is it only works over a LAN. I could see it "works best over a LAN" or "intended to be used on a LAN" but he shat over my idea of a common WSUS server because WSUS doesn't work on layer-3 or some poo poo. This place has its idiosyncrasies. The worst part is even if that was true, it could be worked around using clever VPNs - we already tie all our client sites to a common point via VPN to do monitoring with ZABBIX (I was totally not involved in this clusterfuck). Ideally I'll throw together a server with WSUS on it, we'll point a bunch of the smaller clients at it to authorize updates, and when they are authorized, they will download them directly from MS. We will be able to then verify in the WSUS console which machines have which updates installed. I'm feeling good about this project - even if parts don't work, I think the whole is going to work, and it's going to save me so much time and frustration. I'm sure I will get kudos, a raise, and the girl. I can feel it man. EDIT: Oh, I guess one of the reasons WSUS got pulled out is every site was running its own server, and a lot of these clients are pretty small. They have one iffy server running SBS and the million services that provides, and it couldn't handle the additional requirements WSUS imposed. Also, anything that doesn't work the way my boss thinks it should is broken and abandoned pretty quick. For instance - our imaging process is retarded. The use a linux tool called fsarchiver to take disk images and restore them - we have WIMs, I would prefer to push them out using WDS or something, but whatever. A client moves from W2K to Win7, they get a new HD for each computer so it's easier to clone the disks, then we go onsite and swap them and do all the domain joining and poo poo. I think it's dumb, but it works. Except I've been noticing a lot of machines lately without virtual memory turned on - machines without much actual memory either. Turns out virtual memory is turned off on the master image because the swap file was too big and fsarchiver grabbed it, so that was their solution to cut 2 gbs off of the master image. I guess people are supposed to turn it back on after imaging? I'm not really sure to honest. There isn't a rolleyes big enough. My last job we would reimage a machine over the network after PXE booting, it would boot up after it was finished, rename itself, join the domain, and be ready to use without any further interaction. This poo poo is stupid but WSUS might be the baby step to get things moving in the right direction. Delta-Wye fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jun 8, 2010 |
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Jun 8, 2010 21:36
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Midelne posted:He's clueless. I have WSUS running over five different class C subnets. Well, for what it's worth he runs the business (owns it, in fact) and while he might have used to be in charge of IT (small business that has grown a bit) he isn't any more and he doesn't usually pretend to be.
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Jun 9, 2010 01:35
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Billy the Mountain posted:I know. We have tried installing the SSL cert several times on several phones. The phones connect to the server but are never able to actually download any of the mail. I'm also looking into possibly using OWA instead of active sync. We ran into something that sounds pretty similar because some genius had installed the wrong cert on the mail server. They were all self-signed so noone noticed (you get the same "this cert is invalid!" message for just self-signed and self-signed + wrong server certs) until we tried to connect a few phones, which were pickier. Delta-Wye fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 20, 2010 |
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Jul 20, 2010 22:03
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I have bad news my cj brethren - today is my last day! I am off to grad school and hopefully not a career that involves changing iAdults' iDiapers. I suspect I will probably end up following thread for a while, but I also kind of hope I never have to think of this job ever again. Probably my current favorite part of my current (for 6 more hours) position is the Windows update policy. WSUS is big and scary, and we're far too busy to look for alternatives. Fair enough, we are really busy, but in truth we're really only too busy to look for alternatives because we install updates, by hand, on every computer, once a month. What a huge waste of tech time 
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Jul 23, 2010 18:33
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devmd01 posted:Hollly poo poo. About the only way WSUS is big and scary is if you have thousands of apps that are absolutely mission-critical and can't afford the time to test updates on them. The time spent on doing updates manually could be used to do update testing, not to mention the gain of user productivity. Ugh, yeah. I would be totally happy if we were that on top of stuff. I actually set up a demo WSUS server. It worked, but the idea was shot down because running a common WSUS server hosted by us for all our clients wouldn't work because WSUS isn't "layer 3 aware". This place is almost embarrassing. We are an IT company that does outsourced IT for nonprofits and small medical shops and stuff, and I kind of suspect that part of it is to beef up our billable time. It works for that, but it pisses of the clients because we burn so many hours and they have lots of real issues that need to be looked at A few of my recent favorite tasks: Task Name: The Windows screen has gone black posted:We are receiving a windows message that states: Windows Genuine Version error. posted:Lee says that there is an error that keeps popping up asking him to authenticate his version of windows. It also pops up an error saying that his Windows is not genuine. Task Name Fix Windows 7 activation popup posted:All of our computers are still receiving the pop up to activate windows 7 and has the statement in the lower left hand corner of the screen that this copy of windows is not genuine....We keep ignoring and we are able to use...... Three different clients, three windows 7 rollouts, three times we forget to purchase/put in licenses. Well, not "we" as I wasn't involved, but you know. 
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Jul 23, 2010 19:44
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devmd01 posted:Almost? Well, I haven't really gotten to the embarrassing stuff  We have an open task from 01/22/2010 (130 business days ago, according to our task tracking software) because a client's backup tape drive for their servers wasn't working right. They haven't had a good backup since - no mail backup, no data backup, no nothing. They requested we close the task because they thought it's been taken care of for months. I guess they've been changing tapes diligently since January unaware that they aren't running the backup jobs anymore. 
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Jul 23, 2010 20:31
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If you mean DR as in disaster recovery, if they had a disaster we would probably be yelled at a bunch. Well, not a bunch, probably quite a lot. And, well, not "we" as I'm done here, but you know. EDIT: I've been pushing for infrastructure/process upgrades pretty heavily last few months. Mostly WSUS to reduce our workload a bit, but also WDS for pushing out images. I got stuck at a point because you need domain admin privs to set WDS up and I don't have a admin account on our companies network. I talked to the only person who wasn't on vacation who had an admin logiin, and was told that it was totally inappropriate for me to be doing such work on the clock. Such research should be done during my lunch time (don't take lunch, so I'm already at a 9 hour day) or after hours (I work over 10 hours once or twice a week as it is). I would be lying if this conversation wasn't part of the impetus to move on. I'm confident with an admin account I could have set up WDS and imaged the 5 laptops I was working on faster than booting a winpe cd and loading a wim off of a usb cdrom one laptop at a time . It literally took 5 hours, and was so interactive I couldn't effectively start the process and go work on other stuff. The company has a lot of awesome legacy stuff setup - our older clients are configured well, our task tracking software was done in house and is awesome, but all that stuff is a couple years old at this point. The current crew (myself included) is standing still while the place crumbles around our ears
Delta-Wye fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jul 23, 2010 |
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Jul 23, 2010 20:44
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stubblyhead posted:I am so glad that things did not pan out for me there. It is probably for the best, but at that point I was convinced all they need is one or two really good guys to push them over the top and things would start going well again. They recently hired two very good techs (and one maybe guy to answer phones) but no new sys admins It wasn't until I gave up waiting on our current admins to do something and started trying to do infrastructure work myself (WSUS, WDS, et al) that I got some real heavy pushback about improvements and realized that things are not looking too good here in the long run. It was easier to take when I assumed that the sysadmins were busy instead of inept/lazy.One of them has had a task to create a resource account for use w/ outlook for a month and a half. I don't have permissions to create the user, but I would be happy to do the rest of the setup. It is two or three minutes of work to create a bare bones user and give my user account permissions to do the changes that are required to turn it into a resource account. I have a hard time justifying to myself that he hasn't had two or three minutes in the past month and a half
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Jul 23, 2010 21:23
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