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I'm working right now with a client running XP and Win 2000 to get him from version 8 to (current, win 0 compatible) version 15 of our software. It is taking multiple weeks and involves a temporarily borrowed 2008 server to bridge the gap between 2000 and 2012 and the ticket has already been open for 3 weeks and my boss is sending out departmental emails reminding everyone that calls open more than two weeks need to get TOP PRIORITY and  Also a bunch of our customers have been unexpectedly updated to Windows 10 because our bread and butter is little mom and pop stores who run win 7pro with no domain. CNET must have gotten a huge bump in traffic just from us linking the rollback instructions. A Pinball Wizard fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 03:41
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Goddamn this thread makes me feel happy about my job. About the only thing I have to complain about is bullshit office politics (which aren't even that bad, compared to some jobs I've had) and the occasional "I'm an IT guy, I know all about X" (then why are you calling me?) Otherwise it's just helping olds figure out how shift-delete works in Outlook so they can get their e-mail to work again. Here's literally the most frustrating ticket I've had all month: Most of our clients are small businesses who work with local IT providers and only call us if there's an issue with our software. One of our services is basically an RDP session to our terminal server farm where we run our old-rear end fragile software in a secure and locked down environment. A customer's IT called in because no one could get their e-mail inside the TS environment; he gives me the URL and IP of the Exchange server, and I log into the environment and run a ping and traceroute. Sure enough, every request times out and the traffic never even makes it to the border router. I put in a work order to the environment admins to take a look. First response: "They need to contact their e-mail vendor." Second response: "Timeouts on the traceroute are normal, they don't mean traffic's not going through." Third response: "Fine, I'll have engineering take a look." Fourth response (4 hours after the call came in): "Looks like it got blocked by our proxy filter for some reason. We unblocked it, have them try again." Now to be fair, they will hire literally anyone for my position and a disturbing number of my co-workers pronounce it "tracer-tee", but cut me some slack, dude.
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Jun 15, 2016 03:08
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If a user's PST file ha reached its maximum size, they won't be able to send or receive new mail until it's brought down in size. They also can't move mail to the deleted items folder because... I dunno, ghosts? So they need to go in and shift-delete some mail, which permanently deletes it instead of moving it to deleted. They could just empty their deleted items, of course, but too many of them want to go through it first to make sure nothing important is in there. 
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Jun 15, 2016 04:19
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notwithoutmyanus posted:I meant exactly as you suspected: He's got to be somebody's son right? Or blowing the hiring manager?
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Jun 15, 2016 12:40
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The desktop background gpo on my work machine stopped working for some reason. I put in a ticket not because I missed the constant reminder of my company's core values that used to always be there, but because I didn't want some tech illiterate middle manager to walk by and accuse me of hacking my machine. The internal help desk tech ran gpupdate and rebooted and when my pretty pretty lighthouse background appeared went "uhh.... it'll probably take effect eventually, just enjoy it for now" and closed the ticket. So I figure I'm in the clear now and have changed my background to the loudest, pinkest sunset wallpaper that ships with Windows 7. It's very soothing to look at while I explain for the nth time the difference between disconnecting and logging out of an rdp session.
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Jun 16, 2016 23:37
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Wiggly posted:You IT team probably got caught by the Windows update that went out on Tuesday which has been causing problems with certain GPO's. Been a lot of talk about the last 2 days. Interesting. We had another Microsoft update semi-break* our software's ability to interface with Outlook in this same batch. Just a great Patch Tuesday all around. *it works but users get a "file or directory not found" message. What file or directory? 
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Jun 17, 2016 00:19
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pixaal posted:Why do people not test software? I have test on my computer, then I have a user that is extremely vocal about everything that I have in my test group that I try a week later. If I don't hear anything funny going on everyone else gets it. Make sure your test group includes people with every software package unless there is a snowflake with their own piece of software that is mission critical (you patch this with everything else or even after that if its critical enough). That's a decision way above me, but in this case, it's not really a thing we can test anyway. This is a basic function of our software that hasn't changed much since it was introduced 3 versions ago, it worked fine before the latest Patch Tuesday, and it doesn't work afterward. We can't just tell our customers "don't do any windows updates until we get around to testing them." We just have to deal with the aftermath. Luckily this one got tracked down pretty quickly. As for the group policy thing/internal updates... no idea. We must have WSUS running because I've never seen a Windows 10 ad. It's not even the first time something like this has happened either; a few months ago a Lync update broke our call center software. Probably Corporate just doesn't want to spend money on it 
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Jun 17, 2016 02:48
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odiv posted:I I need like the file equivalent of Lorem Ipsum in MS Office/PDF formats, inoffensive and nonsense. ill send you some of my call notes Kurieg posted:2010 home and student. She was thinking about upgrading since Microsoft is pulling support for the Windows7 mail app and it's compatibility with hotmail. But was worried because most of her home business stuff is locked in office files. Why isn't she using outlook if she has office? Does home and student not come with it?
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Jun 20, 2016 23:30
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I came in to a ticket: A little background: the program I support relies on flat file databases held on a file server that workstations map drives to. All processing is done on the client and installation is basically copying the program files to the client computer. There was a PRIORITY 1 - SYSTEM DOWN - CRITICAL call in the queue. Someone did a support chat trying to restore from a backup after a hard drive crash and the tech couldn't get it to work. No big deal, probably just need to make sure the drives are mapped and the config files are edited correctly and everything will be all set. Just as I finish dialing the company's number, I see that it was logged by our most senior tech, a guy who resolves almost everything on the first try, whether it's fixed or not. poo poo. Well, the customer called in a half hour before close, he was probably just trying to get rid of the guy, and that's not really an appropriate call for chat anyway. Whatever, I plunge right in. Over the course of 2 hours, I tease out a few details: -The guy who chatted in the night before was the agency's IT consultant, using the company owner's account -The backup isn't actually a backup, it's a copy of the data from the failed hard drive that a recovery company pulled off of it -They have no file server; all the files were stored on that computer (which is doable, but super weird) -They have no actual backups - the backup drive failed too -When they replaced the failed hard drive, they upgraded to Windows 10, despite running a version of our program that isn't compatible (and I mean, "refuses to run" incompatible) -The IT consultant, rather than calling us for instructions, had downloaded the installer/updater for our program and run it. Now if the installer is run on an existing install, it will either upgrade the program to the new version or error out if the upgrade is already done... but if it's run on a computer that doesn't have the program files copied to it, it will ask you if you want to do a new install. Their tech had happily clicked yes, put in the drive letter of the "backup" as the location of the database files, and overwrote all the data with fresh new ones. I told the guy to go back to the recovery company and have them re-restore the data, find a Windows 7 computer, then call me before he did anything else with it. He did that, I connect to his station and start going through the data... and not a single file has a date modified after 2011. There were like 3 copies of his data, all scattered in different folders, all with different dates in 2011. So now he's making a third trip to the data recovery company to see if they can find any more recent files. I am at home on my balcony drinking a cold glass of Michigan Cherry Wine.
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Jun 25, 2016 00:27
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Maniaman posted:
Maybe you need to have them re-watch the Louie the Lightning Bug PSAs?
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Jun 25, 2016 16:03
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iajanus posted:In unrelated news I don't mind those. I mind the "Joe is getting an error message. No I don't know what it was. No he's not here, and I can't get on his computer. Can you fix it?"
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Jun 28, 2016 03:13
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So my guy with the "dead hard drive" finally got a copy of his current data and a windows 7 computer. I connect in, copy all the files where they should be, run the installer, everything is great! Then I run the check database integrity tool and get page after page of "INVALID HEADER! INVALID RECORD SIZE! INVALID FIELD NAME!" Turns out half of his databases have been cryptolockered. His story of what exactly happened when this whole deal began has changed like 15 times, but based on the most recent story, they did the upgrade to Windows 10 and it actually completed fine... but then the computer shut down and wouldn't boot, so they took it to Geek Squad who just told them their hard drive failed and to buy a new one. No word about any kind of virus or file corruption or anything until now. I just hope their windows 7 computer isn't hosed now, and I hope he doesn't try to blame me if it is.
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Jun 28, 2016 18:42
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larchesdanrew posted:My entire building is suffering packet losses less than a day after a widespread internet outage. Please continue to try and convince me I have a virus ISP Sounds like you need a new hard drive to me.
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Jun 29, 2016 00:16
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Just got an e-mail that internal IT accidentally sent out e-mails containing call notes to 700 customers. Call notes are supposed to be internal only but you're supposed to be professional in them. I guess this is one way to find out who's been following company policy... 
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Jul 1, 2016 01:23
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We provide our users with a free POP3 e-mail address with 50MB of space. Apparently one of our customers decided they didn't want to pay for Exchange, which has a 5GB limit, when they get this free e-mail service. Now they are logging us calls weekly, forwarding inbox over quota e-mails with a subject of FIX THIS NOW IM SICK OF CALLING ABOUT THIS!!!!! They refuse to understand why they can't get the same features with the free account as with the paid account, and management refuses to tell them to gently caress off with that poo poo. This has been going on for two months 
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Jul 15, 2016 01:43
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Came in today to calls holding 20 minutes. The user profile service for the online environment went down for the second time in as many weeks. I'm leaving early today to have a root canal, and honestly looking forward to it at this point.
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Jul 18, 2016 16:02
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Who was the goon who made the FRSM anti crypto powershell script? I think the latest version with the Chinese and Russian filenames broke it on 2008. That or I'm bad at powershell, but that can't be it
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Jul 18, 2016 21:06
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A hundred thousand tickets came in... Our online environment has gone down every Monday for the past 3 weeks. The storage array holding the user profiles gets bogged down for reasons as yet undetermined, logins are slow if they work at all, and it's 50/50 if users will have the proper drives mapped to use their software. This was bad enough, and we already had people demanding compensation/refusing to leave yesterday, but at least the issue was clearing up by around 10 or 11 every morning. It happened again today. Everything went down at 8, calls start rolling in, people are understandably PIIIIIIISSSSSEEEED that this is happening for a second time this week. Well our admins, in their brilliance, decide to disable access to Outlook for all users, to see if that helps. Of course, they don't let support know this for half an hour afterward, so we have to deal with irate customers who waited half an hour to get logged in and now can't even check their e-mail, and we don't even know why. Then the admins decide to try just loving disabling logins, because hey, why not. By 10 am we had 80 tickets in our backline queue and calls holding an average of 15min. Best of all a bunch of new techs started yesterday, and lol if you think management is bothering to remove them from the "YOU'D BETTER BE DEAD OR JOB HUNTING IF YOU'RE NOT ON THE PHONE RIGHT NOW" e-mails. e: and one surprisingly cheerful user sent me an e-mail he received from our chief competitor - "Sick of paying top dollar for an unreliable system? Contact us today!" A Pinball Wizard fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jul 27, 2016 |
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Jul 27, 2016 01:13
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Well, seems like they finally got a handle on our online issues, all the east coast people logged in and are working and everything's grea- -15 calls holding, everyone get on the phones NOW!!!
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Aug 1, 2016 15:12
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Our self-hosted users have been reporting an issue since an Office update back in June that when they drag and drop an e-mail into our program (which is a very common thing to do) they get a message box saying "File or directory name is not valid". Everything still works, but they get that pop-up every time, and the only fix is to uninstall the update and disable updating until we have a fix. Today I checked the status of the issue on our bug tracker and found a note from the QA team: "Confirmed update such and such is included in the next server build for our online environment. The administrators are unsure if they will be able to remove it before server rollout."
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Aug 2, 2016 01:54
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We're migrating our ticket management to salesforce in two weeks, and we support peons finally got access to the sandbox yesterday. We were assured nothing in the sandbox is live and we can play with it as we want to. So I start creating cases and choosing random contacts and adding notes, etc. An hour later, the operations manager forwards me an automatic reply from one of those contacts with the note "looks like they turned on email notifications in the sandbox, make sure you are changing the email address to @example.com or something!" At least I was making somewhat realistic professional looking tickets and not like "Joe says he has too much poop in his butt!"
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Aug 6, 2016 12:15
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PierreTheMime posted:I'm a fan of actually talking to people to try and resolve conflict--have you or another coworker spoken to FNG about their poor performance and attendance? It's possible that they are having a tough time outside of work and often times people don't realize the impact they have on others unless it's brought up to them. If they get all flippant about it, then tell him if he doesn't shape up his actions will be reported for possible disciplinary action. I'd say that's appropriate for someone who comes in late once in a while, but if it's as egregious as he's saying guy should probably go already.
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Aug 10, 2016 12:47
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It kind of is though. School districts are not known for their vast wealth. If they have to pay out a couple mil to two retarded teenagers whose budget are they cutting first?
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Aug 12, 2016 13:55
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My company is migrating to Salesforce for our ticket management starting on Monday. We've had 3 hours of training and 2 weeks of access to the test environment. Everyone is amazingly positive about it so far, but I'm just waiting to come in on Monday and find out that some stupid basic necessary function doesn't work. But hey, we each get an hour of semi-mandatory overtime each day!
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Aug 19, 2016 00:12
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This is the piddliest of bitches, but I'm starting to get burned out at my job. We rolled out Salesforce for our call tracking and external facing customer site two weeks ago Monday, and it wasn't a complete disaster, but there's the stupidest poo poo that didn't come over or doesn't work. There's so much little retarded poo poo that it feels like no one ever actually sat down with a tech to see what info they needed to take calls, so things like customer hours of business or product codes are missing. No one bothered to consider any of the huge amount of documentation that was on our old site, both customer facing and internal, so it's completely inaccessible to customers and only accessible to us if we remember our old usernames and passwords (which no one does because we always used the SSO link on our main intranet page). Communication with our customers was poor, and we still have people calling in that their accounts aren't working, because no one told them we changed all usernames to the users' e-mail addresses. We take calls as well as calling people back on tickets that they put in. Our hold times have been non-stop in the 10-15 minute range for the past two weeks - today they were in the 30-45 minute range. Our company goal is 4 minutes average. Our backline queue, which used to cause panic and mass e-mails if it got above 15 calls, has over 115 in it. Management has promised endless overtime to anyone willing to work on the queue, but if you do another manager just tells you to get on the phone because of the hold times. I feel like I'm the only one who knows what they're doing. I've been fixing problems that some of the supervisors don't even know how to fix, and there's several techs who know that and come to me first when they have an issue. So I have that, on top of having a trainee - who I haven't actually been able to do much training with, because I'm also still expected to keep up my full caseload. And I'm still technically tier 1 support - I've been here a year, but they don't promote before 18 months, and only do promotions in July, and since I started in August I'm pretty much hosed for the next year or so. I almost had a panic attack tonight because someone e-mailed me after I left that their upgrade bombed (after I went to the trouble of saving copies of the now inaccessible documentation and e-mailing it to them along with specific instructions not to try to run the installer from their terminal sever - guess what they did?) I would go in there early tomorrow to call them, but I'm working late shift (oh yeah, we also have 3 late shifts a month) and I don't know if there's anyone else there I would trust to take it. The supes will just tell them to restore from a backup and run the install again the right way, and of course that will work, but it's so stupid when it could be fixed by someone who actually knows how the software works - which we have, like 2 of. I really need a vacation I think, but I don't know if I can since I'm training someone. I don't know if they'd let me given how badly our call volume has blown up. I feel unappreciated and stressed out, and I don't know if I'm being a big baby or a prima donna, or if going to my direct supervisor or department manager would do any good - the manager is being promoted and a new manager I've never worked with is taking over, so who knows. I don't know if I should just stick with it, since I really loved the job before all this poo poo went down, or if I should start applying elsewhere the way everyone keeps telling me to do. This was my first tech job and I feel nervous about going anywhere else and starting over again. well that's my crybaby sob story thanks for reading
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Sep 7, 2016 03:17
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ErIog posted:
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Sep 7, 2016 15:52
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LethalGeek posted:Mine isn't quite that bad but we're switching from Office 2010 to 2013 and everyone (over 2000 people) is being a giant loving whiny baby about the whole thing and it's gotten on my nerves more than I thought. Plus right after that is done at the end of the week we're going to a new ticket system but they want us to put everything in both places for a week which is going to be a complete loving drag Im sure. So yeah bitch away sometimes this stuff is so loving stupid. I feel you. We switched a bunch of people over to 2013 last April, and the bitching still hasn't stopped. The font is too big. The font is too small. It's too bright. I can't find anything. My email is broken, and so are all my documents and the internet and none of its worked ever one the upgrade. I swear to god, the next person who says "ever since the upgrade" gets a swift kick in the teeth through the phone line. 
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Sep 7, 2016 19:12
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We still have customers who pay to have a disk shipped out to them every time we release a new version. I have to assume they signed up for it then forgot about it
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Sep 14, 2016 03:33
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"Why is my $businessapp giving me this error when I log in?" "You see how when I open up your data files, all the data has been replaced by the repeated letter U, and there's these "_help_decrypt.html" files in the root of the drive?" "Oh... Yeah, those are in the backups too. Is there any way we can replace those files with copies from a fresh install?" RIP their business, I guess
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Sep 17, 2016 01:21
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I'm guessing the backups were like a copy of the files on a second drive attached to the server. That, or they just have the past night's backup and it happened the day before. It wasn't my call, I was helping out another guy who was the one actually talking to the customer.
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Sep 17, 2016 21:01
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Someone on our platinum team e-mailed me a weird case, and like a dumbass I decided to pull it. This lady has some old e-mails saved in her system from 1995 that are showing as being sent by and received by people who didn't start working there until last week. Our ghetto-rear end system relies on unique 4 character IDs for each user, and there's plenty of issues that can crop up if people reuse those codes, but she swears they never ever have used those codes before those users started. So down the rabbit hole I go. Way back in 1995, before it was a virtual certainty that everyone had an e-mail address, our product contained its own mail-like substitute product for sending messages over the LAN. There was an issue where the names of mail users would get out of sync with their 4 digit codes, and the wrong name would be shown on the message. Those utilities were all taken out when we stopped supporting fakemail, 4 versions ago. This isn't a problem for most agencies because the law only requires them to keep files for 7 years. I gently asked the user if she really needed these messages and she gently replied that she sees this as an important data integrity issue and is upset that I would suggest deleting these messages, which are now old enough to drink in the US. Luckily since there's pretty much nothing I can do, it's probably going to leave my hands and go to our special projects team, who will charge her up the rear end to go in and manually re-kajigger the data to have the right names on it.
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Sep 22, 2016 04:05
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My lady isn't looking at backups, she's looking at live data. Our system includes kind of a basic CMS where users can attach files to customer records. Most people purge anything they're not legally required to keep but this lady is apparently a hoarder. I officially pawned it off on Special Projects though, can't wait to see the result.Alighieri posted:Latest round of windows 10 updates in the last two weeks have caused some clients computers to have IIS nuke itself to varying degrees. Lots of tickets with "help my webpage is not responding" and when I try to launch inetmgr I get the helpful "could not find inetmgr" error. On some the manager is still there, but the default website has disappeared. I feel like every round of Windows 10 updates breaks something new and exciting. Last month it broke batch printing in such a way that every other document queued up failed to print for not discernible reason; this week, it's deleting people's RDP shortcuts off their desktops and blocking connections due to certificate errors (the latter is really our fault for using self signed certs though).
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Sep 22, 2016 23:01
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flosofl posted:You might want (if you care) to check on your policy. I've seen people get fired for keeping email, logs, and uneeded data past the retention date (which will vary based on industry and legal team). It's not my data, it's the customer's. Microsoft has no interest if you have 20 year old Word documents; we don't care if you have 20 year old e-mails.
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Sep 23, 2016 02:20
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We have agencies with over 100 customers in multiple branches using our product, which relies on flat file Dbase databases on a network share. Oh, and you have to disable SMB2 and 3 because database consistency is completely reliant on file locking, and opportunistic locking can lead to data corruption, and you can't disable oplocks on SMB2. Then when you suggest they move to our main product, which has SQL server as the back end, they go "well if this product works so poorly, why would I pay.more to convert to a more expensive product?" 
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Sep 24, 2016 01:47
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How do you go about getting an MCSE? I see all kinds of classes on Google, but no way to tell if they're any good. Is it better to study on your own and just find a test near you? Is there a known reputable company to go through?Powered Descent posted:three memorable years as the entire IT department of a 150-person/6-location company full of salesmen  Christ, that sounds awful.
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Sep 29, 2016 03:42
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Neddy Seagoon posted:What do you want to bet someone demanded they restart all twenty at once to save time, and now they're demanding the person they tasked with restarting be found hanging by a cat5 noose in a network riser with a well-forged suicide note somewhere? Fake edit: we've had 8 of our 16 techs taking live calls idle for most of the morning. I bet their phones are down so they can't call and complain about 
A Pinball Wizard fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Oct 4, 2016 19:09
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A ticket came in: "We can receive mail from initech.com but when we try to send it gets blocked by our spam filter!" So I have her forward me the bounceback - "initech.com loops back to myself". Hmmm. I check initech.com's IP, and it resolves to 127.0.0.1. HMM, I bet a lot of people are having similar problems! I called her and let her know what I found, and her response was "So you're saying it's on their end? Oh, good!" Best part? This lady's job description, according to her email sig, was "Database and System Administrator."
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Oct 6, 2016 05:37
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Dick Trauma posted:HERE'S TO ANOTHER 1,000
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Oct 7, 2016 00:21
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Jaco posted:Due to a series of terrible business decisions, I'm currently in the process of handing over the largest and most complicated system the company (~1500 people) has to a single person who's more than a bit simple, refuses to read either my or the vendor's documentation, and doesn't want to learn it.
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Oct 8, 2016 05:15
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 04:18 |
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We've had n issue with our software where certain office 2013 and 2016 updates break functionality in our product's email integration*. This has been happening since the beginning of June to our customers who host their own instances in house. In July it began showing up on our test servers for the cloud users; bug reports and work orders were filed in July with the cloud admins. Over the weekend, they upgraded a bunch of our highest paying private server customers to Office 2013, and guess what started happening? Guess who's claiming they've never heard of the issue? *Well, everything still technically works, but it pops up an extra dialogue box that needs to be cleared every time you use that function, which is annoying on its own but for the grandmas and grandpas using our software is also mysterious and scary and unusable.
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Oct 10, 2016 19:29
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