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I started my managed it job a few weeks ago. When I showed up they introduced me to my brand new machine. 16 gig ram, terabyte sata drive, quad core, and jabra headset. Our office has a 33 mb/s connection shared between 7 users. It has been an absolute dream to work with. It makes me sad when I remote into ten year old machines with 1 gig ram and 20 gig hard drives sharing a t1 line shared between twenty people with heavy internet usage. That client is upgrading to office 2010 and the tickets keep pouring in every day with cascading issues. To top it off, their work is too important to let us get any work done during office hours despite numerous problems with integrations between office and other mission critical software preventing them from doing their jobs.
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Oct 24, 2013 01:47
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A ticket came in... Subject; violence of mouse Body; second request. Come help me or the mouse gets it. 
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Oct 30, 2013 20:12
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A ticket's progress was set back 6 months... A client with 4 computers removed their SBS and got Dropbox for Business. In this process (for which I wasn't here) the data was spread among all 4 computers, then thrown in Dropbox folders. This client loves using insanely long folder names, buries files 8 folders deep, and gives even more information in the file name. When these files were put in c:\users\%user%\dropbox, the file paths became longer than 260 characters. The client sets out on the long and arduous process of renaming files or, only if absolutely necessary, the last folder in the directory to get under this limit. Any folder that is renamed gets everything in it resynced in Dropbox so renaming parent directories isn't a possibility. All 4 computers are short on hard drive space and having duplicates of all this data will both hit the dropbox limit and fill their hard drives. 6 months later, the clients finish 2 computers after renaming thousands of files and begins on the other 2. Then Dropbox rolls out a hilarious update with Dropbox for Business in which it renames "\dropbox" to "\dropbox (company name)". This is to allow users to have a Business Dropbox and a Personal Dropbox on the same computer. How wonderful! I check the directories of these two computers and each one has about 600 files that are once again over 260 characters.  While I'm glad we're forcing the client to clean up their own mistake of using absurd naming and organizational conventions, I've been arguing for weeks that we should just bill them for 2 days of work, turn off dropbox sync, script the renaming of parent directories, pile everything into an external hard drive, sync that with Dropbox, nuke the computers and let the data rain down after being fixed. Everybody would be a lot happier that it's finished and backed up compared to dragging this out another year. The client doesn't want to pay for it or be offline for 2 days despite the risks of a failed hard drive on any one of the 4 machines right now.
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Apr 10, 2014 21:23
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Meanwhile another client has decided to replace their small business server with a NAS that integrates directly with Egnyte. Permissions are easily editable, file access is fast and easy, client is still up if internet goes out, all their data is backed up throughout the day every day, and setup was insanely easy. It's an absolute dream for an MSP.
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Apr 10, 2014 22:25
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If I have to explain to one more software support technician that on a 64 bit system, 32 bit programs go in the "Program Files (x86)" folder and 64 bit programs go in "Program Files", I'm going to lose it. How is this not day 1 poo poo for software support training??
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Apr 11, 2014 17:38
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Whenever I see a failed drive my first reaction is always to swap sata cables, then put the drive in a known good computer. I hate dealing with clients when you break the news that all their local data is simply gone and it's their fault for not using shared drives like we instructed. But if I found out the cable was sabotaged because someone didn't like a joke I made, gently caress that. The guy is probably just trying to fit in because the other guys there treat him like poo poo.
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Apr 15, 2014 04:45
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In our office we have a running joke of building a printer-scanner-shredder. It prints documents, picks them up from the job tray and scans them, then pushes it out into a shredder. The scanner sends the document to the computer in a different file format or emails it directly to the desired recipient while wasting an incredible amount of resources. We got a ticket from a user that he lost the "Save to PDF" button in Word and Office. To convert to PDF, he printed the document, scanned it as PDF, and shredded the original. We sat stunned, our dreams of office inefficiency come true.
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Apr 17, 2014 12:54
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:On my last call I spent 5 minutes explaining how to type a website into the address bar. This and explaining to somebody who doesn't know the term "address bar" where the compatibility button is in IE. "Go up to the top, to the right of the address and you should see a symbol for a broken piece of paper. No, above your google search toolbar. It's where you type in https://www.google.com. Yes, I know you see an arrow, a magnifying glass, some thing, and a circle with an arrow. Click the thing you can't identify. Did it turn blue? What do you mean it refreshed the page you clicked the wrong thing hit one thing to the left of that"
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Apr 17, 2014 14:48
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pr0digal posted:I wonder how this monstrosity started out "Internet goes out when we make coffee and toast at the same time. This is affecting breakfast!" But seriously I don't see a ups and it appears they're plugged into the kitchen circuit. Have they not had frequent unexpected shutdowns?
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Apr 19, 2014 02:51
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Caged posted:The bi-annual ticket came in from a user reporting issues with their VPN. A reply was written asking for more information, clarification of any error message being received and a request for the best time to get in touch to jump on a remote session to resolve the problem. Just like the ticket six months previously, and the one six months prior to that, and the one six months prior to that, I predict no response will be received and it will close itself due to lack of activity. "I don't know boss, I've told IT my VPN won't work for 3 years now and they haven't fixed it. Don't blame me for not working from home, blame them for closing tickets that haven't been resolved!" Urit posted:Or just go to Azure/AWS for everything but the DC. I'm serious. Then you can have as many servers as you want, with hardware that gets updated over time, for a small monthly price. Want to spin up a server to do testing for a specific bug? Ok. Can you do that with a local server? Maybe. But not over any significant capacity. Do you want to test multi-server anything? Have fun trying to make VMs to do that. The only real downside is if you lose internet, you lose your dev/test servers, but machines are so powerful nowadays you should really just be using Vagrant and your local machine to run your dev boxes. This. 5 servers (or even 3) for a 5 user environment is kind of the wheelhouse for a hosted solution. Especially since you don't have a dedicated IT guy to handle the hardware, virtualization, and networking of the devices. If you rebuild locally you're in for a world of hurt. Judge Schnoopy fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 19:24
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Sirotan posted:A user just sent me an appointment reminder for a meeting she just scheduled for me to come to her remote site to look at a printer problem tomorrow at 9am. Why in the hell would a user believe she could schedule you for a ticket? Users should consider themselves lucky to get a scheduled time at all instead of being booted whenever IT shows up 
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Apr 24, 2014 21:09
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n3rdal3rt posted:A request came in..... Check the cloud. Everything is in the cloud.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:52
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"Can I get the badge photos of {list of employees}?"
"I can probably do that."
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angry armadillo posted:I'd go for suggest new time in about a year and a half While amusing, I think pranks should be between you and whoever left their computer unlocked. When you make it a matter of public humiliation you're just making enemies.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:16
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Trastion posted:As for the moving of data, most of their stuff is on network shares already so it will just be a matter of double checking for anything on the desktop and moving that into their network drive. I will be sending a warning about making sure nothing is on the local drives since we will be wiping and reusing the drives. This will be supported by the owner & VP so if they lose anything it will be their fault. I honestly wouldn't believe a single word of support for this. Sounds good now but when a user complains their mission critical file was accidentally in the wrong place and you nuked it it's going to be hard to keep everyone happy. If you've got the time, learn usmt. Runs silently in the background from command prompt, condensed the data it grabs in half, and takes a ton of office settings with it to make the transition friendlier. Even if you don't apply it if something goes wrong it's nice to have that backup.
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May 1, 2014 01:44
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Inspector_666 posted:What is this person's job? Account lead at blackswordca's company
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May 1, 2014 13:55
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Ozz81 posted:One of the best things is seeing people light up when you actually treat them like a PERSON and don't just walk in, fix something and walk out - the little conversations and jokes make everything WAY more fun and people appreciate that you're not just doing the break-fix robotic routine. Apparently I was being too candid with the owner of a small business when upgrading his CAD software. I had just been assigned to this client so I was trying to build a rapport so they feel confident working with me instead of the account lead. Install goes smoothly and I call the owner so we can open the software and make sure everything works. Program opens with a ton of errors about missing files. Path points to a user profile I don't recognize on a computer that doesn't exist on their network. Confused and in the middle of a normal conversation with the guy I utter "wait... What in the world? What is this sh.. garbage?" The guy laughed for a full 5 minutes at the thought of his IT tech saying something like that. Apparently the account lead had been very serious and to the point. Either way the client loves working with me now and even told my boss about how I made his day with that comment.
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May 2, 2014 13:20
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What's the likelihood of getting a software company to pay me for a solution I found for their crappy software? Ticket: Laptop docked, software sits on right screen. When undocked, software still sits on non-existent right screen and you have to go through task manager to maximize the window and get it back. Software support's solution: use the task manager workaround, this is a known issue and we don't plan on fixing it because  5 minutes later I, a first year desktop support, find out how to fix their software via registry edits. Should I be a nice guy and follow up with their support team telling them what to do to fix it? Or should I contact them and hold the solution ransom for 1 hour of billable time? Judge Schnoopy fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jun 1, 2014 |
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Jun 1, 2014 21:31
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Tigerpaw specifically. They designed registry keys to hold a pixel based value of where it was closed. Then there's a key of RestoreSizeOnOpen set to 1. Set to 0 and it opens in the upper left corner every time. It was idiotically simple for them to have told me they couldn't be assed to find a solution.
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Jun 1, 2014 23:47
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vibur posted:What's up, ManageEngine-using buddy? Reminds me of a recent ticket. Office manager asks us to set up a new user, including the purchase of a new laptop as their office doesn't have any spares. Sounds good, when do we need this done by? User started Monday last week and she needs an email now that her training is complete so she can start handling some work of her own. She's here now and has nothing to do until she has an account and machine. 
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Jun 5, 2014 02:14
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You virused his computer! That's entrapment! Countdown to him blaming a lack of security protocols for him getting his fake virus.
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Jun 6, 2014 03:29
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Poor guy probably just doesn't have the guts to ask users to stop what they're doing, log off, and log back on. I refuse to believe a guy rebuilt a file server and doesn't know group policy.
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Jun 6, 2014 12:42
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m.hache posted:Can't wait until you show up and there's a loud loving generator there connected to a projector that you can't see poo poo on. A loud generator 300 yards away with 4 lines of extension cords, each with 6 cords daisy chained together. "It's practically silent!" they'll say as the fire closes in behind the washed out projector screen.
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Jun 6, 2014 15:45
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At my office we make bad puns a lot and tell jokes and one time a guy farted a little on accident while he was on the phone and we all had a really good laugh  There is a balance between always professional all the time and pulling idiotic pranks. It's called "getting along."
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Jun 10, 2014 04:46
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Tickets like that annoy me to no end as they cost the company thousands and cause unnecessary downtime and costly ongoing maintenance in attempts to avoid what is clearly user error
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Jun 10, 2014 13:50
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A critical ticket came in an hour before we opened... "We need a domain admin amount for this software vendor we're working with. Please do this in the next 5 minutes." First, gently caress you 5 minutes at 8am, this project didn't magically start today without warning. Second, we'll deal with this within our SLA which starts at 9. Third, they don't need domain admin stop requesting that we give that out to what is now the fifth software company that's requested it.
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Jun 17, 2014 04:43
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With HR giving him the "lets give it a day and see if he cools off" it sounds like this is a regular occurrence. HR won't defy CEO, but understands that there's a 75% chance "GET HIS rear end OUT OF HERE NOW" means "threaten to fire him to make him nervous, I'll let him off the hook tomorrow."
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Jun 18, 2014 21:30
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KoRMaK posted:Have you ever told him you don't appreciate being tentatively fired for something you can't control? CEO is obviously a piece of garbage who doesn't care. He respects people that can handle his outbursts and brush it off, then continue working harder to prevent his outbursts. Standing up to him, pointing out his behavior, or trying to tell him why he's wrong just puts you higher up on his poo poo list and gives him the impression that you can't handle your job. Time for a new employer, or learn how to eat poo poo and like it.
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Jun 18, 2014 22:17
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Stanos posted:If you pay them, you'll just get these in the mail next: hahahah If you don't comply with our blackmail we'll commit traceable federal crimes that will inconvenience you and send us to jail for decades!
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Jun 19, 2014 17:02
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As much as I hate printers, I'll always go way out of scope to troubleshoot one and get it back in working order. Our company stance is that we support a computer's ability to send / receive jobs from a printer, but the printer itself isn't a supported device. So far this has included at least 3 printers being totally torn apart to diagnose faulty hardware or getting deep paper jams out. One client is getting crazy paranoid with our ability to access their information and is complaining that we need to limit our scope of desktop support. Immediately after, a ticket came in saying a printer is wrinkling paper and isn't printing color at all. It felt good to say "Communication to printer is up. I'll collect warranty information and forward the case on to Brother support. If it's out of warranty, you'll need a new printer."
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Jun 20, 2014 13:24
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Erwin posted:This is not a good thing. Why in the world do you think it's a good thing? Unless you also have phone support, email support is far worse than sitting in a phone queue. At least once you get someone on the phone, you know they will begin to work on your problem. With email support, you have no idea if they just skipped your issue to work on something else or go to lunch or whatever. If the service is down, it also looks better to users if someone is waiting on the phone than if someone is playing solitaire with their feet up saying "welp, I emailed them. Should hear back in a few days." For these reasons I'm a huge fan of chat support. I know I've got somebody paying attention to my issue but I'm free to answer phone calls or talk with co-workers so I'm not totally tied up. I'm an even bigger fan when chat support recognizes a complex issue and schedules a phone call to dive deeper.
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Jun 20, 2014 16:19
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Yeah it's pretty bad when you look less legit than SuperAntiSpyware (which I keep hearing is pretty good? I still use MBAM though). I use mbam first to get rid of the nasty stuff and if it finds anything I do super anti spyware to clean up the little bits of junk that's left behind. They're complementary, not competitive. As for the computer slow tickets, I follow up with a call and say I'll remote in while they demonstrate what is slow. From there I can understand what program is slow, clean out plugins, check logs, troubleshoot the real problem.
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Jun 26, 2014 19:59
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One of my clients is a non profit organization located in a county building. We handle their computers, servers, printers, county IT does phones and network equipment / cabling. Building is redoing an elevator which requires demoing the network closet on the fourth floor. Our server is right outside this closet. Due to an amazing lack of communication, the construction crew assumes our stuff belongs to the county, and the county plans on removing equipment next Monday morning. Construction crew mentions to our client in passing that everything near the closet needs to be moved... Thursday night. We have Friday to relocate a server and all supporting equipment with no planning. We have one open desk in the middle of the office. We've already resigned to using a network port as we can't get close enough to run a new cable to the switch. I move all of the equipment, start running cables through the desk, plug many of them in, and kick on the UPS. Wiring fault. The outlets are so old in this county building they don't have grounds. Just adapter ports to allow ground prongs to be plugged in. I hunt around and find a corner underneath a table. New wing of the building, new outlet. It will have to do. I inform everybody that they will not be allowed to use the table and placing liquids on it would jeopardize the functionality of their organization for weeks. I move the equipment there, get it set up, UPS has no complaints. I check the network port in the wall... Dead. I check the next closest, dead. Apparently it's the strategy of county IT to liven up exactly the number of ports needed by current equipment and not a single port more. gently caress growth, these empty switch ports are important. What's better is each live port is POE to support county IP phones with computers daisy chained to the phone. Anything I unplug results in a dead phone until we can get a power cable or new port activated. Eventually I decide on the one phone I'll take down and inform that unlucky person that we're working on a solution for her. Everything else gets plugged in and powered on. Then the server says "preparing to apply updates" ... for over an hour. The county building closes at 5, no exceptions, and I had to leave not knowing if the server would ever come up. And of course it didn't. It killed an exchange module an hour after I left that was hanging the startup, but then our remote agent crashed and dhcp didn't start correctly, so the whole office stayed dark. Had to go back Saturday to clean up. gently caress county IT, is basically what this comes down to.
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Mar 30, 2015 03:21
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4 pm appointment for a dhcp / networking issues on as laptop, client demands I'm on site for this because his "computer has all sorts of problems ". I block out the end of my day till 5 just in case. Client keeps me waiting until 4:20 to send some emails out and make a phone call to a family member. Then he calls me in, shows me a surprise bullet point list of 25 "problems" he's been having, and asks me to sit and watch as he reproduces every one of them while explaining how he would like it to work. I left at 5:30 without him ever touching on the networking issue I was originally sent in for.
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Apr 2, 2015 02:24
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I'm 9 miles down in a 10 mile problem. We're trying to sign a new client and they've thrown their biggest issue at us as a test. I have all this data supporting the fact that there is a problem but it doesn't point at the problem itself. Some laptops are continually reporting IP address conflicts on 0.0.0.0 with Mac 0.0.0.0, and sometimes on IP 100.100.100.101 with a legit Mac address of a random wireless device that I can identify in the WAP logs and DHCP. This happens all throughout the day. Ip scheme for this place starts 192. My agent shows a wireless nic connected @ 100.100.100.101, gateway 100.100.100.102, subnet 255.255.252.0. Ipconfig on that same device says it's connected normally to the WiFi with a legit 192 ip configuration. None of the networking devices, including WAPs and printers, show anything about the dumb 100 network. Most bizarrely though is that ARP -a on the server shows both 100.100.100.101 and .102 with Mac addresses that I can't find on the network. One Mac says it was manufactured by apple, the other (the gateway address) can't be identified by any mac databases I've looked through. Where in the flying gently caress is this 100.100.100.102 gateway coming from and why is it interfering with wireless devices? vvv a home router would never be configured on a public 100.100.100.0/22 scheme, and still shouldn't have IP conflict issues if it was responding to dhcp. It seems this mystery service is intercepting a single Wi-Fi device at a time on 100.100.100.101, and the conflicts come when a new device boots an old one. Judge Schnoopy fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 01:50
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Mystery solved with the 100.100.100.102 gateway. Xerox printer and companion efi on site. The correct Ethernet configuration is network -> efi -> xerox. The efi creates the secluded 100 network between it and the xerox. Current garbage IT had a problem configuring a service on the xerox so they plugged both the xerox and efi into a switch, thinking it was the same thing. This left the efi to hand out a single address to anything that it could talk to before the server dhcp responded. Needless to say the client was not happy to hear that they've been paying for this efi device that is not only disconnected, but is also causing headaches.
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Apr 8, 2015 01:01
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Dick Trauma posted:This post just solved a mystery for me, why the Fiery was displaying a weird IP when the copier seemed to have a normal one. Be sure to check that your cable between the fiery and the printer is a crossover. It drives me nuts that not only did the previous company configure the devices incorrectly, but they lost the included crossover cable in the process. In fact they probably tossed it thinking it was a bad cable after plugging the efi in to the switch.
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Apr 8, 2015 03:38
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neogeo0823 posted:Incidentally, the problem seems to have been fixed, I think. I didn't get all the details, but apparently our phone service provider did *~something~* to their servers over the weekend that said servers didn't like. Our business, along with a couple others, was on a *~special snowflake~* server of some sort. Now, all of the servers didn't like whatever the *~something~* was, but the one we're on freaked out completely and the mess we were in was the result. I will kinda miss not having to take calls. Ugh, getting voip systems to admit the problem is on their end is the worst. Our account was also on some special snowflake server that didn't interact correctly with the other servers (attended transfers would drop the call only when calling other customers of this service). I produced tons of packet captures from firewalls on both ends of the line showing the differences in the Refer packet and argued for hours, and after two days the company vaguely admitted they found the problem on their end. Made it to tier 4 of 4, who kicked the long term resolution to engineering.
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Apr 9, 2015 04:18
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We did an assessment for a company, they declined because they thought our services were too expensive. Months later a ticket comes in; "Our QuickBooks file went missing. QB support can't find it on my computer either. We lost 2 years of data. Do you guys know of any way the file can be recovered? Shouldn't QuickBooks save automatically??"  Tell me again how you thought our backup solutions were too expensive.
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Apr 11, 2015 11:32
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:Really, just gently caress Quickbooks. So many problems with that software, it's such a fickle piece of poo poo. Absolutely agreed. I've never successfully put together a scenario where qb file is on the server, qb is installed on client computers, and auto backups work consistently overnight. Their auto backup solution is utter poo poo and I think it's on purpose to promote their online backup services.
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Apr 11, 2015 19:37
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 11:08 |
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Yeah. I don't follow finance too closely, but I heard on marketplace that shortly after the Ali Baba IPO, it was something like 1/2 or 2/3 of their total value. I am also pretty sure I remember hearing on that same segment that without Ali Baba, they would have been heavily in the red. A network tech with meraki is 80% downtime so yeah you definitely need to find something to do with your time.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:03
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