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dogstile posted:If it works, there's no problem Blowing didn't do a thing though. The act of re-seating the connector was all that was needed. What happens is that you'll get a little bit of corrosion on the contacts. When you unplug it and plug it back in the friction cleans off that corrosion and gives you a better connection so it starts working. By blowing on it you add moisture and moisture plus copper plus current is bad.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:06
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stevewm posted:DSL can actually deliver decent and rated speeds, however the ISP running the system has to be worth a poo poo. AT&T and Frontier do not meet this criteria. DSL is all about the loop length and line condition. If you are close enough to the DSLAM and you're running over good wire and things are filtered properly to avoid interference you can get a really good fast reliable connection. if however you're far away from the dlam or you're running over crappy wiring then good luck even staying up much less getting good speeds regardless of carrier. As far as tier 1 support sucking, management loves script monkey's because if they can reduce the job to a script they can reduce the pay to a pittance. It just kills the bean counters to pay technical people a decent rate. They're constantly trying to turn us into script monkeys too, fortunately if you are doing anything more complicated that power cycling equipment you rapidly move outside the realm of what can be done with scripting.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:01
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What's pissing me off, My company is run by a bunch of idiots who have created a corporate culture where only "Yes" (wo)men are promoted, and anyone who may warn that some idea coming down from on high (directors or one of the 5 layers of VPs we have) may be less than a stellar idea is labeled as having a negative attitude finds themselves relegated to grunt work. The most recent bit of idiocy is the corporate mandate to have all company applications automatically log users off and force re-authentication after 15 minutes of inactivity. Now the nature of the job and the lack of decent tools support means that we use multiple applications in the course of our duties and it's not uncommon for us to be away from any given tool for more than 15 minutes. Meaning that we are regularly blessed with a message telling us we have to log back in. The stupidity here is multi-faceted. First the tool that's generating the most annoyance doesn't remember its state when it logs you off meaning that after we click through to get back in we have to navigate back to where the information we need is. Now note what I said about clicking through? that's because these are web-based tools and the browsers cache log in credentials which means that their 15 minutes log out timer does gently caress all for adding additional security since anyone who can get access to your desktop will be able to click through the authentication prompts with precious little more effort than if they never existed at all. No loving sense what so ever. And this is pretty typical for the bone headed ideas that are constantly rolling down. What pisses me off the most is that somehow these morons make more money than me, a poo poo ton more. They do poo poo like this all the time then cry about how we aren't meeting whatever arbitrary metric they've decided should be focused on for.... reasons. My business unit is a Network Operations Center yet management insist on treating us like a Call Center (They take calls they must be a call center yuk yuk yuk). Meaning that instead generating metrics that a NOC should be concerned with, down elements, mttr, network availability; they generate metrics that a call center would, Speed to answer, call volumes, ticket churn. The result being that we're an extremely dysfunctional organization that is constantly playing whack-a-mole and our work prioritization is based on the squeaky wheel principle. Since the focus is on call volumes they've prioritized taking calls the result of which is that we end up with higher call volumes than we'd have if we actually behaved like a NOC because issues only get addressed when someone bothers to call in and complain. Instead of encouraging our technicians to be thorough we're focusing on speed of call handling meaning that simple stuff is getting missed, customers are getting poor service because technicians who are trying to make those arbitrary metrics management has dreamed up and they're punting or blowing off customers rather than taking the time to make sure they've really done their due diligence on a particular issue. To aid in measuring their metrics they've chosen to focus on they've added a legion of little book keeping tasks that exist for no reason other than to generate metrics (apparently they're unfamiliar with the concept of observer effect. And thanks to the lack of uniformity in processes people regularly miss those steps because there is no way any human can be expected to remember the sheer volume of crap they make us keep track of. As if we don't have enough to know when it comes to actually doing the Network Operations part of our loving jobs. Oh and did I mention that the metrics they are using are fundamentally flawed because they haven't built in the capabilities to our systems to be able to properly measure what they want to measure? For example one of the metrics we are measured on for our reviews (read raises) is ticket touches. The problem is that the field in the crappy ticketing system that they rammed down our throats that would make it possible to accurately measure that metric (date/time stamp for ticket interactions) isn't propagated to the database they use to generate their reports. And thanks to the yes men culture that exists instead of the people generating said reports telling their bosses "we can't do that because of this, can we fix this?" so that maybe just maybe actions could be taken to rectify the deficiency they just cobble together some hack'd up approximation and pretend it's actually a useful metric. And in keeping with modern American corporate culture of maximizing profits in the short term by not investing in the business (might hurt the stock price if they reported smaller profits after all) they don't provide us with the resources to keep up with the increased work load they continue to dump on us. They don't hire enough bodies they don't invest in effective tools, they don't listen to our feedback on how things could be improved. The sales and marketing people are constantly making commitments that we simply lack the technical capability and head count to dream of meeting. They keep piling more and more work on our already overused workforce all while pushing down different snowflake procedure's that have to be followed in some circumstances but don't apply in others. One would suppose that at some point they might see the results of this but going back to yes men culture and managers pay being contingent on making these arbitrary goals they massage and manipulate the metrics to present a distorted version of reality that cloaks the truly appalling state of the companies operations. Finally in the ultimate bit of clueless irony the same executives who have engendered this "yes (wo)man" corporate culture through their promotion and hiring practices and pushed down all this crap that makes doing the job so much more difficult than it needs to be are promoting this idea that we need to provide an "effortless customer service" experience. Oh yeah and they expect to do this without having to actually spend any additional money. Meritocracy my rear end.
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Oct 17, 2014 22:21
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CitizenKain posted:We had a port scan/intrustion test done on a important vlan on day by some auditors with the help of the security person. Whatever they did caused an old IDS to pretty much poo poo itself and it failed closed instead of open. That was a fun day. Reminds me of the time we had to start providing SLA compensations on a new vpn tunnel product we were rolling out. In the meeting with the software guys I'm asking how are we going to be able to document what failures are our fault and what ones we can exclude and suggest that we should generate tickets to track that, they no lie, with a straight face told me "oh this technology is solid it's not going to cause any problems." I was like are you serious? How long have you been in this industry? nothing ever goes right the first time. Management thought I was over reacting. 2 months later after having to negotiate out of a couple hundred grand in missed SLA fines we started generating tickets to track issues with vpn tunnels.
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Oct 17, 2014 22:37
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lampey posted:Is your NOC taking calls from clients? Do you have a helpdesk? Yes we take calls from Clients, since we're so dysfunctional we get far more inbound calls that we should, ideally we would be primarily making outbound calls to report problems and get the help of onsite staff to assist in layer 1 troubleshooting, but thanks to chronic under-staffing and poor process planning on the part of our management we spend most of our time taking inbound calls as our clients notice and report problems with the network infrastructure we support (squeaky wheel work prioritization). It primarily comes down to a question of what paradigm being applied to the operation. Since management is applying a Call Center paradigm to the NOC they end up focused on metrics that a Call Center would. To give an example of the detrimental affect this mindset has, one of the biggest problem we've faced as an organization for as long as I've worked here is information overload and being able to cut through the chaff to find the actual substance, one of the biggest contributors to that is how our ticketing system works and how automation has been applied to it. I spent a number of years doing reporting for the organization, so I've gained a really good understanding of where these problems are. Under our current system when a device goes down our monitoring system generates an alarm when this happens a second system (rubyrules) sees this alarm and then generates a ticket in our ticketing system. When the device comes back up Ruby then tells the ticketing system that the event has ended and moves the ticket into a ready to close state. A chron job on the ticketing database then looks for tickets that have been in a ready to close state for longer than the target time (I'm not sure what the time is now but originally it was 24 hours) When this was first implemented we had requested that the ticket remain in that ready to close state for 24 hours and only close if the event did not recur in that time period. Within the first couple months I noticed that the ticket volumes were just insane, so I got the ruby programer to send me over his rules and when I deciphered the logic of his processes I found that instead of reactivating the previous ticket when an additional event occurred it was simply creating a new ticket in addition to the original. Now understand when I ran the numbers on this stuff I found 90% of our ticket volume was on device events that took place within 72 hours of a previous event. So I recommended that we correct the automation so that tickets would remain in a ready to close state for 72 hours before closing and for new events to be appended to the existing ticket and that ticket be put back into an active state when that occurred which would instantly reduce our ticket volume by reducing duplicate tickets for the same issue, we would then be able to separate the wheat from the chaff by looking at ticket age so the oldest tickets would be on chronic issues and we could then concentrate our efforts on resolving those while ignoring the short 1 time stuff that tends to clutter up the process. Instead of implementing what was a relatively simple straight forward solution to our problem they ended up implementing a very complicated set of ruby rules that would try to track repeat events and manage tickets that way. Our ruby rules exploded from a few hundred to several thousand and the end result was an extremely complicate process that did nothing to reduce our ticket volume and that was so complex that it's constantly having unintended behavior due primarily to the fact that it's so damned complicated that no one can actually analyze it's logic processes to figure out where it's screwing up. Now when I proposed my far more simple and elegant solution to the problem I was told that they weren't interested because it would increase the reported MTTR and that reducing ticket volume would make it harder to make the case for more headcount. Because I guess all these highly educated directors and VPs are too stupid to understand that metrics are not absolute. Never mind that the MTTRs they are reporting now are essentially fabrications that bear no relation to reality. It would look worse so we can't do it. Never mind that reducing the volume of junk tickets would result in more efficient and effective operations by letting us focus our limited resources on real problems. Remember it wasn't because they thought it was a bad idea or that it wouldn't work. Their objection was that they thought it would work and that it would make them look worse because the numbers reported would change and my appeals that it was simply a matter or explaining the situation to upper management and managing their expectations fell on deaf ears. So we remain in a dysfunctional state primarily because of what metrics management has decided to focus on rather than on what would result in the most efficient and effective operations. This is just one example of how applying the wrong paradigm to an organization can have adverse affects to it's operation. It's not like their way of doing things is actually resulting in issues being resolved faster, it just looks like it because of how they are measuring. Kind of like how giving a measurement in centimeters results in a larger number than giving the measurement in inches would.
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Oct 19, 2014 17:20
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FISHMANPET posted:I'm coming to the slow realization that my boss thinks troubleshooting is just a jar you fill up. Once you've "troubleshooted" enough, the jar is full and a solution appears. Even if in the course of troubleshooting you find out that you just can't do that, he still wants you to fill the jar. The bean counters really want to reduce the job to a series of steps they can script and once the scripts are exhausted the work is done. You run into it all the time when calling any sort of tier 1 call center. Me "ok so there appears to be a problem with the routing of this one IP on the block you are providing us. The primary is working just fine I can see my equipment but this other is dying out on your network before reaching our equipment" Script monkey "ok sir can you power cycle the device" Me "why the hell would I do that I've already explained that this is a routing issue" Script monkey "well we need to perform Layer1 troubleshooting and that's power cycling the equipment" Me "No layer 1 is physical layer and we already know it's good because the first IP works we know layer 2 is good for the same reason this is a layer 3 problem with your routing, learn to OSI" Which was kind of unfair to him since he if he knew the theory they'd have to pay him a reasonable wage rather than the pennies they give him to read from the script they provided. And frankly they'd probably fire him if he did know and went off script. Man I'd love to find a company that wasn't run by sociopathic morons but I fear that such a thing doesn't exist.
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Oct 21, 2014 00:52
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CitizenKain posted:So continuing my bitching about dealing with some lovely cabling, we got to a site that has 0 drops labeled. 90+ drops, not a single loving label on the jack. I found a notebook in their server room that listed ports on their patch panel with things like "Erica's Office West Wall." Which would be great if there was anyone named Erica there. Or lists rooms that are 2 remodels old. That's what induction amplifiers and tone generators are for. Oh and a label maker.
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Oct 23, 2014 13:01
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Sirotan posted:lol I'm not going to use a desk made out of cardboard Because our industry is full libertard morons who don't believe in Unions so we're left with no leverage in negotiating our working conditions. Management views us as a cost center and at best a necessary evil, the bean counters have a hard time (or aren't interested in) quantifying the value we add to the business unlike sales people who's contributions are easily quantified. Typically the only time non-IT people think about us is when something breaks and then they're mad that we haven't magically fixed it already.
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Oct 23, 2014 19:49
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AlternateAccount posted:Oh for gently caress's sake, please briskly walk to the nearest incinerator and throw yourself into it. It has everything to do with politics and economics, everything in the work environment is because of politics and economics. Or are you under some delusion that they're in it to "Create jobs"? The politics create the power dynamics the economics provide the incentives the behaviors are just the manifestation of those forces. Someone asking for special accommodations highlights the over all flaws of the work environment's ergonomics, once that first person is granted a special accommodation other Employees are going to look around and say "gee I'm in as much danger as Sirotan of getting RSI, they got him/her a special desk, I should put in a request for my own." next thing they know one special accommodation becomes a trend and while a single $800 desk isn't a big deal, 50 or more is real money. Money that's going to end up in the wrong spreadsheet column when time comes to figure out bonuses. So it's in their interest to nip that poo poo in the bud with the first one. And no they won't do the right thing to avoid workers comp payouts. Only companies who don't know better would ever pay out on an RSI claim. I know, I'll probably never have full nerve function in my left hand again thanks to the poo poo heads from my company's "self insurer" for workers comp doing everything in their power to delay, deny and defer my claim. It finally reached the point that I just said gently caress it and gave up and let my health insurance eat the cost after I'd spent a year fighting to get them to cover my surgery so at least I could prevent even more damage. "How can you be sure that your injury isn't from playing tennis/golf/jerking off?" gently caress you rear end in a top hat. Profit is the difference between the what the capitalist is paid for the product/service they provide and how much the capitalist paid to create/provide it. You maximize profits by increasing the spread between those two values. Since there is an upper limit to what the customer is willing to pay for a product once you've pushed your price as high as the market will bear the only thing left is to keep costs down. Work environment is a part of the cost of labor, that's why you have cubicle farms rather than individual offices, space costs money that cuts into profits. Cram your workers in like sardines and you reduce expenditures and improve the bottom line. Quality ergonomic work-stations cost money, money that the odds are even if the poor sap with RSI can get compensation for will probably come from another company anyway so why should your company foot the bill when it won't reap the rewards for that investment. Thanks to the hostility towards the idea of unions with so many tech workers, we lack the most effective tool workers have historically had to counter the power of the capitalist. So yeah it is about loving politics and economics. Trade guilds came into existence to address exactly this sort of situation for skilled workers but no that's too socialist for us. What's pissing me off? Stupid loving libertarians cheer-leading the race to the bottom.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:56
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rolleyes posted:Meanwhile, over in the US, the definition of broadband is 4Mb/s. This still annoys the gently caress out of me even though I know it's a lost cause. Broadband does not mean big pipe, it means it's an analogue data signal. Baseband would be the digital equivalent. Fiber for example is not broadband it's a baseband technology. Broadband has nothing to do with speed it has to do with the technology used to transmit the data.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:18
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poo poo pissing me off, network equipment that doesn't have a CLI. Just spent an hour trying to reconfigure a DSL modem over dial up, should have taken a few minutes at most to turn off NAT on the loving thing but the page would only partially render, of course part of what wouldn't render was the "apply" button so while I could make changes I couldn't save those changes. On that note of DSL stuff that pisses me off. DSL field techs who don't follow loving instructions and call the gently caress in so we can make sure they configure their poo poo correctly in the first loving place, despite us insisting that their dispatchers put explicit instructions to call us before leaving the loving sites. It's a business and uses static IPs jack-rear end just because you can plug your loving laptop into it and surf does not mean you are done in fact it means you've hosed up. I've found this to be universal across every ISP. Verizon, AT&T, Centurylink, Frontier you name it their field techs are lazy morons who can't read and follow basic instructions.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:56
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flosofl posted:Totally relate to this. I like telling people, "It was working before, now it isn't. Therefore, during that span of time between when it was known to be working and when it was discovered it stopped, something changed. Find what changed and then figure out how to fix it." Did anyone think to unplug it while pinging it from offsite to see if it went offline? Don't bother answering it's a rhetorical question. I mean I get not knowing all 7 layers of the OSI model inside and out (everything above 3  to me). But 1-3 are absolutely critical when it comes to anything network related.
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Oct 28, 2014 23:47
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Pudgygiant posted:"It's always the ISP" is the new "It's always layer 1". No it's still always layer 1, except when it isn't.
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Oct 29, 2014 15:25
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flosofl posted:We refer to those as PEBKAC issues (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). Indeed, the ID 10 T error is well documented.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:44
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Field tech calls in after replacing a switch, still down. Since it's always layer 1, I ask him to hook his laptop to the back-haul to see if he gets link, he says he doesn't know which one that is, I ask "you moved the ports in order right? the uplink would be the one plugged into..." he cuts me off and says that no he didn't do a 1 for 1 swap because a 48 port switch was sent instead of a 24 (because obviously you can't fit 24 cables in ports 1-24 of a 48 port switch). Apparently it never occurred to the guy that maybe just maybe it might be kind of loving important that the cables went where our documentation says they do so he didn't know which of the 24 cables was the uplink. I then said fine, go to the head end switch and find port blah blah test that port and tone out the line that was connected to it. "um I don't have a toner" Are you loving kidding me? What the gently caress kind of field tech doesn't have a loving tone generator and induction amplifier? That's right up there with a punch tool, snips and a screw driver as far as basic cabling tools go.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:07
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^^That reminds me^^ poo poo that pisses me off; people who put read receipt requests on emails sent to distribution lists. Seriously there are 100 people on that distro you really want read receipts from everyone of them? Oh and the brilliant folks in our software department have decided *AGAIN* that Thursday night is the perfect day to roll out an update, because that's worked out so well every other time they've done it.
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Oct 30, 2014 00:20
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Stuff that pisses me off CALEA
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Oct 30, 2014 17:12
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mewse posted:How are you supposed to impress your new friends in the management club if you aren't using the latest deliberately abstract term to refer to the people you are supposed to be responsible for Besides the more you dehumanize them the easier you'll sleep at night when the time comes to out source all their work and lay them off. Fake edit: Oh who am I kidding sociopaths sleep like proverbial(as opposed to actual) babies.
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Nov 3, 2014 22:43
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Thanks Ants posted:I'd rather have to resort to buzzwords to make people think it's something new and exciting just to get managers to actually manage, than the alternative where entire departments are left to rot. Our helpdesk team leader doesn't do meetings, not even an informal 11am catch-up for 5 minutes or whatever. The team works about as well as you'd expect. Hell managers at my company spend so much time in meetings with other managers that we're (un)lucky to see them once or twice a month, much less doing any actual management. I'm convinced that "Managers" at my company spend all their time in meetings dreaming up ways to make our jobs more tedious and soul crushing.
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Jan 7, 2015 01:40
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