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Sweevo posted:Thermal printers over USB are far far worse. Usually the USB thermal printers are just the serial ones with a cheap USB->serial adapter built in, ships with crappy drivers (often 32bit WinXP only even today) and no documentation on the adapter to hunt out a different driver. If by some miracle you do get it to work chances are when the PC restarts the virtual com port created by the USB->serial adapter is going to change.
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Sep 26, 2013 22:50
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nitrogen posted:Customer bought a netapp for their environment. A mostly WINDOWS environment, I might add. Probably some silly accounting rules, e.g VM maintenance costs will come out of an operations budget and may not need prior approval where as the license will come out of a capital expenditure budget and would need approval from higher up.
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Oct 9, 2013 02:18
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Inspector_71 posted:gently caress Office 2013. When it works I love everything about it but installing it is such a motherfucker with its completely asinine licensing scheme, "Hang on gotta download everything" and "I am done installing by not really!" I wasted five hours tonight installing it on a bunch of computers and then having to roll it back because it couldn't open files on network shares. Godammit. I did an install of that recently where I ran the installer on the disk and then tested out Word, Excel and Outlook to make sure they worked, ensured it was activated etc. All was happy, so I pulled the disk out and turned the PC off. The next day I get a call, nothing is working etc. Turns out that after it tells you it is finished installing it is still installing things off the disk in the background and you need to keep the disk in until it has finished some indeterminate length of time later.
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Oct 9, 2013 03:33
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Dick Trauma posted:People keep turning on Outlook's junk mail filter and then wondering where all their critically important emails are going. <PLONK> With SBS2011 and if the clients have Outlook 2007 or newer. If people add a sender to the junk mail list then the Exchange spam filter will recognise that and add that sender to the spam filter, but only when they send to that particular user. It can be fun tracking down why an external contact can send to everyone else in the organisation but can't send to their regular contact and the regular contact is able to receive from everyone else. Even better is users are somehow able to mistake "Add to address book" with "Add to blocked senders".
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Oct 13, 2013 22:22
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Do people thing Going virtual means you can forget all problems of a infrastructure design or something? No, they just never really understood that in the first place.
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Oct 16, 2013 03:17
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TWBalls posted:I can't say for certain, but I seem to recall reading that it was ngen.exe compiling stuff in the background that was the culprit. If that was the case you would expect it to use a chunk of resources, but when applying it and checking the usage even on an otherwise idle system processor usage doesn't get over 5% and there isn't much RAM or disk IO either. It is possible they limit the resources the update process can use to stop it from swamping an otherwise busy system, but surely they could detect the load level somehow and adjust accordingly.
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Oct 16, 2013 22:35
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dorkanoid posted:Cryptolocker scares me. I know we have backups of everything + shadow copies enabled, but the cleanup would still be horrible. I think this was posted in the ticket thread about the time that Cryptolocker first showed up.  But good backups and enable volume shadow copies on the share are important as well so if it does happen you can recover quickly.
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Oct 23, 2013 23:04
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Inspector_666 posted:Yeah, I don't see the appeal of in-house Exchange anymore at all unless you're huge. If you don't have the resources to commit to a proper environment for the physical server and the staff to manage it, it will be much more trouble than it can ever be worth. Some businesses just can not trust 3rd party mail providers for confidentiality reasons etc. Most specifically lawyers and doctors are the two main ones I can think of who should avoid 3rd party hosted providers for mail and document storage. Not to be  about it but one example was a lawyer working on assisting an immigration case for someone who unknown to the lawyer is on a list for extra scrutiny from the national security agencies.The other issue with externally hosted services like that is the old issue of a contractor getting carried away with a digger and knocking out the fibres carrying the data for the area. Which has happened to us and our clients a couple of times in the last 18 months or so.
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Oct 31, 2013 23:04
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Pissing me off sales reps who don't actually understand the product they are selling. We have a client who got convinced they could save a ton of money by switching their internet/phone/mobile provider. So without consulting us they signed the contract and then brought us in to the loop. So I contact the person who sold them the package to get the relevant details (account details for the routers, what the new static IPs will be etc). She had no idea what an IP was or why you would want a static one, didn't know what an Exchange server was. Then she was unable to tell us which account was tied to which line or even which location. Finally sorting most of it out they can't tell me what the static IPs will be for the lines until the switchover is made and they connect for the first time. We don't know when the switch is happening other than it has a target of Friday. I was talking to a few of their workers and apparently Fridays are the worst day of the week for them to have an interruption to their internet access. Best part is that after having to add on all the 'optional extras' to their internet account (like static IPs etc) for their business to run, they are not going to be making any real savings on their bills. And they now get to be billed for a few hours of our time to get it all running again like it was before they changed provider.
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Nov 14, 2013 02:10
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thebigcow posted:Surely you own a pile of USB extension cords of varying lengths so it doesn't matter where the ports are on the case or where the case is under your desk because you can put a port where you need it? There are some slight differences between the USB2 and USB3 specs which may mean he won't get the advantages of USB3 unless he uses a USB3 spec extension cable.
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Nov 29, 2013 01:35
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rolleyes posted:I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a "bwuuuh?" reaction when confronted with the Bra for Windows. I had to double check the date to make sure it wasn't the start of April, or is this some new tradition someone is trying to start of playing practical jokes over Thanksgiving weekend or something?
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Dec 4, 2013 23:16
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guppy posted:You... didn't think billing customers for doing nothing was fraud? Depends, it can be a grey area where dodgy businesses like to hide. If they were quoted a figure for a build and that figure was based on it taking 40 hours of his time which was agreed to by the client before it started then they might be in the clear. If they are however straight up inflating the time on their bills just for extra cash then if it is proven they are hosed. Well he will be because the company's lawyers will make it all his fault as a rogue employee.
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Dec 11, 2013 04:04
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Pissing me off, clients who won't make decisions. We have one client who had a printer die just out of warranty. We gave the boss there the options for repair about $1000, replace with a similar spec printer is about $800, or lease one with a maintenance contract. He has sat on it for about two weeks, saying he will make a decision in the next day or so. In the meantime I get called every couple of days by the person who actually uses the printer days asking what is happening and when I am going to fix her printer.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:01
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Oh they know that we are waiting on their boss to make the decision. But still seem to call us to complain. Probably because there isn't much else they can do and at least feel like they are doing something by calling us. We remind them we are waiting on their boss and tell them to give him another nudge for us.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:57
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Misogynist posted:It's not a loving airport! Only issue with DFS is you get special snowflake software that won't work with the data files referenced by DFS namespaces. Sure it is easy enough to make sure those drives are mapped using a server name instead of the DFS namespace. But it is 2013 and DFS is not exactly bleeding edge anymore.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:56
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A lot of the hate for Java early on was because of the need for the runtime. A smart arse 1st year comp sci major would make a hello world app in java and run a memory profiler on it and see the JRE using about 40mb of the 256mb RAM in their awesome P2 gamebox. Compared to their optimised hello world written in C Java was a huge memory hog and is bloated etc. This reputation stuck with Java for a long time and people still complain about Java using up their precious RAM.
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Jan 16, 2014 23:28
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Bob Morales posted:We have a couple people with Dutch last names where I work, and of course we get people that try to email them but can't get someones email address right even if they are typing it from a business card or sales flyer. If people emailing the person will bring revenue in to the company then you set up the alias. If it will make more work without bringing in revenue or worse a bill you let it bounce until they get the right address. Feign ingorance when they ask why it isn't coming in and say "I guess you should be using the right address."  Or at least that is what previous bosses expected us to do.
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Jan 19, 2014 22:51
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Back to the Java is poo poo complaints. I caught a good one today. An insurance company here has a java web app which they need to panel beaters to use to upload photos, damage assesments etc and of course final invoices for work done. This app has a little feature which when you launch it checks to see if you are running the latest Java release available. If not it closes and directs you to update. This is all nice and fine. However the app is not signed and so won't work on the latest Java release. Sure there are workarounds, but not exactly the kind of things panel beaters want to be dealing with.
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Jan 20, 2014 02:24
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I think he hid the SSIDs as well because if they can't see it they can't hack in to it.
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Jan 20, 2014 04:06
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Caged posted:"Our IT is poo poo here", says the department lead who won't buy new hardware and deals with slow unreliable old poo poo. Yes, and unless you have someone with similar seniority/clout who will call them on it you will continue to have poo poo rained down on you.
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Jan 20, 2014 21:57
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Yes welcome to business computing, where the license fees are astronomical and the hardware doesn't matter.
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Jan 22, 2014 22:33
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Bob Morales posted:Some old Engineer kept calling his laptop a labtop, and then he said back in the 70's or 80's they made lab-tops that sat 'on top of your laboratory table' and that's why they were called that. I wonder if you spent an hour Googling old magazines or something if that turns out to be a real thing. Sounds like the good old Compaq Luggable  About the size of a suitcase and weighing around 13kg. You certainly wouldn't want that balanced on your lap.
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Jan 23, 2014 22:03
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Don't know who would be good for you locally, but as a general rule if you can get the printers on a lease contract then do it. I think if you were to spend more than about $800 purchasing a printer it will probably make more sense to lease it. Best thing is if it plays up you can just call a toll-free number and read out the fault code and walk away.
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Jan 29, 2014 22:59
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Maybe just try netsh int ip reset Then reconfigure details for the connection. Or throw a cheap PCI/PCI-E NIC in there and see if it still does it.
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Jan 31, 2014 01:22
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Panthrax posted:USB to serial dongles. gently caress those things. I've got one that causes blue screens, just locks up Putty, loses the com port, blah blah, and when I try to restart, hangs the PC, and it won't reboot when it's plugged in. loving hell, especially when I'm on site all week, and I'm loving with my laptop all the time. I even just found newly released drivers in the last few months, and it locked up even quicker than normal after the first install. Any decent ones out there that don't suck horribly? I'm getting tired of this poo poo. My favourites are the ones which get assigned a new com port address on each reboot or when it is unplugged and plugged back in.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:42
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Bob Morales posted:Who are they supposed to ask? Ideally the IT helpdesk could be a clearing house for such requests, e.g Ticket comes in "How do I Excel?" IT helpdesk then forwards it to the user's manager with details on booking additional training for said user.
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Feb 17, 2014 21:22
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Bob Morales posted:One burner. I bet he doesn't even have another device which can read Blu-Ray disks in the company.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:31
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Paladine_PSoT posted:That's not odd that's a standard loving feature. http://www.xero.com/ Is about the only way I can find to fix that particular issue. Unfortunately my boss seems to love Quickbooks and won't look at alternatives. I have suggested it to a couple of clients and I know of some who use it. It must be pretty good as it is about the only accounting package our clients use which they don't call us about because it is misbehaving.
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Feb 26, 2014 21:58
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Pissing me off today. Support for the 3rd party products some of our clients use. First of all we have one client who the support for their business critical software only seems to receive mail from me if I also CC my boss and the boss of the client company. Even then it only seems to work if the boss of the client has made a phone call to the head of their sales department in recent memory. Second one is a support tech for a product used at another client. He doesn't seem to bother listening to the details in voicemails we leave for him. Also I have never spoken directly to him only ever left voicemail. I think my boss has spoken to him two or three times in the ten years he has been dealing with this software. I left him a voicemail few days back after setting up a system ready for him to remote to and setup their product. I left full details with username/password etc. A few days later he emailed my boss saying he can connect but doesn't know the password for the system. I emailed him back with the password. He then emailed me back asking what the username was.
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Mar 18, 2014 02:11
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ratbert90 posted:Also Linux systems "engineers" who make everything static and don't do error checking or failure handeling, can't figure out how to read log files, disable iptables/SElinux/chmod 777 everything and anything, and have the root user with a loginable password. A guy I was working with tried to do this, fortunately only on a test system. He was trying to test why an smtp connection was failing so setup a stupid proxy on this test system which listened on a randomly chosen port for an incoming connection and then forwards it along to the correct smtp server on port 25. He wanted the linux system to log the error from the remote server for the fault  Of course he couldn't connect to his proxy because the firewall was running, and his proxy was being blocked from doing anything anyway by selinux. He tried to disable the firewall, but once again selinux blocked him. He then asked me how to disable selinux, I asked why? He explained. All I could do was stare in disbelief and once again ask why? Apparently he always disables things like firewalls and selinux/apparmour etc as they just get in the way. Oh the original problem was he had a typo in the password for the email program, if he had read the error Outlook threw at him he would have seen that.
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Mar 18, 2014 22:45
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ratbert90 posted:Good sweet Jesus. Why on earth was he using Linux to begin with if he couldn't look at basic log files? Oh he could look at log files, the basic error message from Outlook was the issue. He wanted something to show up in a log file on a linux machine. His reasoning was Outlook errors aren't very helpful, he wanted to see the full smtp error response. In this instance the Outlook error was enough, surely the first thing you do when Outlook reports a username/password failure is double check the username/password you entered. Sometimes people just go looking for an overly complex way to solve a problem rather than the simple thing.
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Mar 19, 2014 02:18
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icehewk posted:Can't you just call her ISP and bill her for your time with a two hour minimum? He would need her account information and would probably need to be authorised as a contact for the account before they will do anything to help. Even then they would probably want him on site to power cycle the modem a few times before doing any real troubleshooting.
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Mar 20, 2014 21:39
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Caged posted:Wow, poo poo quality prints *and* airborne carcinogens. What an excellent bargain those refurb toners turned out to be. Branch office, people making the decisions and reaping the financial rewards aren't there and breathing the carcinogens in.
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Mar 24, 2014 22:58
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AlternateAccount posted:That old SAN is still worth a non-zero amount of money to someone out there. Put it on Ebay and Bob Morales' boss can buy it and run it off a second hand UPS with refurbished batteries he also got of Ebay.
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Mar 25, 2014 21:55
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Either that or run the .exe and then look in your %temp% folder for a folder just recently created. Usually the first thing it does is extract everything to there.
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Apr 7, 2014 02:45
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Alereon posted:Doesn't that mean you can never get drunk unless you're on vacation? gently caress that. Even if you are on vacation they will still call you.
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Apr 15, 2014 22:40
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Sirotan posted:Just register for that Meraki webinar under a half dozen different pseudonyms, wifi problems solved! You just reminded me of something that has been pissing me off for a while now. I sat through the Meraki webinar, got the email and attempted to contact the rep. Except I am in New Zealand and the rep is based in San Francisco. The webinar ended at 12PM our time which is 5PM PST. No answer on his phone so left a message with the relevant details. Also sent a follow up email. Heard nothing for a few days so sent another email and still nothing.  I really wanted that AP after sitting through an hour of hearing how awesome they are 
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May 12, 2014 00:00
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I showed an mcse how shift+right click allowed you to run as a different user. Yeah just..... Wow I remember one time I was working with two other techs from another division on a project and each one of us had a little thing like that we weren't aware of the others were. Just shows the importance of working in small teams really.
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May 12, 2014 23:20
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Galler posted:Should have just searched for coupons and clicked any of the links. Every user that I've ever seen that's in to coupons has all kinds of browser poo poo infecting their computer. Or visited a popular mainstream news site at the right moment. The worst drive-by malware infections I have sen have been as a result of ad networks being compromised or otherwise serving them up on places like CNN, ESPN etc.
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May 19, 2014 23:01
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Often we get told that the monitor is not working, when in fact the whole PC is powered off. Or we get told the computer is broken and nothing ever works etc and all that happened is someone bumped the power button on the monitor.
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May 28, 2014 00:39
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