[SPAM] FW: RE: The logs could do with a courtesy flush

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > [SPAM] FW: RE: The logs could do with a courtesy flush

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Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Ugato posted:

[Employee] is authorized for the biggest and best new computer

Tell them you did as requested and ordered the biggest computer you could find.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 06:21

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:14

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Ars has the best average-level-nerd summary of the CPU stuff I've found: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-heres-what-intel-apple-microsoft-others-are-doing-about-it/

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 21:44

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

The Muffinlord posted:

For content, we just rolled out our new USB mass storage lockdown, mandated and designed by the nationwide corporation that is our parent organization only when they want to tell us to do stuff or demand that the hospital make more money. This is fine and dandy because our doctors are all morons and nobody wants to do infosec training for nurses who already don't have the patience to deal with these computer modems, except that the new filters prevent us from installing any USB hardware at all, not just Dr. Iknowbetter's infected SanDisk.

Thankfully they included a convenient way around it for those of us with AD access but I really wish the networking team and corporate would stop "fixing" problems by offloading them to the helpdesk. I also wish I'd have won the drat lottery. And a pony.

When our Group Policy people, who I've mentioned a few times in this thread before, tried to turn off USB storage at our place a few years ago they accidently turned off the USB ports entirely. We figured this out when everyone started calling the helpdesk at the same time because their mouse stopped working.

Luckily our being behind the times worked in our favor in this case because most people were still on PS/2 keyboards.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2018 21:21

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Renaissance Robot posted:

Assuming the cables were already bought, couldn't you just snip the offending bit of rubber off that one boot with a pair of scissors?

I just tear those things off on principle now when I come across a cable with them. Usually they have little clips on them, no scissors needed. Maybe they're good in a data closet where you really need to make sure a cable's not going to come out, but when you're reaching behind a user's PC trying to unplug the network cable while avoiding the gauntlet of family photos, paperweights, seashells, and whatever else is around their computer, gently caress them.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2018 03:45

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Just set up hundreds of wi-fi networks in your own building so the odds of the one across the street showing up in the first screen of results on anyone's device is really low.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2018 00:08

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

kensei posted:

It was just given to me today. Apparently we purchased it and IT will own it going forward, and I own it in IT. Whee? I have very little SharePoint experience, but that's never stopped me before!

A while ago I found out my place has a Sharepoint environment set up. It's used by one single unit, and they found all the version control stuff annoying so they had it all turned off. We're paying who knows how much for a harder-to-access network drive.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2018 21:40

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

The Iron Rose posted:

so i'm pretty sure that if a computer has lost its trust relationship with the dc and the local admin account is disabled, i'm just entirely hosed, right?

It's a surface book so I can't even rip the drive

Nthing the NT password reset tool others have mentioned, but since you mentioned pulling the drive I assume you're trying to get to the data, you should still be able to boot off any number of Linux recovery CDs/thumbdrives and just mount the NTFS drive there. Assuming it's not encrypted like TWBalls said, and that Surfaces aren't so locked down that they can't boot Linux.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 02:29

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Antioch posted:

My boss went up one side and down another on myself and a coworker a couple years back because the ATM at his home branch was down the day after we installed a new firewall. Wasn't even closed door, just marched in to the cube and called us incompetent, we would be fixing this now goddammit and how dare we use his branch as a test bed.

Turns out the ATM service provider had lost connection. ATM was back up by the time he started yelling. Didn't matter, never got so much as a "my bad".

I've been called incompetent and unprofessional so many times by this d-bag that I'm starting to believe it. Joke's on him though, I'm gonna soon and I'm going to quit with a confetti cannon and balloons.

Do you work for the bank, or is this a "you broke the internet" scenario?

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 07:08

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

The Fool posted:

We deal with this fairly regularly. Someone is coming in to use one of our conference rooms and they have a list of things that they need for their presentation and no-one involved knows what those things are for just that "the presenter said she/he needed this"

Today I got asked how someone can Facetime from their personal phone here at HQ to the projector at some Holiday Inn meeting room we're renting out next month on the other side of the state, and they don't know what that projector will be connected to.

Luckily the person asking is easygoing and took my suggestion of "speakerphone" as an acceptable alternative to projecting the other person's face on the wall for no reason.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 00:37

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

Hello new shell for users who annoy me.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2018 03:25

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Sormus posted:

I'm the 0ms latency. Thats a bold claim.

Pinging over quantum entanglement.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 20:20

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

My first Linux was Corel Linux. This newfangled Linux thing with a major software company behind it, surely that will be the best distribution, right?

I quickly moved on to a real distribution. Mandrake :eng99:

# ¿ May 31, 2018 06:41

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I had that fun experience of copying a user's data from his old laptop to his new one the other day, going into his Pictures folders and watching a few rows of thumbnails of rugged shirtless cowboys populate before deciding to switch to details view. Thanks goodness for remote desktop and not doing it with him over my shoulder.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2018 07:44

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

KillianLett posted:

Does anyone else have "Due dates" on tickets? This is a new thing for me, and I find them generally pointless.

Personal opinion is that as long as there is regular activity from our end, I'm happy.
Sure a ticket may have a hard date of needing completion, but that can just be listed in the ticket (Server must be installed on the 5th, etc).

Thoughts?

We have tickets that sit open for years until we migrate to the next version of Remedy and choose not to import the old data.

That's happened twice since I've been here. Management sees no conflict between this and asking us to document fixes in Remedy so it can be used as a knowledge base.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2018 01:14

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Today one of our people got a thumbdrive from another agency that makes any PC you plug it into bluescreen. Neat trick.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2018 01:31

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Varkk posted:

Probably just infected with malware which relies on a partially patched vulnerability.

Mystery solved and you're closest. I remembered we had an issue last year with a specific model of printer causing a bluescreen when connected over USB so I had the user send me a picture of the bluescreen (she's at a remote site) and it was indeed the same faulting .sys file. The culprit is good old McAfee, its encryption software freaks out when it encounters a certain USB storage spec (Opal, which I had never heard of prior to this). This was supposedly fixed with a hotfix last year when we had the printer issue so I'm not sure if something reverted to the unpatched version or this is a new but related bug.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2018 01:31

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Back in my student assistant days I once had a dev ask me if he needed to shutdown his computer before I installed more RAM. That was my dev skillset wakeup call.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 19:13

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Partycat posted:

Are you just jamming the glass into some sort of data hole ?

What the hell is a �loose fiber cable�?

If your fiber cables are loose you can try Metamucil.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 02:45

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

So I just discovered these and don't know how I missed them for so long.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2018 03:33

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Partycat posted:

Dude you have hundreds of unsupported java computers in production there

Yeah but that's true of pretty much everywhere.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2018 23:40

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Partycat posted:

Yes, and even the Big Easy and Snoopy series phones they have out run Java, but they�re also being patched.

Good news for GreenKnight is they aren�t going to deprecate any more phones but you will need the SIP load. SCCP is dead.

I wasn't just talking about phones.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2018 01:20

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

spog posted:

I kept getting Chad.

I feel like he is the lowest value pokemon.

I'd take Chad anytime over PJ.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2018 03:35

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

nielsm posted:

I researched this when we were having massive issues with literally hundreds of profiles left over from nurses etc. logging on shared workstations, filling up tiny 128 GB SSDs. A script to quickly clean up profiles not used for a long time solves 90% of those issues.

As a secondary note, the best way to get the "last used" date for a user profile is to check the modified time of NTUSER.DAT in the root of the profile dir. The Win32_UserProfile object itself can't really be trusted for that, the last use dates can get updated by various Windows updates/other servicing too. Checking the date on NTUSER.DAT generally gets you the last time that profile was genuinely logged on.

That used to work, but I've found that to be unreliable under Win10. I've seen profiles for people who've left that I know haven't been logged into where the NTUSER.DAT has newer dates than it should have. I don't know that it can happen the other way, so it's probably still fine for a script to delete old profiles, it just won't get all the ones that it should.

The Fool posted:

An e-mail came in:

Man, all we get is homeless junkies pooping in our parking lots.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2018 00:54

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Manager on the other side of the state from me, 4:30 PM last Thursday: My printer stopped working, I can still print to the office printer but my desk printer won't print. <Attaches screenshot of generic "error printing" message above a flyer for a local community St. Patrick's Day luncheon>
Me: Okay, I see you have $crappyoldHP, we've been seeing a lot of issues with that model recently that we've never been able to completely resolve so we should just replace it. Out shipping pickup already came today and I'm off tomorrow through next Wednesday, so a coworker will ship you a new printer tomorrow.
Manager: Should I use the one you already sent?
I do some research I see I already sent him a replacement for this crappy HP printer last November, which I'm sure has been sitting in the box down there since then. By this point it's like 4:45.
Me: Yes, I forgot I sent you that one. Did you want to set it up tonight? I'm here until 6:00.
Manager: No, I'll contact you tomorrow.
Me: I'm off tomorrow through Wednesday, but if you email our group someone else can do the setup.
Manager: Oh yeah you told me that LOL
Manager: Wait never mind it started printing again.

Now Wednesday I get to see if any of my coworkers decided to be proactive, which is unlikely, or if I get to go through this all again in another six months.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 06:45

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

The Fool posted:

Ctrl-c is a process escape command
Ctrl-v is for verbatim mode

HTH

Yeah, are you too good for the real copy/paste shorcuts?

# ¿ Aug 24, 2020 04:14

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

larchesdanrew posted:

I informed the school before I left that there were a few accounts that had 2FA set up that I could not transfer ownership for until there was another TC set up and ready to take on the responsibility (Apple education is a huge pile of poo poo). There always has to be an owner and you can't transfer ownership to service accounts or an empty chair. I honestly can't remember my logic behind it now. I was just ready to gtfo and I thought of exactly no alternative solutions. Whatever.

Point being, they were told that when they finally hired someone, to have them call me so we could work out account ownership transfer.

For a month now, I just get 2FA alerts for these accounts sent to me in short bursts every couple of days. No one ever calls. I just get the the notifications.

I wonder if he knows to call me. I wonder if he's just silently freaking out that he can't get access to these accounts.

How is he this incompetent?

Eeeehhhhhhhhhhh uhhh oh ehhh mmmm

At the start of the pandemic when we were quickly transitioning to O365/telework and enabling 2FA, a significant number of people set it up with the authentication method being to call their office line.

Usually we found out about this when an office's receptionist (who still had to report into the office) would contact us asking if there was any other way for them to work remotely, besides calling into them every day saying "Okay I'm about to start working, you'll get my authentication call in a minute". Note that all of these people had work-issued cell phones.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 23:17

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I got a voicemail today, "Is there a reason that some emails are blocked by the filter?", no additional info.

Yes, there is.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2020 03:47

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Sarern posted:

Please tell me that

Was your entire response.

Unfortunately not, it was from an older user who wouldn't have gotten it.

The end result turned out to be that the PII filter was working as intended, so I didn't have to do anything beyond try to explain encrypted email to the user.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2020 22:06

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

We got an email that a car fire burned a Comcast fiber, forcing a number of our offices over to the backup LTE circuit.

Evidently the backup circuit is blocked from accessing the internet, to ensure all the limited bandwidth goes to communication between the remote site and HQ.

Our email is hosted on O365.

Well at least they can access all their Excel files on the network shares, I guess.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2020 00:11

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

chin up everything sucks posted:

Sounds like something told 2016 to uninstall, and 2013 was still present and for some reason is taking priority over 365 for opening most docs and excel files.

Office installs will fail if there's any component of a different version of Office on the system, so if you want to upgrade to Office 365 you can't get away with keeping your old perpetual Visio 2016 license and have to upgrade that too. I would assume the user is all on O365 now and just thinks it's Office 2013 for some reason.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2020 23:40

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Super Soaker Party! posted:

This guy (who is in his 60s and one of our crankiest users, generally speaking, so this is not surprising), has DOUBLED THE gently caress DOWN.

Our responses so far have essentially been as calm as possible trying to get across that "Office 365" is a cosmetic change over Office 2016, or 2019 technically, and that there is no actual difference.

At this point I'm essentially baiting the guy by continuing to respond with helpful fixes to the things he's complaining about, so the last response I just sent basically walked him through how to change the start behavior in Excel and Word not to show the start screen (I gotta be honest, this is somewhat our fault in that we had a GPO for 2016 that prevented the start screen and I think we just got lazy and didn't update it for 365 so basically he's seeing different behavior than he had before, but as usual with this guy he flies completely off the handle about such things instead of being remotely polite about it, and literally no one else at this client has complained). The reality is 365's not going away buddy, so you just keep yelling at those clouds and I'll continue to offer helpful answers to the "problems" you actually mention. For everything else there's Mastergofuckyourself.

Is this guy's management involved in this yet?

I think at this point I'd be recommend he go to a basic O365 training course, preferably one of the week-long ones :getin:

# ¿ Oct 5, 2020 19:31

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Kurieg posted:

So how are your weeks going?

My coworker is already on my nerves because he keeps contacting me asking what to do when he runs into issues when the answer is always "troubleshoot it". Among the things he's contacted me about today is not being able to remote desktop to a laptop he just put online, not being able to get a second monitor to work, and what to do about said laptop not showing up in SCCM. He's a nice guy and a good worker, but he's been with us for years and should have a pretty good feel for the way things work at our place by now. As soon as he runs into an issue he just stops and contacts me because he thinks I know some magic fix, rather than try to figure it out himself or research it.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2020 23:58

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I got a fun email asking for "a cable to connect two monitors together". They were of course trying to get a dual-monitor setup, but I had a good half-second or so of my brain short-circuiting by envisioning connecting the various ports on monitors together and trying to figure out what it would do.

Also

AlexDeGruven posted:

It was loving Windows 9x, that's how you fixed 99.999999999% of issues.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2020 23:28

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Biowarfare posted:

https://www.dell.com/support/articl...ort-mst?lang=en

Yeah but we have nothing near that fancy at my place, and the user is definitely not technically-inclined enough to be aware of that. Probably half of our monitors are still VGA-only or just VGA and DVI.

As an example of the user's knowledge one of the two "monitors" they wanted to connect together was an all-in-one desktop.

Arquinsiel posted:

I used to always wonder what these were for. I still to wonder why some monitors have two VGA ports.

I assume they're for when you need to turn two regular VGA cables into one long cable, and don't want to just buy a single long cord for some reason? I don't see what else it could do. Assuming that's female on both sides, that is. I've come across one or two of those at my work and wondered the same.

And I always assumed the dual-VGA monitors could do like picture-in-picture or something similar, so you could keep an eye on one input down in the corner in the days before easy remote desktoping?

# ¿ Oct 22, 2020 03:10

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Geemer posted:

I requested a new keyboard for one of our lab computers because I hosed up and poured cement into the old one.
They sent over their intern to pick out the cement until it worked again. He did a surprisingly good job of it, but I'm still going to buy a new one and expense it.

Do you think it was some sort of IT hazing ritual?

Sorry to go back like three pages but... Cement, or rubber cement?

# ¿ Oct 23, 2020 21:51

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

I got an email from a manager that a user's monitor "was all black", with the user cc:'d. I was working from home today so I wrote back asking for more info, figuring I'd have to send our on-site guy over to check the connections, all the usual stuff, when the user started responding to the emails, reiterating (caps hers) "EVERYTHING IS BLK". I didn't get how she was responding with a black screen, so I got her on the phone and remote-assisted.

Apparently she was wiping her keyboard down with some disinfectant wipes and hit some hotkey to turn on high-contrast mode. Everything was black alright, along with highlights of blue and yellow. That was a new one.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2020 05:04

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

RFC2324 posted:

I like the one tHat presses shift every 59 secoNds.

I use one that presses Ctrl every one or t

# ¿ Nov 4, 2020 05:38

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

Collateral Damage posted:

Is there any reason not to just go with firstname.lastname? Why do people come up with these convoluted abbreviation schemes?

I'm pretty sure this guy's been gone for years, but he's got such a unique name I'm guessing you can Google up his entire employment history so I'm censoring it out anyway. Imagine trying to type this freehand off a business card. 18-letter first name, 14-letter last name.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2020 21:13

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

luminalflux posted:

I love being firstname@company. I might make that part of my sign-on package (along with "no sharing hotel rooms on business travel") for my next gig.

We only have one of these at my place, and it's the Exchange admin.

Or at least, former Exchange admin, current head O365 email guy. I'm not exactly sure what you even call that position anymore.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2020 00:52

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:14

Knormal: Nov 11, 2001

mllaneza posted:

I don't know, but 12 instrument vendors have given us a PC bundled with the instrument that has a serial number of 123456789. We have thirty four machines with a s/n of "To be filled by O.E.M." The in-house inventory system that assumes serial numbers are globally unique just about had kittens when they tried to import my database of lab machines. It also assumes hostnames never, ever change.

In a big PC refresh we did about a decade ago we got two PCs with the same MAC. Fortunately they ended up on opposite ends of the state and never ended up on the same subnet, so it never caused any technical issues, but man did that confuse us for a while until we confirmed that they were in fact different machines.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2020 06:25

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > [SPAM] FW: RE: The logs could do with a courtesy flush

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