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Sorry, I should have mentioned - this has to use local storage. Their internet connection is beyond awful.
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Oct 6, 2013 20:35
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| # ? May 16, 2024 00:38 |
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rolleyes posted:Sorry, I should have mentioned - this has to use local storage. Their internet connection is beyond awful. The free version of CrashPlan actually has a limitation of being only local, I think. e:local and remote, just no cloud service Handiklap fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Oct 6, 2013 |
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Oct 6, 2013 20:49
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syncbackfree is very powerful and seems to run pretty fast for me
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Oct 6, 2013 22:24
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spog posted:syncbackfree is very powerful and seems to run pretty fast for me I use this for local backups and it works great.
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Oct 6, 2013 22:40
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Cheers guys, I'll take a look at those options.
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Oct 6, 2013 22:56
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Areca Backup is a Free Software (RMS-style) backup solution that's worth checking out. Very capable and cross-platform.
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Oct 6, 2013 22:58
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A job offer, graduate degree, and ticket came in!  The terrible software I had to use for my thesis produced many stories that would be suitable for this thread, but I was busy. And after graduation I managed to get an, honestly, quite nice and mostly sane job! However, it's a job working on internal infrastructure. Which means that we have users, and, as anyone who reads this thread knows, that's never a good thing. Now, part of what we maintain is a system that lets users safely make changes to production configuration. All such changes must be reviewed, but sometimes something bad slips through the review, so we also have an automatic testing system - the changes are rolled out to a small fraction of production servers, and if no problems are detected, pushed to more servers until they're live everywhere. Now, we have an internal interface to this system that we can use to examine its status - when the last configuration update was, whether the current one is considered safe or not, and so forth. And this interface, in turn, has an administrator mode that can be used, when necessary, to override the defaults - either to force push a configuration that it thinks is unsafe, or to hold back (or rollback) a configuration that it approved incorrectly. This interface is not advertised in any user-facing documentation, but, critically, it is not ACLed. So! A ticket comes in - or rather, an oncall page: the entire serving stack is on fire worldwide. The problem is quickly determined to be a bad configuration update, which is rolled back. But why did it get pushed in the first place? The problems with it are extremely obvious, there's no way it would have been approved automatically. Examination of the logs, and interrogation of the user in question, reveals the truth. Another developer had committed a configuration change. This change had broken everything, and was automatically held back. However, the user was convinced that the problem must have been an unrelated change that went in at the same time, because their change passed all the unit tests. At this point, rather than contacting our team, they somehow found the internal management interface, activated administrator mode, and overrode the safety checks to push their configuration live globally, completely bringing down the service until the oncall could roll back the configuration. The management interface is now ACLed so that only members of our team can access it. Moral of the story: if there is a button that users can press, they will press it, no matter how well hidden you think it is. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 01:09
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rolleyes posted:I recall consumer backup solutions being discussed in this thread before, so I'm hoping someone can jog my memory. I'm in love with MirrorFolder: http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/ It's not free, but well worth the $39.
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Oct 7, 2013 15:24
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My first degraded RAID volume came in... First major problem with the aging Dell PowerEdge 1800 (running SBS 2003) that's been ticking along relatively smoothly since I started here 3 years ago. After panicking a little (the server is near me and the beeping was suitably loud) I found that one of the RAID 1 drives (146Gb SCSI) was down. That was a fun day. Which leads me to... We were planning on replacing it (and bunch of the old desktops) "soon" anyway, so it doesn't seem worth spending money on a tiny SCSI drive instead of putting it towards the replacement, so we're moving the upgrade process up a bit. I've been more or less left in charge of buying a new server and desktops, but I've never done this for a business before. So far I've just been looking direct at the Dell website for what amounts to the latest equivalents of what we have (so Optiplex 3010s and probably a PowerEdge T320). We're a small charity/voluntary sector org in the UK, and we'd just be getting the server and around 5 desktops. Would it be best to try and talk to an account manager/rep, or at this small volume is it fine to just order off the Dell site?
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Oct 7, 2013 16:17
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ToxicFrog posted:
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Oct 7, 2013 16:31
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I had a Premier Schools account with Dell at my last job, and the prices were crazy low compared to the website. If you don't have that account you need to deal with an off-shore rep who gets the quote wrong three times and then beat them down on price. With a Premier account you build it online and then send it off to a rep probably in Scotland. It's worth the small amount of hassle to get one set up. Edit: I should add that I could order a quantity of 2 and they wouldn't get pissed off at all. The 3010 SFF models are great.
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Oct 7, 2013 16:31
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Today we took on a new client. The contract was fast-tracked through. Today's Audit found that their Sysadmin has set up their 1 physical server to have 4 drives in RAID-0.
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Oct 7, 2013 17:26
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ToxicFrog posted:Moral of the story: if there is a button that users can press, they will press it, no matter how well hidden you think it is. The opposite is of course also true. If there is a button the user MUST press they will be unable to find it no matter how obvious its placement.
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Oct 7, 2013 17:32
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:Today we took on a new client. The contract was fast-tracked through. Today's Audit found that their Sysadmin has set up their 1 physical server to have 4 drives in RAID-0. "It's been fine for years, it's not broken so don't touch it. We don't need charging for unnecessary work."
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Oct 7, 2013 17:37
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Caged posted:"It's been fine for years, it's not broken so don't touch it. We don't need charging for unnecessary work." OUR SERVER DIED! THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION! PLEASE DO THE NEEDFUL AND PLEASE TO BE FIXING IT ASAP! 
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Oct 7, 2013 19:38
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Going back to my previous post - I still hate CenturyLink but found out today that they weren't the cause of our client's wireless and printing problems. Apparently the main boss's kid, who is supposedly a super whiz genius with computers, decided to log into their wireless gateway/AP, change the wireless passphrase AND the wireless SSID, and didn't think to update their network printers to connect to it afterward. I got a nice apology from the boss and his co-worker who bitched at me Friday and "didn't want to have to pay for someone to travel out there", so that was a plus. On the flipside, gently caress stupid people who let their goddamn family or other internal employees mess with poo poo, then try to blame us when it goes to hell. I seriously want to punch that boss's kid in the face and break both his goddamn hands for loving with that and stressing me (and them) out.
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Oct 7, 2013 22:06
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Agrikk posted:blackswordca, your ordeal was worth reading on this thread just so we could all be loving stoked that this was the result. Still in catch-up mode. I swear I'll get to the end of the thread soon. This guy, who was told that he needs to cancel plans and no, we can't make sure that you can go to your dentist for the second rescheduling of it - the first time when we made you stay non-critical after-hours with no notice - and who is in YOTJ mode, has bowed his head down and raised one fist in the air in your honor. I want to throw money into your whiskey fund. You should jump straight the hell up to something 21 years and amazing.
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Oct 7, 2013 22:31
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Ozz81 posted:boss's kid Let me tell you about the time that my boss decided that his kid, my intern (nepotism? nah.), was qualified to "clean up" our public DNS records. At noon. On a Tuesday. So I'm in the datacenter, doing some poo poo or another, when I start getting alerts form Solarwinds that the prod html string is unreachable. So I browse to it and our production web site is a landing page for our DNS Registrar. Welp. It turns out that, go figure, our intern really didn't know what he was doing but his Dad, my boss, thought it would be a good way to getting him exposure to DNS, "but he wasn't going to touch anything in production". Of course, getting the site turned back on was a cast iron bitch because we had to go through the registrar and blah blah blah. Yeah, our site was down for four hours during business hours, showing a parking page. Cut to customer panic as all of our paying customers though we'd shut down and made off with their money.
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Oct 7, 2013 22:36
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Agrikk posted:Let me tell you about the time that my boss decided that his kid, my intern (nepotism? nah.), was qualified to "clean up" our public DNS records. At noon. On a Tuesday. You left out the part where this was somehow your fault.
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Oct 7, 2013 22:43
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FISHMANPET posted:You left out the part where this was somehow your fault. Hah. Two jobs ago there would have been a cast-iron change control process for this and the first thing that would have happened was that my boss (and his son) would have been laughed out of the meeting for proposing a change to prod during business hours. In this case, though, since it "wouldn't affect production" my boss thought it would be safe. But he forgot the rule that was hammered into my head many years ago about HA and production systems: "If it isn't in your house, consider it a production system. And production systems never get touched for anything during business hours." It was really, really fun to storm into my boss' office and yell at him for this gaffe. Actually it wasn't, because managing upwards and protecting my boss from himself became a full-time job in its own right. The only way that yutz attained a directorship was from standing on the shoulders of smart folk.
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Oct 7, 2013 23:34
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Agrikk posted:The only way that yutz attained a directorship was from standing on the shoulders of smart folk. > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > RE: A ticket came in: Incompetence standing on the shoulders of giants. Are we not all just a little bit incompetent?
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Oct 8, 2013 02:31
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Agrikk posted:The only way that yutz attained a directorship was from standing on the shoulders of smart folk. I don't expect most managers or directors to be as knowledgeable as I am about the things with which I work on a daily basis for years at a stretch. This goes double for anything related to computer tech, since it changes so fast. What differentiates a great director from a lovely one is the degree to which they acknowledge their shortcomings and trust the people under them to know what they're being paid to know. That and the degree to which they hand out blame and praise.
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Oct 8, 2013 04:04
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incoherent posted:> Serious Hardware / Software Crap > RE: A ticket came in: Incompetence standing on the shoulders of giants. There's incompetence, and then there's willful idiocy. Ones potentially correctable, the other will just plain touch everything and anything they're not supposed to regardless of how many times they burn their hands.
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Oct 8, 2013 12:44
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I got in to work yesterday morning to a chorus of "It's Broke!!!". Our electronic in/out board crapped the bed sometime overnight. While it is convenient to be able to see who is out of the office and when they will return, it is certainly not mission critical. But, my god, the bitching! Anyway, I call the support line, only to discover the company is based out of Alaska, and is 4 hours behind us. So I start poking around the program. The system consists of a central server program and a client that runs on each desktop. Found some error logs, but I couldn't make heads nor tails out of them, so I waited until after my lunch and gave them a call. Turns out the program reached maturity in 1999 and has not seen an update since then. I was passed to three different techs before I found one that was familiar enough with the program to help me. We discovered that a recent update overwrote a .dll required by the server, so we re-installed the .dll, which got the server back up and running. Then we discovered that the program writes each in/out event to a database. An Access 97 database. That had never been purged since the program was installed in 2000. And the database had hit its 1gig size limit sometime overnight. The admin function on the server program refused to mount the database to purge old events because the database was full. Access 2013 refused to open the file because the format was too old. Access 2007 also refused. I found an old copy of OfficeXP, threw it on XP mode, and was finally able to purge about 26,000 entries. The secretary who was the only one who had Admin access to the program only used it to run leave reports, and had no idea there was even a purge function. So now I have an Admin login and a recurring calendar event to purge the database every January. Yay me!
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Oct 8, 2013 15:24
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CollegeCop posted:I got in to work yesterday morning to a chorus of "It's Broke!!!". Our electronic in/out board crapped the bed sometime overnight. While it is convenient to be able to see who is out of the office and when they will return, it is certainly not mission critical. But, my god, the bitching! Don't you just LOVE old custom-build software?
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Oct 8, 2013 16:16
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RadicalR posted:Don't you just LOVE old custom-build software? 
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Oct 8, 2013 16:24
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RadicalR posted:Don't you just LOVE old custom-build software? We chucked the computer when we cleaned our lab room this summer, fortunately the machine was still in the garbage so we could get it back. Finding the right harddrive wasn't so hard either since it was one of the 10 with IDE interface and also the one with the thick black dust on it just like the computer. Booting it revealed a w98 that had been used to surf porn, as apparent by the background image and the c:\windows\downloads\ or whatever it was called back then.. I then spent some days trying to get w95 running on a celeron 2ghz with 256mb ram, which as you would think was actually too fast for w95. Patches and random "just install this".exe's from the internet and i still wasn't able to boot into anything but safemode. I did however just yesterday find two pallets of old computers in one of the storage areas around the factory so i might be able to get something working from that. (Thank you whoever in #sysadmin that recommended that emulator, i haven't had time to try it (yet) but it might help for the timing issues as you said). I've spent so many hours already on this project and we're still just in the testing phases, we might not need any of this at all. urgh..
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Oct 8, 2013 16:25
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How do you people manage mobile devices such as iPhones? We had a user leave the company and when I got his iPhone back and went to format it, it asked me for his iTunes password. We don't have the password and can't reset it. Our Verizon rep said the phone is pretty much junk now. The only way the format function asks for the iTunes password is if the Find My Phone feature is enabled. Would be nice to remotely manage that.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:58
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GreenNight posted:How do you people manage mobile devices such as iPhones? We had a user leave the company and when I got his iPhone back and went to format it, it asked me for his iTunes password. We don't have the password and can't reset it. Our Verizon rep said the phone is pretty much junk now. The only way the format function asks for the iTunes password is if the Find My Phone feature is enabled. Would be nice to remotely manage that. We use Fiberlink MaaS360. It's good once it's up and running with some nicely granular support. I don't know how much it costs so it may be worth looking into 2012 R2's mobile device management if you can spin off a VM for testing/futzing.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:59
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MJP posted:We use Fiberlink MaaS360. It's good once it's up and running with some nicely granular support. I don't know how much it costs so it may be worth looking into 2012 R2's mobile device management if you can spin off a VM for testing/futzing. Thanks for the suggestions. We have SCCM 2012, so it would be beneficial to look at 2012 R2 + Intune. I do like the all in one of MaaS360 though. I'll check it out.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:03
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GreenNight posted:How do you people manage mobile devices such as iPhones? We had a user leave the company and when I got his iPhone back and went to format it, it asked me for his iTunes password. We don't have the password and can't reset it. Our Verizon rep said the phone is pretty much junk now. The only way the format function asks for the iTunes password is if the Find My Phone feature is enabled. Would be nice to remotely manage that. if you put the phone in recovery mode then plug it into a computer with itunes installed you can wipe it to factory that way. Don't need the password. Had to do this to my brother's iPhone when he got drunk and set his phone password.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:08
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Got to witness this ticket exchange this morning. We get automated ticket updates for certain queues in one of our customer's ticketing system, so everyone on our support distro got to see this. I think the tech handled it decently well, but the attitude of the teacher was a bit mind blowing. The wireless cards in the computers in question them don't support WPA, to give you an indicator on how old they are. Teacher posted:Mrs. XXXX wrote, "Computers on round table keep dropping off internet." Tech posted:Computers on center table are too old and out of date to connect to wireless. What do you want to do with them. They seriously need to be replaced with new ones if you want to continue to use that section. Teacher posted:That's because they don't even have the updates installed that allows Tech posted:I'm afraid that's not at all true. Windows updates are not what those particular PC's are needing. When I say they are out of date, I mean technology -wise. You could install all of the updates Windows has and that still wouldn't fix the problem. Those computers are trying to connect to the wireless AP's and because of the old technology that they utilize they are simply not able to. By the way, all teachers logins should have permissions to allow Windows updates. Teacher posted:Yes, XXXX, some of what I said is true. I fully recognize that you Tech posted:Ms. XXXXX, trust me when I say to you that I understand your frustrations. And, believe me when I tell you that there are three other schools in the same, or similar, situation as yours. But, if I'm not mistaken, and please correct me if I'm wrong, we are talking about those 4 or 5 PC's in the middle of the library, Right? If that is the case, then there is nowhere to connect those computers up via ethernet cable. That's the reason they were wireless to begin with. Initially, the wireless technology we were utilizing was compatible with those PC's. When we were basically forced to upgrade in order to keep with the ever-changing technology, unfortunately, those PC's got left behind. If I'm not mistaken, those are the only computers in your school experiencing this issue. All of the other PC's are able to utilize the new technology or have a hard-wired connection. I have made the suggestion that your school replace those PC's with 4 or 5 of those new laptops that you received, but I'm not the controlling authority on that, I can only suggest. As far as the automatic updates are concerned, there is nothing that the teachers need to do. I have a server that pushes updates to the computers. If they see the little yellow icon at the bottom indicating updates just click it to accept them, those PC's didn't get updated because they were turned off. With all of the other software updates, adobe etc... they have to be done manually unless you choose to make them automatic. I hope this kind of answers your concerns or makes things a little clearer as to what's going or what needs to happen. Thanks,
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Oct 8, 2013 17:10
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It makes sense. From the teacher's perspective, all they have are busted up shitboxes over 10 years old. The wired ones work, and the wireless ones used to work. The only issue they can see are the missing windows updates. The fact that wireless standards don't play well with older versions, notably 802.11b, probably is something they're completely unaware of. I probably would have stated straight out that the new g/n network wouldn't work properly with b, so they have some concrete numbers - even if they don't understand the exact specifics.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:31
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GreenNight posted:How do you people manage mobile devices such as iPhones? We had a user leave the company and when I got his iPhone back and went to format it, it asked me for his iTunes password. We don't have the password and can't reset it. Our Verizon rep said the phone is pretty much junk now. The only way the format function asks for the iTunes password is if the Find My Phone feature is enabled. Would be nice to remotely manage that. We have a bunch of Meraki equipment and just use their MDM service. It requires an app to be installed on the device which sucks but it has some nice features such as wiping any currently set passcode, selective wiping, full device wiping, etc.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:35
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n0tqu1tesane posted:Got to witness this ticket exchange this morning. We get automated ticket updates for certain queues in one of our customer's ticketing system, so everyone on our support distro got to see this. I think the tech handled it decently well, but the attitude of the teacher was a bit mind blowing. BUT ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Holy poo poo that's just about as bad as working with nurses.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:36
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Paladine_PSoT posted:BUT ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You guys laugh, but this teacher has absolutely the right priority. I will admit that this teacher got spergy about it in her ticket, but if more teachers actually believed that everything in education should be focused around improving the lives of kids, we'd be better off as a nation. Too many people in education take the adult-centric viewpoint (I'm looking at you, teachers unions) instead of framing any idea with "How does this serve the kids?" I would do anything in my power to help this teacher get what (s)he needs because (s)he's got the proper, albeit spergy, attitude. How about purchasing a wireless bridge and hooking it up to a small switch on the desk? This way all of the PCs can be cabled in to the switch that then hops over a wireless link to the rest of the network. You can avoid a long run across the floor or a power pole from the ceiling. But your point is about the excitable teacher instead of the solution, and I understand that. Teachers can definitely be some of the more... delicate... personalities that sometimes need to be managed with kid gloves on.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:08
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blackswordca posted:if you put the phone in recovery mode then plug it into a computer with itunes installed you can wipe it to factory that way. Don't need the password. Had to do this to my brother's iPhone when he got drunk and set his phone password. iOS 7 does an activation lock - you can't set the phone up unless the previous user enters their Apple ID.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:08
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Agrikk posted:You guys laugh, but this teacher has absolutely the right priority. I will admit that this teacher got spergy about it in her ticket, but if more teachers actually believed that everything in education should be focused around improving the lives of kids, we'd be better off as a nation. I think it's more the "This is my pet project and I'm going to get what I want" attitude that I was really pointing out there. In my experience, (general disclaimer about teachers doing good, not all are tools, blah blah blah) no matter how much something actually is or isn't for the kids, if you tell a teacher no you'll get catholic-level guilt slapped with "it's for the kids" until they get what they want.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:16
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Agrikk posted:How about purchasing a wireless bridge and hooking it up to a small switch on the desk? This way all of the PCs can be cabled in to the switch that then hops over a wireless link to the rest of the network. You can avoid a long run across the floor or a power pole from the ceiling. Highlighted the problem. They probably don't have even $100 in the budget to get new wireless cards or a wireless bridge. The teacher stresses pretty hard that they have to work with what they have, which is sad considering the machines are so old that they can't hop on a modern wireless network.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:20
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| # ? May 16, 2024 00:38 |
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So a ticket came in last week for a different client than I normally deal with. The client needed help installing some amortization software on another users computer. They didn't have an installer, but wanted me to move the Program Files folder from one user to another. Apparently previous techs on the ticket just did the work without asking questions. I looked into the software and found an installer online but it was password protected. From what I can tell they have multiple installs of this application and of course only have a single license. I left a voicemail with the client advising them. I got a phone call back moments later ripping my head off about the issue and demanding I install the software. Ive already told them I wont do it as they are already in breech of contract with this developer. Unfortunately people with my company did it before without investigating into why there was no proper install for the software so it leaves me in a "well you guys did it before" situation.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:21
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