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Agrikk posted:Hah hah hah! Whoops! These servers got decommissioned two months ago. But they were in use! Looks like somebody should use them more than once every 60 days. If anyone gets in "deep poo poo" because some rear end in a top hat/client who "needs" servers they don't even notice missing for two months has complained to his golfing buddy, you should look for a new job. Not even joking. If you yank the power cable and nobody complains after two weeks, it's fair game to decommission. Completely deprovisioning servers and removing LUNs before they complain? Even worse.
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Dec 20, 2013 19:28
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Hey Agrikk, can you check to see of there are any backups for server1 and server2?
Uh, I received a tag to decommission those servers two months ago. Remember?
Hey PM, I need more information about the server1 and server2 decommission. These servers were still in use and I've received an escalation. Agrikk, do the LUNs on server1 and server2 still exist?
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Let's all take Agrikk's situation as a reminder of why we document everything with a ticketing system. Aggrik,, glad you're covered.
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Dec 20, 2013 19:41
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evol262 posted:These servers got decommissioned two months ago. Because no task, ever, has only been useful about once every two months?
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Dec 20, 2013 19:51
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so the Sr tech came in today for a surprise visit He is migrating the ISP over tomorrow and wanted to clarify some stuff we me. While he was here he looked into and 'resolved' an email issue where occasionally a legitimate email with an attachment would end up in a users junk mail folder. Shortly after I left I got a report, all mail from outside the organization is now failing to be delivered with the error 'the server cannot be contacted' and internal mail is all going to the users junk folder. I have no idea what he did.. Edit: not sure who did what but the domains MX record is completely gone. blackswordca fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 19:54
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guppy posted:Let's all take Agrikk's situation as a reminder of why we document everything with a ticketing system. Twenty years in IT has given me a few maxims to live by: 1. If it isn't in your own house, treat it as Production. 2. Never, ever, say, "Well that went well. Since I'm here and I still have time in my maintenance window, I might as well do this one more thing." 3. When someone asks mid deployment how things are going and will we finish on time, never ever jinx it by saying "Things are going great and we'll totally be done ahead of schedule." 4. Before decommissioning anything, send out a validation email saying, "I am about to shut down X, Y and Z servers permanently and remove all backups, permanently destroying all data. Are you okay with this?" and of course: 5. gently caress printers. Fake edit: An email came in: email from PM posted:Dear Bosses Boss,
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Dec 20, 2013 20:02
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blackswordca posted:so the Sr tech came in today for a surprise visit Somehow, you will be blamed for this. God drat, that guy is terrible. He must either have some dirt on the owner or is in cahoots with him on some shady poo poo for him to still be employed.
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Dec 20, 2013 20:09
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the littlest prince posted:Because no task, ever, has only been useful about once every two months? Because if you, the system owner or principal user somehow missed a chain of emails and contacted a PM earlier in the process to say "stop the work" then didn't bother to follow through by, I don't know, actually logging into your systems to see when/if they're decommissioned until it's been so long that the storage guys have potentially removed the LUNs, who is there to blame? There are certainly systems that are useful every 3 months for quarterly accounting and whatever. If the owners of those systems ignore attempts to say "these are going away, does anyone have a stake?", the onus is on whoever the stakeholder on the decommission conversation was. I guess I should have said that if anyone's in deep poo poo other than the business driver, he should look for a new job, but it's "A ticket came in...", so...
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Dec 20, 2013 20:12
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blackswordca posted:so the Sr tech came in today for a surprise visit Holy poo poo your Sr. Tech is a walking disaster area. Pretty sure if I were working there I would have been fired for physically assaulting him every time he tried to put his hands on a keyboard.
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Dec 20, 2013 21:07
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evol262 posted:Ah, the true goon, critiquing people in the most puerile way possible for the subjunctive mood and proper homophone usage which are so crucial to writing Java. I'm pretty sure he wasn't being completely serious, but at the same time I would have thought that not being able to write correctly in your native language would cause some problems writing in a programming language. And even where it doesn't, it certainly could lead to that person writing documentation that is ambiguous or inaccurate. I work with several people who are extremely competent technically but cannot compose an email or write up project documentation without making spelling and grammar mistakes throughout, and I am 100% certain it holds them back career-wise.
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Dec 20, 2013 21:57
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Bwuahahaha what's a ticketing system? Ours is 'sending GreenNight an email and if he is on vacation (which I am) then send it to everyone else in IT (4 other dudes).
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Dec 20, 2013 22:13
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We have a lovely fake database program from Corel called Paradox. We upgraded one computer to Win 7 and Paradox 11 and suddenly printing makes the printer spit out garbage, after re installing drivers and the program now the program crashes when it prints! Everybody else works okay. gently caress printers.
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Dec 21, 2013 00:08
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GreenNight posted:Bwuahahaha what's a ticketing system? Ours is 'sending GreenNight an email and if he is on vacation (which I am) then send it to everyone else in IT (4 other dudes). So install a ticketing system.
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Dec 21, 2013 00:59
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GreenNight posted:Bwuahahaha what's a ticketing system? Ours is 'sending GreenNight an email and if he is on vacation (which I am) then send it to everyone else in IT (4 other dudes). You need to get one. Your immediate reaction when you start using it is that it's a pain in the rear end and generates a lot of dumb work you didn't have to do before that keeps you from your real job. This evaluation is accurate. But it's important for several reasons. One is Agrikk's situation -- you always want to be able to point back to documentation that something was requested, was completed, was authorized, etc. A second one, also very important, is that sooner or later business people are going to ask questions about all the money that goes to IT, and your team will need to justify its existence to mouthbreathers who don't understand what you do.
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Dec 21, 2013 01:06
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A server rack came in for my home lab environment... And it had 3 left side vertical rails and a single right side rail.  I've filled a ticket
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Dec 21, 2013 01:45
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guppy posted:You need to get one. Your immediate reaction when you start using it is that it's a pain in the rear end and generates a lot of dumb work you didn't have to do before that keeps you from your real job. This evaluation is accurate. But it's important for several reasons. One is Agrikk's situation -- you always want to be able to point back to documentation that something was requested, was completed, was authorized, etc. A second one, also very important, is that sooner or later business people are going to ask questions about all the money that goes to IT, and your team will need to justify its existence to mouthbreathers who don't understand what you do. Oh trust me I know. It's a battle I've been fighting for a better part of the decade. The company president put his foot down and said absolutely no ticketing system. Our onsite call center for our manufactured products doesn't have one either. He says it removes "the personal touch". I've had warnings to drop the issue so I don't bring it up anymore. He is also the dude who we can't convince to let us install Lync because "people will stop having face to face conversations". Because email already didn't? I don't know.
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Dec 21, 2013 01:54
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Scikar posted:I'm pretty sure he wasn't being completely serious, but at the same time I would have thought that not being able to write correctly in your native language would cause some problems writing in a programming language. And even where it doesn't, it certainly could lead to that person writing documentation that is ambiguous or inaccurate. I work with several people who are extremely competent technically but cannot compose an email or write up project documentation without making spelling and grammar mistakes throughout, and I am 100% certain it holds them back career-wise. That said, our Chinese devs with broken English still write good code, and we have documentation writers.
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Dec 21, 2013 03:20
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TWBalls posted:Somehow, you will be blamed for this. God drat, that guy is terrible. He must either have some dirt on the owner or is in cahoots with him on some shady poo poo for him to still be employed. Good call on the blame thing... Wasnt my boss to be fair, it was the client. blackswordca fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Dec 21, 2013 |
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Dec 21, 2013 04:49
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Yaos posted:We have a lovely fake database program from Corel called Paradox. We upgraded one computer to Win 7 and Paradox 11 and suddenly printing makes the printer spit out garbage, after re installing drivers and the program now the program crashes when it prints! Everybody else works okay. I knew Corel bought a lot of antique programs and put them on life support, but loving Paradox ? Wow. I'm glad that a program that was pretty major on DOS 4.2 is still alive. It predates Access by a good 5 years. My funny Access story. I was in software retail when 1.0 came out. We sold all 12 copies we received on Monday by Friday. By next Friday we had accepted 13 returns (one was sold at a different store in the chain). 1.0 shipped broken, completely unusable. Nobody is surprised of course.
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Dec 21, 2013 05:59
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A little late to the degree talk but wanted to chime in. Whenever I feel less-than for my HS diploma and tech school cert I remind myself that 1) I did not sink a ton of money into my education and still landed into a sweet career and 2) that my boss was a theater major and the guy I now manage was a stage magician so who the hell knows about the paths our lives take. When I YOTJ'd in January I was thrilled that it was out of a dying business unit and over to corporate even if it was a lateral move. This week I found out that I am bonus eligible, which I wasn't in my old job, and I just got a 10% bonus. 
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Dec 21, 2013 06:08
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GreenNight posted:Oh trust me I know. It's a battle I've been fighting for a better part of the decade. The company president put his foot down and said absolutely no ticketing system. Our onsite call center for our manufactured products doesn't have one either. He says it removes "the personal touch". Consider it a blessing, if he had caved on Lync earlier you might have ended up with OCS 2007. Now you can get the slightly less awful Lync 2013, and even better you can use the end of life Forefront TMG to reverse proxy it at the edge because that's not an awful idea that my PMs keep insisting I do woo.
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Dec 21, 2013 08:01
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tomapot posted:A little late to the degree talk but wanted to chime in. Whenever I feel less-than for my HS diploma and tech school cert I remind myself that 1) I did not sink a ton of money into my education and still landed into a sweet career and 2) that my boss was a theater major and the guy I now manage was a stage magician so who the hell knows about the paths our lives take. IT, especially the administration side of things, is one of those fields where a degree doesn't really matter compared to your actual experience. Hell, the top sysadmin at the first place I worked had an art degree from SCAD. I've only got a liberal studies BS myself, but I started my first job while I was still in college and stayed at the same place for 11 years, going from phone jockey to sysadmin.
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Dec 21, 2013 15:43
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tomapot posted:my boss was a theater major and the guy I now manage was a stage magician. Your boss:  Your subordinate: 
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Dec 21, 2013 17:11
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GreenNight posted:I've been in Costa Rica for a week and I spent 1 hour each night on the Internet doing random poo poo while the gf updates Instagram. All the emails I got from my boss were "add this to your list when you get back". Owns. Jelly, Costa Rica is AWESOME went there for 2 weeks when I was 17. Probably the best/second best out of US trip of my life, you are a lucky man good sir.
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Dec 21, 2013 17:19
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Ticket system? That's pretty much an amalgamation of Outlook, MS Word, Notepad, and Post-it notes; definately the one big thing I want to implement next year, hopefully something that states "LOW PRIORITY: KINDLY gently caress OFF AND DO NOT CALL ME" right back to the requester. Recently I've had this one guy from our sales office constantly badger me for all sorts of poo poo day-in-day-out, until one time he calls me again to state some intermediary phone numbers that divert to their office aren't working. OK fair enough; test call the numbers and they instantly jump between agents without response, and it cycles through the voice recordings way too quick. Test call the sales office and the same thing happens... meaning this problem just became a lot bigger. After calling our support line to our IP phone provider, we both scour through the call plan architect and agree that everything looks and should be fine. "Hmm... when this is happening, are all of the agents logged into their phones?" The penny just loving dropped  "You know what... if it's something as simple as..." *We both chuckle and banter that yes of course, people need to be loving logged in for the phones to work* "If you want, I can look into a provide a user login record for you?" "Oh yes please, I would love that VERY much" "Ah... yes, I can see that [username] has 0 hours and minutes login activity today" To which I marched into my bosses office and stated "I'm going to kill that man", and then she sent out a stern E-mail to that office (CC'd to managers as well) for them to log into their loving phones.
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Dec 21, 2013 19:32
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A ticket came in...to the post holiday party bar-time (not company sponsored). Wasn't much of a ticket, but rather drunken passive aggressiveness at the ticketing system directed at those in attendance from IT.
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Dec 21, 2013 20:10
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MF_James posted:Jelly, Costa Rica is AWESOME went there for 2 weeks when I was 17. Probably the best/second best out of US trip of my life, you are a lucky man good sir. Yeah man it was pretty great. Less great was coming home to Wisconsin and the cold and snow. Was a great trip though.
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Dec 21, 2013 20:14
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A DBA drops all the tables on the DB backing a large, highly-visible, high-traffic service in order to rebuild it, having forgotten to break (master-master) replication between it and the primary DB. Or to DR.
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Dec 21, 2013 22:51
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So an email came in, Sr tech finished internet upgrade. I'm taking bets as to how broken it is on Monday morning when I get in.
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Dec 22, 2013 00:35
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Is it bad that I made sure my email inbox was 97% full before I left for vacation?
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Dec 22, 2013 00:50
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door.jar posted:Is it bad that I made sure my email inbox was 97% full before I left for vacation? Doubly so if you have Google Apps or some such where you've got 30G of space.
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Dec 22, 2013 00:57
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Agrikk posted:4. Before decommissioning anything, send out a validation email saying, "I am about to shut down X, Y and Z servers permanently and remove all backups, permanently destroying all data. Are you okay with this?" I only have 16 years in IT but I can tell you now that this doesn't work. We gave a years notice of decommissioning a bunch of ancient fridge-sized unix servers:
I'm going to use  because this guy was a complete arse. Oh hey I can't connect to UnixServer14 where the hell is it? Ok, I'll just see if I can connect to... wait a minute, UnixServer14, didn't you get the emails about 1-14 being being decommissioned? Yes, but this is really loving important, and if you don't tell me where it's gone right now I'll... (usual threats to my job, my personal safety, reiteration of how important this guy is etc. etc.) ... so you'd better tell me where the gently caress it is right now! Ok, one moment sir (looks up phone number to identify person).. ok you're in Building 51, yes, end office, far side from the lifts? Yes, why the gently caress are you asking this? If you look out of your office window, see that row of beige+brown fridge size things. The end one, furthest from the big yellow skip. That's server 14 What the gently caress! I need to run these annual reports I'm sorry there isn't anything else I can do for you, you were given a year's notice and it was switched off for six months before scrapping, and nobody said anything... *click*Many, many years later when re-telling this story with a former co-worker present, I was told that apparently while he was phoning around various high level management who were not sympathetic, he got to watch a forklift operator try and fail repeatedly to move this thing into a truck, and eventually succeed by jamming his forks through the plastic casing, and lift until it found some weight bearing metal. Lum fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 01:28
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Lum posted:
The creme and cherry on the top of this is here
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Dec 22, 2013 01:41
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Got a ticket Friday at 4:25 PM, for a new hire starting on the 6th of January. She'll need a brand new iMac with all sorts of software. We don't keep iMacs in stock, it will have to be ordered. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, are holidays for all of us, so the next business day is Thursday the 26th. Because of the 5 day weekend, pretty much everybody got sent home early (our group specifically at 3 PM). The first of January is also a holiday. So basically you want us to procure a new computer and all software in 6 business days, over the holiday. Also, the manager that sent the ticket is going to be "in and out of the office" over the next few weeks. Yeah good luck with that. Of course my boss will cave and bend over backwards to make sure that everybody is happy. I feel like the only person that disrespects the IT staff more than our users is my manager.
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Dec 22, 2013 01:43
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QuiteEasilyDone posted:The creme and cherry on the top of this is here Remember that there were 14 of these things in a line. I like to imagine him getting increasingly frantic as the forklift driver having destroyed and loaded up #1 starts quickly moving down the line loading the rest of them in the same manner. Oh, yeah, the backups were on some sort of reel to reel tape, stored on a single reel in a huge room. Not sure if there was even a thing left that could read them after the servers were chucked. The server from itself booted its kernel from an 8" floppy, ran an OS called Pyramid OSx and supposedly had the power of a 486 DX/2 and about 200 users on each server when they were in their prime. The 14 of them were replaced by moving them onto three more modern Siemens-Pyramid machines running DC/OSx Lum fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 01:54
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What the hell kind of report did he need to run? And who would the report have gone to?
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Dec 22, 2013 02:17
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GreenNight posted:What the hell kind of report did he need to run? And who would the report have gone to? An inventory of all the reel to reel magnetic tapes?
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Dec 22, 2013 02:28
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Lum posted:Amazing On the contrary, I'd say this does work because the end of the story was him watching his job become more and more jeopardized after upper management declined to share his outrage and his threats were totally impotent. Throwing away 8" reel along with our last Data General was immensely satisfying.
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Dec 22, 2013 02:30
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GreenNight posted:What the hell kind of report did he need to run? And who would the report have gone to? I honestly have no idea. There were users on that system who honestly had no business being on a unix machine. People who had inherited scripts written by predecessors (the 80s equivalent of inheriting an AccessDB written by the work experience kid?) people who thought that any given server was dedicated solely to their team and so spammed other users local mailboxes with irrelevant poo poo. There were also actual engineers who did unixy-development for products that ran unix internally. One of the beauties of Pyramid OSx was it's dual-universe setup that would accept sysctl's for both SysV and BSD, and remapped all the command-line options for common tools to the ones that were standard for whatever option your user account had specified in /etc/universe. The latter were the ones who actually listened and moved their poo poo to the 3 new Pyramid Nile boxes, the former were probably better off doing their poo poo using the Windows3.11/Novell4 desktop setup that everyone had on their desks. I kind of miss the Pyramid machines. At least one of them should have gone to a museum. I learned shell scripting in ksh on these things. I also learned how to create user accounts by hand as one of my first ever real-work IT tasks as these things didn't have useradd or adduser commands. Lum fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 02:43
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" It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later." T.U.R.D. 
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Dec 22, 2013 02:50
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The Electronaut posted:" It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later." Well the company I worked for used to make telephone exchanges, and a feature to do with number mapping was originally going to be called the Translation Index Table, meaning that all commands to operate on it would have been of the form aa TIT nnnn Unfortunately, we had a department that existed solely to allocate and manage TLAs (and ETLAs) so that there were no conflicts within the same product, and they stomped on that one. The feature eventually got through as TITT but not sure what it stood for.
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Dec 22, 2013 03:41
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