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I wonder if I can push that to all of the XP machines via WSUS. The entirety of two floors (including the directors) still run XP because they're too cheap to upgrade so that might make them sit up and actually approve my request for 30 Win 7 licenses. Edit: Just checked the system requirements for that widget thingy... why the gently caress does it not run on XP Microsoft? Why? WhoNeedsAName fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 1, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 01:39
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Today a ticket came in to move the office. Not an office. THE office. Operations had shutdown for today so that we may relocate and everyone else is working from home as I setup the infrastructure with a team of 4 both today and on thursday. I've been working on both the logistical and the technical... and took the opportunity to untangle the hopelessly snarled rack as well as start testing terminations to make sure that the cable plant is up to snuff. Hopefully in office ops will resume on the 3rd.
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Jan 1, 2014 01:41
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WhoNeedsAName posted:
They were a new thing in Vista and are not in 8. Its EOL software to countdown to an even older software going EOL.
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Jan 1, 2014 01:54
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incoherent posted:I wish it was a goddamn picture. The email contents (from what I relayed, I really didn't want to read it to keep myself out of the politics) used the words "insolvent" and "lawsuits" and "equity firms".  Welp, sounds like it's time to  ?
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Jan 1, 2014 02:14
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thebigcow posted:They were a new thing in Vista and are not in 8. Its EOL software to countdown to an even older software going EOL. Ergo making it completely useless as a method of getting the commercial director of the company I work for to have a sudden bout of common sense. It also doesn't stop Microsoft from making something that is compatible with XP. It doesn't have to be a widget. It can be something as irritating and obtrusive as Norton for all I care. Just as long as it gets the job done. To be fair, I've already implemented a GPO that will completely block XP machines from any form of web access at 00:01 UTC on April the 8th.
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Jan 1, 2014 02:33
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Finished moving HQ, absorbing 30+ people from the other site. Other than a few moments of annoyance when I found that the DHCP scope was too small for our increased size it all worked fine. It was quite a change going from having maybe ten people in my office to 50, especially on a move-in day when everyone needs to be oriented but now it feels like a real office. And it's going to be so much easier supporting them now that they're where I am and not in Hollywood.
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Jan 1, 2014 02:36
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WhoNeedsAName posted:Ergo making it completely useless as a method of getting the commercial director of the company I work for to have a sudden bout of common sense. It also doesn't stop Microsoft from making something that is compatible with XP. It doesn't have to be a widget. It can be something as irritating and obtrusive as Norton for all I care. Just as long as it gets the job done. What did you do for this GPO? I want to do this as well.
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Jan 1, 2014 05:12
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Belated Happy New Years Thread! So a ton of emails came in. There was something wrong with my companies exchange servers and I didnt get any emails sent to me from Monday on. I was flipping through them this morning when they came in. Most of them just automated status updates and the like when one from the SR on the account came up, he sent it on Monday night near midnight. "Hey Blackswordca, the storage array for the backups locked up again, when you get in Thursday can you power cycle it? Thanks!" So no backups for the client for 3 days I suppose 
blackswordca fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 16:12
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So what does this client get from giving your employer money that a CrashPlan account couldn't do?
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Jan 2, 2014 16:33
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The personal financial rear end-raping.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:16
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At least the SR was stupid enough to admit to being ok with no backups over email.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:39
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:At least the SR was stupid enough to admit to being ok with no backups over email. If this is the same guy who intentionally disabled the auditing blackswordca set up due to his previous foul-ups, broke something again, and then somehow managed to get blackswordca shouted at for having enabled auditing in the first place, then I'm going to say that counts for exactly jack poo poo. e: Clarified the ridiculousness a bit.
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Jan 2, 2014 17:42
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rolleyes posted:If this is the same guy who intentionally disabled the auditing blackswordca set up and then somehow managed to get him shouted at for having enabled it in the first place, then I'm going to say that counts for exactly jack poo poo. That was my thought. Because audit trails are entrapment!
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Jan 2, 2014 17:43
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If this isn't the music that people phoning blackswordca's place of work hear then that business is massively violating false advertising laws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D5Sa2Yq-2g
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Jan 2, 2014 18:10
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Literally had to support a Windows 3.11 box this morning. We have a client who has been using the same POS software for over 20 years but still doesn't know their way around it enough to be able to do the end of year rollover on their own. They also never close any of their periods until we do them all at the end of the year and they print everything out every week so they don't have to actually use the program to look up old invoices, so this machine is mostly a glorified typewriter. They call us every year when it stops working in January and every year we show them how to close periods and years but they always forget until a year later when their system stops working again. Luckily we have everything that needs to be done written down at this point, so it's a 5 minute job we can charge our minimum onsite fee for.
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Jan 2, 2014 18:16
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Entropic posted:Literally had to support a Windows 3.11 box this morning. s/minimum/maximum/ Otherwise you'll keep dealing with it :/
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Jan 2, 2014 20:14
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nitrogen posted:s/minimum/maximum/ Even better, when the hard drive shits the bed/motherboard blows up/etc, he'll be on the hook to fix it to. With PoS stuff, man, people just need to replace it. I feel bad for folks with custom solutions for mechanical controls from 20+ years ago that are looking at $10k plus replacement costs though. Lots of farm control systems are like that, and its brutal. A few hundred bucks worth of PC and electronics relay/monitoring hardware = thousands of dollars. Its brutal.
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Jan 2, 2014 20:37
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nitrogen posted:s/minimum/maximum/ Siochain posted:Even better, when the hard drive shits the bed/motherboard blows up/etc, he'll be on the hook to fix it to. What makes me pull my hair out are the clients running some ancient machine their whole business depends on and they want us to fix whatever minor thing went wrong this time but don't want to get into the conversation about "what are you going to do when this whole machine finally falls over?"
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Jan 2, 2014 20:53
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We have an Optiplex GX2something that somehow against all the odds has survived to host an offline database for like the last 10 years. We've told the unit it's with it won't be replaced when it dies, and they've said they're fine with that, but they want it available until then. I think we replaced the hard drive once about five years ago, but unlike every other Dell from that era the motherboard's been rock solid. Also, it's hosting extremely confidential information, on an unencrypted Windows 2000/Filemaker 6 setup, and because everyone kept being confused about why it wouldn't take their AD password they just wrote the login information on a piece of paper taped to the top of it. I used to try taking the paper away but then they'd just complain the machine was "broken", and once I showed any one of them how to log in the paper would come back so eventually I gave up.
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Jan 2, 2014 21:12
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I'd be afraid that if the machine was completely powered down the hard drive wouldn't spin up again.
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Jan 2, 2014 21:35
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A call hasn't come in for 2 hours. Email has not come in for longer than that. No tickets have ever come in because Dell KACE has taken their sweet time fixing a problem with ticketing that has prevented me from enter tickets for myself and launching the system to users starting on Jan 1 as planned. They won't even give me an ETA on when I can expect to get a timeline for resolution. Their tech support is some of the worst I've ever experienced. I'm bored. Also don't ever buy a KACE device.
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Jan 2, 2014 21:57
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Sirotan posted:A call hasn't come in for 2 hours. Email has not come in for longer than that. Post this on twitter and get a response within minutes. Or maybe a libel suit I dunno.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:03
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Just curious, but why did you get one? If I remember correctly, you were the one that recommended PDQ Deploy (Which I love, BTW. Thanks!). Those look like interesting devices though.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:04
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Devor posted:Post this on twitter and get a response within minutes. I had a ticket open with Kaseya and was getting straight ignored by the tech assigned. A coworker tweeted at them and talked about the poo poo service and it got escalated a few tiers up instantly.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:10
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Entropic posted:I see stuff like that from time to time. We have someone running a Win98 VM to keep their old embroidery machine controller software running because moving to the modern equivalent would be >$10K. Most of the time we're at least able to get them running what ever it is in a VM with proper backups so if something fails they can just load a backed up copy of the whole VM and be up and running again with minimal fuss. Custom parallel port dongle running off an in-house engineered ISA slot board to "make sure you can use the software/hardware legitimately". I'm sure if we put the time/effort into it we could find some way to make it work, but the last time it happened, we legitimately had an identical old piece of crap (in working order) that someone had dropped off for us to garbage. Swapped HDD, stuck in a new powersupply, and sent them out the door with a legitimate warning of "start raiding electronics recycling centers at local dumps, we don't have the stuff to fix that". I hate people :P
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Jan 2, 2014 22:22
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TWBalls posted:Just curious, but why did you get one? If I remember correctly, you were the one that recommended PDQ Deploy (Which I love, BTW. Thanks!). Those look like interesting devices though. My ex-boss was hot to buy one and did so about 2 weeks before he decided he was going to quit. I basically had nothing to do with the purchase and wasn't even involved in the process until after the boxes had been delivered. We spent 5-figures on them so, welp. PDQ Deploy and Inventory are still awesome and I do still use them a lot. Hell, to use KACE for inventory tracking you have to install an agent on every device, I use PDQ Deploy for that because it won't work on the KACE box.  Ever since I updated our K1000 box to the latest build ~4 months ago I've had nothing but problems and have needed to contact their tech support once a week or so for various things. On one or two occasions my tickets have gone to people who seem to know what they are doing and I get a resolution fairly quickly. The rest of the time it's days/weeks/months on an issue and I've spent hours on phone calls unable to do anything because the tech has webexed into my machine and I'm watching them try to fix my problem through trial and error. They release hotfixes for problems and you have to stumble on that information on their site, they don't actually contact you or have a central location for development news. Theres a lot of parts of the K1000 box that I find just downright stupid. You can upload files to the knowledge base, but can't delete anything. (But you can upload a 0 byte file with the same name to overwrite!!) Want to get an email when a new ticket has been created? Gotta write a custom SQL query for that. Want instantaneous emails when a change has been made to a ticket? Too bad, the system only sends out email every 3 minutes. (The explanation here, apparently, is so that users don't get a flood of emails when you change owners, escalate status, etc. But then why can you set the options for what types of emails users receive in the first place?? So dumb.) Basically every interaction I have with anyone involved with KACE is making me hate it more and more.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:26
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I'm honestly surprised that we haven't been forced to purchase one of these (I work for Dell Services). After seeing this, I'm glad we haven't. PDQ has been great. I've been kludging my way through MDT/WDS, which hasn't been fun since I'm the only one here that bothers to try to learn this type of stuff. Anytime anything breaks on it, New Guy starts crying "Waaah, TW broke the imaging server". Nevermind that I told them that this is still not production ready, as I'm still learning the system as I go along.
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Jan 2, 2014 23:09
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I'm not in IT currently, but still freelance and also do the needful for the pub I currently work in. My boss brought over a computer yesterday, to act as a new POS server for the pub. Currently the old one in the bar runs Unicenta oPOS 2.80 and he had installed 3.56 on the new computer. I was to set it up upstairs, install MySQL and migrate the DB from Apache Derby if things go wrong, since no-one really knows anything about Derby. The plan was to take a copy of the Derby DB, since it can be read just as easily straight from the flat files instead of going through the Derby Server, install the old oPOS 2.80 on the new machine, upgrade to 3.56, run a migration script and that should be that. I turned on new machine before going down to close the old software and Derby server, copy the files, and reboot. When the old machine came back up oPOS 2.80 was unable to understand anything and refused to work with the DB. No idea why. Luckily I had the DB copied, so we put fixing that problem on hold and went upstairs, where the new machine had now booted. I started oPOS 3.56 which promptly went tits up with a message about not being able to close cash. It then displayed the database connection setup dialog. It was already set up to connect to the downstairs Derby server. And the machine had a live network connection... Some hours of forensics later I have concluded that oPOS 3.56 apparently tried to upgrade the database as it connected to the old, then live, one. Without telling us. It obviously failed, since a comparison with fresh installs of the old and new versions made it clear that the DB now lacked a few of the fields and tables that 3.56 adds, and that it had managed to do enough damage to gently caress up everthing for the 2.80 version. I'm now watching two years of sales slowly importing into the MySQL database after a ridiculous amount of massaging the exported queries. What I had to do, in the end, was do a visual diff and add new tables and fields to the Derby DB to make it match a freshly installed blank 3.56 schema, so the exported insert queries would have the correct amount of fields and not fail all the time on some important NOT NULLs etc. Some search and replace in 120K-row .sql files to correct for dialect differences (AS BLOB vs AS BINARY etc) and removal of duplicate indices that the new version created somehow. I've learned a lot about the differences between Derby and MySQL. And that oPOS stores money as a DOUBLE in the DB. It's now Thursday, 12:20 a.m. and I have to get this up and running before Friday at 4 p.m. when we open for the new year. It's either that, or do a fresh install. Which involves adding all the stock by manual data entry. I'm so setting up regular backups. And everything I'm doing is being documented. Never again!
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Jan 3, 2014 00:37
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So a month ago one of the members of our monitoring team decided to take another job, opening up a spot. Without even bothering to ask me (the most senior guy on our 1st shift team) they just transferred the junior-most person after they asked him if he would do it. I kind of bitched about it when my team lead and the monitoring team lead were shooting the poo poo one day - I didn't want the transfer, but just getting asked would have been nice. In my words "it's like being in gym class and being the last kid picked for kickball - really doesn't do poo poo for your pride or confidence." So today my team lead comes out of their morning meeting and immediately walks over to me and asks if I would be interested in transferring to monitoring, since they're opening up a spot and it's mine if I want it. I'll be honest - I was really tempted because it would mean no more on-call, no more late-night patching, and no people with bi-polar disorder hunting for me because something broke at another base and no one else has a clue what to do. But it also means no more working with vCenter, vSphere, ESXi, server hardware, Windows Server, or any of the things that I actually enjoy dealing with because I get paid to play with that poo poo. I like it when someone walks up to me confident that I can fix or deal with whatever isn't working and asks me to help. I like the challenges that come from some of the configurations we have going, and I love the responsibility that I've been given (even if it feels like they're dumping so much poo poo on me to see how much I can take). If I move over to monitoring my day will consist of staring at a computer screen, and when something breaks asking someone else to fix it. Not my cup of tea. So I told my team lead that I wasn't interested, and it was hilarious to see him almost sob in relief, since the only other guy on 1st shift other than the team lead and his assistant is the new guy who's been with us for three whole weeks. I've learned a ton of stuff in the 9 months I've been here, but more importantly the team lead knows that I'm reliable and steady even when poo poo hits the fan. I'm showing the new guy the ropes and trying to get him up to speed as best I can, but he seems a little unmotivated to learn things, and there have been a few times where I've had to ask him if he's done a task, and when he says no, remind him that it needs to be done now. Frankly he's starting to annoy me because he doesn't pay attention to details. Take today for example - he didn't even bother to ask about replacing a drive that was in predictive failure, but instead went down and swapped it without telling anyone. Normally not an issue, except we tend to ask the teams that manage the server how they want to handle it, because most want to bring the server down after hours and replace the drive with the machine off (even though it's hot-swapable, there have been times when the server would crash because of it and everything would be lost, and it's left people a little gun-shy). We lucked out that the server didn't go tits up, but what made it worse was that the guy swapped the wrong drive. All he had to do was ask me and I would have been happy to show him a diagram of the server to tell him which drive bay was which. And, of course, there's the amber flashing light to indicate which drive has an error, and he completely missed that too. I lied to the team lead and told them that the second drive was now in predictive failure state, and then called our warranty vendor up and had them ship me another drive, but I don't have the inclination to cover for the new guy again and just might let him get an rear end-chewing for failing to properly perform assigned tasks. Maybe then he'll pay a little closer attention. And the saddest part is this guy is 7 years older than me and has been doing desktop support work for at least a decade, so it's not like he doesn't know that the little details make a big difference in outcomes. Fortunately we've only got 3 more weeks until we should hopefully be able to get a third person in place on the team, and by then the new guy will either be better, or looking for a new job. His first solo patching tasking is coming up next week, and he'll either sink or swim from that experience. Daylen Drazzi fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 00:54
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Take today for example - he didn't even bother to ask about replacing a drive that was in predictive failure, but instead went down and swapped it without telling anyone. Normally not an issue, except we tend to ask the teams that manage the server how they want to handle it, because most want to bring the server down after hours and replace the drive with the machine off (even though it's hot-swapable, there have been times when the server would crash because of it and everything would be lost, and it's left people a little gun-shy). We lucked out that the server didn't go tits up, but what made it worse was that the guy swapped the wrong drive. All he had to do was ask me and I would have been happy to show him a diagram of the server to tell him which drive bay was which. And, of course, there's the amber flashing light to indicate which drive has an error, and he completely missed that too. Ah, that explains the ticket I got today for, "oh, yep, replacement drive is showing as failed too, we need another."
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Jan 3, 2014 02:33
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fivre posted:Ah, that explains the ticket I got today for, "oh, yep, replacement drive is showing as failed too, we need another." You haven't lived until your hot spare is bad too. Lucky us, we had a second array still in the boxes,, so we had LOTS of spare drives.
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Jan 3, 2014 05:05
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Ring ring Thank you for calling Reboot reboot Orderly line Outlook rescued Mission critical failures Ticket created Disaster by disaster Quickly averted Until this one Oh no! Level 2 will call you back
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Jan 3, 2014 13:52
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JazzmasterCurious posted:I've learned a lot about the differences between Derby and MySQL. And that oPOS stores money as a DOUBLE in the DB. How in the gently caress can you end up with a job writing financial software and not have had it drummed into you WHY you don't store money as floating point values, ever?
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Jan 3, 2014 13:53
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Entropic posted:They're literally down the block from us so I don't feel too put out running over to do a 5 minute job once a year that we get to charge :50bux: for. Bonus points if you use DOSBox for this one! Win 3.11 works fine in it!
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Jan 3, 2014 14:37
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Lum posted:Bonus points if you use DOSBox for this one! I actually have a customer running stuff in VM's like this. I had to custom build it because their program poo poo the bed when it saw 1gb of memory. (our provisioning tool usualy only does memory in 1gb increments)
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Jan 3, 2014 14:56
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Sirotan posted:I'm glad to see your probation did not stop you from continuing to argue with me. Maybe you should read my posts again, where I said I didn't really care what people did on their downtime, but that (in my opinion) I found certain activities to be inappropriate to be done at work or on work computers (like job hunting, or looking at porn). Inappropriate is not synonymous with illegal. This is from a bit back but yeah, totally agree here. I think in the last thread (or possibly the TPS/corporate IT one) I mentioned how my stepdad worked as an IT Manager for a department store and had to help someone set up their shiny new iPad on the corporate network. When he got the iPad, he minimized a few windows on it and got the lovely surprise of gay bondage porn staring him right in the face. The guy he was helping was super embarrassed, and my stepdad gave him the iPad back and refused to help him because of it. He even went higher to his boss about the situation, and his boss agreed with his decision about it. Porn is a big no-no at any company because of all the legal (and moral) trouble it could cause with people, last thing you need is someone walking by another person with their browser open to some porn site, and getting the lawsuit hammer brought down for indecency and/or other trouble.
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Jan 3, 2014 15:18
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Decided to give up on a KACE tech ever helping me. Since the script I need to run (that they sent me) works on the previous build number but not current, I was going to just say to hell with it and restore my backup from 3 weeks ago before I updated, then re-apply the script. Except the backup restore feature doesn't work. It uploads the files to itself, tells me it's rebooting, and then...does nothing! I guess it's time to call up and bitch at them.
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Jan 3, 2014 15:20
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Sirotan posted:Decided to give up on a KACE tech ever helping me. Since the script I need to run (that they sent me) works on the previous build number but not current, I was going to just say to hell with it and restore my backup from 3 weeks ago before I updated, then re-apply the script. gently caress KACE support. I was so glad to leave my last job because it meant I wouldn't have to work with Dell's lovely KACE support anymore... and then first day at my new job, I find out we're implementing KACE and it'll be my job to implement it 
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Jan 3, 2014 15:34
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The minute I got onto the phone with a KACE tech the box finally did a reboot so I thought maybe it was doing something.quote:[Fri Jan 3 9:09:06 2014] [notice] Version in backup (90545) is different from the current K1000 version (90546). Restore from backup terminated. lol wut? If I can't restore from a previous version what then what good is a restore 'feature' at all?? 
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Jan 3, 2014 15:58
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QPZIL posted:gently caress KACE support. I was so glad to leave my last job because it meant I wouldn't have to work with Dell's lovely KACE support anymore... and then first day at my new job, I find out we're implementing KACE and it'll be my job to implement it That's the worst about having worked with lovely software, you can't even put that crap on your resume otherwise you'll be stuck with it again on the next job.
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Jan 3, 2014 16:39
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