|
This cheapskate manager keeps asking us why his VPN connection doesn't work well from his house. It connects but intermittently drops out and is rather slow. Come to find out his primary internet connection at his house is his company provided Samsung Galaxy SIII on Sprint in the middle of the LA basin. It also turns out that he's right at the edge of a tower's service territory. Sorry pal! I explain to him that until he gets a hard line into his home, or Sprint builds a nice tower closer to him, the VPN connection will continue to suffer. His response includes a CC to my director asking for a new laptop due to "speed issues" and asks if he can try to use a USB dial-up modem in the interim. I twitched in my seat after reading that one. I told him to get an actual internet provider and closed the ticket.
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 22:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 07:06 |
|
|
He could get a network extender from Sprint. Wait nevermind, I just re-read that. Yea...
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 22:46
|
|
|
GreenNight posted:He could get a network extender from Sprint. Haha yeah, the network extenders hook into your home network. There's no magic feedback loop that lets it feed on itself.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 22:47
|
|
|
Migishu posted:We auto-delete e-mails older than a year, and we do not allow PST files. My current work does mail cleanup after 90 days, some of our clients are anywhere from 60 days to a year. I still laugh every time I hear someone bitch about "not being told" the policy, especially when they (and others) have several e-mails that were sent before the policy was put in place, in language a goddamn toddler could understand. Manage your poo poo, because when it's gone, it's gone, our server guys aren't going to waste time trying to recover mail for you.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 23:10
|
|
|
Just about ALL the tickets are coming in right now. Exchange is down. Kerberos is down. Pretty much every service hosted in our Data Center is down. It's so bad we're forced to communicate with the world via Twitter. The phones are still up, though. At least we've got that. We can't even create tickets. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 23:15
|
|
|
The Cubelodyte posted:Just about ALL the tickets are coming in right now. Exchange is down. Kerberos is down. Pretty much every service hosted in our Data Center is down. It's so bad we're forced to communicate with the world via Twitter. THE TICKETING SYSTEM IS DOWN! THIS IS 
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 23:31
|
|
|
Lord Dudeguy posted:Our Avaya IPOffice system only allows us to put an MP3 on an MP3 player and pipe it straight into the system via an audio cable. As a consequence, all hold music is just radio promo material done by our marketing dept. Sup IP Office buddy, I have an old server playing MP3s in a loop hooked into our system. It's been playing the same soft jazz album for about 7 years. I'd really like to switch it to epic sax guy. We work in mental health.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 23:35
|
|
|
Cpt.Wacky posted:Sup IP Office buddy, I have an old server playing MP3s in a loop hooked into our system. It's been playing the same soft jazz album for about 7 years. I'd really like to switch it to epic sax guy. We work in mental health. Gotta get some Moon Hooch on there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slOTvMN0i-Y
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2014 23:49
|
|
|
EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspfe/archive/2013/08/27/auditing-file-access-on-file-servers.aspx I tried to test this out locally on a single test folder. I'm getting like 160 log entries for copying a file or renaming. Is there an obvious idiot thing that I did? Edit: It was making an entry for read events... Probably don't care about it THAT much. Deleting or changing files can stay. Dr. Arbitrary fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jan 11, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 00:19
|
|
|
My email host recently switched from Postini to Spam Shield, and it's a flaming piece of poo poo. The false positive rate is through the roof and my users are forced to whitelist pretty much every drat domain they communicate with. Any suggestions for reliable email filtering? A few users are having such a bad experience I'm prepared to install something locally if there are any good individual user ones.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 01:04
|
|
|
I've heard good stuff about Mimecast
Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jan 11, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 01:18
|
|
|
It's been three years since I got my admin account, but I finally have ADUC rights. It's pretty cool. Unfortunately most people have to use DRA which means no matter how much faster I can do something I still have to wait ages on replication if it's something a coworker was touching.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 03:26
|
|
|
madsushi posted:Or you could actually give them a real solution and help them break down the PST into yearly (or more frequent) archives so that they get to keep their email and they get good performance. PSTs of that size and nature are not a "real solution" where do you store the PSTs? On the network; nope, locally? then the disk fails? omgnoemail  Best way is Exchange 2010/13 + an archive solution (which costs $$$) or really to tell the user to actually delete poo poo
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 04:48
|
|
|
madsushi posted:Or you could actually give them a real solution and help them break down the PST into yearly (or more frequent) archives so that they get to keep their email and they get good performance. This is the users job. He can explain to them why they should do this and what it helps, but they need to manage their poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 05:02
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:I had a client who used the entire album of London Calling. It was a pet groomer. My phone company is back to "Don't you forget about me", which sounds just super at 8khz. On the plus side, our hosted email has a 10 TB total quota, and we're at 2% of that. I'm not looking at mail quotas for at least a year, everybody gets all they want.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 05:47
|
|
|
Ticket: Lotus Notes keeps crashing This happens often. Kind of a pain but nothing hard, usually a reinstall. So I take a look at the mail file in question since it's on a network share and that seems odd. It's 27 loving gigs. Notes isn't crashing, it just takes 20 minutes to open the .NSF file. I tell her she has to make a new one, since the limit is supposed to be 2 GB. "oh we can't do that. This is a shared mailbox the entire team has to use or we can't get our jobs done." Goddamnit. I compressed it and it's down to a svelte 22 GB but I'm not allowed to touch user data for any reason except backup purposes. I tell her to let her team lead know to make a new one. I seriously doubt anyone will put the effort in. A second fun one: got a request to pull some files off a users computer who had left the company. I can't find any records of her or her computer so I ask when she left. June 2013. And nobody bothered to let anyone know that PC has important data on it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 06:31
|
|
|
Sales lady calls in a panic trying to explain to me that neither she nor anyone in their department can see their vacation schedule in Outlook. I remote into her machine to see what calendar she's glancing at. Turns out that whole department has been storing all of their scheduling information on one person's calendar who had it shared out. That person no longer works for us, and their account just breached the 30 days post-shitcanning so it got wiped out. I told her to use the designated department calendars from now on, and that storing any critical data on one person's calendar was a really bad idea.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 08:28
|
|
|
slightpirate posted:I told her to use the designated department calendars from now on, and that storing any critical data on one person's calendar was a really bad idea. About ten years ago this happened to a colleague of mine with an entire sections worth of data. A CAD group received a bunch of new workstations, with one of the lead designers getting a more powerful PC than the rest because he was "IT smart" and management wanted to reward his initiative in helping out his peers with their tier 1 problems. So one of the things he did without anyone knowing was to convince everyone to store their files on drive letters mapped to shares on his computer rather than drives mapped to the central file server because it was faster. You see where this is going already, don't you? Sure enough, one day "IT smart" guy is having serious problems with his PC so the tech decides to flatten it and reinstall. The tech asks IT smart guy if all of his data is on network drives and gets the affirmative from the "IT smart" user, so he blows it all away. Of course immediately all of the section shares drop dead and all the data is gone forever. ka-pow! No backups or copies, of course, because users were told to never keep data on their workstations and to always save data on drive letters lower than F:, which they did diligently. Only to their colleague's hard drive. Management wanted to write up my colleague for loving up, but we all came to his defense saying that it was technically "IT smart" guy's fault for making a data storage policy change without informing any of us and that it was management's fault for encouraging homegrown IT talent to grow like weeds instead of being nurtured in a more controlled manner. In the end, no one got written up, "IT smart" guy got to keep his fancy computer and the "real" IT folks got more of the tier 1 workload. And maybe a dozen CAD projects were set back six months or so.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 13:35
|
|
|
The Cubelodyte posted:Just about ALL the tickets are coming in right now. Exchange is down. Kerberos is down. Pretty much every service hosted in our Data Center is down. It's so bad we're forced to communicate with the world via Twitter. Our lovely java webfarm once went down because the guys that manage it let all primary space get filled up with one apps log spam again and this hilariously took down the ticketting, monitoring and incident management systems because they were all hosted on the same cluster. Those of us with iis based apps were pretty pleased with ourselves. Until the time the iis hosts decided to sync with each other and decided that "all services disabled" was the correct state to sync to anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 19:25
|
|
|
Agrikk posted:About ten years ago this happened to a colleague of mine with an entire sections worth of data. I'd still write up the IT department for not having a "do a quick DD image of people's Hard Drives and save it for a few months before nuking them" policy. I'd then write the IT department up again because they believed people who told them they were "IT Smart". Nobody is IT smart. Hell, half the IT departments in the world aren't even "IT Smart".
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 20:50
|
|
|
There's no "technically" about it, that's 100% his fault. You have a policy, he ignored it -- in a really dumb, obviously problematic way, to boot -- and you have no obvious way of knowing that he did it, right? You guys took the appropriate precautions asking if he had any local data that needed preserving. Hell, of all people he should have known that. You can't control the dumbshit things users do. You have policies for a reason, and when they don't follow them it's not your problem.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:03
|
|
|
Did our overnight patching on Thursday and finished up after 8 hours early Friday morning - 16 hour days suck, but fortunately it's only once or twice a month. I know some of you ask why we babysit the patching, and what happened was a perfect example why - the patches were all installed automatically through SCCM, but for whatever reason the servers didn't reboot automatically. We'd log in and see a warning that the server needed to reboot for patches to take effect and then wait for 10 minutes to verify the server was back up and running and validate the correct patches were installed times 200. It was a long night. Part of the problem is that since this is a legacy system that is going away in a couple months, there's no real urgency to keep the applications and infrastructure that keep it running up-to-date or functioning smoothly. The teams that were overseeing the systems have been re-assigned, and the much-diminished team that I'm on has been given responsibility for keeping them alive until the migration is complete (without the benefit of having any training on the underlying systems, which means if it breaks we go back to manual updating and such). Once these systems are gone then we'll just have to worry about our virtual systems (of which there are a lot less - God, I'm falling in love with virtualization). Earlier some of you were asking about why things are done in a certain way, but I can't speak as to the reasoning for why things are done the way they are - those decisions were made long before I got here, and arguments that could be used about greater efficiency or monetary savings have absolutely no impact here since money or efficiency is not, and probably never will be, a big part of the decision-making process. There's a poster one of the old-timers put up on the wall, and it just says "IT IS WHAT IT IS". Our job is to not tell the military how to do the work or make the decisions, but implement things exactly as they specify, even if it doesn't make sense or there are better ways of accomplishing the task. I've been told the stories about how suggestions will be made, people will be impressed and amazed and the changes implemented after months of conference calls and meetings, and then six months after it's done a new officer will come in and order the changes reverted because he didn't understand the new system or process or didn't like it. It's no use getting upset about it, because in the end the military owns the servers and ultimately makes all the decisions. As long as I'm getting a paycheck and doing work I enjoy then it doesn't really matter to me. Besides, it's just a contract and I'm betting it will be gone in a couple years, but until it is I'm going to learn as much as I can about VMware, Exchange, SharePoint, AD and anything else I can worm my way into getting involved in.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
Powerful Two-Hander posted:Our lovely java webfarm once went down because the guys that manage it let all primary space get filled up with one apps log spam again and this hilariously took down the ticketting, monitoring and incident management systems because they were all hosted on the same cluster. Applications that don't rotate their log files 
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
Nerdrock posted:I'd still write up the IT department for not having a "do a quick DD image of people's Hard Drives and save it for a few months before nuking them" policy. I'd then write the IT department up again because they believed people who told them they were "IT Smart". Nobody is IT smart. Hell, half the IT departments in the world aren't even "IT Smart". I really wish I could do this, sometimes, but as a 1 man/100+ seat/no budget IT team it's completely impossible. At some point when DVSport was coming in to do their initial install they were going to set up one laptop with a working config and then image all the other coach computers with it. I told them that was a great idea, just let me make sure all the coaches have their files in their home drives or backed up to an external drive first. They gave me a day to do it in, and I told them that the coaches are elusive and I was busy with other work sometimes and it might take longer than that, so please check with me that I've made sure, first. The next day they didn't bother asking me if I'd finished, and imaged over the head coach's computer, who of course had been in meetings or out of the office the whole previous day, so I had no chance to get to it. Queue a week of HOW DID YOU LET THIS HAPPEN and being ordered to run every data recovery service known to man on the (imaged over literally bit by bit) hard drive. All of a sudden my no budget IT team of one is spending over a thousand dollars to recover data off of a drive that has literally no chance of having anything being recovered off of it. Nobody would listen to me about how it was 100% guaranteed to be a waste of money. I suppose that was likely to happen, considering nobody listens when I say we do need to spend money. UGH.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:12
|
|
|
Nerdrock posted:I'd still write up the IT department for not having a "do a quick DD image of people's Hard Drives and save it for a few months before nuking them" policy. I'd then write the IT department up again because they believed people who told them they were "IT Smart". Nobody is IT smart. Hell, half the IT departments in the world aren't even "IT Smart". Sounds like it was the managers who believed it, not the IT department. I know I wouldn't loving trust users even if they did seem to be more competent than the average bear. As far as imaging machines before you blow them away, if the stated policy is "keep any and all important files on the network shares", I think the user reaped exactly what they sowed. It's not IT's job to create all the safety nets possible - sure, it'd be nice, but a lot of the time you just don't have the manpower or time to do it. Creating a quick DD image may not be that quick (even just the copying time might be substantial, especially if the guy was storing all the files on his drive for a bunch of other people), and the company may not have the enterprise storage available to store that for a lot of machines for a couple months. (Sure, in an ideal world, the company has a giant SAN with several tiers of storage available and a very low user to technician ratio, but...) Anyway, I would have at least taken a quick glance through the hard drive, like at the user's profile directories and then just elsewhere to see if there's anything important, such as "D:\NETWORK SHARES" or something, so I'd blame the tech for not doing that and blindly trusting the user's statement that everything was saved, but if it were not obvious ("C:\users\bob\documents\temp\data\share") then there's no reason the tech should be expected to know or figure it out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:16
|
|
|
I don't think you can write someone up for believing what someone told them. Yes users lie, but that shouldn't reflect badly on IT.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:41
|
|
|
Our policy is do not store anything locally. If you do and we format the machine or the hard drive fails, tough poo poo. We've had managers yell about this but even the CEO told them that it's policy. Not our problem.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:43
|
|
|
GreenNight posted:Our policy is do not store anything locally. If you do and we format the machine or the hard drive fails, tough poo poo. We've had managers yell about this but even the CEO told them that it's policy. Not our problem. Man, this really makes me wish I had the power to set any kind of policy at all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 21:52
|
|
|
Yeah, my last gig was a pretty similar situation. I literally told our CFO this : "important data is going to disappear when users are responsible for it. You can either a) accept that things are going to disappear, and engineers are going to spend hours/weeks reworking projects because of a small slip up, or you can buy me this big external hard drive for a couple hundred bucks and be protected against it". I scored double points when I asked him to show me where his files are kept, and I berated him for following the very clear "keep files on the network, or in your My Documents folder". I guess despite being poo poo on from most angles, and working for subhuman pay, the benefit was that when I put my foot down with things like that, they listened (sometimes). Edit : My imaginary write-up wasn't necessarily for "believing a user", so much as "entrusting IT department duties to those unqualified." Nerdrock fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Jan 11, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 22:35
|
|
|
They didn't "entrust" anything to anyone. That guy did it without asking or telling anyone in IT. There's a major financial firm in my town for who storing data locally is a firing offense. Must be nice. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 22:47
|
|
|
guppy posted:They didn't "entrust" anything to anyone. That guy did it without asking or telling anyone in IT. huh? "welp, I just got fired for Office Auto Recovery"
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 22:58
|
|
|
Westie posted:huh?
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 23:24
|
|
|
Yeah, I assumed this was obvious, but the goal is to avoid losing irreplaceable financial data. No one gives a poo poo about something like AutoRecover.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2014 23:28
|
|
|
Knormal posted:I'll set up as many new PSTs as people want, but damned if I'm going to help them sort through an existing PST. I'm not going to spend all my day dragging messages around for them just because they still don't understand how drag-and-drop works. That's a pet peeve of mine too. I doubt people demanded somebody else sort their paper mail for them 30 years ago, so why can't they keep their drat emails organized themselves 
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 00:48
|
|
|
Computers make your life easier, dontcha know? Which to most people means it does everything for them and IT have to make it do what they are thinking.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 01:23
|
|
|
peak debt posted:That's a pet peeve of mine too. I doubt people demanded somebody else sort their paper mail for them 30 years ago, so why can't they keep their drat emails organized themselves My users who are worst at email are exactly the kind of people that would have demanded someone else sort their mail for them 30 years ago. Since these guys owned the company back then, too, I'm sure they got it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 01:34
|
|
|
I'm gonna fill my car up with trash and then demand that the mechanic fix the fuel efficiency problems I'm having. No you can't get rid of the trash, I NEED IT!
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 01:34
|
|
|
I spent Friday importing admx files for Office 2013 just to implement blocking PST files for Outlook 2013. We're pushing that out later this year.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 01:51
|
|
|
In the time it took you to come over to my desk and have a snit fit because Outlook wasn't responding, and then walk back, Outlook started responding again. You just wasted time to come aggravate me.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 02:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 07:06 |
|
|
hackedaccount posted:Applications that don't rotate their log files On Thursday I spent 1.5 hours waiting for a command line folder delete to finish as it cleared out something like 14gb of exception files (millions of them) that had accrued because the dev that deployed a service used the wrong credentials and for two solid years the app has been spamming an exception file every 2 seconds. Even better, the exception file was pretty much "can't run maintenance jobs" so it also had 2 solid years of poo poo in the db totalling 60gb of worthless data on an already overused db host 
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2014 02:26
|
|