More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

People who don't understand how computers work on a fundamental level.

:downs:

Why do I have to keep flashing u-boot?
:v:

You aren't flashing it, it's just being loaded into ram.
:downs:

So then why isn't the flash sticking between reboots?
:v:

IT IS IN RAM, IT IS NOT FLASHED, IT IS BEING LOADED TO A CERTAIN POINT IN MEMORY AND THEN BEING JUMPED TO.
:downs:

So it's broken?

# ? May 1, 2014 22:35

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# ? May 10, 2024 05:46

Che Delilas: Nov 23, 2009; FREE TIBET WEED

Sickening posted:

The first IT job I had after the army had new people wear silly costumes as sort of a hazing thing. I was the humorless guy who refused to wear them. They were years old and never washed so... yeah no. After that they didn't do them anymore. Every so often people would remind me that I sunk that whole program. I tried to feel bad.

You did a favor to everyone who comes into that department in the future. Be proud of yourself. God, the last thing I'd want to do to a new employee is make them even more uncomfortable than they already are just by being new. Take them out for drinks or something.

vvv Well I meant if you're part of the 'welcoming committee' take the new person out so they feel welcome, as opposed to making them put on a loving sweaty clown suit so that they feel abused. But what you do is probably a good idea as well.

Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 23:03 on May 1, 2014

# ? May 1, 2014 22:55

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Every time I get a new job I usually take them out for lunch or buy pizza. for the first two pay periods.

# ? May 1, 2014 22:58

MF_James: May 8, 2008; I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

poo poo pissing me off WFM applications and extremely aggressive roll-out schedules

I need to drink all the booze tonight.

# ? May 1, 2014 23:18

guppy: Sep 21, 2004; sting like a byob

I got a snotty email from someone's manager complaining that something wasn't done yet. It was done, I already did it, he didn't check. It did indeed take me a day or so to get to it, because it was utterly inconsequential and I had more important things to do. :rolleyes:

People cannot stop meddling.

# ? May 1, 2014 23:45

Powerful Two-Hander: Mar 10, 2004; Mods please change my name to "Tooter Skeleton" TIA.

TWBalls posted:

Apparently, the dipshits at corporate I.S. sent everyone (except local I.S.) an email telling users to download and install either Chrome or Firefox due to the IE vulnerability. So, we've been getting a poo poo ton of calls on this. If they had bothered to give us a heads up, I could have simply pushed out Chrome for Enterprise using PDQ deploy.

One of our I.S heads was hot desking behind me today and I heard him having a conversation along the lines of "Look, I know Asia told everyone to not browse any non business sites in IE and they want to suddenly push to Chrome but this is a massive overreaction. Zero days occur all the time, just look at Java for gods sake."

Conincidentally it got announced we're finally getting win 7 in August :woop:

# ? May 1, 2014 23:46

TWBalls: Apr 16, 2003; My medication never lies

Powerful Two-Hander posted:

Conincidentally it got announced we're finally getting win 7 in August

Corporate is supposed to be getting us a volume license for 7, but they've been taking forever to get it. I've slowly been re-imaging our XP systems to Vista in the meantime.

# ? May 1, 2014 23:58

Powerful Two-Hander: Mar 10, 2004; Mods please change my name to "Tooter Skeleton" TIA.

TWBalls posted:

Corporate is supposed to be getting us a volume license for 7, but they've been taking forever to get it. I've slowly been re-imaging our XP systems to Vista in the meantime.

Gutsy move. If you're in the UK I have one vista premium oem copy in my desk at home from my old pc if you want it :v:

# ? May 2, 2014 00:05

TWBalls: Apr 16, 2003; My medication never lies

Heh, thanks. For whatever reason, we have a volume license for Vista Business even though corporate told us not to deploy it due to compatibility reasons. That's a poo poo excuse since I've had more compatibility issues with 7 than I've had with Vista.

# ? May 2, 2014 02:01

Sirotan: Oct 17, 2006; Sirotan is a seal.

ratbert90 posted:

People who don't understand how computers work on a fundamental level.

Why do I have to keep flashing u-boot?
You aren't flashing it, it's just being loaded into ram.
So then why isn't the flash sticking between reboots?
IT IS IN RAM, IT IS NOT FLASHED, IT IS BEING LOADED TO A CERTAIN POINT IN MEMORY AND THEN BEING JUMPED TO.
So it's broken?

They know what RAM is so they're already leagues ahead of my users. Today I had a doctor (an actual doctor who went to med school) come up to me and ask me if we had any spare cables to charge her phone. I told her sorry no we didn't have any spare micro USB cables around which just made her get frustrated, insisting that "it only needs electricity!"

She sees patients.

# ? May 2, 2014 02:23

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

"This is urgent"

Are you sure? Because it says "test domain" right up there in the subject line. Talk to you in the morning.

# ? May 2, 2014 05:48

Ynglaur: Oct 9, 2013; The Malta Conference, anyone?

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

"This is urgent"

Are you sure? Because it says "test domain" right up there in the subject line. Talk to you in the morning.

Maybe they were testing something that needed to be moved to production to resolve an issue there (a data issue perhaps), and something in the test domain was preventing them from doing so?

# ? May 2, 2014 12:56

Judge Schnoopy: Nov 2, 2005; dont even TRY it, pal

TWBalls posted:

Apparently, the dipshits at corporate I.S. sent everyone (except local I.S.) an email telling users to download and install either Chrome or Firefox due to the IE vulnerability. So, we've been getting a poo poo ton of calls on this. If they had bothered to give us a heads up, I could have simply pushed out Chrome for Enterprise using PDQ deploy.

This was Wednesday for me. Message goes out to users saying don't use ie and if you don't have chrome call us to get it installed. I rushed to build a script silently installing chrome and push it to all clients.
"We use this defunct website that only works in ie!!!!"
Rush to build a script silently uninstalling flash player and deploy to necessary clients.
"I need help importing bookmarks!"
Work all afternoon with individual computers.

Thursday morning we approve the patches that made both scripts unnecessary

# ? May 2, 2014 14:01

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Sirotan posted:

They know what RAM is so they're already leagues ahead of my users.

He's an embedded hardware engineer. :smith:

# ? May 2, 2014 15:39

HalloKitty: Sep 30, 2005; Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

ratbert90 posted:

He's an embedded hardware engineer.

What the hell? He's the type of guy you'd expect to understand those concepts

vv Sorry, I had too much faith

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 17:09 on May 2, 2014

# ? May 2, 2014 16:29

ookiimarukochan: Apr 4, 2011

HalloKitty posted:

What the hell? He's the type of guy you'd expect to understand those concepts

Spoken like someone who has never seen the sort of software that electronics vendors manage to come up with

# ? May 2, 2014 16:37

Feral Bueller: Apr 23, 2004; Fun is important.; Nap Ghost

HalloKitty posted:

What the hell? He's the type of guy you'd expect to understand those concepts

Apparently you've never worked on a software project with Samsung.

# ? May 2, 2014 17:08

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

I asked 2 of my guys for some pretty basic information about a deployment. They've provided everything but, despite my pointing out that they need to re-read the original request, so I am fast approaching the point where I have to decide if I want to just drag this out indefinitely, or let them win and just do it myself. My heart says drag it out, but my head says just get it myself and admit defeat.

Working for stripe: stall long enough, I'll just do it for you.

# ? May 2, 2014 18:08

Soylent Heliotrope: Jan 27, 2009

Not pissing me off but actually making me very happy: after hours of digging through documentation and tinkering with WAIK, I got WIM imaging working correctly (problem was I wasn't running bcdboot after applying the image) and got my unattend.xml file to do exactly what I want. Baby steps to many of you, I'm sure, but this is a huge step towards actually doing imaging right. When I started here I had to walk around with an external hard drive and a Vista-era boot disk with a sector-based utility on it, and my predecessor was in the habit of not using sysprep because :confused:

. Maybe now I can convince my boss to let me set up WDS and it won't take me five hours to image a whole room anymore.

# ? May 2, 2014 18:10

mewse: May 2, 2006

Soylent Heliotrope posted:

Not pissing me off but actually making me very happy: after hours of digging through documentation and tinkering with WAIK, I got WIM imaging working correctly (problem was I wasn't running bcdboot after applying the image) and got my unattend.xml file to do exactly what I want. Baby steps to many of you, I'm sure, but this is a huge step towards actually doing imaging right. When I started here I had to walk around with an external hard drive and a Vista-era boot disk with a sector-based utility on it, and my predecessor was in the habit of not using sysprep because . Maybe now I can convince my boss to let me set up WDS and it won't take me five hours to image a whole room anymore.

What can I read to figure this stuff out for myself? I'm still using ghost as well.

# ? May 2, 2014 18:40

stubblyhead: Sep 13, 2007; That is treason, Johnny!; Fun Shoe

mewse posted:

What can I read to figure this stuff out for myself? I'm still using ghost as well.

Here's something someone posted a while back that I stuck in evernote. I didn't note who it was though so I can't give credit:

quote:

Once you've set up WDS & MDT (you don't need to setup WAIK per se, in the components view of MDT you can download & install everything needed, which includes WAIK), I suggest adding the apps you want (appdeploy.com for all the command lines you need for non-MSI apps - Office has its own deploy config built into MDT), drivers for your machines, and the OS of course.

Then use a standard task sequence to deploy the OS + apps to your test machine (don't forget to generate boot images by updating the deployment share including your drivers and add them to WDS, since WDS is actually what you PXE boot from). After the deploy, once you've booted the machine, enter audit mode. The Internet (specifically Brian Lee Jackson's page) claims you can use Ctrl+Shift+F3 to enter audit mode. Whether because of things MDT did or something else, I couldn't do that - had to run sysprep from system32\sysprep, and choose "Enter Audit Mode" and reboot when prompted. Entering audit mode is the key, because combined with the CopyProfile=True setting in unattend.xml, that'll copy the Admin profile over to the Default user profile. (There are various workarounds to enable the old-style "copy the Admin folder and overwrite the Default User folder", but that's generally not recommended).

Once you've configured the Admin profile as desired and installed any additional apps (for instance I could never get MSE to deploy successfully from MDT), use a standard "Sysprep & Capture" sequence from MDT to capture the machine. Protip: you have to launch this from Windows - navigate to the deployment share from within Windows and in the Scripts directory launch LiteTouch.vbs - not LiteTouch.wsf. If you launch the Sysprep & Capture from WinPE it will not work.

Here's the important bit. Do not bother to change the unattend.xml in the Sysprep & Capture task sequence. This does jack poo poo for you, and I'm about to tell you why (this took me a whole day of Googling to find in some random blog of some random MS person who worked on MDT).

Sysprep puts all its poo poo in %WINDOWS%\Panther. Why is the directory named Panther? gently caress if I know. But at any rate, the MDT sysprep & capture does NOT copy the contents of this directory. This means that even though the Sysprep & Capture task sequence copies all its poo poo to Panther (I think - never actually verified that part), the captured image doesn't have that. Which means when you boot, poo poo doesn't get customized properly.

So....here's the important bit. Create & customize an unattend.xml and add it to WDS - in the image properties, set "allow image to be deployed unattended" and select the customized unattend.xml you created. You will also want to boot from a standard W7 boot image in WDS, rather than the MDT boot image, since you realistically want to just deploy the image rather than run a task sequence.

In the unattend.xml, in the Specialize phase, make sure you set CopyProfile=True in Shell Setup. Also, in the same phase, make sure Organization is Microsoft and Owner is set to AutoBVT. (These last two may actually not be necessary and I don't know why they are - I followed Brian Lee Jackson on that and it did seem to make a difference).

Also important: if you do have errors in the process, boot to the Windows PE environment again on that machine, hit Shift+F10 to open a command prompt, launch notepad (type "Notepad" at the command prompt and hit enter), and open the error log from %WINDOWS%\Panther (there are four text files, one is like "err" something, sorry I don't remember completely but you can figure it out). This will show you what part it's failing on at least, which is crucial if you actually want to get anywhere. Note: if you get an "error denied" when trying to open the log file, right click from the open dialog, copy, and navigate somewhere and paste, then open that).

This all assumes you want to do it this way - you can always just stop after the deploy sequence from MDT, and you'd have a working install. The issues with that are you don't get to customize the user profile, and it takes a lot longer because MDT is actually running all the OS & app installs. If you deploy from MDT, customize, capture, and deploy from WDS, you're doing a bit dump of an image, and it only takes however long it takes to copy that image. For reference, deployment from MDT took about an hour and a half for Windows 7, Office 2010, and all updates (the updates are really what kills it, especially since I didn't change MDT from downloading from Microsoft and not from our WSUS server - I tried that but it didn't seem to download all the updates successfully). Deployment of the captured image took about 5 minutes over gigabit, and another 5 minutes to boot & sysprep properly. I imaged 12 desktops in 2 hours last week, and that was over Fast Ethernet (and also I had to redo 3 because their BIOS had SATA set to ATA instead of AHCI, and apparently Windows 7 still can't loving cope with that being switched after the install).

Also, I'd like to send a shoutout to Chrome - while I was about 3/4 done with this post, Windows loving restarted on me (Windows Updates, which is weird because I don't have this machine set to do that and it's not subject to GPOs, so apparently Microsoft decided I really needed this update), and I was freaking out thinking I'd wasted 15 minutes of typing, but when I launched Chrome and restored tabs, all the text was there. So thank you Google, for not making me retype all this poo poo.

Anyway, let me know if you have questions. It's definitely harder than it should be, and I had a loving devil of a time making it work, but now that it does it's loving beautiful and I have a customized logon screen background, customized Windows 7 pinned taskbar icons (have to use a VBS script for that one that launches on user's first login and then deletes itself - check Brian Lee Jackson's page for that script), and so on.

--if you edit your unattend.xml and remove the line that reads <ComputerName></ComputerName>, Windows Mini Setup will prompt you for a computer name
--if you set UnattendedJoin in the WDS unattend.xml I spoke about in my first post, the computer will most likely do this successfully (assuming you put in the right credentials)
--The unattended domain join happens during the Sysprep process
--Sysprep process is before Windows Mini Setup.
--Windows Mini Setup will change the computer name, but it will fail to inform the domain of this.

So putting this all together, if you do things the Microsoft recommended way, your deployed computer will join the domain using a random username (the default is %USERNAME%, with that variable being populated by the username you use to connect to the WDS server when you boot into the Windows PE environment to deploy the machine). Then, Windows Mini Setup will ask you for a computer name, you enter it, and Windows Mini Setup will change the computer name, without changing the name on the domain. So you end up with a computer that thinks it's connected to a domain with one name, a domain that only knows the computer with another name, and in general it's a clusterfuck of ridiculousness.

Anyway, Microsoft gets around this by suggesting you buy SCCM, which will kick off a domain join script after the machine finishes Windows Mini Setup and boots, but if you want to do this yourself you need to kick off a domain join script manually (or add it to the image in the Startup folder and set it to delete itself after running, like the Windows 7 pinned taskbar icons script I mentioned in my other post).

Edit: for my recent deployment I just joined the domain manually on all 12 machines, since it wasn't a lot of machines. So others may have more clues when it comes to the domain join scripts.

# ? May 2, 2014 19:01

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

Just because you can make +2TB VMFS luns doesn't mean you should.

# ? May 2, 2014 21:29

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

Just because you can make +2TB VMFS luns doesn't mean you should.

I have valid reasons to.

# ? May 2, 2014 21:39

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

HalloKitty posted:

What the hell? He's the type of guy you'd expect to understand those concepts

HAH

No no you see, he's an embedded HARDWARE engineer! He can't be arsed to figure things out about Linux, because it's a Linux project you see, and therefor things like Ram are different somehow. :downs:

Now please be diligently doing the needful and automate the build process and create a complete flashing environment so I may focus on just a tiny tiny part of the project without figuring out anything else about it on my own. :downs:

# ? May 2, 2014 21:44

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA: May 29, 2008

quote:

Would you be able to look for the enclosed PowerPoint presentation (on [thing]) prepared by [person_who_left_in_2006] in about 2003-2004 for an internal lunch an learn session?

I will get right on that, even though we have a firm 10-year retention policy and you just tried to get me to dig through multiple years of non-existent archives over something that your assistant could transcribe in 20 minutes.

# ? May 3, 2014 00:00

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

We let the new guy build a WSUS server to get his feet wet. He gave it 16GB of memory.

Ahhh god I needed a good laugh, thank you sir.

# ? May 3, 2014 02:50

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA: May 29, 2008

Maybe he knows something you don't and you're going to have 500k clients soon?

# ? May 3, 2014 03:30

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

Oh you wanted a Microsoft update server? I thought you wanted the Microsoft update server, sorry about that.

# ? May 3, 2014 03:43

Paladine_PSoT: Jan 2, 2010; If you have a problem Yo, I'll solve it

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Oh you wanted a Microsoft update server? I thought you wanted the Microsoft update server, sorry about that.

P. sure that's linux.

# ? May 3, 2014 06:23

Pudgygiant: Apr 8, 2004; Garnet and black? More like gold and blue or whatever the fuck colors these are

Last Monday: "Hey, you've been interviewing to replace your Linux Architect right? We're doing mass layoffs and he's pretty high on the list"
Last Friday: "Hey, we're instituting a company-wide hiring freeze so it's going to be a while before we can approve a replacement for your Linux Architect"

He's super motivated at work now

# ? May 3, 2014 07:40

Humphreys: Jan 26, 2013; We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule

My predecessor it turns out probably just used Youtube tutorials to do everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b85h_ujZ_vg

# ? May 3, 2014 08:57

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Sarcasmatron posted:

Apparently you've never worked on a software project with Samsung.

My time working at Samsung has taught me that working on phone firmware development is less like competing in the Olympics and more like competing in the Special Olympics. It's all so horrible and I'm surprised to this day that our phones don't simply openly burst into flames when we try to make a call.

There is no best vendor. There are only degrees of worse. Samsung is the least worst.

# ? May 3, 2014 13:27

QuiteEasilyDone: Jul 2, 2010; Won't you play with me?

Humphreys posted:

My predecessor it turns out probably just used Youtube tutorials to do everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b85h_ujZ_vg

What in the ever living gently caress did I just watch? Why?! Why did I watch it all the way through :gonk:

# ? May 3, 2014 14:16

meanieface: Mar 27, 2012; During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Humphreys posted:

My predecessor it turns out probably just used Youtube tutorials to do everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b85h_ujZ_vg

Thanks. One of my coworkers has openly admitted to not knowing how to build a computer. This may be headed his way.

# ? May 3, 2014 14:27

ookiimarukochan: Apr 4, 2011

Volmarias posted:

There is no best vendor. There are only degrees of worse. Samsung is the least worst.

If you work in San Jose, I hate you (other vendors at least have a go at testing their APIs before releasing them to the public / advertising them heavily)

# ? May 3, 2014 14:32

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

meanieface posted:

Thanks. One of my coworkers has openly admitted to not knowing how to build a computer. This may be headed his way.

He's got a whole bunch of "How to" videos that are all in the same style.

# ? May 3, 2014 14:33

mewse: May 2, 2006

Humphreys posted:

My predecessor it turns out probably just used Youtube tutorials to do everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b85h_ujZ_vg

That video is mostly correct but a bit outdated

# ? May 3, 2014 14:48

Roargasm: Oct 21, 2010; Hate to sound sleazy
But tease me
I don't want it if it's that easy

Humphreys posted:

My predecessor it turns out probably just used Youtube tutorials to do everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b85h_ujZ_vg

What could Bill Gates have possibly done to deserve that

# ? May 3, 2014 15:20

tomapot: Apr 7, 2005; Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.; Oven Wrangler

QuiteEasilyDone posted:

What in the ever living gently caress did I just watch? Why?! Why did I watch it all the way through

It started out normal enough, but it went downhill fast.

# ? May 3, 2014 16:35

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# ? May 10, 2024 05:46

Che Delilas: Nov 23, 2009; FREE TIBET WEED

tomapot posted:

It started out normal enough, but it went downhill fast.

It just keeps going. So. Many. Eggs.

# ? May 3, 2014 16:52

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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