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dennyk posted:One of our application teams unfortunately has sudo access on their Linux servers. They have a Jira instance, and it seems when they set it up they decided that Jira had to run as root so it could listen on port 80 because they didn't want to have to use a port number in their URL. Then this morning they decided to downgrade their Jira version by uninstalling the current one using Jira's uninstall tool...which apparently removes the user account that Jira is configured to run under. How does this even happen? uid 0 is special. You should be able to boot into rescue, add it to passwd, and set a new password without any problems.
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# ? Jul 23, 2014 23:23 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:51 |
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evol262 posted:How does this even happen? uid 0 is special. You should be able to boot into rescue, add it to passwd, and set a new password without any problems. Yeah, it was easy to fix. Didn't even need a rescue ISO, single-user still worked. Readded the root passwd and shadow entries manually, reset the password, and added it to the necessary groups again, and it was happy again in about five minutes. Just annoying that it happened at all, when it could have been easily avoided by (a) listening to the application's documentation when it says "don't run this as root, it's bad, mmmkay?", and/or (b) if your uninstall program deletes users unprompted, adding a check to make sure the user it's trying to delete isn't named "root"...
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 00:15 |
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It's me. I'm the one who pissed me off today. Was working with a vendor on their ASA VPN solution, setting up routes in the firewall. All in test, with production for reference. Or was that production with test for reference? OH SILLY FUCKIN' ME! Firewall route was going All Sources->All Destinations->All Sources in a loop. There goes the Internet! After fixing it, and a brush with a very forgiving CFO, I decided it was time to walk away from the keyboard for the day.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 00:32 |
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I win, I have the stupidest loving client. Bar none. They are actually the stupidest person I've ever worked with in my entire loving life and I have no idea how the gently caress they dress themselves in the morning, let alone have power over somebody. This was a mishmash of every single "you wouldn't believe this dumbass" ticket but all in the same ticket. It starts with my first dumb decision: I did phone-support for a user that lives several states away. First things first, his new (hand-me-down from an ex-employee) phone doesn't work. He can't make calls to anybody, just receive them. I ask more about the situation, he says that he thinks there's a virus on the phone left over from the previous user (????) and he wants to get it reset. He cannot take it into the Verizon store, as their remote site has an outstanding balance and Verizon will not help them until they pay the balance. I should have told him to gently caress right off, right here, but I didn't, because the person deals directly with clients that would be worse off in life if this person doesn't call out to them. So I agree to research and help out. Here's the catch: he can't unlock the phone, because he doesn't know the code. So first thing's first, I get the documentation on factory resetting the phone. All I know is that it is an Android device. I push him further, he says that it is a Motorola. Alright, a Motorola Android is probably a Droid. I have him turn the power off the phone, then tell him to press and hold the volume-up key. "This doesn't have a volume up key" "What" "I only see a silver button that locks the phone. There's nothing else on the sides. Just that one button" So at this point, I'm worried he has some bullshit Motorola non-droid phone that doesn't have volume buttons because it goes entirely by some kind of soft-touch touchscreen horse poo poo with a fancy slider that isn't visible unless you can actually unlock the phone. I call him on the phone and have him push everywhere on the outside of the case, the edges of the screen, basically everywhere besides the volume slider that he's been using. No success. I give up on that, and decide it'd be better to pinpoint the type of phone he uses, in case it has a different factory reset process. He, of course, has no loving idea what TYPE of phone he has, just that he has a phone. It does not say Droid on it. It has the Motorola M, has exactly one silver button on the side, and no fancy stuff. I was told, I quote, "It's black, about 4.5 inches long, and has rounded corners. Does that help?" Obviously it doesn't, so I opt to have that person visit gsmarena and pick out their phone from the lineup of phones on the site. They can't find the links on the pages (You go to Motorola -> Smartphone and then click through pages like you're shopping, it's stupid loving simple), and ask me to do it for them. Fine. I have a screen sharing program that lets me just hijack their session, I'll hop on and see what they're looking at. I fire it up, and it fails to connect. The installation on his machine is two goddamned years old and an entire x.0 version out of date. I push out the policy from our dashboard to replace that installation, but it won't happen until overnight. He needs the needful to be doing the now. Luckily we have a back-up with LogMeIn, but he can't get to the right website. Me: "Are you at the page with the six digit code?" Him: "No, I see a bunch of blue links. One of them says LogMeIn Remote Desktop Support?" "Click that one, that's the one you want." "It's asking me to sign in." "That's the LogMeIn Rescue side, that's what I'm using. You need to go to LogMeIn Remote Desktop Support. It's the first link." "I did that and it wants me to buy one of their licenses." "NO, no, go back to the Google results and type LogMeIn again. Or just type in LogMeIn123.com into the top bar. It takes you right there." "That's still not working..." Repeat this for a solid loving fifteen minutes. FINALLY he ends up on the right page, punches in the code, and makes it through the entire LogMeIn setup process without any problems. When the screen loads up, I see three loving Ask Search Toolbars underneath their URL. I ask him to open up the gsmarena page again, so I could show him where to go. He moves the mouse to the top of the IE windows, drags the window all the way down until only the top of the window peeks above the taskbar, uncovering the window underneath it. This window is open to Motorola.com. I get him onto gsmarena.com, hoping to dear god that I will just see what goofy loving non-smart-phone touchscreen this guy inherited. After a couple minutes of looking around, he finds it. "That's the one. That's the one I have." The Droid loving Razr M "Sir, the volume buttons are below the silver button you mentioned before." "No they're not, there's nothing there." "This is the exact same model of phone. You have a Droid. All Droids have volume buttons. They are there." "That's not a button, that's where the Sim card goes." "Please push the top half of the bit of plastic sticking out" "Oh what do you know, the volume went up" I want to loving die It takes a couple tries, but we finally get the phone reset. That part is easy, I emailed him the instructions and he knows exactly what buttons to push because I've explained the function of every piece of plastic on that stupid goddamn phone for the past five minutes, answering a stream of "what's this thing do" questions that would make a 5-year-old blush. We get the phone back to factory settings, it begins the reset process, we both breathe a sigh of relief. Everything's fixed. Ticket closed. Then a ticket comes in. "My phone's hosed up AGAIN. How can this already happen???? Please help" I call them back. They had just started setting everything up again. Email, security settings, calendar, etc. Now that they're finished, when he goes to call somebody on his phone, he can't dial out. If somebody calls him, he can answer, but he can't call anybody or unlock his phone. "You just set your security settings, though. Just unlock the phone and sign in again, there's no way the code can be anything besides what you set it as." "Where am I supposed to type that in?" "Swipe the screen, then type in the four digit code you set" "Oh. I thought that was the dialer" "" "Doesn't this use my computer password though? I thought all the electronic crap uses the same password." "" "Oh well, that explains why I couldn't make calls in the first place. It works now. Have a nice day!" Total ticket time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 02:06 |
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quote:
Yessssssssssss. Hrrnngggg.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 03:00 |
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death .cab for qt posted:
How do cars not get stolen all the time? I thought every car uses the same key.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 03:39 |
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death .cab for qt posted:"Oh. I thought that was the dialer" Add a note to the client's file that they should be given a Jitterbug, gratis.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 04:28 |
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I love your story and your post immediately jumped out because last.fm tells me I've listened to 52 tracks by Death Cab for Cutie in the past week, so you're instantly a standout!
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 04:35 |
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death .cab for qt posted:I want to loving die You have my dad as a client?
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 05:13 |
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SamDabbers posted:Not pissing me off: HP Procurve lifetime warranty Good vendor support is so rare. I remember one of my old workplaces having the top tier NetApp support and we had an instance where a courier rocked up at our NOC at 3am on a Sunday with a HDD and we had nfi what it was for. 5 Minutes later our monitoring system alerts us that there is a broken disk in one of our NetApp appliances. How they knew and got a new HDD to us before our monitoring system even caught is still a mystery
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 05:53 |
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I have a client that is insisting that their PC is slow. I've jumped on, opened our program, gone onto the internet, clicked about, its fine. Its faster than the machine she say's its slower than. Her problem now? "Oh its slow when it starts up, oh and it looks different". Well no poo poo, it looks different because its XP, not 7 like your other machines (despite being a better specced machine somehow) and its slow starting up because its still loading stuff. Stop trying to load a million things on it as the log in tune is still loving playing. I've told her this in nicer words and now she's annoyed because its XP and not 7. She wants to know why we provided her with an XP machine. At this point I just want to tell her to bugger off and speak to her drat manager, we sold it to her 3 years ago and gave her the option of Win 7 or XP on the cheap and she went with XP. She's also still complaining that its slow. Despite me proving to her that once it starts up, it loads pretty much everything instantly. Just, gently caress people ignoring evidence.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 09:49 |
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For some people, "it's slow" is code for "I want a new computer, but I don't want to admit it, so I'm going to pretend there's a technical reason." Meanwhile, institutional inertia is pissing me off. I can't tell the exact story, so I'll tell one from some time back that's similar. I have this client, and I find outtheir work-from-home system is this: you enable RDP on your machine. IT forwards a random high port to :3389 on your machine. You go home and log in. And the url to do all this is vpn.company.com. My hair stands on end like in the old Peanuts comics. "But we have a VPN! VPNs are secure! *blah blah showing me things that say VPNs are secure*" "It would be secure if you had a VPN, but you only call it a VPN. It's not. I can set you up an actual VPN." So I do, I test it, and I leave instructions with local IT on creating certificates for everyone and bugger off. Two days later, early Saturday morning, I get an angry call that "my" VPN is broken. I log in, get in just fine. Come to find out, IT created one cert, made sure it worked, then just gave it to everyone. Now, I didn't explicitly say "Make a new key/cert for everyone" but I think that's implied in "use the person's full name when you generate the cert." (They just renamed it for each person.) And, of course, the VPN system wouldn't allow simultaneous logins with the same cert. Now, guess the end result! A) Management backed me up and punished local IT for such a boneheaded move. b) Management backed local IT and told me to "change the setting that's causing all the problems." c) Management told everyone to switch back to the rdp system and didn't pay me for the project. c, plus management gave me an extremely condescending talk about how this is a business and we don't have time and money to waste on playing with Linux, especially when it doesn't work, and by the next time I was in they had reinstalled the machine I used anyway, and I lost the client not long after.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 14:43 |
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"My $109 tablet from ABC Warehouse doesn't display the company website properly!"
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 14:44 |
I work at an MSP that also does residential stuff. Before starting here, I would never have believed the sheer number of people who call in because their internet is down and they want us to remote in because they don't want to bring it in and also don't want us to drive to their house because that's more expensive. Sure, I can remote in, do you have any pixie dust around? Maybe a unicorn horn to use as an antenna?
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 14:45 |
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sfwarlock posted:
Send them an invoice for the project now.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 14:54 |
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President Ark posted:I work at an MSP that also does residential stuff. Before starting here, I would never have believed the sheer number of people who call in because their internet is down and they want us to remote in because they don't want to bring it in and also don't want us to drive to their house because that's more expensive. Cell data tethering
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 14:57 |
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People with 8 mile long email signatures reminding me not to print the email, 700 contact methods, no less than 5 images, toss in a lame rear end quote, and links to our company website. For fucks sake if the my preview window (about 1/3rd my screen) can't fit your entire sig I'm just going to delete your email. Stop that poo poo.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 16:04 |
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sfwarlock posted:. Uh, send them an invoice right now, and keep all your emails and documentation that you sent to their it department.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 16:19 |
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Off topic, but does anyone remember/have a link to an article that got passed around here a few years ago? It was about managing IT employees, and how IT employees would structure their work to cut you out of the process once they deemed you were incompetent, and it was on you not to be a shithead in order to prevent them from doing it.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 17:38 |
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stuxracer posted:People with 8 mile long email signatures reminding me not to print the email, 700 contact methods, no less than 5 images, toss in a lame rear end quote, and links to our company website. Especially when someone forwards you an e-mail chain with 10 different messages in it, where these gigantic signatures take up the vast majority of the actual e-mail content. I usually don't bother to read and just reply "Filter out the important parts" because gently caress reading through that poo poo.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 17:43 |
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Volmarias posted:Cell data tethering I am dealing with a VPN solution that isn't working at a remote site because the internet connection is a PC tethered to an iPhone. I basically told them they need to get a real internet connection in there and it will work fine.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 19:15 |
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Banking software vendors piss me off. I have come to the conclusion that every vendor that creates and sells software to banks is terrible in just about every way. Our core banking software is named Browser not because it runs in the browser but because it launches from IE. Oh make sure you disable all your IE and .net security settings and run at least 2 versions of behind! Make sure you turn macros on in word because we use some hosed up method of generating and printing our documents through word in the background. Our check imaging company who cant insists every problem with their steaming pile of poo poo is due to us having AV on our systems. For some reason one of our check scanner stations started creating the check images upside down. So I open a support ticket with the vendor. I get them connected to the system. He looks around finds that we have anti-virus installed and it must be flipping the image... Our internet banking vendor still doesn't support IE 11 and they cannot seem to manage to keep their data-center up. They had a complete outage for over 24 hours due to "a ups power cable over heated and FELL out" Yes apparently one UPS power cable was all it took to take everything from their phones to their backup generators down. And their "hot site" is apparently more like a cold site. Keep in mind every one of these companies are worth BILLIONS.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 19:18 |
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death .cab for qt posted:gently caress Mobile Phones off the face of the earth One of our field sales guys is having constant iPhone troubles; sometimes mail doesnt work, sometimes calls and text messages, recently the battery, now its exchange calendars going blank. I don't know what the gently caress else to do, hard reseting, delete all network connections, cycle airplane mode, run without Wi-fi... all the same poo poo. And this is the guy who I sent out a replacement iPhone we luckily had in storage, so I could retrieve said phone to send off to Apple... only it gets loving stolen as the guy lives in an apartment, and the delivery guy gave no fucks and just signed it off himself and threw the package through the door and ended up god knows where. And of course management don't want to fork out for another phone, AND the phone was bought outright without insurance! stuxracer posted:People with 8 mile long email signatures reminding me not to print the email, 700 contact methods, no less than 5 images, toss in a lame rear end quote, and links to our company website. Better yet, people who straight up can't loving read or spell properly; every now and then I get badgered about "E-mail problems" and asked if the systems are ok because a client is pissed off that nobody is responding to them. One quick check in the catchall inbox... oh look it's full of misspelled name addresses with random full stops and wrong domains.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 19:31 |
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TheFuzzyLumpkin posted:Off topic, but does anyone remember/have a link to an article that got passed around here a few years ago? It was about managing IT employees, and how IT employees would structure their work to cut you out of the process once they deemed you were incompetent, and it was on you not to be a shithead in order to prevent them from doing it. I'm not sure if this is it, but it has a similar theme: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 22:32 |
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That was it, thanks man.
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 22:33 |
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tehfeer posted:Banking software vendors piss me off. I have come to the conclusion that every vendor that creates and sells software to banks is terrible in just about every way. They don't have the word Henry in their company name do they?
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# ? Jul 24, 2014 23:00 |
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No but I have plenty of negative experience with the company you speak of. We purchased one of their products and they have not released any updates for it in years but they want us to move it all to their cloud because CLOUD! Our internet banking provider was just bought for 1 billion and sold a week or two later for 1.6 billion. If someone wants to make a ton of money they should look into creating some decent banking software. Trust me the bar is EXTREMELY low. The only good vendor we have is a one man shop who built our custom IVR system. It could be worse. I could have gotten that hospital job... tehfeer fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jul 24, 2014 |
# ? Jul 24, 2014 23:38 |
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tehfeer posted:Banking software vendors piss me off. I have come to the conclusion that every vendor that creates and sells software to banks is terrible in just about every way. Would this 'Browser' happen to be provided by a vendor that begins with F? If so, I recently quit supporting that used that pile of.. I mean, that very high-tech and totally secure system.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 02:27 |
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tehfeer posted:No but I have plenty of negative experience with the company you speak of. We purchased one of their products and they have not released any updates for it in years but they want us to move it all to their cloud because CLOUD! Our internet banking provider was just bought for 1 billion and sold a week or two later for 1.6 billion. If someone wants to make a ton of money they should look into creating some decent banking software. Trust me the bar is EXTREMELY low. The only good vendor we have is a one man shop who built our custom IVR system. The problem with all banking software is at some point it has to talk to a mainframe that is running software that is older then almost everyone in the company. On top of that, the UIs they come up with are so bad they remind me of video card/motherboard utilities. They have a special blend of Visual Basic/.Net default icons, combined with some royalty free clipart and word text.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 05:55 |
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Solumin posted:I'm not sure if this is it, but it has a similar theme: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 14:53 |
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As a sysadmin for a banking software vendor, I can assure you we're not all bad! Some big investment banks are using antiquated technologies (loving old-rear end versions of Sybase) but from my perspective most banks have adapted to relatively modern servers and technologies.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 15:16 |
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Trastion posted:I am dealing with a VPN solution that isn't working at a remote site because the internet connection is a PC tethered to an iPhone. I basically told them they need to get a real internet connection in there and it will work fine. I work on an airgapped network so if I want to use internet, I have to either flip this giant switch and lose all my terminal connections or tether my personal laptop to a cell phone. Whooo
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 15:19 |
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stuxracer posted:People with 8 mile long email signatures reminding me not to print the email, 700 contact methods, no less than 5 images, toss in a lame rear end quote, and links to our company website. If someone created the equivalent of AdBlock as plug-in for Outlook that blocked silly signatures, I would pay for it.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 15:53 |
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So how did disabling link speed auto-negotiation become and remain a best practice? In modern times I've only seen or heard of autonegotiation issues or speed fluctuations with bad hardware or cables that would have shown up as packet loss or link flapping with a forced link speed. I mostly wonder because of the number of maintenance windows I see scheduled because GigE really should have more than 100mbit of throughput (or a DS3 more than 10mbit) so I can't see how it makes sense.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 17:26 |
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I know on Cisco 18-whatevers your ISP will usually tell you to set your ports to 100/full because performance will often be erratic on auto-negotiate.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 18:05 |
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Alereon posted:So how did disabling link speed auto-negotiation become and remain a best practice? In modern times I've only seen or heard of autonegotiation issues or speed fluctuations with bad hardware or cables that would have shown up as packet loss or link flapping with a forced link speed. I mostly wonder because of the number of maintenance windows I see scheduled because GigE really should have more than 100mbit of throughput (or a DS3 more than 10mbit) so I can't see how it makes sense. I don't know. I'd heard that from a few older networking guys. Personally, it pisses me off because I've seen instances where something was forced at (for example) 100/full and get poo poo throughput. Set it to auto negotiate, it still connects at 100/full but for whatever reason, files transfer considerably faster.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 18:23 |
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Alereon posted:So how did disabling link speed auto-negotiation become and remain a best practice? In modern times I've only seen or heard of autonegotiation issues or speed fluctuations with bad hardware or cables that would have shown up as packet loss or link flapping with a forced link speed. I mostly wonder because of the number of maintenance windows I see scheduled because GigE really should have more than 100mbit of throughput (or a DS3 more than 10mbit) so I can't see how it makes sense. Because older equipment, and I am talking 10+ years old or more, had problems negotiating duplexity, so if you had a newer device, it wouldn't get a response from the 15 year old 3com hub or whatever, so it would go to half. Special snowflake vendors (example: Avaya) got tired of being blamed for issues when really it was the fact that the customer half-assed their network, so they preached 100/full. Obviously modern networking equipment does auto/auto fine, but there are still folks who don't know any better and still try to lock everything to 100/full. You still run into the occasional problem, though. I remember being on a conference call troubleshooting a flaky network connection. The tech traced the connection from server, to patch panel under the floor, and found it went to a hub under the floor. Someone on the call said, "You mean data switch?" No, it was an old hub that somehow got put in place years ago.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 18:28 |
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Annoyed person emails me about a problem I am only on the periphery of. Copies in her boss, her boss's boss and two of my bosses, none of whom are going to be familiar with what's going on. Why are there so many people who exercise the nuclear option every time they have an issue? She could've picked up the drat phone and asked me about this directly, and would've gotten a good answer, too.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 18:45 |
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The Sharepoint 2007 farm we inherited from another team has a 600GB content database. Holy loving poo poo. For the curious, Microsoft's absolute recommended maximum is below 100 GB. How the gently caress is this thing still running? I'm absolutely livid. Who the gently caress let this go so long? How the gently caress was this not flagged years ago? I want to scream. gently caress this, I'm going to talk to a sympathetic manager. This is complete bullshit. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jul 25, 2014 |
# ? Jul 25, 2014 19:07 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:51 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Annoyed person emails me about a problem I am only on the periphery of. Copies in her boss, her boss's boss and two of my bosses, none of whom are going to be familiar with what's going on. Because its easier to go "bosses because otherwise the IT guy will tell me its not possible" and drag you through a world of poo poo than it is to admit they might be wrong on some things. I have clients who repeatedly complain to my boss that i'm not being helpful because we don't support their products. Or today I found that a client heard that I liked spybot, installed Kapersky (somehow, don't ask me how), told me I'd recommended it to them and therefore we had to support it. gently caress you, guy.
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# ? Jul 25, 2014 19:40 |