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Oct 24, 2017 04:01
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iospace posted:Nah, nothing does. Want to see the guy who created Time Cube himself narrate and show you his site on his desktop for about an hour? Course you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q0Wj2mLS1k
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Oct 24, 2017 04:02
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iospace posted:Nah, nothing does. It's the same kind of incoherent natter. They're saying something and the words are English but the language isn't. To keep things from going too off topic I'll contribute something semi-related. I'm taking classes at the local community college to get paper that says I can do IT, and one of these classes is an intro to local networks. Pretty easy stuff, honestly, and this first assignment is to review a chapter that (shockingly!) explains how computers work, and post in the class discussion forums on a topic chosen by the prof. The topic is sharing network resources and your opinion on usability vs. security. One person's opinion stuck out to me: quote:I am aging myself with my response (translate to 'old') but here it goes. I prefer to have my operating systems and devices security locked down tightly by the manufacturers of the products. They are the experts and know how their security works. It should be left to those of us that purchase their products to decide what and how much or how little access we provide to them. My very first IT certification was for a server operating system called Novell (Microsoft didn't have a server product yet). Novell was very restrictive and the administrators of Novell had to decide what access to give and to who. When Microsoft server operating systems became available it was the exact opposite and administrators had to ensure that they restricted access which makes it tougher ensure that your system is secure.  If I'm reading this correctly, this person assumes that the default settings on their router and McAfee are enough to protect them from intrusions, because they don't want to make sure their network is secure.
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Oct 24, 2017 04:08
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:I didn't know they managed to isolate the cause of the whisker growth, last I looked into it, they were seeing what kind of conformal coatings they can use on the leads to prevent growth entirely. Nah, the cause of the whisker growths have been pretty clear for a while. It has to do with repeated cycles through the anisotropic alpha/beta-tin phase transformation. I'll have to consult my textbook tomorrow for specifics, but IIRC the oxide layer is harder than the metal underneath, so the tin is extruded at screw dislocations along the surface as a means of relieving stress. Something along those lines. Fun fact, uranium also has an anisotropic phase transformation and will deform into a funny looking bar if you temp cycle it. edit: they may very well still be looking at coatings to prevent tin whiskers, because 13C is a pretty common temperature for something to go through repeatedly. If it happened at, say, 50C or -40C then it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, obviously.
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Oct 24, 2017 04:35
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Entropic posted:Except what always seems to happen is they run out of direct dial numbers and assume that adding a new extension to the internal phone system automatically gives them the corresponding public phone number. This happens all the time. Usually followed up with a demand to acquire the number in question.
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Oct 24, 2017 11:14
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wa27 posted:One time a local business around here got a new phone system or something, and while moving providers they managed to straight-up steal one of our DID's. Something where it was on the end of our block and the beginning of theirs. I didn't (and still don't) know much about telephony so that this was even possible came as a surprise to me. We have a pool with our numbers for all of our clients (I work for a voip telecom) and the number of times I've seen someone go in and change the customer on a DID because "well they didn't have any more and they REALLY NEEDED one" is staggering. This becomes extra fun when they've been using the stolen number for some time and we have to gently tell them that they don't actually own that number, sorry.
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Oct 24, 2017 15:10
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Relevant: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/922856687987552256
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Oct 24, 2017 23:02
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This whole thing is just loving fantastic. $1 says that it will still take the company 8 or more weeks to port them back.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:22
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larchesdanrew posted:Now I get to have a talk with the director this afternoon. I wholeheartedly plan on pointing out that I have a planned deployment of $489k worth of new technology that will cost the school absolutely nothing, as well as a future expansion that will save us $30k a year. If he wants to crawl my rear end about a lazy luddite art teacher who should have retired 8 years ago then I will gladly allow him to make his point to my back as I head out the door with every contact and deal I've spent the last two years working on. At this point I can only assume larches was murdered by his director, his remains hidden in several Buffalo drives.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:50
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You think that's bad, we've deprovisioned entire customers accidentally. More than once.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:30
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I now want to hear stories about this from Renegret if it's happened to them.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:41
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My old department was always required to have the administrator listed for the customer account email us from the address on file with written permission to reset passwords (if they we're too lazy to do it themselves) Unless the customer pitched a fit, in which case your manager would handwave it away and tell you to "just reset it this one time as a courtesy" Or the said ok then called into another department who would just reset it no questions asked as long as you said you were the admin
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Oct 25, 2017 00:41
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Kaethela posted:You think that's bad, we've deprovisioned entire customers accidentally. More than once. Phone numbers are some weird voodoo that it's possible to lose completely, though.  ENUM
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Oct 25, 2017 01:07
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iospace posted:I now want to hear stories about this from Renegret if it's happened to them. Thankfully I don't talk to customers. But at this point in my career nothing would surprise me. I got some loving stories. Renegret fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 02:00
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No time like the present. Lets hear em.
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Oct 25, 2017 02:06
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Renegret posted:Thankfully I don't talk to customers. 
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Oct 25, 2017 03:19
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We have a customer that owns all of 555-123-XXXX, except for ONE number that the telco gave to a residential customer and can't get back.
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Oct 25, 2017 03:57
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n0tqu1tesane posted:We have a customer that owns all of 555-123-XXXX, except for ONE number that the telco gave to a residential customer and can't get back. Im the residential customer still using the bakelite rotary
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Oct 25, 2017 04:33
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Thanks Ants posted:Managers at MSPs think that "having somebody on site" is the highest form of customer service, as they have long since given up on being able to rely on "fix the problem efficiently" or even "don't have a problem in the first place". So they send people to sites even if it's completely unnecessary, because then there's no need for them to actually talk to the customer and explain what happened. This is one of the things my MSP does right. When I started, we weren't really a small shop anymore, but still had that mentality. We'd do free courtesy visits to soothe ruffled feathers, give credits, and sell services cheaper than we really should have, on the grounds of stuff like 'they're a really small non-profit and can't afford this otherwise!' from other people in our company. That is almost entirely gone now, except for a few legacy customers that have been with us forever. Our biggest problem is customers that make changes to long-standing setups (frequently without telling us), and then demand free onsite help to fix it. We've almost certainly lost some accounts over the last few years by putting our foot down, and it's incredibly gratifying to see other departments show a spine once in a while. One customer set up a new VPN with some other vendor without any communication to us whatsoever. One (Friday) night, we saw their site go down, and followed all our contact instructions, but heard nothing until Monday morning, when their IT guy called in every 10 minutes demanding someone onsite NOW to fix it. Engineering shook someone loose, who got out there and found their firewall totally reconfigured, and a second circuit we knew nothing about. Theory is that their vendor reset the configs to default, then made the changes they needed, and everyone went home without doing more than to make sure the internal network was working. We fixed it pretty quickly, then the engineer got stuck onsite while someone from the vendor made the changes they needed again remotely. I dont know if we slapped the emergency dispatch charge on, but they definitely got billed for the onsite visit, and were told their monthly bill would go up if we were expected to monitor and manage the new circuit and VPN, plus another pre-scheduled onsite visit to properly document the new stuff. They became super uncooperative about everything after that, and left 6 months later. As far as I know, there's an ongoing lawsuit about the early termination fee for their original contract, which I assume we are pursuing because they refuse to settle and were such assholes up to that point. It doesn't always happen that way, but it sure is cool and good when it does. We have another customer that has us do all their device monitoring, patching, etc. as well as act as their user helpdesk, but for reasons beyond understanding had a different vendor actually manage their network, and they refuse to give us even read-only access to anything. Network problems can take WEEKS to resove, and sometimes end up with conference calls between us, them, the network company, the device vendor, and the ISP, and somehow this is an acceptable state of affairs.
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Oct 25, 2017 11:45
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TheParadigm posted:No time like the present. Lets hear em. teeeeeeeeeeechnically I'm not supposed to talk about specific outages but I hate this loving place so I usually let on to a little more than I'm supposed to on outages several years after the fact and leave things incredibly vague. Like the time an angry developer changed the customer service phone number to a phone sex hotline number on an obscure error message for set top boxes. Set top box code updates are a Big loving Deal too so it had to stay like that for a few weeks. Or the time the VOD Most Watched cache was cleared at 1AM on our mobile app. It started repopulating normally, but you know what kind of VODs people are ordering at 1AM? Apparently a safeguard was never put in place because the developers never thought it would be a problem.
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Oct 25, 2017 12:15
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Small time TV Providers are my favorite. On more than one occasion, we'd tune to an obscure international channel and see the bouncing Samsung logo of a DVD player. At least once I watched someone rewind a VHS tape live on air. A popular international channel went black for just short of a week. We later found out that they fired their entire engineering staff, then told the last remaining engineer that he's 24/7 on call. Also you're not allowed to go on vacation anymore, because you're the only person who knows how to make this place run. No pay raise, of course. His response was to pull out a whole bunch of wires quit on the spot. All of the old engineers refused to be rehired. On another occasion, a Spanish international channel was showing concert being played live, and the call sign at the top of the screen was for a channel we didn't even offer. We found out that the provider had gone out of business and didn't tell anyone. The owners took all the equipment out of the building, and when the employees showed up to work the next day they found the doors locked. We had a company that accepted the streams of multiple international channels and re-streamed them to us, so they could act as a middle man for all those providers for us (which was nice because most of them didn't speak English). When they found out what happened, they just stuck a random channel in that slot just to prevent it from being black and neglected to actually tell us. They had good intentions, but it wound up pissing off our customers even more than if we put up a "technical difficulties" slate and left it blank. A government agency hired a bunch of contractors to do some deconstruction in a local courthouse. I didn't get the full story, but there was an error in the plans and the contractors were inadvertently told to tear apart a room full of live A/V equipment. Since the room was on the 3rd floor, they tore apart all the equipment and chucked it down the garbage chute into a dumpster waiting below. That county's local access channels were out for six months while they got through all the bureaucratic red tape of ordering new equipment because the old stuff was completely wrecked. You know those scrolling guide channels that only old people use? That's just a windows XP machine running 3rd party software and set to full screen mode. Back when XP was still supported and received updates, you'd occasionally get computers that would reboot themselves to run updates (while live on air), or you'd see pop ups on the system tray asking for updates. We then take set top box, tune it to a music channel, and splice the two feeds together so you get some smooth jazz while the guide scrolls. Whenever that channel goes silent, some poor tech has to roll to that remote site and turn the box back on (this was automated about two years ago). The first time I saw one of those machines get rebooted live on air, it was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain for the first time. Renegret fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 13:09
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Renegret posted:A government agency hired a bunch of contractors to do some deconstruction in a local courthouse. I didn't get the full story, but there was an error in the plans and the contractors were inadvertently told to tear apart a room full of live A/V equipment. Since the room was on the 3rd floor, they tore apart all the equipment and chucked it down the garbage chute into a dumpster waiting below. That county's local access channels were out for six months while they got through all the bureaucratic red tape of ordering new equipment because the old stuff was completely wrecked. 
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Oct 25, 2017 13:15
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Renegret posted:Like the time an angry developer changed the customer service phone number to a phone sex hotline number on an obscure error message for set top boxes. Set top box code updates are a Big loving Deal too so it had to stay like that for a few weeks. Uh, isn't this what emergency change controls are for? I don't care where you are, you can't leave that in production once you know about it, right? Fix it now, deal with the red tape and fallout later!
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Oct 25, 2017 13:35
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MANime in the sheets posted:Uh, isn't this what emergency change controls are for? I don't care where you are, you can't leave that in production once you know about it, right? Fix it now, deal with the red tape and fallout later! The problem is the logistics behind deploying a code upgrade for set top boxes. I think the number is roughly 2.5 boxes per customer, multiplied by several million customers. There's so many devices on our network that not enough private IP space actually exists for management purposes. A code upgrade usually takes about a week of overnight work. It consumes a huge amount of resources and carries a poo poo ton of risk for the customers. You also have to pause a lot of other planned maintenance work because you probably shouldn't mess with your core network when you expect several million boxes to reboot and download code. I can't emphasize how obscure the location of the phone number was too. I don't know how long it was like that, but if someone said several months I'd believe it. Renegret fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 13:52
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Do you know what caused the error to start appearing often enough that people noticed it?
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Oct 25, 2017 14:02
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Thanks Ants posted:Do you know what caused the error to start appearing often enough that people noticed it? Yes It was a very specific case for a feature that nobody really used very often. Only one customer ever called to report it to us, and he didn't even care. He thought it was funny.
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Oct 25, 2017 14:05
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Renegret posted:....STB stuff... If only they spent as much time and attention on making the things not be horribly slow. And update the interface so it doesn't look straight out of 1995.... My local fiber/IPTV company uses ADB branded STBs... They are quite slow and take more than 4 minutes to boot if powered entirely down. The guide and menus are some horrid color combination of bright green on bright blue, with white text.
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Oct 25, 2017 14:31
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stevewm posted:If only they spent as much time and attention on making the things not be horribly slow. And update the interface so it doesn't look straight out of 1995.... ....yeah I got nothing on this one. gently caress STBs. When I first started this job they took about a half hour to come back up. Luckily it's nowhere near as bad anymore.
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Oct 25, 2017 14:41
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Renegret posted:
This one rings a bell. Did you post about this before? It may have been someone else, as this kind of poo poo happens with surprising regularity.
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Oct 25, 2017 19:48
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Proteus Jones posted:This one rings a bell. Did you post about this before? It might've been me. sometimes I forget what I post in this thread e: Did I ever talk about that time I had to watch Playboy en Español to try and figure out if the guide info was right? It's really hard to tell what a programming is when all you have to go by are people loving and a program title written in a language you don't speak. I ended up turning the channel on right as a program was starting and waiting to see if they were nice enough to put a title screen up. It took an hour and a half for me to actually get one. At one point my weirdo boss started looking over my shoulder and said "HEY IS THAT A PIERCING ON HER TITTY??" I was never so uncomfortable in my life. The kicker is that this was escalated by an employee. Renegret fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 19:51
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The CEO's son was having an issue with his iPhone so he hands it over to me to look at. Onscreen is an "escort" website with a woman's profile that he was trying to arrange an assignation with. Safari was having trouble processing the payment page so I suggested he use a browser on his desktop and then went to the kitchen and washed my hands.
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Oct 25, 2017 20:00
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Dick Trauma posted:The CEO's son was having an issue with his iPhone so he hands it over to me to look at. Onscreen is an "escort" website with a woman's profile that he was trying to arrange an assignation with. Safari was having trouble processing the payment page so I suggested he use a browser on his desktop and then went to the kitchen and washed my hands. you missed an opportunity to become a MSP
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Oct 25, 2017 20:05
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Dick Trauma posted:The CEO's son was having an issue with his iPhone so he hands it over to me to look at. Onscreen is an "escort" website with a woman's profile that he was trying to arrange an assignation with. Safari was having trouble processing the payment page so I suggested he use a browser on his desktop and then went to the kitchen and washed my hands. But WHY is the company in financial trouble?
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Oct 25, 2017 20:06
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My boss says he has to get up at 1am Friday to buy an iPhone X for the CEO and CFO. Good luck buddy. Better him than me.
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Oct 25, 2017 20:07
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lmao if the C-levels are such children that they can't wait a couple of days for whatever company the corporate phone contract is with to get them delivered
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Oct 25, 2017 20:31
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I wish I'd seen an escort website over the full gape pic of a senior (in both senses) partner's twenty-something chinese 'bride'.
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Oct 25, 2017 20:31
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I've seen an OTA TV channel that was run off a YouTube playlist before, it was stuck on a "Video not available in your country" message for a whole weekend. It's a channel owned by a church so that's not too surprising.
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Oct 25, 2017 20:43
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A job offer came in. 
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Oct 25, 2017 20:56
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Sirotan posted:A job offer came in. 
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Oct 25, 2017 20:58
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Sirotan posted:A job offer came in. We need you to journal your boss's reaction and post here. Please to do the needful.
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Oct 25, 2017 21:00
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