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stevewm posted:UGH.... Probably a ten-year-old website.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:46
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More UGH.... I put in a order for Comcast services 9 days ago at said new locations. Got an order number, etc... Was told I would receive a call in 3 business days to schedule installation. Well you can guess what has happened. No calls yet, the sales rep will not answer my emails, and customer support has no record of my order, despite giving them the order number. They can't find it at all. I have never once had a normal, non-hosed up interaction with Comcast in the years I have dealt with them.
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Aug 2, 2018 17:00
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angry armadillo posted:he then got told, well tough get on with it and we spotted jobs for things like changing the kitchen roll holder thing when the roll ran out. Why is every middle manager a passive-aggressive baby? (I know this is a chicken/egg kind of question)
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Aug 2, 2018 18:04
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stevewm posted:I have never once had a normal, non-hosed up interaction with Comcast in the years I have dealt with them. Earlier I posted about a positively dreamy experience I had with Comcast when I moved my business internet and phone service and my home TV service to a new house. Well apparently something got hosed in my account because I was in the road this week and wanted to watch shows on discovery.com which requires a valid cableTV subscription. So I log in to my xfinity account and it’s all blank with no services active and I call Comcast figuring something with the move hosed something up and sure enough I get the most ridiculous phone support person who cannot grok the fact that I have TV through xfinity and nothing else. “Your account package does not have The Discovery channel.” This is patently false. Last week I had it and now I don’t. Un-gently caress this please. She kept saying, “I’ve never seen someone with TV with no internet. You need to have internet in order for me to access your account!” Also false. Last week this was all working just fine so it IS possible. Fix it. So around and around and around we go. Finally she says, “Well I don’t know what to do.” and we sit there in silence like I’m going to say, “oh. Well since you don’t know what to do I’ll just go away and live with my broken mess.” Instead I say I’ll wait until you either figure it out or go get someone who can figure this out. Eventually she kicked it up to a manager who also had a hard time understanding my two-account setup and how both accounts had the same service address and billing address. 65 minutes later I was finally watching Fast N Loud in peace.
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Aug 2, 2018 18:17
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stevewm posted:UGH.... I'm constantly surprised how finicky some things are about Java. We have a lot of trouble getting into iLOs on older Dells because it doesn't like the Java on our machine. We used to just be able to spend 20 minutes hunting down the right version, but we lost admin last year, and now sometimes we just can't get the page to load. And even when we do, the remote console still won't load. Yeah, I know we can SSH or whatever, but we need to see the screen!
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Aug 2, 2018 18:29
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I tried to move my internet/tv service. Called in advance, gave dates, etc. My TV service was immediately shut off, and broken to the degree that the central TV gateway had to be replaced because they couldn't figure out how to reprovision it and make it work, even with a tech on site. Then I get a call a week before I actually sign papers that they're at my new place about to start digging things up to run the fiber. YOU CAN'T DO THAT, THAT'S NOT MY HOUSE YET. It's a fuckin' mess :| AlternateAccount fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 18:31
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This story has been building for a while so I'll just write it all out. Also, hi actual IT professionals, I am not quite one of you but I hope this tale of woe is still appropriate. So my day job largely rotates around supporting an in-house application built atop an Oracle database. Maintain PL/SQL scripts (yay spending a day unfucking someone else's mistake that affected half a million rows in production), answer questions, investigate system misbehaviour and write tickets for the devs. I like most of it because I get to crawl into the guts of the app's business logic and figure out new puzzles every day. The application, however, has one flaw that is crucial to my story: it does not have a robust reporting interface. Well, actually, let me elaborate on that. It has some built-in reports, but departments are either unable or unwilling to write Changes to the system that would implement the reports they want (and frankly some of them I don't think could be implemented into the application as is due to interface limitations), the devs have better things to take care of so any tickets that do come in for these things are low priority, and the business intelligence department does...I honestly don't know, but it sure as hell isn't providing these kinds of reports to other departments on short notice. Nope, this is part of our job. When the issue of a lacking robust reporting interface was raised, the task of writing the Change that would lead to the creation of said robust reporting interface actually was dropped at my feet. I'm not in the department that usually writes and coordinates Changes but hey, Gatac is smart and he knows his way around this, he can do it. That was about a year ago, by the way, in the wake of the failure of X. I haven't made much conceptual progress because the time I can tear away from my other tasks has been spent on maintaining X. Let me tell you about X. A colleague took a database query tool the devs had graciously provided us and brewed up an interface for it. And by interface I mean "Excel workbook with some forms and VBA", because we're not devs and what does everybody have anyway? So Excel it was. Nothing fancy, but if you just wanted to copy/paste a premade SELECT into a userform, click a few buttons to choose systems and then have it run stuff in the background and spit out a CSV at the end, it did the job. This is X. Originally intended just for our use, X spread far and wide across multiple departments in lieu of better tools to get the reports people needed. Heck, it was certainly better than writing tickets to us to query stuff. The colleague who created X left us some time ago, as is the circle of life. Then, some time after he left, it was discovered that X had been distributed with a dev tool config file that included hard-coded usernames and passwords for our various databases. To be quite honest we were all vaguely aware of this but hadn't considered the security implications because we assumed the dev tool kept those credentials in an encrypted format. It did not. The credentials in the config file were plaintext. Cue shitstorm. After making sure that all instances of X with that config file were purged and all passwords subsequently changed, the devs were persuaded to provide a new version of their tool with a much better setup. Credentials were now kept in a database of their own, with individual user accounts integrated via LDAP to manage what everyone was supposed to have access to. The tool could use your Windows credentials to log in to the database, then pull down an encrypted file of database users and passwords and use that going forward. Great! But other departments didn't want to use just the tool. The tool was written to be run from the command line. The tool had obtuse parameters that confused the users. The tool required that you be able to write your own drat complete SQL query and gently caress you if you couldn't. X on the other hand had already built-in the queries people wanted to run and gave you a nice little selection of what systems to run them against and it built your WHERE clause for you, too. People wanted X back. Well, it was only "a few changes" to X to cooperate with the new version of the tool and with a proper reporting interface still far away, I foolishly agreed to take over maintenance of X. Fast forward a year. There is still no reporting interface; I haven't even started writing up the Change ticket for it because even the first phase of collecting user input from everyone concerned has seen the scope of said Change massively increase. It turns out we don't just need a reporting interface, we need to maintain queries, log who runs what, the ability to run across multiple systems probably can't be integrated into the app at all, and hey why don't we use this to run our scripts, too. The devs have, understandably, been keen for some years to reign in our ability to run rampant in production, but so far been thwarted by the unwieldiness of trying to keep up with our script collection. Anyway, there's probably a sensible way to put it all together but gently caress if I know what it is, I haven't had the peace and quiet to figure it out. Meanwhile, X - through a series of what I assure you are perfectly logical, incremental developments - has been reworked basically from the ground up. The code is still nasty but at least now it's halfway modular and easier to read. It sanitizes user input and takes into account which department a user belongs to tp determine what options are displayed to them. It can update itself from our internal wiki (ASK ME about MSXML and parsing Confluence attachment pages via their DOM for download links). And I'm 90% of the way to this thing modifying itself to automagically add new forms and code handlers when I add a new option for user inputs to the internal config file - this admittedly wasn't in the spec but futzing around with poo poo by hand is error-prone and you always gotta automate the boring stuff, right? In any event, X is now more powerful than ever before and yet more entrenched. It is an utter abomination and the process of learning what can be done with VBA has been terrifying. Excel should not be able to do all this. I should have hit a wall of sanity months ago. I don't want to know what kind of business case led to Excel's version of VBA having all these capabilities. I can no longer say with confidence how much time and effort I've spent working on X, getting it running for my coworkers and trying to stay ahead of the requirements. I am, however, pretty loving sure I would've had a beautiful Change written by now for a proper loving reporting interface if I had spent roughly half the time and effort on that instead of "maintaining" X. I've done such a quote-unquote good job with beating this Excel POS into shape that nobody has brought up the reporting interface since. In the meantime the dev tool X is an interface for has grown an optional interface of its own, but people still don't use it because a) it's different and b) it only does around 80% of what X does - in a much better way, mind, but still. So why would anyone bother? Their precious workflow has been maintained. Things can continue as they always have. People have thanked me for my work on X. They don't know how much I want to erase it from the face of the universe. I am the poo poo that is pissing me off.
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Aug 2, 2018 19:05
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Should've used MS Access  No, really; it's actually designed to be a forms and report frontend to real databases, unlike Excel.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:17
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Corsair Pool Boy posted:I'm constantly surprised how finicky some things are about Java. We have a lot of trouble getting into iLOs on older Dells because it doesn't like the Java on our machine. We used to just be able to spend 20 minutes hunting down the right version, but we lost admin last year, and now sometimes we just can't get the page to load. And even when we do, the remote console still won't load. 90% of these issues are due to the old iLO using a deprecated cipher. You should be able to change a couple lines in the java.security file(I always just temporarily comment them out while doing the thing) to allow the old cipher. I can't remember which lines it is, but it wasn't too hard to find, add a comment to make it easy to search, and then its 30 seconds before and after to get change the setting to allow the connections. Took me 2 days on my old ILOM to figure out the exact problem, but it hasn't been an issue since.
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Aug 2, 2018 21:50
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xzzy posted:Yeah I get that, I'm just a huge fan of ensuring remote control over every system I'm responsible for. IPMI isn't the best solution ever but it tends to work reliably. Are there any IPMI solutions available in desktops that aren't known security issues? The main one I'm aware of is the Intel vPro offering, but given its history it's hard to trust. Of course I'm not saying the options built in to servers are any better, they most certainly are just as bad, but they at least have separate NICs for the IPMI and tend to exist physically in places where an extra cable to a secure network can be easily connected. I have a hard enough time convincing my clients to do one drop per person in their cubes rather than scattering miniswitches everywhere, so anything in a user-facing station has to be something that could comfortably exist on the same LAN as the users. The combination of wake-on-LAN and a Windows-based remote admin tool is good enough in 99% of situations, but there are definitely a few times a month where I wish I could remotely access the boot messages on a system where the user is horrible at describing the error being displayed.
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Aug 2, 2018 22:27
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wolrah posted:Are there any IPMI solutions available in desktops that aren't known security issues? The main one I'm aware of is the Intel vPro offering, but given its history it's hard to trust. ipmitool installed in wsl works  I even have a script to turn servers on using it if you want a copy. Uses expect to ssh into them and turn it off, for added fun.I feel like wake-on-LAN is even less secure than IPMI
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Aug 3, 2018 02:02
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RFC2324 posted:ipmitool installed in wsl works quote:I feel like wake-on-LAN is even less secure than IPMI Insecure management controllers allow a lot more control over the system, so I take their security problems a lot more seriously. Wake-on-LAN having no authentication in most cases is basically meaningless compared to the features exposed through even a lower-end remote management controller. wolrah fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 04:24
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wolrah posted:I'm referring to the hardware in the device I'm attempting to control and the software it runs. I'm definitely a fan of ipmitool, I just haven't yet seem a BMC that I'd trust on the same physical network as users browsing the internet. Ok, i missed your point about user accessible ipmi, and just assumed it would be on an oob network. Ignore me 
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Aug 3, 2018 04:30
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Gatac posted:
What are the odds you can limit the (potential) damage this way? make custom user accounts that limits what can be run instead of full superuser or whatever, and update the X accounts that interface with the database.
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Aug 3, 2018 05:35
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TheParadigm posted:What are the odds you can limit the (potential) damage this way? make custom user accounts that limits what can be run instead of full superuser or whatever, and update the X accounts that interface with the database. Not happening chiefly because we're not replaceable in this role. As in, sure, you could limit our access but we have way too many business processes right now that effectively end with "Gatac's department adjusts the production DB by hand or by script" and over the last several years our remit has increased rather than decreased. We do work with the devs to get stuff automated in the app when we've finished figuring it out but honestly, it seems just about impossible here to write a spec that covers all eventualities, so a certain amount of "wait and see" is expected with every Change. That's a business culture issue we haven't been able to solve, chiefly because of Make-It-Work-ism and inertia. Anyway, if you wanted to take this away from us, you'd either need to have many more devs for this scutwork, or you'd need to stand up a new department to do exactly the same thing we do, only they'd be starting from scratch while I daresay we have a lot of institutional knowledge and experience. What was proposed was basically an intermediate between changes to the codebase (bound to our monthly release cycle) and just letting us Wild West the whole thing: build a scheduler-type thing that can run scripts created by us and approved by the devs, build a nice interface in the app for us and then log who ran what scripts when on which system with which parameters. The difficulty is getting there, not just with implementing this thing, but also conceptually. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that we have piled up an immense amount of technical debt in regards to documentation. The code itself isn't bad in regards to readability and naming conventions and such (though one might argue uncommented code is bad a priori), but we struggle mightily with keeping up with modifications to the system. When searching for individual procedure names being mentioned in JIRA tickets is your main source of information on how stuff was implemented, you're never going to be sure that what you just read is still canonical. And when there's no canonical understanding of how a process is supposed to work, it's difficult to implement sensible changes to it. Gatac fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 06:26
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I'm a bit paranoid my boss is a goon or somehow reads this thread. Today I got reassigned to another team that has plenty to do.
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Aug 3, 2018 17:06
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Ariba network is the most stupidest company in the world
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Aug 3, 2018 18:18
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With companies like HPE, Cisco, Charter, Comcast and ATT around, that's a pretty bold claim.
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Aug 3, 2018 18:40
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This is a competition where I'm cool with everyone getting a reward for participating.
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Aug 3, 2018 18:57
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Regarding the aforementioned "old-rear end java required" fun for remote consoles like DRACs, I recently stumbled across this and it made me very happy: https://gist.github.com/xbb/4fd651c2493ad9284dbcb827dc8886d6 Finding an old JRE can be a pain but once you do, very helpful.
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Aug 4, 2018 00:37
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Last time I had to use iLO I noticed that the .NET remote console clickonce package was signed, but the signature was way out of date. You can get around this by messing with the registry but I opened a ticket with HPE anyway, and after a few months not only were they unable to reproduce it, but they didn't seem to understand what my problem was. There's a non-clickonce remote console package you can download, which is also signed, and, yes: that signature was also extremely out of date.
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Aug 4, 2018 01:26
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Dell's Linux command line client is kinda garbage but at least it only has like one "probably not already installed" dependency, and even that is definitely in the standard repo. Feel sorry for all you Windows dudes getting saddled with Java/.Net crap, compared to that my problems are zero.
Sheep fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 01:39
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Got my check. A couple days later than they said they would send it, but if payroll had their poo poo together they wouldn't be needing to settle labor board disputes with me. What pissed me off is all the tax that got taken out lol. Time to look at Telecasters again  Fake edit: Also had to go back to work after I left to attend to "ransomware" mitigation that turned out to be just a popup faking people out into thinking it's ransomware so they'll pay up.
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Aug 4, 2018 06:10
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I was handed a ziplock bag with 12 barcode scanners saying "none of these work". All of these are assigned to remote users (for trade shows so they can sell items). All of the company identification has completely worn off (these are small about the size and shape of a finger). So I now have to look up the serial number to figure out who to ship these to individually. Oh if you haven't guessed they all worked perfectly after charging, no chargers were shipped and all of them were out of battery.  they couldn't figure out they needed a charge. More fun, there's a trade show this week in several of the locations so some of these are being overnighted to hotels. Massive waste of money.The sales manager needs to stop taking people at their word that poo poo doesn't work. It's driving me insane. pixaal fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 14:51
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I'd call to see if they have chargers first and maybe send those along if they don't. YOU MEAN THESE DON'T WORK FOREVER OFF A CHARGE?
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Aug 6, 2018 15:16
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Bob Morales posted:I'd call to see if they have chargers first and maybe send those along if they don't. I thought you said these were wireless?? Why do I have to plug it in?
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Aug 6, 2018 15:18
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xsf421 posted:I thought you said these were wireless?? Why do I have to plug it in? I have had to legitimately answer this question when doing tech support for an ISP. Several times.
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Aug 6, 2018 15:30
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Bob Morales posted:I'd call to see if they have chargers first and maybe send those along if they don't. They know they are supposed to charge them, we sent them with chargers. They are standard micro USB chargers that are pretty much everywhere. I charged it using a micro USB cable and a computer, we don't stock USB chargers they go with the device they came for. What happens if a user loses them? Oh that "covered" under the destruction of company property part of the hand book. Basically they have to replace it out of pocket unless they can produce a police report.
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Aug 6, 2018 15:56
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xsf421 posted:I thought you said these were wireless?? Why do I have to plug it in? TESLA AGREES
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Aug 6, 2018 17:25
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We have a product that uses those big old 12V batteries like you'd see in a lawnmower or motorcycle and the owner of the company wants them charging wirelessly by the end of the year. Good luck.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:29
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Bob Morales posted:We have a product that uses those big old 12V batteries like you'd see in a lawnmower or motorcycle and the owner of the company wants them charging wirelessly by the end of the year. Good luck. 
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Aug 6, 2018 17:33
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It's coming! Slowly but surely. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3019437/ces/hands-on-with-witricitys-wireless-charging-for-laptops.html But yeah, lol at charging those kinds of batteries wirelessly in the next 10 years.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:36
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And I want a teleporter between my office and my house that is DNA locked to myself only by the end of year but that's not loving happening because physics.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:38
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Brb buying stock in rubber shoes factory
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Aug 6, 2018 17:39
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BallerBallerDillz posted:It's coming! Slowly but surely. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3019437/ces/hands-on-with-witricitys-wireless-charging-for-laptops.html That sort of inductive charging already exists for some high end models, I think? HP makes some, IIRC. So with that and the little short range WiGig dock, no cables ever. Real nice, just needs to percolate down to lower-end stuff.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:41
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AlternateAccount posted:That sort of inductive charging already exists for some high end models, I think? HP makes some, IIRC. So with that and the little short range WiGig dock, no cables ever. Real nice, just needs to percolate down to lower-end stuff. You still need it to be near the pad. That's not going to help in 99% of cases because the problem is they are just leaving their laptops in a bag overnight. Even if you could charge through a bag (and it not be a fire hazard) you'd need to leave the bag on the charging pad. This fixes nothing. Even for large equipment like a pallet jack this wouldn't help in most cases I've seen. Everyplace I've been people always try and find where the drat thing was left last night and it's always been left unplugged so they can't use it the first half of the day. I guess if the only charging spot was "this special pad" and not "anyplace there's a plug just make sure to plug it in" people might respect that. But that is a problem for warehouse / shipping. The only device I've seen be successful with wireless charging is cellphones, and that's because people can't part with them and sleep right next to them. This means it has a home, so it's easy to just put it there each night.
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Aug 6, 2018 17:48
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pixaal posted:You still need it to be near the pad. That's not going to help in 99% of cases because the problem is they are just leaving their laptops in a bag overnight. Even if you could charge through a bag (and it not be a fire hazard) you'd need to leave the bag on the charging pad. medium brain: make the bag itself a charging pad so you don't have to remember to take the laptop out large brain: the bag rests on the floor, so make the floor a charging pad so you don't have to remember where to put the bag with the laptop in it galaxy brain: the floor is part of the building, so make the entire building a charging pad
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Aug 7, 2018 00:43
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A co-worker and I spent an hour trying to figure out why DNS resolution wasn't working at a client site - turns out I messed up a 1:1 NAT rule while swapping routers around. It wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't stuck in the same room as the site owner's personal bitcoin mine, with at least 3 GPU fans in noisy states of failure.
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Aug 7, 2018 02:40
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To upgrade one of our video conference systems from 7.3.whatever to 8 or 9 requires us to spend 50 dollars to buy a new remote because they added a back button. Thanks assholes.
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Aug 7, 2018 04:37
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Time to learn you some API dawg
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Aug 7, 2018 11:35
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