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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xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

a_pineapple posted:

The helpdesk is required to install some software on all our Macs. The designated Mac Guy provided them a 20mb file called installer.sh.
I was pretty impressed that someone wrote a 20mb shell script. Then I actually looked at what was in it. Below the actual lines of the script I found:

### DO NOT MODIFY ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ###

... And then what appeared to be 20mb of encoded binary from an installer.

The dude literally pasted the binary from an installer into a shell script and is using that to deploy an application.

This actually used to be a common way to distribute stuff.. in the 90's. I forget who did it though, I want to say IBM but my neurons might be fabricating that. It was because transferring binaries was hard, but uuencoded strings were easy. Especially on usenet.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 19:33

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# ? May 25, 2024 15:42

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

I am about to lose my goddamn mind.

I don't know how you deal with the poo poo you do. Sounds super frustrating.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 19:33

Weedle: May 31, 2006

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

I am about to lose my goddamn mind.

I set up a "Covid-19" response line where citizens can basically call in and talk to someone about 'the coronavirus crisis' instead of calling our police department and wasting our Dispatcher's time complaining that they're out of toilet paper and their favorite nail salon is closed.

Volunteers are supposed to man this line, but since none of them are essential personnel, they're all stuck at home.

So, I set up a voicemail box where people can hear updates about the situation and leave a message requesting a response if they need to talk to someone.
Voicemails get forwarded to a shared mailbox that everyone can check. They can mark emails under certain already configured catagories or flag the emails or mark them as urgent or forward them to the health department, etc...
It's a very good system actually and everyone agrees. Lots of volunteers can use it concurrently and everyone is happy.
...for exactly 4 hours.

Then I get a request to replace it with softphones for every single person who could possibly man this line. We are not licensed and like half these people don't have loving internet so we can't use our phone system.
I build a whole 'nother Asterisk phone system that the softphones can connect to and test the proof of concept and everyone likes it.
but we can't just have a public facing PBX because that's "a security risk" so it has to be behind a firewall. I ask to open up ports and NAT all the right things so that these softphones will actually work and my request is denied because, "that is insecure. Use the VPN"
So we are back to volunteers who do not have internet or company owned computers issued to them not being allowed to connect to the is softphone.

So, I just built out a whole phone system in Vonage that is "in the cloud."
Anyone can just download the apps to their desktop, or phone, login with the credentials we provide, they all share the same extension (not even a ring group )
It's like $50/mo and there's no restrictions, ITS doesn't have to manage it, it does voicemail to email, it does IVR's it does loving everything you could want in a phone system and crisis management line.
It does literally everything. It's perfect.
I present it. Everyone is happy.
...for about four hours.

Now they've all changed their mind and the plan is to have calls forward to a single cellphone that they will take turns using.

Meaning non-essential VOLUNTEERS manning this "Covid-19 Response Line" will have to break quarantine, leave their house, to come to the office to physically hand the device off from one person to another.

Unless they plan on doing a dead drop in a Clorox bucket or something.

can i call the hotline to complain that my idiot coworkers want to smear their phone germs on each other's faces

# ? Mar 25, 2020 19:42

Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

We should not have shipped the telephone sanitisers off planet.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 20:13

mllaneza: Apr 28, 2007; Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952

xzzy posted:

This actually used to be a common way to distribute stuff.. in the 90's. I forget who did it though, I want to say IBM but my neurons might be fabricating that. It was because transferring binaries was hard, but uuencoded strings were easy. Especially on usenet.

Also Tesla firmware updates as of at least a few years ago according to the leaks from their IT team.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 20:25

Super-NintendoUser: Jan 16, 2004; COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES; Soiled Meat

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

Asterisk phone system

Asterisks, now that's a name I haven't for a long time.

I'm actually one of the first dCAPs, and after I got it, I went to a party at Mark Spencer's house, and rolled a four wheeler on myself.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 20:32

D34THROW: Jan 29, 2012; RETAIL RETAIL LISTEN TO ME BITCH ABOUT RETAIL

Agrikk posted:

gently caress you Comcast Business and your 42% packet loss. I didn't need my business class connection anyway.

That explains a lot - VPN traffic is going in and out through a Comcast connection at HQ.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 21:19

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

My internet connection has been very boring and continued to work without issue through all this, not even getting any issues with Netflix buffering or quality loss. It also means I have no excuses for not being available.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 22:10

Ham Equity: Apr 16, 2013; The first thing we do, let's kill all the cars.; Grimey Drawer

Thanks Ants posted:

My internet connection has been very boring and continued to work without issue through all this, not even getting any issues with Netflix buffering or quality loss. It also means I have no excuses for not being available.

Same. The downsides of fiber.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 22:20

Proteus Jones: Feb 28, 2013

Thanks Ants posted:

My internet connection has been very boring and continued to work without issue through all this, not even getting any issues with Netflix buffering or quality loss. It also means I have no excuses for not being available.

Same. I had a brief outage this AM, but apparently they were replacing/upgrading equipment at the local hub and it ran over their 4AM window a bit. I couldn�t even use that as an excuse since using my phone as a hotspot was blazing fast as well.

At the very least I was pulling for not being able to join the AM meetings :negative:

# ? Mar 25, 2020 22:24

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

We had an all-hands broadcast yesterday and you have to be on-site or on the VPN to see that stuff. The VPN technically survived whatever percentage of my 1200 co-workers tuned in, but I was trying to do some shell scripting at the same time and it was like maintaining a linux server in the 90's with a dialup quality ping.

"just gonna hold delete to get rid of that word.. and aww gently caress there goes the whole line"

But zero actual outages which I wasn't expecting, good job on whoever set that up.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 22:32

Weedle: May 31, 2006

Wrapping up day two of remote learning. The question of how teachers should post videos to their class pages has become a colossal boondoggle requiring extended coordination between all building principals and the headmaster. One might wonder why this was not decided during spring break last week.

# ? Mar 25, 2020 23:02

Agrikk: Oct 17, 2003; Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

Thanks Ants posted:

My internet connection has been very boring and continued to work without issue through all this, not even getting any issues with Netflix buffering or quality loss. It also means I have no excuses for not being available.

Best part about this Comcast issue is that the wife is also WFH and is on video conferences all day. The poor connection is somehow my fault as an IT guy and she expects me to "do something".

# ? Mar 25, 2020 23:50

mitra: Sep 27, 2012; between subtle shading, and the absence of light, lies the nuance of iqlusion

a_pineapple posted:

The helpdesk is required to install some software on all our Macs. The designated Mac Guy provided them a 20mb file called installer.sh.
I was pretty impressed that someone wrote a 20mb shell script. Then I actually looked at what was in it. Below the actual lines of the script I found:

### DO NOT MODIFY ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ###

... And then what appeared to be 20mb of encoded binary from an installer.

The dude literally pasted the binary from an installer into a shell script and is using that to deploy an application.

Enterprisey software is sometimes packaged this way. You can play along at home with gzexe

# ? Mar 26, 2020 04:54

J: Jun 10, 2001

Someone took home a desktop to work from home on monday without telling anyone. Management has already told everyone not to do that. Obviously the desktop didn't work, but they did not say anything about this either until today. :thunk:

# ? Mar 26, 2020 15:59

mllaneza: Apr 28, 2007; Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952

xzzy posted:

"just gonna hold delete to get rid of that word.. and aww gently caress there goes the whole line"

ctrl-w says what ?

# ? Mar 26, 2020 16:29

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

J posted:

Someone took home a desktop to work from home on monday without telling anyone. Management has already told everyone not to do that. Obviously the desktop didn't work, but they did not say anything about this either until today.

Do you work at softdisk? Maybe they are making 2D side scrollers at home

# ? Mar 26, 2020 16:37

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

xzzy posted:

This actually used to be a common way to distribute stuff.. in the 90's. I forget who did it though, I want to say IBM but my neurons might be fabricating that. It was because transferring binaries was hard, but uuencoded strings were easy. Especially on usenet.

The nVidia binary driver for Linux still does this. It's an ~800 line shell script with a 135 MB blob at the end.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 18:17

Dick Trauma: Nov 30, 2007; God damn it, you've got to be kind.

I've taken to doing ten pushups between calls and email requests. Feel like I should watch a YouTube video on making shanks.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 18:49

GnarlyCharlie4u: Sep 23, 2007; I have an unhealthy obsession with motorcycles.

Proof

J posted:

Someone took home a desktop to work from home on monday without telling anyone. Management has already told everyone not to do that. Obviously the desktop didn't work, but they did not say anything about this either until today.

Yeah we had like a dozen of those.
We sent out an email to every manager directly informing them of the process.
We sent out an org wide email informing them of the process.
We had a meeting with every department head where they all literally SIGNED off on the process.

Then like half of them went back to their offices and told everyone to pack it up and go home.
Luckily we had managed to push the VPN client to most of those desktops so only about a dozen couldn't access the network and had to bring their computers back.

But then my boss bought a Teamviewer license anyway "so we can install the client for them at home" after we had already fixed them all.

They didn't even need to bring them back in the first place because we can do remote support through Teams, or Skype, or Webex, or Zoom, or any number of things we alreay loving have.
I am pulling out my loving hair dealing with all this stupid poo poo, do whatever you want, panic buying, not listening to a word I say about anything.

Dick Trauma posted:

I've taken to doing ten pushups between calls and email requests. Feel like I should watch a YouTube video on making shanks.

If you take the fan off your CPU heatsink and run Prime 95 it will get hot enough to melt down the plastic parts of USB drives into a flat, sharp edge. You can then strip some wire out of an ethernet cable and use those pairs to affix your new USBlade to the other end of the cable giving you a pretty decent flail.

GnarlyCharlie4u fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 26, 2020

# ? Mar 26, 2020 19:02

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

GnarlyCharlie4u posted:

You can then strip some wire out of an ethernet cable and use those pairs to affix your new USBlade to the other end of the cable giving you a pretty decent flail.

Or just choke motherfuckers from behind with said ethernet cable.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 19:30

Dick Trauma: Nov 30, 2007; God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Email from one of the assistants: "Please let me know when you have a minute so I can ask you a question."

Could've used that email to... ask the question. :confused:

# ? Mar 26, 2020 19:43

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Dick Trauma posted:

Email from one of the assistants: "Please let me know when you have a minute so I can ask you a question."

Could've used that email to... ask the question.

When I was a kid and saw this scene on Futurama I thought it was just a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoRoaNVho54

There's even one of those single purpose web sites about this: https://dontasktoask.com/

# ? Mar 26, 2020 21:38

Ham Equity: Apr 16, 2013; The first thing we do, let's kill all the cars.; Grimey Drawer

Dick Trauma posted:

Email from one of the assistants: "Please let me know when you have a minute so I can ask you a question."

Could've used that email to... ask the question.

I got a voicemail today with the name of a piece of software and a call back number. No other context.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 22:08

Obsoletely Fabulous: May 6, 2008; Who are you, and why should I care?

wolrah posted:

When I was a kid and saw this scene on Futurama I thought it was just a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoRoaNVho54

There's even one of those single purpose web sites about this: https://dontasktoask.com/

I had to attend a 30 minute meeting today that was about the meeting we will be having next week. It wasn�t like a planning thing or anything. It was just a meeting to tell us about what we are going to talk about next week. I feel like an agenda could have accomplished that.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 22:39

cage-free egghead: Mar 8, 2004

I reached out to see users who we had to rush to WFH to see if they had any issues and they said, "yes still having issues but don't have time to troubleshoot. Tried earlier but didn't get anywhere".

I just ignored it, I'm not encouraging having to dissect someone to get them to explain things.

# ? Mar 26, 2020 23:55

J: Jun 10, 2001

cage-free egghead posted:

I reached out to see users who we had to rush to WFH to see if they had any issues and they said, "yes still having issues but don't have time to troubleshoot. Tried earlier but didn't get anywhere".

I just ignored it, I'm not encouraging having to dissect someone to get them to explain things.

I'm unable to work but I'm too busy working to have time to fix this problem!!!

# ? Mar 27, 2020 04:03

Erwin: Feb 17, 2006

a_pineapple posted:

The helpdesk is required to install some software on all our Macs. The designated Mac Guy provided them a 20mb file called installer.sh.
I was pretty impressed that someone wrote a 20mb shell script. Then I actually looked at what was in it. Below the actual lines of the script I found:

### DO NOT MODIFY ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ###

... And then what appeared to be 20mb of encoded binary from an installer.

The dude literally pasted the binary from an installer into a shell script and is using that to deploy an application.

Mesosphere's DC/OS is installed via a 500MB shell script and it's buck wild.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 04:27

GnarlyCharlie4u: Sep 23, 2007; I have an unhealthy obsession with motorcycles.

Proof

OH MY GOD I just wasted like 3 hours of my life getting this lovely loving softphone to register to our PBX over a goddamned Cisco VPN only to find out that we aren't even licensed to use this lovely loving softphone FUCKKKKKKKKK.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 05:50

HiroProtagonist: May 7, 2007

Accession or some (other) Cisco product?

# ? Mar 27, 2020 06:05

Antigravitas: Dec 8, 2019; Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

Erwin posted:

Mesosphere's DC/OS is installed via a 500MB shell script and it's buck wild.

FWIW this is not really different from other self-extracting installers. An MS MSI file has a number of sections which can include embedded compressed .cab files. The only real difference is that MSI don't feature a human-readable code section while a shell script installer can be read until you hit the embedded binary blob.

I generally dislike executable installers but they are still extremely common across all relevant ecosystems.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 10:29

DropsySufferer: Nov 9, 2008; Impractical practicality

I was working from home since this started but an onsite IT manager who couldn�t wfh threatened to quit and nepotism they are giving my position to him. So guess who will be working on site now. Yep the company hosed me good.

I�m getting legit nervous. The help desk works in a cramped room with 5 people. The location deals with transportation so anyone I interact with is a disease vector.

I�m debating if should just not show up the next week and get fired so I can collect unemployment.
Which will hopefully be enough to ride this out.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 12:07

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Don't go in.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 13:16

J: Jun 10, 2001

If you're in the US you may want to look into how unemployment claims are going in your state. Some states are hugely backlogged in unemployment claims and it may take them a while to process yours.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 13:39

BaseballPCHiker: Jan 16, 2006

I am going to lose my poo poo dealing with people today.

We just forklifted 1000+ users to work from home setups. All of us are supposed to man the phones to help with calls as our helpdesk is getting bombarded by people trying to work from home for the first time ever.

No idiot user we will not be paying for your internet at home, no we do not have a special deal with the state to get you free high speed internet.

No random parks employee I dont care that you consider yourself an essential employee, we dont have hot spots to hand out.

IT has gone above and beyond in my opinion to get everyone working reasonably well from home and its just not enough for some of these knuckle draggers at home. They want the 100% exact same setup they had at home here. Sorry that no one is going to go to your house and setup your desktop and 3 monitor setup Mr Engineer, guess you'll just have to suffer along with the rest of us.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 13:42

Shut up Meg: Jan 8, 2019; You're safe here.

DropsySufferer posted:

I was working from home since this started but an onsite IT manager who couldn�t wfh threatened to quit and nepotism they are giving my position to him. So guess who will be working on site now. Yep the company hosed me good.

I�m getting legit nervous. The help desk works in a cramped room with 5 people. The location deals with transportation so anyone I interact with is a disease vector.

I�m debating if should just not show up the next week and get fired so I can collect unemployment.
Which will hopefully be enough to ride this out.

Threaten to quit.

Thanks Ants posted:

Don't go in.

This is a wise man, you should listen to him.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 13:44

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Even if you recover it�s likely that your lungs will be at least a bit hosed and then who knows what the implications of that are in a private medical hellscape in terms of ongoing costs.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 13:51

D34THROW: Jan 29, 2012; RETAIL RETAIL LISTEN TO ME BITCH ABOUT RETAIL

Y'all goons and your loving meetings. Not even Teams meetings for me :smuggo:

I am SO loving thankful I don't have to be in on the daily production meetings anymore. This was after I repeatedly made the point that we literally missed order deadlines for next-day delivery because these "15-minute meetings" turned into 1-2 hour meetings during which I contributed perhaps 5-10 minutes' worth of talk.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 18:29

nexus6: Sep 2, 2011; If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes

Teams is complete garbage. It

forgets my headset is plugged in after a few minutes and switches to laptop mic & speakers
forgets internal mic & speakers exist after a few minutes and outputs through monitor speakers
can't share a screen properly
frequently freezes other people's video while audio continues
in tyool 2020 can only show 4 videos at any one time

Seriously, I had a meeting of 7 people and only 4 could be seen at any one time. Zoom supported 61 without breaking a sweat.

# ? Mar 27, 2020 19:58

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# ? May 25, 2024 15:42

Weedle: May 31, 2006

yeah it's insanely bad. the document-sharing/collaborative notebook stuff sucks too. it boggles my mind when people say they love teams

# ? Mar 27, 2020 20:03

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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