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Turns out my predecessors knew absolutely nothing about group policy but that didn't stop them from trying. Originally I found no less than 45 policies in the root and then they were just linked/delinked according to which OU they were being applied to (but not always). Today I was digging a bit deeper in an effort to clean up our extremely messy group policy tree and found several calls to a series of batch files which run a windows build of PHP off a different server who's sole job was to have a share with php.exe in it which then called back to various random shares on the group policy server and applied various registry files. The last one I looked at before I left for the day attempted to modify Internet Explorer's version string to spoof some old version of Firefox. Helushune fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 01:06
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Nativity In Black posted:... several people suddenly being prompted to log into Outlook despite domain logins being fine ...[/i] Are you using Office 365? This happens constantly with my users and Microsoft has no solution. The only thing I've found is to nuke all the outlook.com stuff in credential manager which works for about a month before it starts happening again.
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Aug 15, 2013 19:59
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Aphrodite posted:It's because the actual server you're connecting to changes occasionally, and Microsoft Sign-in Assistant sucks and never works. I know why it happens, it's just frustrating that it's a constant thorn in my side. On the other hand, it's probably the only thing I don't like about Office 365 so far.
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Aug 15, 2013 20:06
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Aphrodite posted:Which version of Office do you use? For us it seems to only happen with 2007, which is pre-365. I don't think anyone with 2010 has had it happen, and nobody has had 2013 long enough to know. THF13 posted:We get prompts to login to Outlook occasionally if Outlook is set to automatically "determine Logon network security" instead of having it specifically set. EDIT: I should probably mention that my org is using a hybrid environment with O365 as our Exchange server. If nothing else, it's a dream to never have to touch a locally hosted Exchange server ever again. Helushune fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 20:23
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I just got a phone call... "One of the keys on my laptop keyboard broke off. I need a new laptop". Because the slightest thing being broken warrants an entirely new device. Some users caught wind of the tech department issuing new laptops to people who had some severely old machines or ones that were damaged so they've been trying to break their currently working ones (which are Core i3s at the minimum) in order to get a new one.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:56
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skipdogg posted:I keep a D610 around for poo poo like that. Oh, here's your loaner, I'll let you know when this one is fixed. Enjoy WindowsXP on a single core laptop with a 5400 rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Take better care of your poo poo. You've inspired me to do the same. We recently found a P2-233 stashed away in a storage closet running Windows 98 that we've been using to play old dos games on. That would probably work... fivre posted:Well, if it was something like a space/backspace/modifier key that gets used all the time it'd at least be worth replacing the keyboard... I'm fine with keyboard replacements, those need to happen pretty frequently. This person literally took their finger nail and popped off a key and hoped I wouldn't try to put it back on. I pushed it back on, smiled at them, and said "Good thing we didn't have to get you a brand new one, huh?". The look of disappointment was almost picture worthy.
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Aug 21, 2013 17:15
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drukqs posted:Unbelievable. To top it off, I've had horrendous experiences hassling with their warranty support department trying to get an Ultrabook fixed. Two motherboard swaps, two display swaps. Delays and hassle and pigeon english out the wazoo. Pray you never have to try and RMA something to them. Several of our Asus laptops broke while under warranty and it's been an absolute nightmare trying to get them RMA'ed. Asus seems to go out of their way to prevent you from doing so. We gave up and I'm currently using one as a Windows 8 client and trying to get it to play nice with our group policy settings.
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Aug 21, 2013 21:12
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skipdogg posted:Why are you guys using consumer grade stuff for work? Business class laptops from one of the big 3 (HP, Dell, Lenovo) is the only way to go. If your on a budget, the Vostro stuff from Dell is serviceable. Because I work for a small-ish non-profit. I've tried to push enterprise and business level hardware multiple times but constantly get shut down with "Well, I saw this at Best Buy that does the same thing and is several hundred dollars less so let's use that instead". We only recently switched over to Aruba access points and that was pretty hard. They wanted to spend less money on consumer grade d-link hardware with the "it's all the same" reasoning. We do have a lot of Dell business grade hardware but our most recent purchase was a bunch of Asus laptops because they were $250/ea. Sadly, my hands are tied when it comes to making purchasing decisions, I can only suggest. It's also great when other departments just buy tech stuff because they have cash burning a hole in their pocket. "We need someone to set up all these HP PhotoSmart printers we just bought!" Helushune fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 21:49
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I just received several emails from some of our new hires... "There's no Outlook or Word icons on my desktop! These are mission critical programs that I need installed within the hour to do my work!"I know for a fact that Office is installed on these users machines because I personally re-imaged their workstations. This whole "the icon's not on my desktop and that means the program's not installed" mentality is becoming more and more common in all of our new hires. It seems like no one knows what the start menu is or hasn't the slightest idea of how to use it.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:26
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SEKCobra posted:Thats why Windows 8 Windows 8 doesn't play nice with our required group policy settings (mostly just disabling UAC). That and I'm absolutely terrified of springing a new UI look on to most of my users who are terrified of computers to begin with.
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Aug 24, 2013 20:34
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Science posted:It's just going to get worst as the kids that grew up with tablets/smart phones as their "computer" enter the work force. In a way Windows 8 is really ahead of the curve in it's iOS-ification. Yeah, I can see that. I refuse to believe that a bunch of 30-40 somethings have never used a version of Windows earlier than 8 though. The tickets just don't make any sense to me. DragonReach posted:Why the heck are you disabling UAC? Enabling it interferes with a bunch of legacy applications that are still pretty critical, the incredibly odd way we handle some roaming profiles, and the way some old group policies were written before I started working here. There's a bunch of really odd logon scripts that copy php scripts to the local c:, run php.exe off some server that I haven't been able to find yet, and then apply various computer and registry settings instead of, you know, doing all that through group policy like a normal sysadmin. As far as I can tell, my predecessors couldn't figure out group policy but they kind of knew php scripting so they just did everything through that instead.
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Aug 25, 2013 04:00
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Volmarias posted:You should make getting rid of this horrific situation your highest priority. I sincerely hope you're just joking about this. I wish I was. We're currently being slammed by a lot of requests that are coming in last minute so I haven't had any time but this is my top priority once we're done putting out the fires that keep springing up. Oh, and fixing our current "backup solution" which is just an old P4 machine with a whole bunch of hard drives in it for every day of the week and just has them all shared out. I'm waiting for it to literally catch fire. On the upside, I'm never without projects.
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Aug 25, 2013 17:58
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Since we've been incredibly busy lately, we had a contractor come in and run some cat-5 to network up a lab of ours. When he was done, only about a quarter of the computers could connect to the network. Long story short, he crimped all the ends like so: Orange, orange white, blue, brown white, brown, blue white, green, green white. I think it took us longer to re-crimp all the cable to pattern B than it would have to just do it right the first time.
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Sep 1, 2013 17:28
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sfwarlock posted:Huh. Not that that was at all the right thing to do, but it should theoretically have worked, unless you have some crappy cat-5 stock that skimps on the blue and brown pairs. Hell, I've seen some cables that just go straight down whatever color order the guy making them had in his head, without splitting one pair, and they still worked. I didn't check every cable the ones I did check that weren't working had that weird pattern. When we reset them to pattern b everything was working fine again. I guess it's probable that something else was going on like he accidentally cut in to the cable before the head. He was also using his cat-5 stock instead of ours so your theory might also be correct.
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Sep 1, 2013 18:17
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SEKCobra posted:Can I ask why you use hand made cables? They usually are inferior at the ends compared to mass produced ones, and they usually run far more expensive. We get 1000ft spools for ~$30 (bulk cat-5e) and can cut everything to length for the job at hand. I'll give you the inferior bit but we're a small-ish non-profit who's still mostly stuck in 10/100 (although we've been moving things to gigabit). It just makes sense for us to make our own cable.
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Sep 1, 2013 19:38
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Sickening posted:Its powershell or bust. Powershell doesn't lie to me. It lied to me about DHCP failover in 2008r2.  The Powershell cmdlets are there but they literally just don't do anything.
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Sep 9, 2013 21:58
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tjl posted:File extensions should have died with DOS, at least that's my offhand opinion. It always bothered me why Windows associates based on what basically amounts to verbiage that can change. I guess this problem isn't Windows specific either, but just one of those things we just accept as 'working good enough'. When or how a better way will come along is anyone's guess though. I couldn't agree more. Funny enough, we were discussing how useful/useless file extensions at work the other day and you could easily point out the *nix/mac users and those who had used Windows all their life. The argument the Windows users kept making was "well, how would you know what program opens them if it didn't have a file extension?" which seems completely pointless if you can just change them and have them open in a different application. I'm still convinced they're horribly useless and Windows should make every effort to move away from them beyond just hiding them by default.
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Sep 11, 2013 02:43
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Wagonburner posted:(and if you're serious about .exe I'm going to go put in an application at the carwash) HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile. But seriously, don't go work at a car wash.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:38
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dennyk posted:Speaking of Windows file extension associations, as simple as that system is, Adobe has somehow found a way to gently caress it up. A while back when I updated from Reader 8 to Reader X, the uninstall for Reader 8 didn't actually remove anything, and PDFs continued to open in 8. Trying to change the file association to Reader X manually would do absolutely nothing. Now after my last reboot, PDF files suddenly aren't associated with any program, and can't be associated with anything via Windows Explorer. Open With... is available, but it won't save associations, and it's impossible to choose the Acrobat Reader executable anyway (when you select it with Browse, it doesn't add it to the list of available programs). If you try to associate Reader X with PDF files in the Reader preferences dialog, it runs an installer and then forces you to reboot, but doesn't actually fix anything. Uninstalling Reader X, like Reader 8, doesn't actually remove anything, so I can't reinstall. Seriously, gently caress Adobe. gently caress every Adobe product, really, although Flash and Reader are easily the worst. The latest version of Reader refuses to open any PDFs in any browser on all of our workstations. I originally thought it was one of my group policies since I've been trying to clean up the whole "lets use php.exe to apply registry settings!" mess but it happens to workstations that aren't even in an OU yet. It really feels like every ticket that isn't about a printer is about some Adobe product malfunctioning. I'm already completely fed up trying to deal with all the "adobe account" bullshit they've been trying to push. Need to re-download Acrobat Pro? Install this extra thing that requires several hundred updates, then enter your account details that doesn't matter because the account servers are down. Is this the place to complain about ISPs? Some time in the past 24 hours, our modem stopped receiving a signal. We called them at 0700, they said they'd have someone out within a couple hours at the latest and the tech would call before he got there. 1230 rolls around, the tech finally shows up and looks at our modem and various lines. He says he needs to go back to his truck and will be right back but instead just leaves without telling us anything. We call the ISP again, get bounced around through several departments, are forced to open a new ticket with them, and are promised another tech. At about 1430, no one's showed up yet so we call again and are tolled "The tech's at your location but he's not within visual range". It sure would have been nice if he could have at least called to let us know he was here/in the area working on our problem. At around 1500 our modem finally kicks back to life and everything is right with the world again. Basically, our ISP and their techs are really awful at any sort of communication and it's absolutely baffling. The horrible part about all this is our ADFS server for our Office365 hybrid environment is hosted on-site and no one on our other three campuses were able to log in to their email for most of the day. What's sad is that we have a co-lo but the only reason the ADFS server isn't down there is because the machines that do virtualization are still running virtualbox where as we've migrated everything else over to hyper-v. I made sure we bought a new server today to run hyper-v down at the co-lo so this will never happen again. Helushune fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 05:58
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JohnnyCanuck posted:NEVER let your clients have your cellphone number - even if it is a business phone - and I've been giving out my Google Voice number and have Do Not Disturb set up to turn on after work hours and on weekends. I've had more than one person complain that they called me six times one weekend (about how to install a font) and wasn't able to get through.
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Sep 13, 2013 16:32
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teethgrinder posted:Fess up: I wish the print dialogue in Windows asked this. I have one user who prints out every single email she sends or receives and puts them all in a gigantic binder so she "has a paper trail and can find something if it gets deleted".
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Sep 13, 2013 17:34
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tehloki posted:I work for a football team. Passwords I have disallowed to GREAT resistance from users: Every person who does anything regarding athletics where I work always does just "team_name" or slaps a number on the end of it. The difference is I didn't get my way and virtually everyone in that department has variants of the exact same password.
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Sep 18, 2013 22:46
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I'm in for the bottle opener.
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Sep 20, 2013 21:52
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drukqs posted:Boss's response: I setup a KMS server here in about 10 minutes and I had no idea what I was doing. Server 2012 just asks for your primary key and then goes off on its merry way. 2008r2 is a little more difficult because you have to use the command line and a fairly wonky command but it's not a time sink.
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Sep 23, 2013 23:26
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I still don't see why printers don't come with a 128mb flash drive that hosts the base drivers for xp/win7/osx The HP LaserJet P1102w comes with one built-in and it's fantastic. Plug it in via usb, it mounts as a flash drive with the drivers as an autorun. I really wish more printers would follow in its footsteps. Helushune fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 20:04
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tehloki posted:
What's up, ancient gigantic ProLiant buddy?  We use ours as a Hyper-V host and pray every day that it doesn't catch fire. The running joke is that Bistromath's size constantly increases every time we mention it. I think it's currently up to 36us.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:59
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GreenNight posted:How do you people manage mobile devices such as iPhones? We had a user leave the company and when I got his iPhone back and went to format it, it asked me for his iTunes password. We don't have the password and can't reset it. Our Verizon rep said the phone is pretty much junk now. The only way the format function asks for the iTunes password is if the Find My Phone feature is enabled. Would be nice to remotely manage that. We have a bunch of Meraki equipment and just use their MDM service. It requires an app to be installed on the device which sucks but it has some nice features such as wiping any currently set passcode, selective wiping, full device wiping, etc.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:35
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GreenNight posted:The problem is that 80% of the users here HAS TO OMG have a laptop because they might travel twice a year. This is the mentality at my current place of work. The best part is that they're all starting to use LogMeIn or some other remote desktop service so they can all leave their laptops here and work on them remotely with their personal laptops instead of taking their work one home. So now I get to watch a bunch of users that we just transitioned from desktops over to laptops because they "OMG had to have it" just leave them here so they can remote in to them from off-site instead of just taking it with them. But the second you mention you should put their tower back it's "but I take my laptop *everywhere* with me!". I'm convinced I just can't win.
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Oct 28, 2013 20:06
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:What's the best free VM solution out there if all I plan to use it for is VPN/RDPing into my work computer? If you have Windows 8/8.1 Pro or Enterprise, install Hyper-V and call it a day. Beyond that, VirtualBox is alright.
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Nov 5, 2013 05:57
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Caged posted:Holy poo poo yes. No Outlook icon on the desktop = email isn't working this is affecting production This is every single user on my network. No Word icon? Office must not be installed. No IE icon? The internet needs to be installed on my computer! No one has any idea what the start menu is or how to navigate it and a little bit of me dies every time I get a ticket like that. Just the other day I was asked to write a group policy to add a shortcut to the library system on everyone's desktop because the URL is too hard to remember (it's literally http://library). Helushune fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 17:36
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blackswordca posted:I look at the ticket to see what the problem is and this is the description. "Microsoft says that WSUS is causing printers to be dropped from users profiles. Please fix ASAP. - Client" You just laughed right in their face, right? I don't think I've ever seen something so far fetched as this in quite some time.
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Nov 25, 2013 17:27
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blackswordca posted:Pretty much. The thing that comes to my mind, if they're using roaming profiles, is that their ntuser.dat has become corrupt and they're all logging in with temporary profiles. Or, you know, roaming profiles are doing their thing and printers set up for one user don't carry over to the next. You could also set something up using group policy to force the printers but that would require  for a client that sounds like they're calling you up just because they can.Things pissing me off today: Windows 8's Hyper-V manager being unable to connect to servers running 2008r2. Does anyone have a utility they like for this kind of thing? I just moved my workstation over to 8.1 Enterprise without knowing this limitation and most of our Hyper-V hosts are still running 2008r2. That'll show me for leaping before I look.
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Nov 25, 2013 18:25
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KennyTheFish posted:I am starting to think you are working in some sort of Stanford-esque psychology experiment. The green fever begins! This all just reaffirms that blacksword just needs to YOTJ as soon as humanly possible.
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Dec 10, 2013 00:20
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All of our desktops are Dells and our laptops are a mix of Dell, Lenovo, and Asus. Dell's customer service/support with us has been pretty piss poor lately but our older Vostro 3550s and Precisions are absolutely great if you need to do any hardware work on. We have some N5050s (consumer grade but they were on the cheap which is what matters here) which are an absolute nightmare to work on and have been nothing but a huge headache. The Lenovo laptops never give us any trouble. I didn't even know we had deployed some until a teacher brought one in for us to hold on to it over the summer. The Asus ones have been nothing but trouble since the day we got them in; they were a giant mistake.
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Dec 18, 2013 18:26
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Started off with an IT degree, realized I knew more than the dude teaching the first couple of classes (I hate jumping through hoops), switched to photography, realized it's impossible to get a job not doing wedding photography, went back to IT, then dropped out all together because of more hoop jumping. One of the guys I replaced at the job I have now is a history major though. Edit: I don't have much but I'm willing to throw  at blacksword. He really needs to be anywhere that's not his current job.
Helushune fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 22:01
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Paladine_PSoT posted:That's the show about the red mage, right? Everyone knows it was superior to use a black and white mage. Red mages looked super classy though.
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Dec 19, 2013 23:33
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A phone ticket came in regarding rings going to voicemail. None of us know that much/anything about our PBX, our PBX support company decided to take today off, and since I'm the only one with some hobby experience with VoIP, I fired up the management software to poke around and saw a familiar face.  I really can't wait until I take down our entire phone system because I only have an inkling of what I'm doing.
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Mar 10, 2014 21:25
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larchesdanrew posted:Does anyone else have supervisors that have intimate knowledge of everything that is going on, but refuse to let you in on the secret so you can do your loving job, then swoop in at the last minute to interfere with every single loving thing you end up working on and take all the credit? Do you first find out about every single project, big or small, three days after it's supposed to have been finished? Are your repeated inquiries related to how things are set up and operate completely ignored, only to have said reaction come back to bite you in the rear end? That was my entire experience when I was a contractor at a large local corporation (not doing IT). I wrote some stupid programs to make my team's life easier, took a mandatory break (to avoid giving contractors stock options), and when I came back one of the managers had gone through my code and literally only changed my name to his. He then would send out emails telling other teams to "check out this cool program he wrote". It was also common for my team to help other teams that were struggling and then not receive any recognition while the one that we helped were praised for doing such a thorough and accurate job. My personal favorite was when higher managers would come by, pull us all off the task we were currently working on to do this other "priority one, extremely urgent, needs to get done now" task and would then chastise us for getting the first task done immediately after what we were moved to.
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Mar 13, 2014 23:08
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thing.
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nexxai posted:Just a quick shout-out to Ubiquiti for their magical UniFi series of devices. I had 10 APs configured and working around our office in under 30 minutes (including walking time). Goddamn, why can't all hardware be this easy to setup? We have a bunch of Aruba Wireless APs that basically do the same thing and it's an absolute godsend. Getting the first master going was trial and error since we had a couple that wanted to be in isolation mode but to add more, we just plug them in. They figure out which one is the master, pull the config off it, talk to the others in the area to figure out which channels are free and what is optimal to use, and just go from there.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:53
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An email came in! From my department head so that must mean it's important! Subject: Google Chrome Body Text: Can you get this fixed... ? ... everywhere ... In a mad panic I called a couple people. They were all able to launch Chrome without issue. I logged on to several different machines using different access level accounts and they could all load Chrome just fine. 
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Mar 31, 2014 23:16
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