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I work for a smallish non-profit as an accountant, but made the mistake of mentioning that I build my own computers at home. Suddenly I became the organizations tech guru. Over the past two years I've replaced 35 XP workstations with new Win 7 hardware, built 2 brand new security DVR systems and a new win 2012 server to replace our ailing SBS 2003 server. I also somehow successfully migrated the Exchange 2003 server that was part of SBS and corrupting mailboxes left and right to a new Exchange 2010 install which has (knock on wood) been stable for six months now. I have had no formal sysadmin experience or training before this job, so I attribute much of my ability to do the job to Google and stuff I've picked up from this thread. I've been reading this thread (and it's predecessor) from the beginning over the last couple years. I'm still only up to page 550, but I just had to post because... A Sticky Note came in! quote:"Emergency!!! The printer in question is a Lanier MP C3002 that we rarely if ever have had a problem with, and that we have a service contract on. If there is a problem we're supposed to call the printer tech using the number posted on the printer rather than trying to fix it ourselves. I walk over anyway to take a look before calling. Sure enough there's an error message on the screen: quote:Please put 8 1/2" by 11" paper into tray #3 
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Nov 20, 2015 21:52
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A ticket went out: I got a notification last night that one of our critical scheduled backup jobs failed to start. Ok, no problem. Let me fire up LogMeIn and go see what happened. Nope not happening. LogMeIn has contracted a case of security insecurity. They apparently reset all their users passwords to be "proactive" after "high profile breaches" of social media sites. Unfortunately their reset process requires that you have access to the email address used to create the LogMeIn account. I don't. The original address I used to create my account was tied to my old ISP and was taken out of service when I switched. So I submit a ticket to have my email address changed. After an hour of waiting and getting no response I give their support line a call. They answer the phone immediately, but can't change my email address to anything else without a signed letter on company letterhead adequately explaining the need for the change. Even after receiving said documentation it can take up to 48 hours to process the change. He then told me that I really should just "reactivate the original address". At this point I thanked the poor help-desk monkey for making my life a living hell (sorry, I was pissed and I know it's not his fault, it was more for the quality control people if they happen to listen to the call) hung up the phone before he could respond and drove in to work at 1am (which required waking up the facilities manager to let me in the building) to restart a god drat script that should have been a 30 second task. Needless to say I am in the market for a new remote access solution. What do you folks use these days? PremiumSupport fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 15:14
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Gerdalti posted:To add to this, you shouldn't be using an ISP generated email address for anything, like ever. ISP's go like the wind. Use your company email address for company things. To clarify, I used LogMeIn to get to my workstation, from there I RDP to the server, and my LogMeIn account is/was a personal account (used to be free, kept it and went Pro when they removed the free option), not connected to my employer. I work for a not-for-profit, we don't exactly have a lot of resources at our disposal.
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Jul 12, 2016 16:00
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Medical is on the ballot in North Dakota, and that's historically been a very red state.
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Aug 30, 2016 18:53
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Renegret posted:
This is certainly not the case with cable companies in my neck of the woods. I'm paying $60 a month for 50mbps cable service and getting drat close to 100mbps last time I checked it. What's more, both cable companies that serve my area (CableOne and Midcontinent) are spending money on infrastructure for gigabit residential service. That just makes the fact that we're paying over $100 a month for 10/2 fiber at work seem a bit dumb, especially since we don't have a reason to care about 99.999% uptime or SLAs. We're a museum, we don't grind to a halt and lose big $$ if the internet happens to be down.
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Sep 1, 2016 21:00
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Oh lovely. Got back from lunch to see a notification from my file server. A raid 10 array has become degraded. I log in to MSM and one of the disks is completely missing. It doesn't show up at all, so I can't gracefully remove it from the array. Here's hoping that none of the other drives fail before the end of the day when I can offline the server, and that I can just swap in a good drive and rebuild without a fuss. Else it is going to be a very long day and there will be much drinking
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Sep 7, 2016 19:18
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pixaal posted:If the drives are hot-swap, which most are in a server, you can just yank it out without telling the controller you are going to do it. Please verify that the drives and controller are hot-swap before you do this. I believe the LSI 2008 controller integrated on this board is hot-swap capable, but I'm not going to risk it. Mainly because I don't know which physical drive it is when I'm standing in front of the server. There are no serial numbers on the drive trays and none of the leds are off. My plan is to power down the server and pull each of the drives one at a time until I identify the missing serial number, swap the drive with the new one sitting on my desk, power it back on and pray.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:26
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I think from what he says the raid controller has totally lost the disk, but the lights on it are still lit. This. According to the controller there were only 3 disks attached to it. According to the drive bay all four disks were online. It only took about 5 minutes for me to pull the drives, label the bays and swap the bad drive. The controller played nice on boot, identified the new drive as being a replacement and started rebuilding the array without any further intervention on my part. I really couldn't have asked for it to go any better.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:09
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If I could choose my hold music I would use some version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHFM7f1ErZo Right now we have nothing.
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Sep 12, 2016 14:37
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Thanks Ants posted:Are fibre circuits with real SLAs prohibitively expensive stateside, or are the build costs what push it out of the realm of affordability? Is it just a case of people wanting to pay as little as they can get away with? I'm actually pushing to get us off of our fiber connection and onto one of the local cable plans. We're currently paying $100 a month for a 10/2 fiber connection. Unfortunately this is not quite enough bandwidth for what we are wanting to use it for, and they are not willing to cut us any kind of price break but instead will charge us through the nose for upgrading. We're not a commercial business, we're a NPO and don't particularly care if the internet has 99.999% reliability. We have two cable options in the area, CableOne and a smaller regional company, both of which I've used for residential service in the past and been quite happy with. Both of them are currently (or soon will be) offering up to 1 Gigabit service for residential customers. I expect that same $100 we're paying for 10/2 fiber could get us at least 30-40Mbps with business class cable.
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Sep 13, 2016 15:31
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:orange-white, orange. green-n-white, blue. blue-n-white, green. brownin-white, brown. orange-stripe, orange, green-stripe, blue, blue-stripe, green, brown-stripe, brown, *clip* *crimp* I've lost count of how many times I've gone through the routine. I could probably do it in my sleep.
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Sep 20, 2016 22:20
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SEKCobra posted:But you have to specify a mailbox in there, so it's hard to find things that are gone wrong. The Tracking Log Explorer in the Exchange toolbox allows you to search by all sorts of criteria including server responses
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Oct 17, 2016 19:52
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Internet Explorer posted:Ah... What? How is something that queries the timekeeper server for the time and then writes it to a database even remotely difficult? On the surface it is an insanely simple concept. In the real world however time tracking is a very complex system and all parts have to work flawlessly all the time as it directly impacts peoples pay. Sure you start with the basics, employee logs in, write the time to a database. But then you start adding layers to make up for the curse of humanity: You need a system to note and flag missed punches You need a system to allow a supervisor to edit the punch time if John stopped by the post office to pick up a package for the office on his way to work Because of the above the system now needs company hierarchy so it knows who John's supervisor is. Also we are now editing punch times so you need a system to track and log who changed a punch, when and why Due to state laws you need systems to track and flag things like a lunch break that was less than 30 minutes (In my state employers are required to pay for lunch breaks less than 30min long) Then you get in to the different needs of different companies, like company A rounding to the nearest 15 minutes while company B uses actual punch time and company C rounds to the nearest 5 minutes. Add to that company D that wants the system to flag if an employee is more than 15 minutes late for a shift, which means your time system now has to handle scheduling as well. We're currently installing a new cloud-based system, I'm just glad I'm not the one programming it.
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Oct 18, 2016 20:14
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I owe someone in this thread a case of beer or bottle of the good stuff. We got hit with a Locky variant late yesterday. It came in the form of an email supposedly from FedEx saying a package had been delivered and to open the attachment for details. Well, one of the college kids we have working in reception did just that. Fortunately I had set up file screening on our file server per a suggestion earlier in this thread (might have even been the previous one) and it slammed the door hard on Locky's attempt to encrypt the shares. All told I only have one laptop to flatten and reinstall and two files to restore to the file server from backup.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:21
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nexxai posted:Are you talking about https://fsrm.experiant.ca If so, that was me and I'm glad it helped! Yes, that's the one. Thank you again! Gumbel2Gumbel posted:My roommate is a network engineer and got his own personal laptop hit with that because he had JUST sent a certified FedEx express package with his documentation to bring his wife to the states. Yeah it looks like it's actually a variant called Nemucod that was released earlier this year. It only encrypts the first 2048 bytes of the file making it fairly easy to decrypt if you have a good copy of an encrypted file in a backup somewhere. Basically there's a tool that compares the two files and constructs a decryption key.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:25
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flosofl posted:Well, if it's a captive portal it didn't fail connecting to the WLAN. It failed on authenticating to the captive portal so it can communicate to anything other than the captive portal. But the WLAN part was working correctly. As flosofl said, the phone is connecting to the WLAN just fine, which overrides the carrier network for all web communication. The only solutions I know of to force the phone to use LTE are for the user to "forget" the WLAN network and never allow the phone to connect to it, or turn off wifi completely.
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Dec 2, 2016 15:25
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NeuralSpark posted:I don't know if WiFI Assist will kick in if there's a strong wifi signal. In my experience it seems to be primarily keyed off the wifi signal strength. Both iOS and macOS have "captiveagent" that will attempt to load "http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html" and, failing that, should pop up a modal Safari page to show the portal's login. It will continue to try to load that URL in the background for some number of retries, and (on iOS) then fail back to the cell carrier. My experience, which granted is a few iOS versions out of date, has been that this agent only runs on the first ever successful attempt to connect to a WLAN. Subsequent logins to the now remembered network do not trigger the connectivity test because it has already been passed. I've either had to remember myself to load a page in Safari to force authentication or disable connectivity to the network to force LTE usage.
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Dec 2, 2016 17:43
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pixaal posted:There is no compatibility mode needed 32bit just runs natively on a 64bit OS. Most software is still 32bit. The real problem is 32bit natively runs 16bit which 64bit does not. While this is true, a lot of software designed in the Win 95/98/early XP era comes packaged with 16-bit installers. The software may run fine, but good luck getting it properly installed on a 64bit system without a fight.
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Jan 31, 2017 22:04
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nexxai posted:You should at the very least be installing the FSRM role on any Windows file server and using a list (shameless plug) like ours (which is totally free to access and use) to protect against ransomware. I second this. Saved my rear end a few months ago. Well worth the very few minutes it takes to set up.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:51
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Trastion posted:Whats the go to now for remote helping software? I need something that will be easy to setup on a machine and not have to mess with firewalls or anything. It kills me to say it, but I still have to allow Teamviewer on my network. It's the only service our HVAC people can manage to use, and being a museum, climate control is critically important, especially humidity control. It's the one system that has to run no matter what, and if there's a problem the vendor has to be able to access the system and fix it right the hell now or we risk losing assets.
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May 3, 2017 16:56
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Thanks Ants posted:Better than having your entire building management system that runs in Java on an XP box exposed to the world via port 80. That what we had for our HVAC system up until a year ago. XP Service Pack 2 Running Java 5 Port 80 exposed, easy to guess username & password So yeah, Teamviewer is technically an upgrade 
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May 3, 2017 17:45
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pixaal posted:
IANAL but from what I remember from my Contract Law courses, the verbal agreement can be considered binding if both parties agree to it and abide by it. If it goes to court however the judge cannot accept verbal agreements as evidence and will fall back to what's on the written agreement.
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May 5, 2017 20:33
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pixaal posted:I too love it. All I've ever gotten are false positives but it's really nice. I don't lose sleep worrying about it but I really don't want to spend a weekend fixing a massive mess, or possibly lose my job because it would take several days to recover, if not from an over reaction than to the company going under. We have VMs but nothing in place to leverage them in backup everything is still file level and on the "to purchase" list and keeps getting promised. Management thinks they are okay with losing a day of work but It would be a nightmare and probably actually be 2-3 days of effective time lost. 1 because the backup would be the previous day, 2 to get everything back and running normal and another for users to figure out what is missing and re-enter data. stuff would still get missed by users because they already did that! It'd be a poo poo show. I get a few false positives too, usually 1 every couple months. I'll gladly live with that though, the frsm list saved my rear end last year.
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May 15, 2017 22:08
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Lynxifer posted:How do you deal with the false positives, do you just restore access and move on? In our situation we have one or two specific files that were flagging, so I modified the setup script so we can supply our own second JSON feed to allow for inserting them. In my case it's usually triggered by a bad date format in the file name followed by some combination of letters contained in the filter list, making the entire file name look like an extension. I've been training my users to rename files using the mm-dd-yyyy format rather than mm.dd.yyyy and then restoring access.
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May 16, 2017 14:18
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Thanks Ants posted:Don't you mean the yyyymmdd format Baby steps... we are talking about users here
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May 16, 2017 20:16
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Collateral Damage posted:Doesn't the police deal with trespassing? If he was fired and told to leave he has no right to be on the company's property, right? While true it is technically trespassing, in most places it is not considered a crime unless it's posted land or a judge has issued a restrictive order of some kind. All the police can do is ask the guy to leave or wait until he does something else arrest-worthy.
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Jun 6, 2017 22:28
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Truga posted:you must be some kind of hyper incompetent snowflake if managing exchange takes more than 10 minutes a month when you install updates from microsoft on patch tuesday This. Exchange is rock solid these days. It runs itself. I haven't had to touch our 2010 install in over a year other than to apply patches. It just works.
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Jun 7, 2017 17:18
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SEKCobra posted:No, actually my point is exactly that this is on an almost equal level of legality. Accessing a personal credential storage for another user without their consent is definitely far outside any arguably acceptable tolerance imo. Even if you are 'just' checking usernames. I think you'll find that in a corporate environment (in the United States at least) the computer and everything on it, including any personal login credentials that may or may not be there, is considered to be company property and no right to privacy exists. If the said harassment was sent from a work machine, company IT is well within it's rights, and possibly even obligated by law so search their own computers for evidence. Now if the machine is owned by the employee then you would probably be correct, but in most companies this is not the case. Edit: I do agree however that HR should be involved. The police on the other hand, unless the harassment is at a criminal level they really have no need to be involved in what is essentially a civil matter. PremiumSupport fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Jul 18, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 14:58
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SEKCobra posted:I am indeed not based in the US, defacto you'd get into so much trouble in my country for even thinking about doing this aloud that you could probably shut your company down on the spot. But having touched bases with US companies, it just seems unlikely this extent of invasion can be legal even in the US. But obviously IDK, my main point still stands to CYA to hell and back. The laws in the US, with a few notable exceptions are very pro company - screw the employee. This is especially true in creative industries. A buddy of mine worked for a company as a video game developer, and was developing a small indy game on his own in his free time at home. If he so much as looked into a bug report for his personal project while on break at work the company could have legally laid claim to his personal project for being developed using company resources. I actually saw the contract where that was spelled out in black and white. There is absolutely no such thing as computer privacy in the US when using corporate resources. In the OP's particular case I doubt the information, if found, will ever be used to take legal action against the harasser. Instead what will likely happen is that HR will use the information to show a breach of signed computer policy and arrange for security to escort the harasser out of the building. This is enough to satisfy the company's responsibility for proper handling of workplace harassment, and perfectly acceptable practice under US law.
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Jul 18, 2017 17:38
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A ticket came in: Word document won't print. The file was sent to the user through email, but it's not infected in any way that can be detected by our antivirus suite. Printer is working fine and other documents print fine, tried the file on another workstation, still wouldn't print. Tried the file on my personal workstation, still wouldn't print. No error message at all, click print, select printer, hit the print button nothing happens. Tried saving it as a new file, still wouldn't print. Copy/pasted the entire contents of the document to a brand new Word document and it prints beautifully 
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Jul 20, 2017 22:33
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stevewm posted:HP Printer? Original printer was indeed an older HP 2035, but it also failed to print to either of our big Lanier MFPs, so I discounted driver issues as the cause. I'm guessing it was a margin error or some other funky setting like Dr. Arbitrary suggested, causing windows to barf on the file when trying to print.
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Jul 21, 2017 14:22
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ratbert90 posted:24601 I do like using that one for 5 digit locks,  for 4 digit models though you can't do better than 1138.
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Aug 21, 2017 18:13
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Fil5000 posted:0451 For 3-digit sure, but the leading 0 to force it into 4 digits kinda ruins it
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Aug 21, 2017 19:07
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RFC2324 posted:He got the original, but not the intermediate. The code in Deus Ex is a reference to Fahrenheit 451. Yeah, I've never played Deus Ex, so I thought of the book instead. 
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Aug 21, 2017 19:42
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A ticket came in:quote:Good morning,  Looks like the wires feeding the motherboard from the power supply got hot and actually caught fire. Don't know why yet.  The fire melted this unused SATA power connector that was tucked in the wire loop. Happy Monday!
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Aug 28, 2017 15:46
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iospace posted:What about external combustion engines? Either the SATA power connector shorted out or the power supply decided to send too much current down the wires to the motherboard. I'm leaning towards SATA connector short as the cause because that connector shows the most damage, the wires are just sooty and scorched, the connector actually melted and charred. My guess is that over the weekend the connector shorted out and tripped the power supply, which was why the computer was off. On startup it shorted again, but this time the power supply didn't trip and the short got hot enough to catch fire. Either way I'm trashing everything inside the case and getting the user a new machine.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:43
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Y'all are weird. I just looked it up, it's not even monitored by a live proctor. Students set up the camera, take the test with the camera on them, and turn it off when they're done. The recording gets submitted along with the test and the software flags potential "suspicious behavior" for human review. And we all know that there's zero chance that some kid with the hots for her teacher will decide to take the test in her underwear, or that some bubblehead will try to improve her grade by taking it topless. The fact that it is not monitored live and the test/session terminated at the first sign of inappropriate behavior actually makes it worse.
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Sep 5, 2017 22:15
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:You know that had the potential to happen before this software existed right? And isn't limited to women for that matter? The assumption here being that it is only being used in post secondary education. That was not clear in the original post.
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Sep 5, 2017 22:52
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I don't know if it was this thread, but I had to show my cubemate how to get Visual Studio Code so that he'd stop writing scripts in Word. Agreed. Whomever hires you may say and even think they want SQL experience, but what they really want is someone capable of learning SQL. Someone who's learning and understands that they are learning is less likely to make a critical mistake without having a backup, or rush haphazardly into unknown territory without sitting down to research the issue.
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Sep 26, 2017 18:48
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From experience: Accountants are very protective of their old school Windows 2003 physical servers running accounting software built (if you're lucky) in the early 90's. Ours is still Win 2003 but at least I finally managed to retire it's physical essence a few months ago. (It's still sitting behind me in my cube "in case we need it") 
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Oct 11, 2017 21:36
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