RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

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Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

guppy posted:

Sort of. The stuff it tests is a mix of "very basic" and "unnecessary," for a variety of reasons ranging from "I don't need to remember the exact wording of every option in Control Panel and how to get to it, I know to go to Control Panel and everything is labeled and I'll figure it out" to "literally no one needs to remember the pinouts for a deprecated connector no one uses anymore."

But if your hiring goes through HR, they need some way to filter entry-level candidates. Remember that these are the same HR people who call you because they didn't realize their monitor was off, they are not qualified to evaluate technical competence. What sucks is that a. it's an artificial barrier between perfectly capable people and their first job that's already tough to get, and also that b. there isn't an obviously good way to turn the sort of logical and technical reasoning needed in a job like that into a standardized test, so it gets padded with a bunch of junk you don't need.

I thought about taking A+ just to get a cert on my resume and I knew I was more than good enough to pass the practical bits.

After taking a practice test online that had several questions about different IDE cable conventions and the physical architecture of a floppy disk I figured it wasn't worth the cost/aggravation to learn that poo poo.

EDIT: I should have a cert on my resume, I just need to stop being such a pussy and schedule CCNA.

Belial42 posted:

Except that it would be a half day trip with no actual fun. You'd be in the air as long as the meeting, not counting time in an airport. All to start a loving Webex.

I work for accountants that value money so little that they'd spend a thousand bucks to have someone click a link.

Join.me or LMI Rescue hasn't crossed anybody's mind?

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Aug 13, 2013

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 19:33

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 05:07

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Belial42 posted:

It is totally an option. Just one that has been dismissed out of hand. "What if something went wrong?"

The link may become...unclicked.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 20:38

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Paladine_PSoT posted:

poo poo that makes me cringe. People who make 2-3x my salary with a default email font of 0000FF Comic Sans.

If I was a high-powered executive you'd better loving believe all of my e-mails would be sent in rainbow Jokerman.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 21:08

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Ursine Asylum posted:

Add a couple (dozen) full-drive-zeroing passes to your pre-install workflow.

You know, for security.

Hey, you wouldn't build a house without leveling the grade first, right?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2013 17:55

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

What the gently caress do people do all day in non-IT fields? How do so many people go literally weeks without realizing that at least one folder on the server that they apparently desperately need has been missing?

:psyduck:

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 00:09

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Varkk posted:

Install Windows 7, install XP mode, set windows 7 on boot to go straight in to full screen XP mode. Bill customer for excessive hours to set this mess up.
Either that or pop in a cheap 3rd party RAID1 card which does have XP drivers. (Promise 2300 or similar would do it)
Run away screaming because MS is dropping all XP support next year.

I don't get how none of these terrible legacy programs works in a VM at all.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 02:45

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Going from a place where all of our customers handled their own e-mail and ended up using a hodgepodge of hosts that did or did not support POP3/IMAP to varying degrees to an MSP where every single customer uses some flavor of Exchange is :yotj:

as gently caress.

Life is pretty swell as far as Outlook issues go right now, guys.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2013 04:58

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

code:

Get-WmiObject win32_operatingsystem -computer 127.0.0.1| select csname, @{LABEL='LastBootUpTime'

;EXPRESSION={$_.ConverttoDateTime($_.lastbootuptime)}}

Or just type "net statistics server" in the command prompt.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 01:52

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

I'm not familiar with that command, how do you target a remote PC in the domain?

Oh, it's just a local thing. I just figured if you were already remoted in, it's less keypresses :v:

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 02:02

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

So a (unmanaged) switch took a poo poo at a customer's office sometime overnight and as a result, my computer and only my computer cannot complete an RDP connection to any of the servers. VPN authentication works fine, and I can connect to the servers from my laptop, but as soon as the connection goes through I get some error about encryption differences and the always helpful "Try again later or contact your server administrator." Any other computer with all of the same credentials works fine.

Actually, does anybody have any idea what could be causing this? It's kind of a problem.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 20, 2013

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 00:31

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

So apparently MS decided that if you run IE10, you don't need any way to manage it via GPO without upgrading your DC to Server 2012 unless you want to have to push new install bundles every time you make a change. The gently caress is up with that?

Yaos posted:

Let me guess, the program requires local admin to run.

Just think, one day we may be able to stop getting programs that require local admin to run. One day, far away.

The other day I got to use some Dell scanning management software that ran fine without being elevated, but needed to be run as administrator in order for the scan destination to be changed from the default. :wtc:

gently caress printers.

I'm halfway through setting up network scanning via SMB from a Xerox to various desktops and of course it's not working for...well, I have no loving idea. There's no way to check if the MFP can see the computers, no way to check if it can login correctly, no way to check if I even have the folder locations input correctly. There is a Ricoh MFP in the same office with the exact same SMB settings that works fine though, I can tell you that!

If printer companies insist on making their SMB setups all special snowflake manual input into loving web interfaces they could at least make the error messages instructive in the least.

(Also as a followup to my RDP issue, this is the only thing that shows up in the event viewer, and it's only on my computer, the servers don't even seem to know I'm trying to connect. It's kind of not a problem anymore for the moment, but I would still like it to not be a thing at all.)

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Aug 21, 2013

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 00:11

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

GreenNight posted:

Hey if anyone is trying to mess with GPO's and IE10, just spin up a quick 2012 VM and edit Group Policy from there. Your DC's don't need to be 2012, just edit GP from a 2012 box. I do it all the time.

We just rolled one of the DCs and the Terminal Server back to IE9. I don't think anybody really needed IE10 for anything.

Spinning up a VM would probably be doable since this place is already running a couple of servers on Hyper-V, but it's more trouble than it's worth right now.

EDIT: But wait, if it's not the DC how would that work? I know very little about server setup/environments outside editing GPOs and managing users.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 03:37

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

fluppet posted:

And now we're into day two of lync not working, office 365 really is a loving joke.

The outages are seriously problematic, but what's even worse is that the support is pretty much the standard MS "we'll get to you at some point" style poo poo. Generally when your entire cloud-based infrastructure goes down you need to talk to somebody pretty quickly, not in a day when they finally get to your name on the list. And then they read a loving script.

But I mean, the fact that MS runs their own server solutions in "the cloud" with about the same efficiency as a guy doing it out of his garage is pretty hilarious at the same time it is infuriating.

EDIT:

nitrogen posted:

Lync isnt so bad, because there are plugins for it for Pidgin.

Could you link me to the one you use? I couldn't find one that worked.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Aug 21, 2013

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 17:33

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

go3 posted:

Its almost like switching to third-party services outside of your control could be a bad idea

Yeah but sometimes it's the only feasible option. The problem isn't that you're giving other people control, it's that they can't keep their poo poo up worth a drat, and are terrible at communicating to you when/why it is down.

The place I work now has the majority of our customers on a single hosted exchange provider who has great uptime and are pretty easy to get in contact with, it works fine for the most part.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 18:43

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Sirotan posted:

This is what you want: http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/sfnet_sipe/releases/

nitrogen posted:

pidgin-2.10.7-3.fc19.x86_64
pidgin-sipe-1.16.1-1.fc19.x86_64
pidgin-otr-3.2.1-3.fc19.x86_64
purple-plugin_pack-pidgin-2.6.3-6.fc19.x86_64

This is my current set of pidgin and pidgin plugins. I am using fedora 19, and I installed the sipe package and it Just Worked.

Thanks guys, this worked. I mean, I don't know if I actually want to be on Lync on my laptop, but it's nice to have the option now.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 19:05

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:

so one of my parts guys uses a volvo partner network page (vppn.com) to order parts for some of the stuff we buy. Turns out that the page uses embedded SVG that looks for adobe SVG support...that ended in 2009.

He has a brand new windows 8 computer and it isn't showing him the graphics. I cannot imagine a more rear end backwards catalog of parts. Anyone have any ideas in how I could fix that?

Auto/bike shop software is the most retrograde, fly-by-night bullshit I ever dealt with at my old job, even if it comes from established manufacturers like Yamaha. Every single piece of it required some kind of combination of incredibly specific hardware configuration and installation order for the various unconnected modules on the CDs.

And forget ever getting support for them.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 22:34

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Fenrisulfr posted:

Man I'd love to do stuff like that, but unfortunately my boss signed away our ability to manage our own GPOs just after I started. We can ask the company that now manages it to do it of course, but it's something like $150/hour for simple stuff (usually multiple hours because of testing and whatnot, of course), and like $300-500/hour for anything complex. Admittedly I also don't know GPO basically at all so I didn't know that was possible (and I now have no motivation to learn it except for my own edification), and my boss is usually pretty chill with costs less than a few thousand, but it still means I have to know what to ask for and get approval from the higher-ups before anything like this can happen.

Also, of course all of our users (and for a time, hundreds or thousands of other users also hosted by the aforementioned company) have local admin on all of our computers, including until recently our servers. I'm fairly sure it was either my co-worker or my boss that did it for some reason, but if they did neither can remember it/won't admit to it.

Wait, it sounds like you're a Sysadmin. Why would the Sysadmins not be able to handle GPOS? That seems like a ridiculous slice to contract out.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2013 00:05

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Got babby's first "Do the necessary" today from a customer.

Sure it's not needful, but I'm counting it!

# ¿ Aug 22, 2013 00:48

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Caged posted:

I'm slightly guilty of that, I help a company of about 12 out with their IT stuff now and again and they have 3 VLANs, but that's for IP cameras, phones, and everything else, so I'm going to claim that it's justified.

It's also written down exactly how it works.

The half-dozen VLAN setup would be much less offensive to me if the VLANs were actually segregated beyond simply the inherent differences. Overbuilt and probably just bill padding for sure, but at least then it would serve a purpose.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2013 20:14

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Varkk posted:

You forget the immediate follow up "When is it coming back?"

Last time this happened I was IT support for a small newspaper and the editor was asking me, never mind the fact at the same moment he had one reporter on the phone with the power company preparing a story about the outage and another reporter talking to a police spokesperson about the car which crashed in to a power transformer, nope better ask the IT guy keeping an eye on the servers/UPS to make sure it was all behaving as it should during a blackout, he is the one who will know all about the power situation in the wider area..

Oh man. The place I'm working now is pod paradise compared to where I used to be. Customers (except for one or two) actually understand that I'm not the ISP, or Microsoft, or their building management company, or their printer leasing company.

Having other people able to understand the concept of "scope of service," much less act on it, is truly amazing.

(gently caress printers though.)

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 01:39

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

ThinkFear posted:

Holy poo poo, Avaya's phone system has to be one of the worst. Pretty much made me swear that I will never buy another Avaya system.

It took me loving weeks just to find out if a certain Avaya phone could handle ethernet input, or was just limited to serial. Their site had nothing, their tech support didn't know, their loving sales people didn't know. I only ever found the answer because somebody in one of these threads offhandedly mentioned working for Avaya and he was able to tell me.

I mean, it was all a moot point anyway because the business in question was too loving cheap to upgrade their decade old XP machines even though it was actively costing them money since they couldn't do transactions on them half the time.

Crowley posted:

This is an IT thread. You can do better than PBF!

http://xkcd.com/961/

If by "better" you mean "painfully unfunnier and with not even an iota of artistry" then yes.

Today I had to replace a Time Warner modem that was destroyed by sprinklers due to a fire in the building. TWC went 0/2 on providing me replacements that were actually functional. That's loving amazing.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2013 02:24

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

abigserve posted:

Steps for enabling spanning tree;

1. Pick root bridge/set root bridge (spanning-tree vlan/mst [vlan/msti] priority root)
2. Turn on spanning tree (spanning-tree mode rapid-pvst/mst depending on your requirements)
3. Wait between 1 and 5 seconds depending on the scale of your network

The concept that you have a production network not running spanning-tree is a joke. Even if you don't have a single loop in your entire network, and every port is perfectly controlled there is 0 reason not to run MST (or PVST+ if you don't have more than 50[?] vlans).

Yeah, dude needs to STP the poo poo out of that place and then apply security to every access port and commence the beatings for violators.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 03:18

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

SEKCobra posted:

Reset them? Since you don't know their passwords you don't know their config and that is BAD.

If they're Cisco, you can boot them into the ROM and change the password without wiping out everything else.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 00:32

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

captkirk posted:

Do most people actually use pre-made ethernet cables when wiring up your racks?

Wait. I am inferring here that you stand at the rack making at least a couple of dozen cables every time you wire up a new rack.

WHY.

I understand manually finishing long runs, because you're probably running it through walls or something, and you probably need a length more specific than you can buy easily, but between 1 and 10 feet, why the gently caress not use pre-made?

# ¿ Sep 2, 2013 02:38

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

deimos posted:

It's one of those "email fails to send further than 500 miles" kinda issues that until you see it (and haven't experienced/read about it before) you can't believe it.

Holy poo poo, that story is awesome. I love reading stuff like that, where "real" engineering collides head on with IT engineering.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 01:40

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

door.jar posted:

There is just something so off-putting about a user reporting an error or problem that clearly just CANNOT happen. And then you try it out and reproduce it. They always result in the best stories though, and they are the sole reason I don't mind doing some end-user support occasionally.

I do love that the Dept Chair didn't report it to IT until the had a satisfactory amount of evidence to support the theory.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 04:48

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Paladine_PSoT posted:

Most (just about all) end users don't know what a file really is, let alone understand FTP well enough to use it.

A lot of our clients just use Dropbox to share everything. It's great because it's pretty much transparent to the end users, aside from the person in charge who tells us who gets what shares.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2013 21:45

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

TWBalls posted:

She can do what quite a few of the users here do, hit the Caps lock key, type the letter, then hit the caps lock key again and type out the rest. I know this, because Windows helpfully pops up a balloon that tells them their caps lock is on when they're typing in their password. Do they not know what the shift key is for? The really weird part is that it's not just one user, as I've seen quite a few that do this.

Are they terminal services users? There's something with Windows Server where it will pop up the sticky keys window every time you press shift while connected via RDP sometimes.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 06:08

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Nativity In Black posted:

Anyway, we are reaching derailment territory, so for content:

I have had two different computers with different printers randomly start giving an error message that says "The printer has not yet responded...." Then you click and set the default printer and it prints.

gently caress printers.

Today I got to spend entirely too much time trying to explain to a printer install tech that the client was on a domain, and we needed to pass the domain information along with the username when we did SMB scanning. He just kept saying "But I can scan to my laptop, so it works!" over and over.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2013 22:14

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

rscott posted:

I took more umbrage at the whole "menstruations of my boss" thing than another goon being a goony goon (although I suppose that fits neatly into the goony goon part as well)

I assume he meant ministrations.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2013 22:30

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Vin BioEthanol posted:

Somehow I've never heard of this. I wonder if their remote desktop.exe actually gives them remote desktop or if it's just some generic zombie trojan.

I'm tempted to setup a VM to keep handy that has wallpaper for the FBI or Pakistani intelligence agency or something they'd like to own a whole bunch, let them in and see what it is then cut the internet connection.

"oops I slipped cutting my steak and cut this gray wire in half. Can you send me a new one?"

I've cleaned up a couple of computers that fell for the "Hi this is Microsoft your Windows is reporting a virus!" calls, and I found an LMI Rescue applet and UltraVNC installed on both of them. It's not exactly high-grade stuff going on.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2013 21:53

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

coyo7e posted:

Yeah, a scientist at my work came in livid that her husband had fallen for this phone scam, but at least it wasn't her work computer.

On the list of "gently caress you virus-getters!" that one is not that high on the list for me. I mean, I can understand the problem if there's sensitive data on the computer/network (aside from anything that would be harvested from cookies, etc.) but it doesn't leave very much poo poo behind that needs cleaning up, and the stuff it does leave can just be uninstalled normally for the most part.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2013 22:15

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Dick Trauma posted:

My new boss is already doing the same thing my old boss did: asking me if I want to do something, and when I don't telling me to do it anyway. The HR VP does this as well and I find it infuriating. If you want me to do something and you're going to insist on it then don't frame it as a question.

Sometimes I feel like the only person that knows how to properly exercise authority.

I used to have to ask my old boss "Are you asking me or telling me?" all the time.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 18:26

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Today I got to teach myself a crash course in managing ProCurve switches in a production environment and it was...really easy?

I mean, I wasn't doing any heavy lifting, just assigning IPs for management purposes, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that there's a very straightforward menu that you can pull up via the console.

Part of me is actually disappointed that I didn't get to nerd out with a proper CLI, but most of me is happy that it didn't come to that.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 00:38

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

toe shoes posted:

^^ we use procurves here too, they're pretty awesome things when you need to do something.

My only experience with managed switches prior to this afternoon is the old-rear end Catalyst I bought for play around with at home, and an 8-port HP model that I just used the web interface for.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 00:43

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

CitizenKain posted:

You can load the cisco-clone CLI if you want though on a Procurve, although there really isn't a good reason to do it.

It defaults to a straight-up CLI, but I didn't want to learn the syntax or have to worry about what the default VLAN assignments were or anything.

The switches actually pulled addresses via DHCP when they first got connected, so I could have set everything up with an IP scanner and the browser interface, too.

Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Sep 19, 2013

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 01:23

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

gently caress Blackberries almost as hard as printers. gently caress their tiny, lovely little keyboards and terrible trackball/touchpad things. Yes it is nice to be able to set up their e-mail via a web interface but when it doesn't work and the error messages tell you nothing, then gently caress that too.

BYOD, I'll setup Exchange on it and then you can proceed to do whatever the gently caress you want because it's not my problem.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 19:10

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I might be interested depending on the size/price.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2013 20:47

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Nativity In Black posted:

So my mom's laptop got hosed up. Stopped booting altogether. I'm still not convinced that it was the hard drive but trying to boot to the system recovery or even a USB image didn't work at all until I put in a different drive.

Anyway, I'm on my third attempt to install Win 7 because it keeps getting hosed up and going to a startup repair loop. At first I thought it was Windows update, but now I think it's Toshiba's lovely drivers.

Everyone who says Linux is hard has never installed Windows and had to deal with going to an OEM site to download loving drivers, hoping you get the right ones.

I think I have it now, I just need to find the right video driver.

Have you checked the RAM? If the OS install keeps loving up, that's the likely culprit.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2013 22:56

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 05:07

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

dennyk posted:

A lot of people really don't do poo poo on their computer but check their email and maybe surf the web with a single browser tab, which doesn't use much memory. Even if it does happen to encounter uncorrectable errors from a bad DIMM, it will probably just cause the current application to crash, which most non-technical people won't think twice about unless it happens really frequently. I'd guess a full Windows install uses quite a bit more memory and is therefore more likely to have an issue with a flaky DIMM, and of course when it has a problem, the whole install dies.

Yeah, the Windows install process unpacks loads of stuff into RAM.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2013 02:28

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > RE: A ticket came in: Did they take the printer into the shitters with them?

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