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Helushune posted: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. I had a customer whose backups kept failing, somehow. The backups of various network drives were failing because the service account was locked out. The call eventually gets up the tree to me. I start digging through logs and I find out that the service account's password was being reset AND locked. I fixed the password and unlocked it, but a few minutes later it started failing again. Account was again locked out with a password reset. Eventually, I find the weirdest drat thing. There was a script in Scheduled tasks that checked an Access database that stored all username/password combos. If the user wasn't in the database, it locked the account. If the password didn't meet complexity requirements, it reset the password. The service account wasn't in the Access database and thus was getting locked. Its password wasn't complex enough and was getting reset (to "NoBadPassword4U!" lol). I disabled the scheduled task and all was well. For a while. The guy called back the next day: it happened again. Long story short, there was a GPO existed that ensured this script was added as a scheduled task to all machines on the domain and set to run every 5 minutes. No one knew who set this up, or at least, no one would fess up. Rather than disable it or figure it out, the customer added the service account as a local user instead of a domain user. Because, you see, this convoluted script/database/GPO monster only did all that crazy poo poo for domain users. It didn't give a gently caress about local accounts. 
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Aug 14, 2013 01:28
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Sales people are the bane of my life. Or maybe it's just this one pod of them. I don't know. A year after my startup was acquired, the Sales teams are still asking the same questions. It's the same three topics. Always. I've spent hours walking them through these questions. I get three or four inquiries a day from this team. Then when I tell them something like, "No, we don't support that", they'll start asking other people. People who have no idea what they're doing. Then someone finally says "maybe?" because they don't know. Sales guys immediately run to the phones and call all these customers telling them that "Yes, we can do that now!", sell boatloads of lies, all while saying things like "And here we thought we couldn't do that, because ConfusedUs said so. BUT LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY WE JUST MADE gently caress YEAH!" No, we loving can't do that. The feature doesn't exist. Even if we approved it today (not happening), it would take weeks to implement and roll out, if not longer. Get ready to refund all that money you just made. Sales motto: Over promise, under deliver, pass the blame.
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Aug 16, 2013 21:14
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Anybody here use Bomgar for remote support? I alternately love it and hate it. We use it for our corporate customer support. I love how simple it is to get connected with a customer. Send them an email link or a session key. They download and run the client. Boom, I'm in. And once I'm in, it tends to Just Work. I don't like using it to transfer sessions, though. I don't know if our IT guys set it up wrong or what, but all of our logged-in agents are only listed by their first name. There's NO way to tell two Sams apart, or two Erics. Sucks because I'm one of the duplicates. There's a 50/50 chance that a session someone tries to transfer to me ends up in the wrong place. And my duties are literally like no one else's: if it doesn't get to me, it doesn't get fixed. Also, it seems to randomly use a lot of resources on the clients' machines. Once in a while I have a customer's machine that drat near locks up using it. CPU and memory usage go through the roof.
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Aug 19, 2013 19:04
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gently caress that. I work from home and I'm in my bath robe right now. And I'm more productive than any of my coworkers. 
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Aug 22, 2013 17:50
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ConfusedUs posted:gently caress that. I work from home and I'm in my bath robe right now. And I'm more productive than any of my coworkers. Can I brag? Because, while sitting in my bathrobe, my boss called me up and offered me an additional $22k/year with only a minor shift in responsibility. The shift is good (less of the stuff I don't like, more of the stuff I'm good at), and I'll have a chance to delve into some new tech I'm not familiar with. I took on several big projects in the last six months and now I'm getting rewarded for it. Hell yeah!
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Aug 22, 2013 19:59
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blackswordca posted:I'll be honest, I'm not sure why. The client hasn't been happier, and the ticket load has been cut to 1/3rd of where it was when I started here full time. You act as if facts have anything to do with the actions of your employers.
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Aug 23, 2013 20:52
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fivre posted:"can u give me a call 555-555-5555 we are about to start the push" Remember to breathe, and don't push unless the doctor tells you.
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Aug 28, 2013 22:23
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Cluster size is starting to become A Thing at work for me. Customers buy drives to use for their backups, and a lot of newer drives use 4k clusters. Sadly, almost all of my customers are still using Server 2003/2008. 4k drives are only fully supported by Windows 8 and Server 2012 (for Windows). Something less than 3% of my customers use Win8/2012. The other 97%, if they buy a 4k drive, will often experience random failures and other problems, because their OS isn't compatible with the drive that they bought.
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Sep 3, 2013 04:05
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Sirotan posted:I tried to send in a ticket.... That's dumb as hell.
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Sep 3, 2013 18:34
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It's like the Twitter version of tech support. I then spent 5min trying to paraphrase my problem and troubleshooting steps I'd already taken into their dumb form.
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I hate Access so much.
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Sep 10, 2013 00:09
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Edit: SALR somehow posted this in the wrong thread. Content: I hate call center metrics. They're a blight when taken to extremes...and every call center takes them to extremes eventually.
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Sep 10, 2013 15:32
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My company was recently purchased by a larger one, and we're in the process of switching support structures from our existing (free-form, collaborative, fixing-it-right-is-better-than-fixing-it-fast) support structure to the new parent company's, which is highly focused on metrics. It's been a disaster. The first guy they trained over there got railed on for his poor metrics with the new product, daily. But the simple fact is that our product is far, far more complicated than the existing one. Ten minute calls simply don't exist for our product(s). Hell, it can take over an hour, on a simple system, to do a full configuration and initial testing. Even I, who has more customer-facing experience with my product than anyone, could not meet their metrics. I couldn't come close. Eventually the guy they trained over there, the one that was hand-picked for his ability, dedication, and general all-around awesomeness, was let go because of this metrics bullshit. That was two months ago. There's not a day goes by I don't wish I had him back. There are now 10 people doing the job he did. They try hard, but none of them have his ability. I turned down a couple of opportunities to go work directly in that department because of this metrics bullshit. I'm glad I did--I have a much more interesting and less stressful position now after an internal promotion a couple of weeks ago.
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Sep 10, 2013 15:50
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Sickening posted:Corporate mergers and buyouts are never pretty from what I have had experience with. The buying company employees are going for the kill because they don't want new talent to affect them and the bought employees are freaking out because their world is being turned on end. The worst things about corporate life are then brought to 11. Surprisingly, things are going really well, outside of product support, which is a complete and total clusterfuck. All of the engineering, marketing, and sales teams have been left largely alone. Total attrition in my company is less than 10% since it was bought. We lost our HR director, a sales manager, and a developer. Maybe a couple others. Only one of those was a direct layoff as a result of the buyout. The others may have left anyway. We basically are carrying on as before, except we're building a new branch of the product with the parent company's branding. We have more resources (why yes, please, forward your test automation scripts to us!) and such. Our support reps are basically being shunted or promoted into engineering/test positions where they can work at a high level while fielding escalations from the (dozens of) new peons in basic support. It's just that communication with the support folks (and especially their management) is a mess. Support is so ridiculously metrics focused that every single discussion bogs down in minutia. If we can even have a discussion at all. Mid-level managers have to justify every minute they or their people spend working on the integration. High-level management won't implement a single policy without numbers to back it up--numbers we don't have because we never tracked them. And they won't run a test in their environment to /get/ the numbers they need. They want numbers to justify the numbers so their numbers continue to say the right things.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:22
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fivre posted:And to think I almost took the support role there... Granted, I probably would have moved more into engineering/test since the position they offered was 50/50 anyway, and I got fired from the job I took instead 2 months later, but whatever. If you were one of my referrals, well, the support role you were originally applying for was with my group (the good side) and not the bullshit I went on about above. I've never referred someone to work directly in the parent company's support department. And I probably never will.
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Sep 10, 2013 19:23
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God of Mischief posted:Those are the easiest numbers to come up with, especially if you never tracked them. Make poo poo up and get some other people to make up supporting numbers. Make sure that the numbers for the budget are at least double than you actually need and numbers for metrics that they track are low enough to pass judgement and high enough that you won't kill yourself later. We actually gave them numbers that were slightly inflated. We were told that they were "ridiculous" and there was "no way anything takes that long". Our "worst case scenario" numbers weren't even considered. Now, six months later, they're faced with the reality that everything is taking about 50% longer than our projected "worst case scenarios" because they didn't spend any time or money on training the new peons. They basically took our product and our customers, ignored everything we told them, and are now ridiculously over-budget and under-performing because they ignored everything. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that directly anymore.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:35
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Tech companies in Silicon Valley--especially startups--tend to have really loose rules for alcohol and stuff. Very laid back and chill atmosphere. As long as you do your job no one cares if you've had one or two (or half a dozen).
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Sep 12, 2013 21:42
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Oh hey, remember my complaints about the support department a couple pages ago? All of those upper management types I complained about were let go. Total wipeout. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch. 
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Sep 12, 2013 21:52
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Most cities have laws in place to prevent grills and similar devices within a certain distance (10' is common) of occupied multi-residence and office buildings.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:25
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Rohaq posted:This. This is like a goddamned unicorn. Hold onto this moment forever. No kidding. Like I said before, I'm not directly in the same department, but I interface heavily with them. Morale has been terrible for months, hemorrhaging talent like crazy. Yesterday it was a party atmosphere. Today, it still is. This was a real chop-the-head-off-the-snake kind of move too. Of all the people who got the axe, the least important had a Director's title.
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Sep 13, 2013 15:51
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I'm sort of new to IT, but at some point doesn't it become more cost effective to transfer everything to a physical medium and mail or even personally deliver the data? Yes. http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ Edit: beaten ConfusedUs fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 00:28
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So this Cryptolocker thing is floating around and really picking up steam: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care_feeding_of_your_cryptolocker/ gently caress the people who wrote this thing. It's simple, evil, and they're going to make some bank.
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Sep 17, 2013 21:38
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wintermuteCF posted:
gently caress yeah good job man
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Sep 28, 2013 01:30
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Year of the Job time!
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Vin BioEthanol posted:So dumb question, I've seen desktop guys in here talking about telling users "don't give me your password". Really? You do that? And people actually give you the passwords? That's awful security. Yes there are ways around it.
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Oct 2, 2013 17:17
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drukqs posted:New record phone bill by our international sales director guy 21 thousand dollars for 8.3GB? That's loving ridiculous. Expected--it's AT&T--but ridiculous nonetheless.
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Oct 8, 2013 21:43
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TWBalls posted:July 2015. I looked this up the other day because some lovely vendor wants us to set up 2 R620s running 2003... 32bit. gently caress GE and their lovely Muse program. I cannot loving /wait/ for July 2015 so we can stop trying to fix people's lovely 2003 servers.
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Oct 9, 2013 21:02
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AlexDeGruven posted:You say that like there won't be some business critical app that hasn't been updated since 1999 running on 2003 somewhere that will gently caress up royally on 8/1/15. I don't do general purpose IT. I work with a particular app, and we'll phase out support for 2003 when Microsoft does. Seriously, server 2003 machines are like 70% of our support cases. The vast majority of those have nothing to do with my app, but are related to general system instability.
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Oct 10, 2013 00:57
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Working from home can have its disadvantages. I worked all day yesterday. It was slower than usual but not outside the norm. Turns out yesterday was a paid holiday, and I was the only member of my team to work. drat it.
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Oct 15, 2013 19:43
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:A awesome ticket came in, Cryptolocker. Spotted the symptoms of it on the FS, but was delayed like 1.5 hrs going through "processes" I'm no fan of reddit, but this is really the best consolidated resource for Cryptolocker stuff. http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care_feeding_of_your_cryptolocker/
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Oct 24, 2013 02:29
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"yeah can't open files on \\X\Y\Z.xlsx" Says X is corrupt or not the original file type.
"lemme get remoted in here and see what is going on
Oh okay.
I-... Okay I'll do the process
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I like this source, http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/507240/crypto-locker-malware-removed-files-still-encrypted/ The information is much more spread out at bleepingcomputer.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:48
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:So does paying the 300 dollars or nominal fee work? By all reports, yes it works. It can take a while; they process the payments manually.
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Oct 24, 2013 02:53
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blackswordca posted:So a bunch of emails came in. gently caress whoever thought that wasn't helpful. Please tell them that you were helping the company save money on pursuing an impossible course of action.
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Oct 28, 2013 18:39
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blackswordca posted:Was the same manager as always, i think i just wont reply to these email threads anymore. There's no one in this thread who wants you to YOTJ out of there more than I. Good luck. Anyway, when it comes to Cryptolocker, you really only have two courses of action: 1) Restore backups. Shadow copies, Windows Server Backup, Symantec, Carbonite, whatever. Anything with versioning should be okay. 2) Pay them. It'll take a while, but it actually works.
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Oct 28, 2013 19:11
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teethgrinder posted:Frankly I'm surprised they're only asking for $300, and that businesses are resistant to just paying it to get back their ESSENTIAL THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION UNBACKED-UP files. It's loving genius, like everything else about Cryptolocker. Awful, terrible, evil genius. The people most affected by this are the ones too cheap to pay a thousand bucks (or a few thousand bucks, whatever) for some sort of basic backup. If Cryptolocker people charged much more than $300, these cheapskates wouldn't pay them either. I think $300 is about the most Cryptolocker could charge without seeing a massive drop-off in people who paid. Make a little less per person, but have many more victims who do pay. The fact that they actually DO decrypt your poo poo is likewise genius. Word of mouth spreads, and more people pay in the end! Cryptolocker is built by some pretty smart people, and they're adapting to get around most of the common blocks, like those GPOs that block poo poo in \AppData\. I read today about a new variant that runs in the %TEMP% folder and blocking that would block all sorts of applications. I think they're bastards, and deserve to have their faces rubbed into a cheese grater, but I can't help but admire it.
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Oct 28, 2013 21:16
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Sirotan posted:Jesus loving christ. Just yesterday I sent out two emails to the entire company cautioning them not to click on links or attachments they might get in their email that looks suspicious. Less than 24 hours later I get *2* emails forwarded from the CEO complaining she can't open an email with an attachment, subject "See what i uploaded for you!!!", and a link to http://totallyobvioussmalwaresite.tk. The first one she even got a rejection email citing 'spam', and still tried to open it. Enjoy your future cryptolocker infestation. Check your backups, now, because some idiot is going to infect your network.
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Oct 29, 2013 18:39
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Whales posted:We got a guy come in with a dead thin client today, and judging by the smell it had overheated and something had died. I know exactly the smell you're talking about, too. Get one whiff of the magic smoke, and you never forget.
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Oct 31, 2013 22:11
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KillHour posted:It's really... odd actually. The cameras are pointed at digital signage. The company needs a way to prove that the displays are showing what they're supposed to when they're supposed to, so they are recording all 10,000 displays they have, and having the video compared against what SHOULD be displayed there. They want to store the data all at the same place so they can have people "forensically analyze" the feeds (their words, not mine) in their NOC to make sure everything's correct. It's basically one of the craziest requests I've ever had. What? The gently caress? I have nothing constructive to add.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:36
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KillHour posted:Give this man a prize. Jesus Christ. Are they expecting someone to manually do the login/download thing? If so, calculate the wages they'll spend on someone to do that vs the cost of automating. I bet it'll pay for itself quickly.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:38
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GreenNight posted:No it's not. An intranet page should be functional enough so that a user doesn't need a half dozen shortcuts on their desktop of all places. Bookmarks? What's that? Users who already have a screen full of shortcuts? Good luck finding the new ones. Rule #1 for Clueless Users: If it's not on the desktop, it doesn't exist. Rule #2 for Clueless Users: If you change their desktop, they will hate you. You're hosed no matter what, buddy, but there is a valid use case here. 
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Nov 15, 2013 21:43
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Backups can be complex to troubleshoot. Events are a great place to start, and the NTFS disk errors you found are an even better place. I've lost track of the number of times I've had to tell a client that no, his backups to a disk won't work until the disk itself is fixed or replaced. Kinda hard to write to a failing disk, you know. Good luck with your new responsibility.
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Nov 18, 2013 17:43
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Paladine_PSoT posted:On the plus side, you know the warning signs. This. When they ask you if you have questions, you should give them a "hypothetical" situation that is out of your scope and ask how they'd deal with it.
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Nov 27, 2013 23:27
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