More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Tab8715 posted:

Can't use any software that's not already on your machine. Open Source software is a security and legal liability.

No notepad++ for you.

Notepad++ doesn't require an install, and can be run from a network drive or a thumb drive :ssh:

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 02:15

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:20

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

We use Novell NDS here. Our Novell passwords are not case-sensitive.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 01:38

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Some outside vendor is trying to SSH in, but they're getting blocked and don't know why. According to our UNIX/Linux guy, incoming connections are limited during tax season, that they'll just have to keep trying, and there's nothing we can do about it.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 19:42

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

fivre posted:

Errr... What?

Yep.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 21:11

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

baquerd posted:

But it's not tax season?

I'm not a tax guy, but it is about six months after, so maybe six-month extensions need to be filed in a couple weeks? But between the "tax season" thing and the "limiting incoming connections while incoming connections are important" thing, I think the second thing is much worse.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 22:10

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

anthonypants posted:

Some outside vendor is trying to SSH in, but they're getting blocked and don't know why. According to our UNIX/Linux guy, incoming connections are limited during tax season, that they'll just have to keep trying, and there's nothing we can do about it.

quote:

The [tax] systems are currently unavailable due to required backups being run for the current tax processing season.

The systems should be availabe within approximately the last hour.

Just before this e-mail went out they called to let us know we might get calls from the vendors about it. This is a cool and good place to work.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2013 18:26

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

This happens maybe 75% of the time when a new user account is created:

The user logs in with their temporary password as instructed. Everything is fine, nothing is broken.
The user is never prompted to change their password, but they are able to get to the desktop.
The account's "grace login" counter goes to zero, and needs to be reset by the helpdesk before the user will be able to log in again.
If the user logs off or locks their computer, they will be unable to log back in. They will be given an error message saying that they are out of grace logins, and to call the helpdesk.
Setting the user's grace logins to 1 and allowing the user to attempt another login will prompt the user to change their password.
If the user's computer was locked, they will not be able to reset their password. The helpdesk must give them a temporary password and have them unlock their computer first. They will be able change their password from the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen once they are at the desktop.

I don't know how or why this happens, I just know it happens to new accounts the most. Sometimes it happens to existing employees.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2013 22:18

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

MrMoo posted:

That's a nice UX horror.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2013 01:02

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Our print server admin just told me that changing a printer's default paper type can't be configured on the server, so a printer that incorrectly defaults to glossy paper needs to have that setting changed on each workstation. There've been work orders for printers that have had the wrong paper type or tray before, so now I know why it's taken her a week or two to complete those.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 17:37

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Syano posted:

Its even easier than that. Right click and choose print defaults. No group policy or scripting necessary

Here's a scrsenshot she sent along with her e-mail, showing how that option doesn't exist:

# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 21:26

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

This isn't pissing me off, but it's probably pissing someone off today.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 18:21

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

We've been planning to upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2010 for at least the entire year, and the Exchange admin is finally doing testing on moving production mailboxes and calendars over. One of the objects he moved was the IT vacation calendar, so nobody can see that calendar anymore. I have a feeling our Exchange admin fixed it for IT management, since his bosses are handwaving it awat as a non-issue and saying all we have to do was remove and re-add the calendar from Outlook, but that's not working for anyone else. I am eagerly anticipating a widespread 2010 rollout.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 23:49

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Our e-mail archive product went down this afternoon. Call up the sysadmins, and it was a "planned" outage. They didn't bother telling anyone that they'd "planned" to take down the e-mail archive from 1pm to 4pm.

Come 4:30pm, it's still down. Call up the sysadmins, it should be back up tomorrow. Cool. E-mail guy is probably loving around in Exchange 2010 and has no goddamn idea what he's doing.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2013 00:53

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

A really cool and good thing about my job here is that the help desk is prevented from looking up a network folder to tell what security groups grant rights to read/write to it. In order to grant rights for a user, we ask their department for a second user who has the correct read/write privileges, and use their account to "mirror" the permissions. This is also how permissions are set up for new accounts.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2013 21:13

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Phatty2x4 posted:

Maroon - Hah. Haven't heard that since bugs bunny

What a maroon
He's a guli-bull
He's a nin-cow-poop

My favorite now is - what does hell does that acronym stand for. What the gently caress was wrong with the old acronym.
I see acronym changes almost weekly now.

I'm like "the gently caress is this - the gently caress was that" as new acronyms get thrown about like a cheap hooker in a bachelor party.

People can't memorize computer industry acronyms.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2013 05:00

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

This is our current procedure for creating new user accounts and it may seem like there are many steps but it is actually loads of fun, especially since none of them are automated.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 01:12

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Our e-mail guy got one too many requests to increase a director's mailbox size, so he's educating the helpdesk that we need to tell the users to delete items. That's great, but the users 100% of the time say they can't delete anything, because the archive isn't working or they only need a size increase temporarily or whatever bullshit. In the past, when we've told the users we wouldn't be able to open a ticket for them, they just go to e-mail guy's boss, who then tell us to open a work order. E-mail guy believes this is a client-side issue and needs to be handled by desktop support.

Oh, and our mailbox size limit is 400MB.

Here's what pisses me off, more than anything:

my boss posted:

Unfortunately, when [e-mail guy] pushes back as a client services issue, we have to prove that it is not a client services issue. I know this is not quite fair but it is the way it works here. Once we have proven that nothing can be done by client services and document it, then we can push back. If we've done what we can and can't fix it and SA is not willing to accept the work order, then the client should escalate it higher. We just need to be sure we have everything that was tried documented.

anthonypants fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Oct 17, 2013

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 18:14

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

TWBalls posted:

For us, the only way you're going to get a 400MB Inbox is if you're on the Admin team. Directors top off @ 300MB, end users most often top off at 50MB but, I've seen go as high as 100MB depending on their role. Standard Inbox is 20MB, which is where mine is. We're expected to put poo poo into PST's or delete.

We've also outlawed psts. We haven't actually prevented users from using psts on their own, but we don't support em and the policy is Don't Use PSTs.

Sickening posted:

Changing up your entire email infrastructure is not exactly a painless task. Quite frankly something like this is what I would expect a user to say.

We're going through a 2010 migration right now, and e-mail guy is incapable of doing it on his own so we've hired a contractor. Migrating our 2500 users to Google Apps would cost less in both the short and long terms than this fuckup.

anthonypants fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 17, 2013

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 20:23

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Bob Morales posted:

What do you do with those emails from 7 years ago that I NEED TO SAVE FOREVAR

We use an ancient version of Mimosa Nearpoint and it's a steaming pile of garbage.

Also I just noticed they don't support Exchange 2010. That's incredible.

anthonypants fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Oct 17, 2013

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 20:38

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

skipdogg posted:

Google Apps runs 50 bucks a user/year, so that would be 375K for 3 years. In house email is probably less expensive than that. Probably not a whole lot more once you factor everything in like hardware/software/CALs/Spam&Virus but hosted email isn't usually less expensive for larger organizations.

I'm pretty sure you get a break if you're a local government. Or we could partner with a local ISP. There are legitimately good reasons for keeping e-mail in-house, but they are literally throwing money away. Google Apps is just one way for us to have a working e-mail system and to have e-mail guy gently caress off.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 20:49

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Mierdaan posted:

Explain how retention policies work? Preferably with a lawyer standing behind you while you do so?

Well, we've got five retention folders in your Outlook Inbox: _01 Year, _05 Years, _10 Years, _20 Years, and Permament. It's up to you and your department to decide which e-mail goes in which folder. You can create all the subfolders you want, but everything will get stored in the archive. E-mails in your inbox get backed up silently, and are deleted after 90 days. If you want to look at e-mails older than 90 days, or you want to make sure an item has been archived, you have to go into the archive.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 21:11

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Agrikk posted:

In the last twenty years, having worked for exactly one company that has existed longer than five years, I got a perverse delight in the optimism involved around creating 10 year, 20 year and Permanent folders.

More like:

Inbox
_Crazy Months
_Good Years
_Fading Hopes
_Oh Please Buy Us
_I'm the last guy here. Guess I'll burn this to DVD and shut the lights off now.

It's a local government, they'll be around for a while.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 22:12

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

The S of SMB really ticks me sometimes...

Yay people who have been up +20hours

Server?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2013 06:11

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

Poor planning for an environment when I completely advised the customer and project engineer against doing a design that would end in disaster. GUESS WHAT HAPPENED???

many SMB's don't believe in a thing called RIO, RPO's, TCO, or Business contentuity until after it is too late!

I think I will call out tomorrow I will call out tomorrow because like <12 hours of sleep in the past 2 days, and I think it is starting to Catch Up. But All Good Because I Mean A Jason Langone VCDX tomrrow!

I really think you meant Small/Medium Business but you could also mean Server Message Block :iiam:

# ¿ Oct 24, 2013 08:45

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Someone wanted to make coffee when they showed up, and they cleaned out the coffee pot and the basket. I think he lost a part for the basket, because it wasn't pouring into the pot. Now there's a huge mess and coffee in the reservoir. I unplugged the coffee maker since it's sitting near me, but didn't have a chance to do anything with it. He came by after I unplugged it, looked at it, and walked off. He didn't come back.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 21:16

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

We're forcing cached mode in Outlook 2003 prior to our full-scale migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. The way this cached mode push is being done will clear everyone's signatures and shared mailboxes, so we'll get a billion calls about getting those re-added. We've also been turning off cached mode for everyone who's complaining about how slow e-mail is, either because their mobile phone gets the notification before it hits Outlook, or because another recipient who has cached mode off will get it up to 15 minutes sooner than someone who has cached mode on. The lead sysadmin's response is that "it's e-mail, not instant messaging."

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 21:50

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Negromancer posted:

I see nothing wrong with this response.

Inspector_666 posted:

Neither do I. People need to realize that e-mail can take a bit sometimes.

An internal e-mail shouldn't hit their mobile phone before their desktop. Two recipients next to each other shouldn't get the same e-mail 10-15 minutes apart. I'm sure that cached mode is lovely, but our network infrastructure and sysadmins are in no way ready for it.

Here is another thing that literally just happened:
A user complained that any document scans from one of our Canon MFCs were taking an hour or more to reach a Windows share. One of the apps guys contacted a Canon rep who suggested that we follow the instructions in this TechNet article. The apps guy then had the user attempt to perform these steps on her local computer. When she got an error message that the Server service wasn't started, the apps guy came to us.

anthonypants fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 30, 2013

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 22:33

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Maniaman posted:

I despise web developers that don't know the difference between POST and GET and when you should use each. A page that someone may want to link someone else to? Lets use POST for the query instead of GET! Surely nobody will want to copy the url to a friend to pull up this posting!

# ¿ Nov 7, 2013 02:01

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

I've been told my last day is on Friday, so this doesn't piss me off as much anymore:

E-mails from our MFCs, at least one of our apps, and from the customer contact forms on our website are getting sent to users' Junk E-mail folder in Outlook. Our Exchange admin says there's nothing he can do, and has instructed helpdesk/desktop support to have users whitelist these senders. Management believes this is satisfactory.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2013 19:05

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

anthonypants posted:

I've been told my last day is on Friday, so this doesn't piss me off as much anymore:

E-mails from our MFCs, at least one of our apps, and from the customer contact forms on our website are getting sent to users' Junk E-mail folder in Outlook. Our Exchange admin says there's nothing he can do, and has instructed helpdesk/desktop support to have users whitelist these senders. Management believes this is satisfactory.

Management talked to the vendor about this issue this morning, and they recommended disabling the Junk Mail filter. So that's what's gonna happen.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2013 20:08

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

evol262 posted:

Time for you to learn your job. You run puppet/chef? Great. But either you shouldn't be in a position where DBAs are asking you what common systems functions do and their intricacies, or you should be able to answer them.

Believe it or not, 5 pages of logs isn't a lot. And if you can't identify what's "concerning", you're no better. It's your job to track down what happened. When Oracle pegs a CPU because it's overflown a 32 bit counter and gettimeofday() is negative, is that an oracle problem? Or is their job to keep the database performing and your job is to keep it running.

For better or worse, production databases ARE special.

From Bhodi's post I got the impression the DBAs were asking questions like "What is the function of #include?"

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 08:53

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Please say it's not for Google this time.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2013 03:13

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

mAlfunkti0n posted:

I'll vent here, even though I vent at work all the time anyways.

So back when everything was physical, someone decided to give virtualization a whirl. I love this, because it is my job and keeps me on my toes. What I do not like is that some guy told everyone "oh it's OK, it's JUST LIKE physical except you can have AS MANY CPUS AND AS MUCH RAM AS YOU WANT.

What did this lead to? People auto provisioning servers with 16 virtual CPUs and 64GB of ram when they need ONE CPU, literally A SINGLE CPU. That is the single thing I hate about my job. People treat virtualization like a magic pill that solves everything because you can assign an arbitrary number of CPUs and RAM and that it's just infinite! Then when I show them the hard data that they have better performance with 1-2 CPUs (rather than 16) they say "well, we want 16 anyways!".

UHGHHHHEUHRERER

If virtualization is your job and they're not going to let you do your job, have them sign away their support rights and have them buy a server of their own. Offer to set them up with an EC2 node and describe the look on their faces when the invoice comes in.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2013 22:21

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Instead of being evasive, why not just use the number that you'd like to make at the job you're applying for :confused:

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:31

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Misogynist posted:

You're upgrading to an operating system that's already two versions behind the current one?

If you're still on Server 2003 literally a decade after it came out, 2008r2 isn't so bad.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 04:15

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

I applied to a job that I think I would like, and it's really close to my apartment, and it pays really well. Then I got this e-mail:

quote:

Hello,
We would like to begin the hiring process for the Field Technology Analyst Position. This process has three steps:
90 minute written exam (scheduled for either January 21st or 22nd)
1 hour hands-on exam (tentatively scheduled for January 23rd)
1 hour panel interview (tentatively scheduled for February 7th)

At this point, we would like to invite you to the written exam. Our two sessions are:
Tuesday, January 21st at 3:00 PM
Wednesday, January 22nd at 9:30 AM

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 20:08

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Install Windows posted:

Because spammers never just sent emails at random before??

But now they don't even need to buy your e-mail address.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2014 03:30

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

It has nothing to do with Star Wars, it's that a company as big as Oracle can't configure their SSL certs properly.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2014 16:35

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

HalloKitty posted:

Only slightly related, I noticed the Java updater has switched from bundling the Ask Toolbar to some McAfee bollocks now.

Why the hell does Oracle pull this poo poo? Ugh.

I noticed Adobe was doing the same thing. Also I thought it wasn't called McAfee anymore?

# ¿ Jan 16, 2014 17:42

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:20

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

incoherent posted:

poo poo that pisses you off?

Getting your boss to ask the CEO to ok a macbook air purchase and putting it on your company card. God knows what else they bought. gently caress I am so livid. I dont even care about buying macbooks, it's the sneaky behind your back and disregarding an entire dept.

Feign ignorance as long as you can. Kill the network port it's on and send out a reminder e-mail that people shouldn't plug their home equipment into the work network.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2014 18:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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