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Post your best UI buttons with bad vibes 
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Feb 2, 2023 23:55
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:00 |
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One of our phone customers has a hunt group for taking calls from customers who are reporting outages, which internally ended up being called the “Trouble” group, so a bunch of their phones have a softkey button on their screen that says “Enable Trouble”
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Feb 3, 2023 20:29
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Weedle posted:when i was a small childe using windows 95 i thought the "illegal operation" error meant i was in huge, huge trouble and might go to jail A friend lent me one of the discs for Command & Conquer and the elaborate animations in the installer where it pretends to be establishing a satellite uplink and decrypting the transmission or whatever while it copied the game files made me panic and think it was detecting that I was installing it illegally.
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Feb 3, 2023 22:51
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I remember scoffing at gmail because it seemed comical to me that anyone would need an entire gigabyte for email of all things.
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Feb 13, 2023 14:34
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tomapot posted:Expiring certs are a pet peeve of mine, absolutely preventable. While my support team has gotten better with this between a cert checker and reminders and another IT team starting to take this responsibility we still seem to drop one every 6 months or so. My boss forgot that the openVPN certs he set up for remote access to all the phone systems we manage were only good for 10 years. Starting in 2013.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:20
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Renegret posted:Would it be unprofessional if I closed a ticket by saying it's so stupid it made my brain hurt? I routinely get  tickets because the customer doesn’t have the terminology to describe what the problem actually is and they’re often going through a non-technician taking the initial call and writing down what they say.I’ve learned to just not believe anything in even clearly worded tickets and just start by calling the customer contact and trying to establish from first principles what exactly the problem they’re having is. “Phones are down” could be anything from “the PBX was fried in a lightning strike” to “a network issue breaking communication with the voicemail server” to “a manager accidentally hit the button that puts his phone in do-not-disturb mode”
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Mar 27, 2023 21:29
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The Fool posted:this was extra fun when I was managing a phone system because I live in a state where we only have one area code We're about to have this exact issue in Northern Ontario. Local calls have been 7 digit for as long as anyone can remember, tons of systems have dial tables and hard-coded numbers with that in mind, and it's switching to 10 digit this fall. Renegret posted:This is actually some of the best advice I've ever gotten out of this thread over the years. Yeah, it is always a good idea to start with "ok, what are you actually trying to do, what steps are you actually taking to do that thing, and at what step do you run into a problem?" Had one last week where they were saying something about voicemail problems, it got filtered down to me as "oh it's another one of those systems where the voicemail-to-email stopped working because it uses our mail server for that and the vpn link is broken". I get there and it turns out they don't even use vm-to-email and the actual problem is that voicemail is actually completely down on their system because a glitch created a giant file that completely filled up the SD card that the system runs off of. Entropic fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 00:02
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Thanks Ants posted:Phones are poo poo welcome to my life
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Mar 28, 2023 00:34
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I love when someone sends me a list of ambiguously worded extension move requests and I email back “hey, when you say ‘x to y’ do you mean ‘change the one that is currently showing X to make it Y’, or ‘put X onto the one currently showing Y’?” and they reply “yes”
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May 16, 2023 20:32
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Got to reboot one of these today: I don't recommend it. They're designed to run 24/7/365 and there is no actual software shutdown command. This one had to be shut down because they were doing some maintenance work that required shutting down the building power for longer than the battery backup (those 8 giant batteries on the right) was rated for. The shutdown / cold boot procedure basically involves just taking a config backup and then flipping the breakers on the back. And then praying when you fire it back up. This one took about 3 hours to coax all the control boards and line cards back to life.
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Jun 11, 2023 03:42
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Thanks Ants posted:That thing is a relic, wow You know it's old because it's branded Northern Telecom. You know, the company that would later go on to change its name to Nortel. Who famously went out of business like 15 years ago. Now if you want a real relic, you gotta find something branded Northern Electric. Entropic fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jun 11, 2023 |
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Jun 11, 2023 14:55
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nexxai posted:I can't be the only one wondering what happens during an unscheduled utility power black out Hopefully, the batteries last. It has a lot of them, but I imagine it's power-hungry.  And actually, this building has backup generators, but those generators had to be taken offline as part of the maintenance yesterday, hence the controlled shutdown of the old PBX. It also comes with a voicemail server that is the exact size and form-factor of a mini-fridge: 
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Jun 11, 2023 15:08
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Thanks Ants posted:What's the reasoning behind running that thing still? Inertia. Sure, it ends up costing a bunch of money in dribs and drabs to keep it running over the years (and I bet no one has looked at how much it contributes to elecricity bill costs) but those are expenses that already fit in the existing budget and replacing it with a modern new system would be a big one-time cost in the 5 figures and can you prove to the beancounters that whatever new system you put in won't also have lots of maintenance costs? This isn't even the only Meridian 1 system I know of that's still running in this town. You install something like that at a government site and they're gonna keep it running until they literally can't.
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Jun 11, 2023 15:18
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GreenNight posted:Just don't be the one working there when it finally goes kaput. I've worked on an install at a hotel where their old system abruptly died on them and we had to rush to get something new up and running. They had their main business number forwarded to a cell phone that lucky employees got to pass around for days while we scrambled to get parts in and get it installed. And they were lucky, all the hundreds of room phones were basic analog sets and compatible with the new system. I can't imagine doing a panic install at a huge office where there's hundreds of sets but they're all digital ones that need to be individually replaced and extension numbers aren't all wired in neat linear order in the phone room. Nothing makes you appreciate VOIP like having to map out cross-connects for 100+ digital extensions. (god help you if the jacks don't have labeling you can rely on and you have to tone stuff out)
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Jun 11, 2023 15:36
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Data Graham posted:Oh hi US Robotics Sportster, haven’t seen you in a minute I routinely run into those still in service as out-of-band remote access to network equipment. Mostly being superceded by cellular modems now, but if you want a reliable way to remotely access a router if the site's internet is down or the WAN settings are buggered, having a dial-in to the console port still does the job.
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Jun 11, 2023 20:43
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poo poo, I just remembered something about that hotel install. We did have some trouble finding a few extensions in the end, so once I was done with the programming I was helping a cabling tech to tone those out. In big buildings usually they'll have voice wiring terminated to panels on each floor or wing or whatever with 25 or 50 pair riser cables going from those down to the main panel, terminated to BIX strips at both ends. (BIX was the Nortel standard so you see it everywhere in Canada, I think in USA the equivalent is more commonly 110 block? basically the same thing) It will be labeled on the panel strip so you can see where it goes. Like you'll see a BIX strip in the main voice wiring panel that says "50 pair to 2nd floor" on it or something. Anyway, we were trying to tone something out and traced the pair back to a BIX strip that was just labeled code:Basically there turned out to be dirt-floor crawlspace tunnels in the basement which for some reason had a cross-connect panel in them
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Jun 12, 2023 04:08
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gooby pls posted:Sounds like a speedy cutover OK now I'm looking through all the other stuff on the Archives section on AT&T's tech channel and they have some neat stuff there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Is9s9PgQFM
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Jun 16, 2023 01:14
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Wasnt that one of the original push backs to VOIP? That regular copper lines still had enough juice in them to work during power outages and stuff? A lot of critical stuff still uses copper lines, or has them as a fallback, precisely because they’re so reliable. Copper trunks going down is so much rarer than internet service or PRI or SIP circuits going down and with a good UPS you can keep some plain digital (not IP) phones going pretty easily through a power outage. I’ve worked on stuff like a mental health support line call centre system, and yeah, they’re not about to trust a SIP trunk (especially from our local provider…), they’ve got a dozen copper POTS trunks in a hunt group. And they have contingency plans in place to reroute calls to a different physical location. You’ll occasionally get a copper trunk fail or degrade but that usually happens slowly a pair at a time. I’ve been doing telephony stuff in my current job for >6 years and I’ve seen SIP and PRI trunks go down all the time but the only occasion I can remember where anyone with normal landlines had total loss of service was that time when a city work crew repairing a burst water main took a backhoe through the main backbone between two of the main local telecom exchanges.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:21
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https://twitter.com/bl4sty/status/1678657320023126017?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Jul 11, 2023 20:50
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HP now sells printers that require an active ethernet internet connection to print over USB. 
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Jul 11, 2023 23:40
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https://twitter.com/hilare_belloc/status/1683797122628321280?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Jul 25, 2023 22:28
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Knormal posted:I got one of the classic email exchanges today. Welcome to the company, your email is john.smithorsmyth@company.biz
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Aug 23, 2023 13:52
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Dandywalken posted:3 of my coworkers use LastPass Speaking of stuff like this, whatever happened with the TrueCrypt thing? It seemed like the original creators disavowed the project in a way that strongly implied it had been compromised somehow but there were investigations and no one ever really found anything?
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Sep 2, 2023 00:22
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An email came in from one of the contractors we work for, a happy holidays message with a broken message body. Except it was addressed to a different company than ours. And the header showed that the to: field included a a couple hundred addresses… And then my phone starts pinging. And pinging. I think they meant to send 200 individualized emails to 1 recipient each and instead sent 200 individualized emails to 200 recipients each. e: “stop sending this!” Reply-all count currently stands at 3, no “stop replying-all!” reply-all yet, but I give it an hour.
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Dec 20, 2023 03:02
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Hello old friend
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Jan 24, 2024 22:09
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A Frosty Witch posted:It's quite literally old enough to drink. Is it still in use It was until yesterday until the equally old 8 port netgear 10/100 switch feeding it died. I was honestly surprised a switch that old had POE ports.
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Jan 24, 2024 22:27
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Exciting career opportunity here: https://twitter.com/en4rab/status/1751302219700269448?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Jan 29, 2024 18:38
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They’re gonna go the minimalist route, the next version is gonna be their self-titled album just called “Windows”
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Feb 3, 2024 19:37
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https://twitter.com/evil_mog/status/1753852592348922059?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Feb 4, 2024 17:49
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I was pleasantly surprised the other day to actually be denied entry to a job site. It was a government office and a different tech had initially been assigned but he got pulled away for something else and they sent me instead. But it turned out they hadn't sent my government clearance forms to the site. My dispatcher was all annoyed that they wouldn't let me in but I had to make a point of commending the site contact for actually taking it seriously since my name didn't match the name she'd been given and she didn't have my clearance info. Normally you can get in basically anywhere if you have a clipboard and look bored.
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Feb 14, 2024 05:00
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A ticket came in... "Whenever I lock my PC, my phone stops working, so when I leave my desk it doesn't ring, it just goes straight to voicemail" Can you guess the cause?
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Feb 24, 2024 03:08
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dragonshardz posted:Softphone that sets status to away when the computer is locked (b/c the user is away) Nope, it's a separate physical desk phone. Clue: It's a VOIP phone but their network does not have POE.
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Feb 24, 2024 03:38
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dragonshardz posted:Is...locking the computer also turning off power to it?  Monitor plugged into the master outlet and VOIP phone plugged into one of the slave outlets. Monitor turns off from power-save mode 30 seconds after PC is locked.
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Feb 24, 2024 04:01
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Several dozen calls came in this morning... Apparently all of the Avaya phone systems we support came with 10 years of DST time changes pre-programmed into them. No one ever bothered to really look at this, because why would you? 10 years is basically forever. That 10 years started counting on 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzDqvxiEZ4k
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Mar 12, 2024 02:00
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Thanks Ants posted:Why would you have a look up table of DST when you could just do something sane like have a rule that checks if it's the last Sunday of March or whatever. This is one of many questions I have for Avaya. Their user interface for setting the time change dates is absolutely abysmal too. You pick the year for the start date, click through a calendar to choose the day, then click to choose the end date and it starts you back at January 2014. Then to enter the time of day it doesn’t let you type I. The time you have to scroll through a clock except tying to numbers has seemingly random results. After doing a bunch the fastest way I found to get to 2:00AM was to click on the time field that starts at 12:00 AM and then type 1 2 1 2 1 which someone gets you to 1:59AM and then you can go up by one.
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Mar 13, 2024 03:58
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Arquinsiel posted:You made the mistake of not moving on before the first of your traps went off. Well it wasn’t MY trap it was Avaya’s, but also sort of my trap for not noticing that the systems we were deploying did not actually have default configs containing the next ten years of DST changes, they all came with a default config containing ten years of DST changes covering 2014 - 2023 including ones we bought and deployed as recently as a month ago.
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Mar 13, 2024 04:02
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Time changes have never even slightly bothered me sleep-wise, but then I’ve also never been bothered by jet lag if it’s less than transatlantic. Skill issue IMO. Git gud. Be less sleep deprived in your regular schedule. Also it takes like 1 to 5 button presses to change the time on most cars, ovens, etc. I swear to god people who complain about that are just projecting their memories of 90s comedy routines about VCRs onto something that has actually been incredibly easy for decades.
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Mar 13, 2024 14:54
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It doesn’t help that Google results for any tech question have gotten unbelievably more lovely in the last few years and are now fully turning into an endless sea of generative AI slop.
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Mar 21, 2024 15:21
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Oh boy, look what Glassdoor did https://twitter.com/carnage4life/status/1771132649391993063?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Mar 22, 2024 14:13
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:00 |
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The world’s oldest firmware update has been deployed https://twitter.com/iswupdates/status/1770901451159556487?s=46&t=dQl6Iu6Wmq7antcZ30Prgw
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Mar 26, 2024 13:42
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