Tales from Techsupport

[Melcar]

Ok, I just thought I'd share it this way... the above is my Rant -- this one is actually more coherent -- The email I sent to my girlfriend about the same situation:




She was attempting to restore a file for --------------... one he
accidentally saved over.

- Ok, so she goes and pulls up the backup system, instead of using the
Job I've already got created, she attempts to create a new job. (yes,
I have shown her how to use my premade job - she just forgot) --

So, I help her get her job created, get the right device, but then she
screws up and restores the file to the wrong spot, Panics, deletes her
newly created job, starts using my Pre-made job.
Forgets to clear the previous selection -- the files restored The LAST
time the job was run - which fortunately was just garbage files of
mine from when I taught her how to run a restore.

Restores the wrong version of the file... Panics {again} - deletes
the file from the backup database, when she meant to remove it from
the Computers...


So, She ran the restore 4 different times, never got the correct file
restored - did restore files that shouldn't have been 3 times (my
files, no damage done) -- and deleted a section of the Backup
database...

So, I had to go in and restore the backup database, find the proper
file and version and restore from backup...


Basically she turned a 2 minute job into a 1 hour job.

[Mileron]

Phone call. When running our application, customer gets an error that only happens for 2 reasons: bad install, and bad folder permissions.
Me: I need you to verify the permissions on the folder.
Tech: It shows "system", "administrators", "users", "everyone", (and two other groups I don't remember.)
Me: OK, what are the permissions for Users?
Tech: How do I check that?
Me: Click the Users group. What does it show at the bottom for Full Control?
Tech: Done. How do I check that?
Me: Is the box to the right of Full Control checked?
Tech: No.
Me: Check it. Then click Apply.
Tech: Done. Wait, now the other groups at the top of the window are gone...

This was a 50 minute fuster where she couldn't even rename a folder logged in, ostensibly, as Administrator. Though I treated her as a "hostile witness" so to speak when she asked me how to map a network drive...

[Mileron]

Website problem this morning.
I send an email to my department, my manager, and the dev team. Maybe 9 people. "Website isn't accessible."
This email was apparently forwarded to all the managers.
One manager then emails her group, who apparently have been trying to use it all morning, and instead of letting someone know there's a problem - or maybe stopping after the first 10 tries in a couple minutes - complains "why didn't tech support let us know" with a CC to me. (Her dept uses the website so infrequently, it's never affected them when we had a problem...)
So then one of her people (who received the email!) walks over to my desk, says "there's a problem with the website", to which I responded "yes I know, you got an email. I got a copy of it."
So an hour later the website starts working again. I reply to EVERYONE who had been included in the email thread - all 14 people or so. So then the manager of the other group CALLS the woman who walked over to my desk, via speakerphone, when
-The woman's desk is RIGHT OUTSIDE HER OFFICE
-SPEAKERPHONE
-I had ALREADY EMAILED a copy to this woman
to tell her subordinate that an email was sent that the website is working again.

[Ronaan]

Sometimes I think my coworkers are just "playing office", the way kids play "family" or "grocery store".

FFUUUUUuuuuuu.....
what a bunch of cretins.

(Mileron's post above could very well have happened here too...)

[Melcar]

Said to another techie(same one from the backup rant) this morning right before lunch:

Is it really a good idea to set the printer right underneath the dripping frozen air conditioner?

[FilanFyretracker]

Said to another techie(same one from the backup rant) this morning right before lunch:

Is it really a good idea to set the printer right underneath the dripping frozen air conditioner?

LOL there you have two problems. electronics+water and a company too cheap to replace a window unit. that or its too cool outside(AC units dont like ambient temps around the condenser below 65), could be low on Freon. but meh odds are the user wont move the printer and just call and ask why its not printing.....

[Melcar]

electronics+water and a company too cheap to replace a window unit. that or its too cool outside(AC units dont like ambient temps around the condenser below 65), could be low on Freon. but meh odds are the user wont move the printer and just call and ask why its not printing..

Actually it's not a window unit - it's one of the two AC units in our server vault (the storage side) -- so the compressor is modified for cold weather operation. The printer was actually yanked out of service, and put on a desk that happened to be under the AC unit -- that had frozen solid that morning.

And the actual cause of the AC unit freezing seems to have been the Anti-Freezing thermistor had somehow fallen out of the coils. So, it didn't cutout when it should have to thaw.

[Mileron]

One of my coworkers got this one...

Customer asks about our government-approved vendor's VPN solution.
He wants to know if we have a security document explaining how the security is set up on (my company's) side. Since we are curious if (vpn client) is connected via VPN once the tunnel is established, what's to prevent someone from accessing the client computer from (my company) via the VPN tunnel?

I don't even know how to respond to that.

[Alikat Astrae]

Just give him your credit card numbers and back away slowly....

[Eremius]

Answer: "We're too busy surfing shady free porn sites to bother trying to mess with PCs that connect via VPN"

[Mileron]

Being in the phone queue, I get a LOT of strange "wrong number" calls.

The really funny thing is, folks either have to go through a 2-level or 9-level menu to get to me.

By that point, it's no longer a wrong number. It's freaking stupidity.

[Layonya]

My hubby got a corker today.

"I can't send this 6 GB email! And now my computer won't boot!"

"Well, what happened?"

"I only had 10 programs running, and it didn't send instantly, so i pushed the power button. Then it wouldn't reboot ... so I pushed it again. Only 15 times, is that a problem?"

Head, meet desk - and I didn't even talk to them!

[Ronaan]

Just today... installed some software on a workstation in the network. Software install fails, asks for server to get said software update first.
OK, log off, walk over to server, start update.

Meanwhile, coworker sits at his workstation doing nothing. 2 hours later he asks me if he can work again. I give him a dumbfounded look, telling him he was able to work all morning.
He was sitting at the windows logon screen, the username still had "administrator" in it, and he tried to log on with his own password.
No, that didn't work.
Windows even asked him to check username/pw, and he was still too dense to grasp what happened. The thought to just type his username into the field never occurred to him.
All that after 11 years or more of logging onto a standard windows network.

So I log him on with *his* username, then proceed to log him off again and install the software update from earlier... now he's whining he can't work - well it's not my fault he wasted 2 hours staring at a logon screen earlier in the morning. He could have just asked at 7.30 instead of 9.30 ...

Sometimes I can't wait for the day the zombie apocalypse comes, because no matter what, I'll find time to hunt him down and off him.

(some might find my behavior assholish, but it's not the first time he's pulled this particular stunt either. Sometimes I just don't know what to do with this guy.)

[Mileron]

Sometimes I can't wait for the day the zombie apocalypse comes, because no matter what, I'll find time to hunt him down and off him.

(some might find my behavior assholish, but it's not the first time he's pulled this particular stunt either. Sometimes I just don't know what to do with this guy.)

That sounds like at least half a dozen people in my office... so I feel your pain

[FilanFyretracker]

Just today... installed some software on a workstation in the network. Software install fails, asks for server to get said software update first.
OK, log off, walk over to server, start update.

Meanwhile, coworker sits at his workstation doing nothing. 2 hours later he asks me if he can work again. I give him a dumbfounded look, telling him he was able to work all morning.
He was sitting at the windows logon screen, the username still had "administrator" in it, and he tried to log on with his own password.
No, that didn't work.
Windows even asked him to check username/pw, and he was still too dense to grasp what happened. The thought to just type his username into the field never occurred to him.
All that after 11 years or more of logging onto a standard windows network.

So I log him on with *his* username, then proceed to log him off again and install the software update from earlier... now he's whining he can't work - well it's not my fault he wasted 2 hours staring at a logon screen earlier in the morning. He could have just asked at 7.30 instead of 9.30 ...

Sometimes I can't wait for the day the zombie apocalypse comes, because no matter what, I'll find time to hunt him down and off him.

(some might find my behavior assholish, but it's not the first time he's pulled this particular stunt either. Sometimes I just don't know what to do with this guy.)

And people like this are why there will always be tech support and always be WoW/MMO accounts getting stolen. I bet at home he clicks yes to all popups.

[Eremius]

If I understand correct, we will not see blog.<domain>.com while <domain>.com DNS provider is <another host>, correct?

Seriously? And you're the technical contact?

[Alikat Astrae]

Yeah, WTF? Who cares where the DNS server is hosted, I just care if it's getting updates.

[Mileron]

The following conversation has been seriously paraphrased and reduced from three 90 minute conversations, broken up slightly to show the separation and lack of information they're trying to give me

Tech: We've had some data corruption
Me: Okay, restore from last backup
Tech: We've had some data corruption
Me: Okay, restore from last backup

Tech: We've had some backup corruption
Me: Well, there's not much I can do for you in that respect.
Tech: We've had some data corruption
Me: We've gone over this - if you can't restore it from backup, there's nothing I can do for you
Tech: We've had some data corruption, and I have a folder full of information in one place that has data modified as of 3/2010, which is missing data from as recently as 10/2010, so I'd like you to wave your magic wand and make it reappear
Me: Well, if you don't have a working backup, I can't re-add records and data tables where they don't exist
Tech: You mean you don't track that?
Me: ....
Me: No sir, sorry, it's up to the respective office or tech group for the office to be responsible for their own backups.
Tech: What if I have the files from April, and give you some incremental backup data from October, can you use that to restore working clients?
Me: No, because information FileQ will have record pointers going back to FileA through FileP and you'll end up with broken records, bad pointers, and other errors I don't even want to imagine

Tech: Well, we have a backup but it's from June...
Me: So restore it?
Tech: It was a DFS share, we can't restore it
Me: You can't do a selective restore of folders to a different location on the share and move the respective client data back into its proper location?
Tech: Let me get my director
Me: ...
Director: Hi, so we've had this major assfuck of a problem where our DFS Replication fucked up and replicated old data from April 2010 onto the current datasets, and our last known good backup was June 2010, but we want you to magically make client data reappear from October
Me: ... I'm sorry, I still cannot magically make your client data reappear since you have no recent backup
Director: Well we're paying Kroll Ontrack umpteen assfucking thousands of dollars to restore the data that corresponds to your company's client data, but they can't guarantee a working folder structure
Me: But my program requires that, because files inside a respective client dataset are identically named with no other identifying information
Director: So you mean if I give you a set of DVDs with 27GB of data you can't pick and choose which files belong to which client so I can get my users back up and running?
Me: ... ... ... ... No.

[Alikat Astrae]

Whoa, so the individual files don't have header information containing the date/time and file location they were written to? if they did, you could make a script that would sort them into separate directories.

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

Whoa, so the individual files don't have header information containing the date/time and file location they were written to? if they did, you could make a script that would sort them into separate directories.

I've run into backup programs that have this flaw. It drives me NUTS. It's one of the FEW reasons I still made rotating tape backups outside of the DFS for a few select mission-critical things. It was worth it too, we had a box go down HARD and were able to get configuration data from a week ago right back up (I made a new tape every 2 weeks and kept 6 months worth off site) It took all night to back up the requisite 140+ gigs of stuff to LTO so only the super important stuff went there but noone else was using the drives for anything else and they wouldn't buy me better hardware when "it was already being backed up". Worked great when they realized that, despite daily differential backups on everything that wasn't a workstation, they were still 10 years behind on OS install discs and configs for several legacy boxes.

It was fun walking in to the MIS and CEO having meltdowns at each other over how many days it was going to take to fix things just to say "it's fixed! Yeah, remember that meeting I held last year where I pointed out the holes in our backup strategy? I took matters into my own hands with some hardware that was getting recycled otherwise and just implemented it. The documentation is in all the right places. I sent you an e-mail after I did it because my answer to your question of 'how much is it going to cost' was 'a few hours of my time some weekend' and you didn't say I *couldn't* do it." Heh. That was a nice bonus check
Heads would probably roll if I tried that at a larger company, despite it being in my job description.

Shit like that always makes me feel like I should be wearing a cape or something. Sure, you have to hold them back when you pee and they get caught in revolving doors, but there are days...