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Thread: Tales from Techsupport

  1. #1181
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Why, it does all we need and a thousand other things.

    It even saves to pdf.

  2. #1182
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by Ronaan View Post
    ...it does all we need and a thousand other things...
    ...that we don't need.

    Sounds like Sharepoint, or as I call it "A solution in search of a problem".
    For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
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  3. #1183
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by FilanFyretracker View Post
    plot twist twist... maybe its time to update from a version of word that is not closing in on being a decade old.
    We are just updating our client users from office XP to 2010 - and some are reverting back to the old as it is more familiar/not as locked down.

  4. #1184
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    What does MS support now? They must have XP EOL by now for office.
    Today we sail
    On the Solar Rail
    For there's much we just don't know
    So farewell with a kiss
    Then it's fast for the mist
    Till we're sleeping in the cold below

  5. #1185
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Me: Sees a bunch of emails (~half dozen) in a shared mailbox addressed to one of my coworkers, so I drop them in her folder and let her know the emails arrived.
    Coworker: Thanks
    Me: Soon, I see a bunch of emails from the coworker in the mailbox and discovers they're badly re-addressed Reply All messages, so I drop them in the coworker's folder again and let her know she needs to resend those messages to her customer
    Coworker: Why?
    Me: Because you're using Reply to All, but not actually sending the email to the customer
    Coworker: Yes I am
    Me: Another email comes in from the customer saying "Please acknowledge original email with phone call." I forward the email directly to my coworker.
    Coworker: Why did you forward this to me? I already replied to it
    Me: No you didn't. You replied to the shared mailbox and not the customer.
    Coworker: Forwards me the "sent" message. The "From" field is her. The "To" field is the shared mailbox.
    Me: I send back a screenshot of the email, highlighting the previous fact
    Coworker: See? I sent it back to her
    Me: No, you just keep replying to yourself. Stop removing the customer's email address from the Reply All email. Or copy the email to your Personal Folders and reply to it from there. Or just call her and tell her you got the first email.
    Coworker: Why?

  6. #1186
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by FilanFyretracker View Post
    What does MS support now? They must have XP EOL by now for office.
    http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_su...office-xp.aspx
    July 12 2011
    Even Office 2003 is EOL.
    https://support.office.com/en-nz/art...1-b9c4fe5b6b90
    Same date as XP OS - April 8th 2014

  7. #1187
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by Mileron View Post
    Me: Sees a bunch of emails (~half dozen) in a shared mailbox addressed to one of my coworkers, so I drop them in her folder and let her know the emails arrived.
    Coworker: Thanks
    Me: Soon, I see a bunch of emails from the coworker in the mailbox and discovers they're badly re-addressed Reply All messages, so I drop them in the coworker's folder again and let her know she needs to resend those messages to her customer
    Coworker: Why?
    Me: Because you're using Reply to All, but not actually sending the email to the customer
    Coworker: Yes I am
    Me: Another email comes in from the customer saying "Please acknowledge original email with phone call." I forward the email directly to my coworker.
    Coworker: Why did you forward this to me? I already replied to it
    Me: No you didn't. You replied to the shared mailbox and not the customer.
    Coworker: Forwards me the "sent" message. The "From" field is her. The "To" field is the shared mailbox.
    Me: I send back a screenshot of the email, highlighting the previous fact
    Coworker: See? I sent it back to her
    Me: No, you just keep replying to yourself. Stop removing the customer's email address from the Reply All email. Or copy the email to your Personal Folders and reply to it from there. Or just call her and tell her you got the first email.
    Coworker: Why?
    Reply all. It's like a predator drone or the atom bomb. It has its uses and right times to be used but its not needed for every engagement.

  8. #1188
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by FilanFyretracker View Post
    Reply all. It's like a predator drone or the atom bomb. It has its uses and right times to be used but its not needed for every engagement.
    We recently had an incident where one of the techs accidently sent an email to the global distribution list (4500+ users) instead of a support team. Queue multiple users hitting the reply all to tell everyone that it's not them. Several more emails from more experienced users (?) replying to all telling them to stop using reply all (oh the irony) and we think its all sorted. This was on the Friday.

    Monday morning and we get the normal global email that the client sends out which also contains advice to ignore the email sent out.

    The Friday, it seems a few folks return from leave and the first email they read is the one the servicedesk sent out. And off we go again. The individual email (thanks to all the headers and signature blocks) hits 3MB. Times 4500. Sent repeatedly.

    Oddly enough, the original sender got a lot of stick for bringing the entire email system to a grinding halt.

  9. #1189
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by FilanFyretracker View Post
    Reply all. It's like a predator drone or the atom bomb. It has its uses and right times to be used but its not needed for every engagement.
    So this one time about 7 or 8 years ago, a company that was still using HP Openmail had a test group in Belgium that was working on some project. This project had it's own mailing list. We'll call it --project-belgium-projectname-test.

    Somehow, the OM-UID got screwed up in /var/opt/openmail/ and sending mail to --project-belgium-projectname-test instead sent it to --all-all.

    So 160,000 some e-mails go out. Ooops. The test group immediately stops using the address and they put in a request with IT to get this fixed.

    Somehow, sadly, they forgot about the "recall" feature that works on any unopened mail.

    Before IT can get to it?

    Cue this from thousands upon thousands of users, filling up everyone's mailstore.

    ReplyAll: Unsubscribe
    ReplyAll: Take me off this list
    ReplyAll: Why am I getting these e-mails?
    ReplyAll: Please stop hitting reply all, you're making it worse.
    ReplyAll: I didn't sign up for this, take me off the list
    IT Sends: Please do not hit "Reply All". We are working to fix this issue as soon as possible.
    ReplyAll: Guys, IT says stop hitting "Reply All".
    ReplyAll: So why did you hit "Reply All" when they already told us?
    ReplyAll: I just wanted to make sure people saw it.
    ReplyAll: Well DON'T DO THAT.
    ReplyAll: There's no need to be mean
    ReplyAll: Guys, send those e-mail to each other personally, please. IT said stop hitting reply all.
    ReplyAll: UNSUBSCRIBE!!
    ReplyAll: How do I block these? I can't get any work done, I'm getting hundreds of e-mails every minute
    ReplyAll: Yeah, me too! CIRCLE BACK!~
    ReplyAll: GUYS, IT SAYS STOP HITTING REPLY ALL
    ReplyAll: What's a mailbox size warning?

    Over the course of several hours, e-mail got slower and slower.

    Brought the whole company down for almost a week as the manually worked on the mailstores for several hundred servers around the globe.
    For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
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  10. #1190
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    We've had several variations of those mails. That's why we stopped all variations of "send e-mail to everyone" for normal users.
    Only a very few select people can now send mail to the whole company.
    "Silver bullet solutions are rare, silver bullet sales commonplace"

  11. #1191
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by Dawlin View Post
    We've had several variations of those mails. That's why we stopped all variations of "send e-mail to everyone" for normal users.
    Only a very few select people can now send mail to the whole company.
    My company has started using BCC for large-group addressing.

  12. #1192
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Somebody called with a problem with the email server - don't know who it was, don't know what their error was, I just assumed it was a locked account until somebody else called complaining of a similar problem 3 hours later...

    ---

    Fuck I hate my coworkers.
    I've got beer to drink and You guys are wasting my time.

  13. #1193
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Three HOURS?!?!?!

    The phones light up around here if there's the slightest hiccup in mail for so much as two simultaneous users for three MINUTES and then everyone's dialing into conference bridges to figure out what's going wrong.

    Thankfully, our Exchange farm is massive, distributed, and sitting at a nice 5 9's.
    For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
    http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
    Noone should sue or be sued ambiguously.

  14. #1194
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Just a glitch in the Webmail.

    but yeah, I'm surprised it took that long to get a 2nd report too.
    I've got beer to drink and You guys are wasting my time.

  15. #1195
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by Melcar View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Mileron View Post
    Helpless Desk: Why don't you see if anyone else is having the same problem as you?
    Me: 29 other people are having the same problems
    Helpless Desk: And that's your local server, yes?
    Yes, exactly and that's when I shot him your Honor...
    Going on day 7 of this problem.
    Tuesday it took until after 1130 to get local ITS to grant me access to the server room to force-hard-boot the server.
    The problem reoccurred at 1830. As best as I can tell from the server logs, the backup is trying to write its startup log, hitting a corrupt sector on the HDD, and croaking. Except it keeps trying to write the log, which ends up causing the server to run out of memory and hard lock, preventing access.
    Wednesday it took until after 1400 to get ITS to grant me access to the server room for another forceboot.
    Thursday they never showed up and we had to go a full day without access to the server. The Help Desk refused to escalate it to server support tier.
    Friday came and still down. I got access to the server room finally at 1230 but the server wouldn't boot - "non-system disk."
    I finally got the Help Desk to recognize it's a problem so they escalated it to Server Support (SST).
    Server Support used iLO to boot the server but didn't see fit to read my analysis of the situation, the roles of the server (file/doc, database, development central, app server, IIS), or even how the problem really was presenting.
    Thus when we came in on Monday the server was inaccessible again.
    Emails to SST finally got us in by 1000 but again my emails stating that "at 1830 when the server backup begins the server will hardlock again" were ignored because again today Tuesday it was hardlocked.
    SST got it up and running by 825.

    Email from SST: "What kind of functions does this server perform?"

    Quote Originally Posted by Melcar View Post
    Yes, exactly and that's when I shot him your Honor...
    ^^^

  16. #1196
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    ...Yeah, server room trip number two and I would have been un-racking that bad boy and placing it somewhere that could be reached without their intervention.

    I would have figured out SOMETHING to keep it out of EVERYONE'S hands, but unless the server support team is giving you cell phone numbers for instant on-call iLO restarts, your office is effectively down.
    For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
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  17. #1197
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    And that is when you wish you could just credit card the door and do the job. If it takes them that long to grant access there is a problem.
    Today we sail
    On the Solar Rail
    For there's much we just don't know
    So farewell with a kiss
    Then it's fast for the mist
    Till we're sleeping in the cold below

  18. #1198
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Actual user email: Also Eremius, it keeps coming up that my anti virus business addition needs updated…..restart computer now. Thanks DeepThinkingUser


    Well, what would you guess that message means? It IS rather cryptic...

  19. #1199
    Mr. Angsty Spice
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Other Tech: Working on users shared calendar and I'm getting really confused and frustrated -
    I get some of users calendar - but not all ; I think I need to reinstall the shared calendar component..

    Me: I don't think so. -- If you open calendar view set it to show all items see here? says 50 items, hop out to server console pull up user, Server says 50 items synced. What does that tell you?

    OT: I dunno. but she created an item today that's not syncing.

    Me: Well it tells me she's creating it in the wrong calendar; Specifically one she's not syncing.

    OT: Oh, I never thought of that.
    I've got beer to drink and You guys are wasting my time.

  20. #1200
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    Re: Tales from Techsupport

    Quote Originally Posted by Melcar View Post
    Other Tech: Working on users shared calendar and I'm getting really confused and frustrated -
    I get some of users calendar - but not all ; I think I need to reinstall the shared calendar component..

    Me: I don't think so. -- If you open calendar view set it to show all items see here? says 50 items, hop out to server console pull up user, Server says 50 items synced. What does that tell you?

    OT: I dunno. but she created an item today that's not syncing.

    Me: Well it tells me she's creating it in the wrong calendar; Specifically one she's not syncing.

    OT: Oh, I never thought of that.
    Wow.

    95% of the exchange issues I hear about or have to support are related to cached exchange mode being turned on.

    This one, on the other hand, is 100% sheer idiocy.
    For copyright purposes, all of my posts are covered under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"
    http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
    Noone should sue or be sued ambiguously.

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