Tales from Techsupport

[Alikat Astrae]

No way would that fly, clients often send each other work related files.

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

Yeah some people abuse the overhead services and need to be reminded that they are a cost center.

I have LONG been a proponent of billing back each department for every minute of IT time they use, listing each user.

It turns IT from a cost center into a revenue generator.

Most places I've worked make the IT department use *their* budget for every *other* department's IT purchases, then complain about how much we're spending and that we're not bringing anything in like sales does, where sales is the department that's slaying trees by the dozens and printing everything in max dpi full color at the rate of hundreds to sometimes THOUSANDS of pages an hour.

I've only worked a grand total of ONE place that charged IT time back to the individual departments *and* automatically took mandatory PC upgrades out of every department's budget when the leases were up.

This was over ten years ago, but the rule was if you needed a deleted e-mail restored from the HP Openmail servers, it was $1,000 per item out of your department's budget and required department VP approval because the only way to do it was to do a bare-metal restore from backup onto an off-net box and that took HOURS.

Suddenly we went from getting dozens upon dozens of requests a day to everyone realizing they could just ask the person to send it again.

File restores from network drive deletions were easier (and therefore cheaper) because once we got all of the servers upgraded to 2003, we had volume shadow copy enabled, but every minute of IT time was billed back.

This had the added benefit of meaning we could afford some very expensive software that made fixing certain kinds of problems a very fast and easy turnaround, and it meant we could afford to do backups far more frequently, so it helped everyone.

Every company should do it.

IT is integral to productivity in a business and if the bean-counters can see that it's not just a money-sink, and actually FUNDS the IT department, it benefits the company as a whole.

[Mileron]

Caller: Hi, this is mumbledname also from my own company so this is an internal call and should not be counted for recording purposes.
Sorry buddy, doesn't work that way.
Me: Good morning, how can I help you?
Caller: I need you to take these two tickets off my hands. They're for Product1 that's not mine that I've never heard of and Product2 that's not mine that's based in the UK.
Me: Well as far as the first one, I've never heard of it, and the second one, you yourself said that's a UK product, so you'll need the UK support queues.
Caller: Can you transfer me?
Me: No... I'm based in the US, in Philadelphia, so I wouldn't know how to transfer to the UK. My phone won't even dial another country. For true. They disabled dialing other countries. This was a problem when we got developers based in India until they implemented internal international calling.
Caller: So you're not going to help me?
Me: Knowing my calls are always recorded...: You are making an assumption I have not stated. Please let me check my Good Old Generic List... Okay with some digging around, here are the phone numbers you need for the tickets. Turns out the first ticket is a sub-product of another of my company's
Caller: You are not going to take ownership of these?
Me: I am not. They are not products I am able to support.
Caller: Fine. Goodbye.

[Mileron]

This is a series of chats that took place over about 45 minutes (due to call volume, both he and I were really busy)

Coworker: Did you receive the file?
Me: No, how did you try to send it?
Coworker: Email
Me: You know you can't email DLL files internally
Coworker: Since when?
Me: ... 2004?
Coworker: Not even if I zip them?
Me: ... No
Coworker: What about if I rename it?
Me: Highly unlikely
Coworker: So what am I supposed to do?
Me: Put it in a folder on the network we both have access to?
Coworker: That takes too long.

...Sure, as opposed to the extra 45 minutes or more you've already made me wait...

[Melcar]

Coworker: What about if I rename it?
Me: Highly unlikely

I would expect A Rename to work as long as you renamed to an actual permitted extension (or none) - SMTP servers don't read the content of the files - it simply reads the MIME header for attachment blocking.

[Mileron]

I would expect A Rename to work as long as you renamed to an actual permitted extension (or none) - SMTP servers don't read the content of the files - it simply reads the MIME header for attachment blocking.

Some other background in-depth scanning is going on, because an EXE renamed to, for example, XEX, or a DLL renamed to DOC will get rejected as a disallowed file.

[FilanFyretracker]

Some other background in-depth scanning is going on, because an EXE renamed to, for example, XEX, or a DLL renamed to DOC will get rejected as a disallowed file.

My guess, The scanner knows the overall structure of certain file types. After all the extension is really quite meaningless, It is merely something that tells the operating system how to handle it. but id imagine the software looks at the file just a bit and knows executables and dlls for example have a known pattern so even renaming to .png does not hide what it really is.

[Mileron]

New product release
Getting swamped with calls
Lead tech sends email chain with fix forwarded from developers
LT: If you see this error, shown below, please see the forwarded email's steps for the fix
Email: Do this, do this, do that, and if you see this, do this last thing. No screenshots
Me: LT, there are no screenshots - none from you, none from the developers
LT: Yes there are
Me: No, there aren't. Did you forward the email from your iPhone or something or somehow turn off HTML formatting so that the screenshots got stripped?
LT: Directly sends me a copy of the email Look, screenshots
Me: sends back screenshot of the email Look, no screenshots
LT: You must have deleted them
Me: Sure, because I want to not help my customers

[Mileron]

One of my more prolific external customers is a penny pincher, and doesn't renew his license until it's absotively necessary.
So if his invoice was due in March, but he didn't need an update or support, he'll let it go unpaid until June or July or later and then call when he needs an update saying "I didn't have the money then but I do now".
He got a new computer this week and I helped him reinstall his programs.
Fine and easy right?
Today I've got a rip-roaring migraine but can't take off due to my prior post (new product/swamped) not to mention not having any more PTO due to said migraines and he calls me and says "okay I'm having problems with the software."
I hear the telltale echo of "your call is being recorded" so I make sure I follow call procedure to the letter, right, which I usually do anyway, but this guy's a chatterer and likes to take the conversation on tangents
So I get logged into his computer and start poking around and he starts going off on one of those tangents about how Intuit no longer owns Quickbooks (or something) and then he says "now I need you to fix my Quickbooks install."
I said simply "I cannot support another company's tax software", he laughed it off, I fixed his other problem (which I now think, a half hour later due to the migraine no doubt, that he engineered the problem in order to get me on the phone to try to get me to support his Quickbooks) and said "have a good weekend".

If I get a bad recording report because of this call, I'll be royally pissed.

[FilanFyretracker]

People always try and get you to support things that are unsupported. My work in cable tech support and startling number of people called and wanted Us to clean up their computers because to them the virus "came from the cable modem".

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

I would expect A Rename to work as long as you renamed to an actual permitted extension (or none) - SMTP servers don't read the content of the files - it simply reads the MIME header for attachment blocking.

You can, actually, use transport rules to scan by MIME type and block "application/x-msdownload", which will get all DLL files with that MIME type, even if they're renamed to .txt files.

There's also another step in there, but I forget what it is and don't feel like looking it up.

It's the same reason that someone can change a gif to a jpg and it'll still animate in your browser (on some browsers).

I remember back in the late 90's early 2000's there was a way to change the actual MIME type information displayed to IE so that an .hta file looked like a .txt file to the BROWSER but still executed as an .hta the instant it finished downloading. Something to do with the javascript engine at the time.

That was the basis of a TON of exploits.

What we always did to get around stuff like that was zip the banned extension, then encrypt (or sometimes just password protect) the zip file.

Of course, then the crypto-scammers got wise and started doing that with THEIR zipped payloads (your invoice is enclosed, type "openinvoice" when prompted to view it.), so we had to ban all non-scannable zip files and tell everyone to use a secure FTP solution if it needed to get in and out of the company.

Thankfully, Filezilla is pretty easy to set up for that.

[Melcar]

Follow along very closely now:

Pick up the phone... Dial the first number... Press "Conference/Transfer" - first call is placed on hold automatically, dial the 2nd number, once they pick up, Press "Conference/Transfer". -- All 3 parties are now talking.

It's very complicated..


"What was the first button again?"

[Mileron]

Sales Rep: Customer's asking me if (software last supported in 2003) will install on a new Windows 10 computer
Me: Probably not
SR: Why not?
Me: Let's say for a moment you took the train into the office
SR: OK
Me: Let's say you had a pathological need for it to be a steam engine
SR: OK
Me: What are the chances of you getting onto a train and having it be pulled by a steam engine nowadays?
SR: Slim to none outside of museums?
Me: Ding ding ding

[Melcar]

Well the highlight of my day to day has been explaining to our County Administrator that the reason Commissioner A's email to Commissioner B was rejected because Commissioner A can't spell the name of our County.

[Alikat Astrae]

He is the cretin of the countyyyyyyyyyyyy!

[Mileron]

On Monday, the power went out in my house for oh, maybe 15 minutes?
My sister-in-law's wireless printer decided upon rebooting that it didn't want to remember that it had a wireless connection anymore.

I powercycled the printer. I let it sit powered off overnight. After a reset I even wholly power cycled the whole wireless network hoping that something would jigger. No such luck. It simply wouldn't find any wireless networks.
So then I reset the printer to factory defaults and finally it was able to find access points. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to connect to the network with the SSID and passcode.

Then I tried WPS. I hate, hate WPS with a passion. Still nothing. Not with the button. Not with the PIN.
So I tried something else crazy. I disabled the wireless radio on the second AP in the house (which has the same SSID), which barely transmitted far enough to hit the SiL's room.

And wouldn't you know it, the damn printer started pissing out all of the spooled pages.
2017-01-04.jpg

[Eremius]

Wireless is the devil. It is a connection of last resort.

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

Wireless is the devil. It is a connection of last resort.

Dude, seriously.

I've been saying this for well over a decade.

The hundreds upon hundreds of times I've solved escalated tickets that noone, even on level 2 supprt, can figure out by saying "plug in an ethernet cable" is RIDICULOUS.

The hundreds of thousands of tickets I've worked since 1998, at least 10% of them, probably more, have been wi-fi issues.

Wireless is a beautiful thing when it works. I love being able to carry my tablet from my office to the kitchen and watch streaming media while I cook, but I SURE AS FUCK DON'T RELY ON IT TO BE ANY KIND OF STABLE.

Copper works far more reliably than signal-over-air.

As the old Glade air freshener ads used to say:

Plug it in, Plug it in.

[Merrick ap'Milandra]

Although I did once hitch into my asshat neighbor's wireless (and completely unsecured) printer and print him a nice three page dissertation on chicken, complete with the standard derivations of said ground-bound fowl.

https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

He somehow figured out how to secure his wireless shortly thereafter.

[Mileron]

Copper works far more reliably than signal-over-air.

As the old Glade air freshener ads used to say:

Plug it in, Plug it in.

I've haphazardly wired my house, because this is my mantra as well.

The only things that are wireless in my house that I have direct control over are the things that must be - phones, tablets, Echo, Fire stick - everything else except my wife's laptop (which means, realistically, everything that I use) has up to now been hard wired.

It's great when it works, but with the lack of knowledge Joe Neighbor (as your subsequent reply demonstrates quite nicely) has over the technology coupled with the intrinsically limited usability it has when there's more-and-more people having it at home, plus more-and-more devices that simply piss out wireless broadcasting, it makes it quite difficult to keep a "clean" wireless environment.

Before I moved in with my now-wife, it was no problem, because my mom's house is so old, the wiring and shitty ass 1940s foil-backed insulation basically turned my house into a radio free zone and wireless signals couldn't get in or out. Sure, this made it difficult to use cell phones indoors sometimes, but we almost never got wireless interruptions due to neighboring APs.

But now, in a cul-de-sac where the houses are less than 60 feet apart, approximately 200 feet from my front door to the across-the-loop neighbor, my Wifi analyzer app on my phone picks up 8 different wireless signals (at least 3 of them are xfinity guest hotspots. I turned mine off months ago.) Two are printers.

I used to think bridging and duplicating SSIDs between APs was the way to go for spreading a wireless signal across an area but since having a second AP with a duplicate SSID seems to be causing more problems with the phones etc I may end up just getting a signal repeater.