arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
And sometimes you get a request that just makes you laugh. Just received this email:
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Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more
Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)
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Faydra
sinning sybarite
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The greatest satisfaction ever comes from sweetly and politely telling them how stupid they are.
I have two examples.
1) In a previous life I worked on an sftp file transfer system. You create keys and give out your public key for them to encrypt a file with, and then use your private key to decrypt it. I was unable to decrypt a file and went back to the vendor letting them know there was a problem. They continued for days to insist that I was doing something wrong. Finally, they said "I don't know why you can't decrypt it, I downloaded it and was able to decrypt it just fine". I sweetly told them, had they encrypted it properly with MY key, they should not have been able to decrypt it. I had a correct file in about 5 minutes after that reply along with very sweet and satisfying dead silence.
2) SAP job kept failing with an error. I'm not an SAP person, I've never been on an SAP system in my life. The person kept insisting the problem was on my side. I googled the error it was reporting and gave them the solution in about 5 minutes. Never heard from them again. Sweet sweet silence, the sound of WINNING.
I have two examples.
1) In a previous life I worked on an sftp file transfer system. You create keys and give out your public key for them to encrypt a file with, and then use your private key to decrypt it. I was unable to decrypt a file and went back to the vendor letting them know there was a problem. They continued for days to insist that I was doing something wrong. Finally, they said "I don't know why you can't decrypt it, I downloaded it and was able to decrypt it just fine". I sweetly told them, had they encrypted it properly with MY key, they should not have been able to decrypt it. I had a correct file in about 5 minutes after that reply along with very sweet and satisfying dead silence.
2) SAP job kept failing with an error. I'm not an SAP person, I've never been on an SAP system in my life. The person kept insisting the problem was on my side. I googled the error it was reporting and gave them the solution in about 5 minutes. Never heard from them again. Sweet sweet silence, the sound of WINNING.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I was once asked what SAP stands for, so I found out. I'm not going to look it up again, but it turned out to be something really boring like "Systems Analysis and Procedures". But probably in German.
Faydra
sinning sybarite
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Ha! I don't remember it either. And equally not interested in finding out again.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I do remember when I called the person back with the information saying "I found out what it stands for, but you're going to be disappointed".
Faydra
sinning sybarite
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People that include humor in their tickets have the best chance of getting my full attention to their issue.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Yes!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Not with me. I'm definitely a time and a place kind of guy. You have a problem, all I want is to solve it as quickly as possible, so we can both relax and go back to doing something we'd each enjoy more. Jokes in tickets just get in the way of me figuring out what's broke and fixing it. And please don't spend time thinking of jokes instead of thinking how to describe the problem better.
Faydra
sinning sybarite
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Stupid jokes get you nowhere. Clever humor related to the problem get prioritized below actual REAL problems and above stupid people problems.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
The joke in the ticket I posted above does nothing to get in the way of the user's actual problem. It is clear from the email that their mouse wheel is broken, and we know precisely what we need to do about that. The joke is merely a decoration, and we see those so rarely in this job that its mere presence makes me smile. And my colleagues and TL for that matter when I read the email out.
If, on the other hand, the user tried to explain their problem to me in the form of a riddle, I would have a lot less patience with that.
Here's another one that I copied into my OneNote when I received it:
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I'm not saying you're wrong to feel that way. But not everybody does. What makes me smile is a clear and succinct problem description, full stop. An extra line with a joke in it is another line of problem description I have to read... only to discover I didn't have to read it after all.
That's one of those "thinking of jokes instead of thinking of how to describe the problem" things I hate.
Sounds possessed? WTF is that? Static? Echo? Distortion? Feedback? Constant beeping? When does it happen? When you pick up the handset? On speakerphone? Only when dialing into a conference call? Only when receiving a call?
"When you have to shoot... shoot! Don't crack jokes." - Tuco, probably.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Yeah, that one was a little harder to parse. But it was funny. The phone sounds like it's possessed. Gold.
Wudang
BOFH
https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/
It happens. At an IBM lab many years ago they decided to try cleanroom development. They were warned in advance that traditional management metrics would not apply. Everything ticked along nicely as predicted but cleanroom was killed despite being a success because managers missed their usual metrics.
TheGnome
Thinker
I think you are misremebering here. I don't think I've ever seen a dongle for use with any proprietary hardware. The only effect they ever had on hardware was for it to not work properly anymore.
The dongles were used for software copy protection. They were small things that you plugged (most often) into the parallel port. They then sat there and did nothing obvious.
Today I'm quite okay with calling anything a dongle that is small, plugs into the usb and doesn't do anything immediately obvious. But maybe that's because I'm a german speaking Swiss. We have a history of misusing a lot of english words.
You are both correct, they were often security devices - either to allow hardware to be connected or software to run.
These days the most common use for a dongle is as a mobile data connection.
And see this is what bugs me.
We have a customer base that is putting no effort into describing their problem or what they need and we're so damn scared of being seen as "non-professional" that we have to laugh and shrug it off.
If the woman needed a part for her laptop she should have been able to at least try to verbalize what it was and what function it would accomplish. That's not asking too much.
But comments made here have made it obvious that such concepts make us "unprofessional" and "ungrateful since these people keep us in jobs."
We have a customer base that is putting no effort into describing their problem or what they need and we're so damn scared of being seen as "non-professional" that we have to laugh and shrug it off.
If the woman needed a part for her laptop she should have been able to at least try to verbalize what it was and what function it would accomplish. That's not asking too much.
But comments made here have made it obvious that such concepts make us "unprofessional" and "ungrateful since these people keep us in jobs."
Hellbound
Merchant of Doom
Sadly, it's not just users.
I run our internal Certification Authority (the system that issues TLS certificates to our internal systems). While I don't expect everyone to be an expert, I am continually amazed at the number of system administrators and web site owners who don't even know the functional basics: how to request and apply a certificate to their own system. Heck, any software you get will have that printed out in the help documentation, usually easily found.
And this morning I get a call from someone having an issue with one of our external websites. Apparently, they still were using Symantec-issued public certs. So several of our production sites are down due to cert errors because the admin that runs those sites was out-of-touch enough to not know that Symantec was going away (something that's been in the news for over a year now).
I run our internal Certification Authority (the system that issues TLS certificates to our internal systems). While I don't expect everyone to be an expert, I am continually amazed at the number of system administrators and web site owners who don't even know the functional basics: how to request and apply a certificate to their own system. Heck, any software you get will have that printed out in the help documentation, usually easily found.
And this morning I get a call from someone having an issue with one of our external websites. Apparently, they still were using Symantec-issued public certs. So several of our production sites are down due to cert errors because the admin that runs those sites was out-of-touch enough to not know that Symantec was going away (something that's been in the news for over a year now).
Wudang
BOFH
In case it's of use a friend wrote this a few years back. Amongst other things it checks when certs will expire from a list of websites.
https://github.com/brabster/website-checker
Faydra
sinning sybarite
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Ha.
My software does have it in their documentation and it is fairly easily found.
But it's wrong, it doesn't include half the steps you need to do in addition to what's on the document. I've had a ticket open with them for a month and they still don't know what to do to get it to work.
Certs are the 5th level of hell for me.
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Hellbound
Merchant of Doom
IBM product?
ETA: There are some exceptions (IBM being the major one: seriously, java-based keystores for everything? Proprietary tools to access them? WTF?). And some of the -ix based appliances can be a bit trickier. I'm more than willing to work with an admin to find answers, but there are limits. We have one guy that, although I've written multiple copies of clear instructions, with screenshots, to walk him through the process of updating his WebSphere certs, I STILL end up having to walk him through it in a Skype session everytime they expire, because he'll do things like create the CSR on an entirely different system and never move the private key over, or put the CA certs into a personal store instead of trusted roots, or similar. Not just a matter of having issues, but refusing to learn or understand even the basics of how a certificate operates. I sometimes wonder why I'm not a 10:00 news item yet: "Downtown Man kills 16, wounds 78 in staple remover homicide!"
ETA2: Heck, I even wrote up three versions of classes for the company on encryption (a short, medium, and long, with varying levels of details) to teach our admins the basics. I did have some takers, but none of the ones that are always the most trouble. Seriously, I'm willing to give up 2 hours to train people, instead they want to waste twice that amount of time every year when they need new certs.
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