Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Norman Alexander said:
That would probably be Mandrake 8. Alphas vary in size and shape from pizza box to phone booth. Hopefully you didn't have to wheel in the phone booth model?
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Hahah! No, not a phone booth. It was roughly the size of two tower PCs joined together into an almost cube. (the footprint was rectangular).

I'm almost certain it was one of these (particularly because I remember it having four CPUs in the box):
AlphaServerWP

and Mandrake 5 maybe?

I've just had a poke around, and I'm guessing that it was probably originally running RedHat and I "upgraded" it to Mandrake 5.1, because of the userland stuff in the Mandrake distro.

Good times.
 
Place I do the occasional repair for still has 2 98se machines and a xp machine...
They will never be upgraded until they break down for good however

DSC00416.jpg


I have them networked but isolated from the net
The cost of upgrading would be astronomical (you basically have to replace the entire control head) and the old hardware doesn't have the grunt to run anything newer
Replacing the entire machine is a definite 'not gunna happen' and all three???
LOL

This is one of the issues with windows, its all nice to say that old systems should be upgraded, but in many cases, it simply isn't economical or even possible to do so)
All I can do is keep them running, and as isolated from the real world as much as possible but they have to be networked and thats that... (designs come from all over the country and sometimes even from overseas, and those files have to get onto the machines somehow)
 
arthwollipot said:
Anyone remember OS2 Warp?
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Yes!

Struggling to remember which department it was, probably Centrelink (in pre-Centrelink days).

There was one guy who sat near me who had OS/2 .

It looked like windows, but prettier, and, IIRC, he was running it because he needed to run multiple instances of something at the same time.

:)

Hah! I remember CP/M-86, that was the first "desktop" OS that I used at work.

(WordStar and SuperCal may have been the names of the two packages that I used the most)
 
Dabop said:
Place I do the occasional repair for still has 2 98se machines and a xp machine...
They will never be upgraded until they break down for good however

[qimg]https://i.postimg.cc/QxCY3fV6/DSC00416.jpg[/qimg]

I have them networked but isolated from the net
The cost of upgrading would be astronomical (you basically have to replace the entire control head) and the old hardware doesn't have the grunt to run anything newer
Replacing the entire machine is a definite 'not gunna happen' and all three???
LOL

This is one of the issues with windows, its all nice to say that old systems should be upgraded, but in many cases, it simply isn't economical or even possible to do so)
All I can do is keep them running, and as isolated from the real world as much as possible but they have to be networked and thats that... (designs come from all over the country and sometimes even from overseas, and those files have to get onto the machines somehow)
Click to expand...
Many medical and scientific instrument systems are "certified" at specific configurations. These will include the OS version and the hardware in some cases. Change those out of spec without checking and the certification lapses. And that means some medical diagnoses and procedures are considered no longer "reliable" (as in, if someone gets hurt due to decisions made based on data from these systems, and the software is not properly certified...BIG legal trouble).

To get any new versions, it is quite literally a whole new food-fight from scratch to justify a replacement system.
 
I worked in the mining game for a while, and its the same there- we literally started to get a new system certified for use for fluid transfer systems (3 million litres of diesel isnt something you can have a mistake with) and by the time that the then new vista o/s programs were tested and approved, vista was already gone.....

This one was fun
DSC00411.jpg

It no longer looks like that....

I had bumped the screen eht up several times as it aged, but still had gotten to the stage it couldn't be seen (hey they got their moneys worth out of it- its been on 8hrs a day minimum, 5 days a week since the 90's...)
Its a standard vga monitor, but obviously you cant buy a crt one anymore
So it now has a shiny new aluminium box mounted where the old crt monitor was, with a small lcd monitor inside with a plexiglass front cover (theres a lot of metal shavings and lube splashing around so it needs protection)

I am dreading if the hub supplying these machines goes bang (its on its third) its an old 10mb/s with coax connectors and cat5 connectors as well- the run to the office computer is cat 5, but all these machines are bnc coax network connections on them....

I used my last one last time, if it fails again I'm going to be scratching to keep that network going....
(that machine is still 98se btw)
 
Dabop said:
I worked in the mining game for a while, and its the same there- we literally started to get a new system certified for use for fluid transfer systems (3 million litres of diesel isnt something you can have a mistake with) and by the time that the then new vista o/s programs were tested and approved, vista was already gone.....

This one was fun
[qimg]https://i.postimg.cc/Kjxjd9bQ/DSC00411.jpg[/qimg]
It no longer looks like that....

I had bumped the screen eht up several times as it aged, but still had gotten to the stage it couldn't be seen (hey they got their moneys worth out of it- its been on 8hrs a day minimum, 5 days a week since the 90's...)
Its a standard vga monitor, but obviously you cant buy a crt one anymore
So it now has a shiny new aluminium box mounted where the old crt monitor was, with a small lcd monitor inside with a plexiglass front cover (theres a lot of metal shavings and lube splashing around so it needs protection)

I am dreading if the hub supplying these machines goes bang (its on its third) its an old 10mb/s with coax connectors and cat5 connectors as well- the run to the office computer is cat 5, but all these machines are bnc coax network connections on them....

I used my last one last time, if it fails again I'm going to be scratching to keep that network going....
(that machine is still 98se btw)
Click to expand...
PM me offline about old network gear. MAY be able to help there.
 
Oh, here's a good one.

Someone sends an email to Service Desk describing a problem. I reply saying "Try this, and if it doesn't fix the problem, please phone the Service Desk on {number}."

A day later there's another email saying "It didn't work. What do I do?"
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh, here's a good one.

Someone sends an email to Service Desk describing a problem. I reply saying "Try this, and if it doesn't fix the problem, please phone the Service Desk on {number}."

A day later there's another email saying "It didn't work. What do I do?"
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I don't get this one. She seems to be being polite to you by contacting by e-mail rather than phone. E-mail is generally less demanding than a phone call.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
I don't get this one. She seems to be being polite to you by contacting by e-mail rather than phone. E-mail is generally less demanding than a phone call.
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Yeah, in this case we needed to fix the problem by remote accessing the computer, which has to be done during a phone call. As it turned out, I took the call and was able to resolve the problem easily enough. But it's not the kind of thing that is practical to do via email exchange, especially with a nontechnical user.

But regardless, I asked them specifically to phone, and they sent an email. People just can't follow instructions.
 
arthwollipot said:
But regardless, I asked them specifically to phone, and they sent an email. People just can't follow instructions.
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She made a polite interpretation of your instructions. If you're going to ding her for not calling then you should have explained at least a bit about why a phone call would be necessary. Something as simple "please call, we won't be able to resolve this via e-mail".
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
She made a polite interpretation of your instructions. If you're going to ding her for not calling then you should have explained at least a bit about why a phone call would be necessary. Something as simple "please call, we won't be able to resolve this via e-mail".
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In an environment where a frequent call opening is "Hi, my user ID is {userid} and my asset number is {workstationname}, can you please remote access my PC?" it tends to be assumed.

But yes, sometimes when it isn't as busy and there isn't the certainty that I'm going to be interrupted by three calls while in the process of typing a single sentence into an email, I'll generally say that we need to fix the problem by remote accessing the workstation. I neglected that in this case.
 
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