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

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TragicMonkey said:
2015

TM: Shouldn't this huge notes field have some limitations on it, or strip out some unwelcome characters and whitespace before it stores it in the reporting database?

Expert: That's not necessary.



2016

Expert: Why are people putting pipes and so many tabs and enters in the notes field?! It's messing up all the exports!!!

TM: What a pity nobody thought of-- oh, wait, here's the email chain where I did, and you said it wasn't necessary. I saved it. I save all the emails.



Turns out a lot of people actually do use pipes when typing out large screeds of text, they think it looks neat.
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Just the thought of invalidated chunks of text bring me out in a cold sweat. In 20 or so years of working with databases, I've seen people use all sorts of characters to break text up.
 
Blue Mountain said:
Yes! Unfortunately developers tend to coddle their software. "I know that doing x, y, and z together will break the program, so I won't do it." I can get away with that thinking if I'm writing a program for my own use, but not if anyone else can supply it with input. A good tester should try to break the software.
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That's why developers should never test the code they've written.

If a tester doesn't break software on a regular basis he/she is not doing a good job.
 
Wudang said:
They're amatuers. I wouldn't give them a job. Seriously.
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The sad thing is that I'm neither IT nor business unit so I don't have any direct influence over the processes. I just use my authority as head of internal audit to muscle in and try to show them the error of their ways. And make sure that the Board and the audit committee receive memos from me pointing out the issues long before things go badly wrong.
 
Darat said:
I keep all my emails, and before that all my memos and I always record any decisions with a summary of the decisions and why and most telling who has made the decision. It’s not just a matter of CYA, it is amazing how some people will change their mind about something that is apparently very important (and of course will cost more or take longer) when their name is put against the decision.
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I've been implementing a formalised part of our risk management process in which I document my perception of residual risks at the project and business level and invite the heads of divisions to sign off that they accept them. That's been effective at focusing minds so far.
 
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Gord_in_Toronto said:
Plus, of course, if your project has TEST in the project plan just before GO LIVE, as (when) the project starts missing deadlines the time for testing gets cut shorter and shorter. I've had the misfortune to be Test Manager on some fairly large projects and I don't think I've ever been on one where the PM or senior management said, "Whatever we do we must complete the testing as we planned". :(
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We are three years into a five year, $multimillion project and I've just presented a report to the Board saying I don't believe we can deliver in time and perform all the testing steps. Much to my surprise, BigBoss has requested an updated project plan giving us a year longer and $millionmore to get it all done properly.

I should perhaps mention that this most rare of situations has come about because this project is an absolute show-stopper, business-critical, get-it-wrong-and-we-close-our-doors kind of IT implementation project.
 
erlando said:
That's why developers should never test the code they've written.

If a tester doesn't break software on a regular basis he/she is not doing a good job.
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But whoever writes the test plan should at least talk to the users, when coming up with workflows to test. My last implemenation project had a horrific testing because the idiots writing the test plans knew nothing about the workflow, and would order the testers (who were the builders anyway, but by making us follow undeviatingly from their mighty test plan supposedly that was cancelled out) to do the test plans exactly as written no matter how nonsensical or impossible they were.

My favorite was a week-long argument trying to get them to understand that even the best clinics aren't doing liver transplants as outpatient procedures, and that's why it's impossible to schedule one that way in our system. They insisted it was shoddy build rather than legitimate medical practice that made that not work. They also didn't understand why we made it impossible to schedule dead people for future follow-up appointments. No offense, public, but after you die your doctors don't care whether your weight is in an acceptable BMI range. After death you are allowed to let yourself go. Most people lose weight postmortem, gradually if buried and a lot at once if cremated.
 
And for some reason this morning about 1/3 of my users time on their PCs is 5 minutes fast. And it's nearly totally at random with no consistent shared variables between the ones who have it and the ones who don't.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And for some reason this morning about 1/3 of my users time on their PCs is 5 minutes fast. And it's nearly totally at random with no consistent shared variables between the ones who have it and the ones who don't.
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It's a fluctuation in time! Call the Doctor!!!
 
JoeMorgue said:
And for some reason this morning about 1/3 of my users time on their PCs is 5 minutes fast. And it's nearly totally at random with no consistent shared variables between the ones who have it and the ones who don't.
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Unlike the time on this forum, which is about 8 minutes behind. That kind of surprised me; my other forum is consistently five minutes fast.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And for some reason this morning about 1/3 of my users time on their PCs is 5 minutes fast. And it's nearly totally at random with no consistent shared variables between the ones who have it and the ones who don't.
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Possibly a problem with a round-robin front-end at time.windows.com? Although I would think Microsoft could keep all the servers running there all on the same time. There's an RFC for that [IETF] and it's been in Windows since NT4.

Trebuchet said:
Unlike the time on this forum, which is about 8 minutes behind. That kind of surprised me; my other forum is consistently five minutes fast.
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This has always baffled me. It's Linux server and most Linux distributions have an NTP client available as a package. Why is it not installed and enabled?
 
JoeMorgue said:
And for some reason this morning about 1/3 of my users time on their PCs is 5 minutes fast. And it's nearly totally at random with no consistent shared variables between the ones who have it and the ones who don't.
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Trebuchet said:
Unlike the time on this forum, which is about 8 minutes behind. That kind of surprised me; my other forum is consistently five minutes fast.
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NTP. It works. Windows PC's on Active Directory time sync with the domain controller, but the domain controller should be synced with a reliable time source.
 
"The computer won't boot, is on fire, has obtained sentience and sent a machine back kill Sarah Conner, and it is displaying every virus warning know to man" - Easy trouble call.

"I can't get this website to load" - Wildcard. Either a 2 second fix or a few hours of banging your head against the wall.

"When I print out a report it doesn't look right" - Nightmare trouble call.

The word "Microsoft .net Framework" appears anywhere in the trouble call - Continuous existential terror, screaming into the void while my eyes bleed and I start chanting backwards in Latin waiting for Death's sweet embrace.
 
JoeMorgue said:
"The computer won't boot, is on fire, has obtained sentience and sent a machine back kill Sarah Conner, and it is displaying every virus warning know to man" - Easy trouble call.

"I can't get this website to load" - Wildcard. Either a 2 second fix or a few hours of banging your head against the wall.

"When I print out a report it doesn't look right" - Nightmare trouble call.

The word "Microsoft .net Framework" appears anywhere in the trouble call - Continuous existential terror, screaming into the void while my eyes bleed and I start chanting backwards in Latin waiting for Death's sweet embrace.
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Exceeded by "My printer is flashing an error light." :D

Over on Reddit's TalesFromTechSupport (despite Reddit's poor reputation, it's is one of their better subreddits) there's a meme that every time a company designs a new printer they summon up a fresh demon from Hell to inhabit it.
 
My company used to have a lot of a particular model of HP laser printer. It was probably more common than not to go pick up your printout and find an error message on the printer: "PAPER JAM. CLEAR JAM TO CONTINUE"
Other than pulling out the tray, there was absolutely no access to the interior of the machine to clear a jam. Fortunately, the jams were pretty much always imaginary and the solution was to reboot the machine.
 
This is all so weird because every industry I've worked in has being going to "go paperless" any day now for the last 30 years.
 
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