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

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In clearing out my cellar I've uncovered some old games I fancy playing again. These are old enough to be on CD but with instructions if playing them on a Win95 box to drop out to DOS. I've played around on an ancient laptop for an hour or so but I'd forgotten just what a faff it used to be to get everything working back in those days. CD support was iffy and of course no USB.
 
arthwollipot said:
Things I Wish More People Knew, Part 49325: The letter doesn't matter.

The letter of the alphabet that you use to refer to a network drive is arbitary. There are some standard conventions in use in this organisation, but by and large telling us that you need access to the K: drive doesn't actually tell us anything about what network location you need access to. Every network share has a name - in this organisation, that name is an 8-digit number. We need to know that name in order to give you access to it.

Tier 1s, you should know this too.

So glad we're migrating to a sharepoint environment, even though it will break many brains. They're just going to have to get used to it.
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I don't know about SharePoint, but Linux has never had drive letters. It's always been mount points. Couple those with fstab and automount, and network shares are pretty transparent to the users ... until they go down! (There's a reason NFS is sometimes referred to as the Nightmare File System :) )
 
Blue Mountain said:
I don't know about SharePoint, but Linux has never had drive letters. It's always been mount points. Couple those with fstab and automount, and network shares are pretty transparent to the users ... until they go down! (There's a reason NFS is sometimes referred to as the Nightmare File System :) )
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I still miss AFS. That was an eye opener for me.

Sharepoint can be okay but at the bank they massively FUBARed it by turning off direct links to files. So any time someone decided folders needed reorganising links got lost.
 
Blue Mountain said:
I don't know about SharePoint, but Linux has never had drive letters. It's always been mount points. Couple those with fstab and automount, and network shares are pretty transparent to the users ... until they go down! (There's a reason NFS is sometimes referred to as the Nightmare File System :) )
Click to expand...
I can barely imagine what it'd be like to try and teach the average government employee how to use a Linux desktop.
 
arthwollipot said:
I can barely imagine what it'd be like to try and teach the average government employee how to use a Linux desktop.
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Been there, done that. Most successful method (and that was barely scraping by) was:

1) Make it look like a Windows desktop
2) Try to use similar icons to Windows icons
3) Try to make it behave as close as possible to Windows desktop
4) Don't tell the user and see if they notice
5) Scrap the idea and use a real Windows desktop instead

Linux is fine for IT-aware techies and gurus, no issue there. Appreciate all the good reasons why you would select and run it in a techie environment. But it's not really a user-friendly and stable environment in userland. Too many opportunities for each version and platform to be different from another in critically noticeable ways that will confuse the heck out of dumb-ass users. It's a rod for your own back especially for support.
 
arthwollipot said:
I can barely imagine what it'd be like to try and teach the average government employee how to use a Linux desktop.
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It really depends on what said user needs to do. The problem isn't so much the desktop environment itself as it is the applications. Modern offices use Microsoft software, most of which is really quite suitable for the task. The open source alternatives are sometimes pretty good (LibreOffice Writer instead of Word) or wanting (LibreOffice Calc instead of Excel.) For some applications there really isn't a good alternative, such as the Adobe Suite.

A lot of back-end stuff can run on Linux: things like file servers, web servers, and mail servers. That said, I certainly would not want to attempt to convert a large Active Directory setup to something Linux-like. Microsoft has poured a huge amount of development into AD, and as far as I know there's nothing in Linux that can do at scale what AD can do.
 
malbui said:
In clearing out my cellar I've uncovered some old games I fancy playing again. These are old enough to be on CD but with instructions if playing them on a Win95 box to drop out to DOS. I've played around on an ancient laptop for an hour or so but I'd forgotten just what a faff it used to be to get everything working back in those days. CD support was iffy and of course no USB.
Click to expand...
DOSBox is a very good DOS emulator for modern systems.
The other option is to see if they're on Good Old Games (GOG.com) which, while they're a few dollars, come pre-configured for Windows. Check the reviews though as some are configured better than others.
 
Mongrel said:
DOSBox is a very good DOS emulator for modern systems.
The other option is to see if they're on Good Old Games (GOG.com) which, while they're a few dollars, come pre-configured for Windows. Check the reviews though as some are configured better than others.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that link. I'll be purchasing a couple of games at €3 each to see how they go. I'm far too old to be trying to remember DOS configuration stuff I barely even understood 25 years ago.
 
Seriously, who else remembers having a 486 running Windows 3.1 on DOS 6.22 and having boot menus allowing the machine to boot with the settings necessary to play different games? Many configurations because every freaking game was different.
 
malbui said:
Seriously, who else remembers having a 486 running Windows 3.1 on DOS 6.22 and having boot menus allowing the machine to boot with the settings necessary to play different games? Many configurations because every freaking game was different.
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486? I remember doing that with the first 8086 based PCs!

I’m having flashbacks to HIMEM.SYS and EMM386 ....
 
Darat said:
486? I remember doing that with the first 8086 based PCs!

I’m having flashbacks to HIMEM.SYS and EMM386 ....
Click to expand...

640K base memory and Load high to squeeze out a little more.

Constant tweaks and reboots and still the damn game wouldn't run.
 
My favorite support call ever:

Client was a Baptist church and school, with all grades, and one PC in each classroom. They asked me to address the problem of kids getting on the computers when the teachers were not in the room. So I changed the OS from Win98 to NT 4.0 with actual password protection, plus local policies as needed. We enabled the settings system-wide over a weekend.

Monday morning, one of the assistant principals calls and said everything was working great except for one of the high school classes. <Ctrl><Alt><Delete> just wasn't doing anything. I gave all the usual suggestions, such as check that there's not a paper clip stuck under one of the keys, and waited 5 mins each time he trotted to the class to check and back to the phone. He finally said, "Why is the keyboard in that class different than the others?" I asked what he meant, and said there should be no differences. He said, "The Ctrl key is where the Tab key is on all the other keyboards."

When I finally stopped laughing (mostly to myself!), I told him to go back and try <Tab><Alt><Delete>, and lo and behold, that worked. Those kids must've been busting watching him run back and forth 3 times after they moved the keys! :)
 
Second favorite, only because it resulted in a big recovery bill:

Client with a server with a 3-drive RAID 5 calls, and says the server is making a horrible beeping noise. I head over and see one of the drives is offline. I pop it out, and reseat it, and the RAID begins to rebuild. I silenced the alarm while it did so, then re-enabled it when it was complete. (In retrospect, I probably should've replaced the drive then, but I was still a little green myself)

A few weeks later, I get another call. This time, the server is down completely. The caller tells me the alarm went off again, and the president comes in her office (where the server was), and asks what's going on. She tells him the IT guy pulled it out and put it back in. He tells her to do it, and she does. But the alarm is still sounding, so he says, "Try another one." :D

Me: Please pack up all the backup tapes and have them ready for me. I'll be taking the server back to the shop and have it back to you in the morning.
 
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