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

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Wudang said:
That works and can be saved easily as you say. I always have notepad++ open so it feels easier for me just to do a bulk change with the regex characters for start and end of line, dollar and caret.
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I always used to do that sort of thing with regex substitution, though VIM is my editor of choice, rather than notepad++. Both are good editors, but I learned vi way back in the dark ages, and vi has possibly the least intuitive but most efficient interface possible for a text editor.
 
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HHellpop said:
This one should be posted by the support guy at the game company, dealing with me, when I was just a (l)user back then. I bought a game for my 386 with a 10 MB HDD. The game required over 15 MB of space. I ran doublespace, but still wasn't able to install the game. I actually called the company to complain. To the rep's credit, he didn't laugh in my face, but patiently explained how compression worked. :)

My more spectacular fail was trying to use DOS 5 version of Laplink to connect a laptop. My system had a 25-pin "serial" port, but it was the wrong gender. You all see where this is going, right? I bought a gender bender at Radio Shack, and proceeded to blow up my motherboard!
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The "wrong gender 25 pin serial port" was actually a parallel port? It's been forever since I dealt with those things, but my recollection is that a parallel port and a 25 pin serial port used the same connector but on the back of the computer one was typically male and the other was female (I don't remember which was which).
 
CORed said:
The "wrong gender 25 pin serial port" was actually a parallel port? It's been forever since I dealt with those things, but my recollection is that a parallel port and a 25 pin serial port used the same connector but on the back of the computer one was typically male and the other was female (I don't remember which was which).
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A parallel port is a 25-pin female connector that takes a cable with a male end. The serial port started out as a 25-pin male connector that takes a cable with a female end, but it was quickly replaced with a nine pin variant because serial uses fewer wires within the cable, needing fewer pins.
 
Yesterday I was assisting, over the phone, the owner of a clothing store in a different province. She's using a an ancient DOS point of sale system originally written by a friend of mine, and is only one of three remaining businesses in the world using it. (Not that it ever had a huge user base; perhaps thirty over its entire career.)

The problem was she had purchased a new printer to replace one that had died. But the new printer has a USB interface, while the old one was parallel. This is an issue because DOS (actually the DOS layer in Windows 7) can talk to the parallel port directly as LPT1, but not to newer USB devices. The solution is to share the printer, then issue a command to direct LPT1 to the share.

She warned me she wasn't very good with computers and asked me to be patient. While getting the printer set up under my guidance, this nice lady who "wasn't very good with computers" successfully accomplished the following tasks (I was telling her what needed to be done, and she was doing the actions):
  • Opened the Control Panel, found the computer name, and read it back to me
  • In the Control Panel, found the printer, got its properties, read off the printer name ("Lexmark 1242 Series"), changed the name to simply "Lexmark" and saved the change
  • Turned on printer sharing, then closed and re-opened Control Panel to verify the printer actually was being shared
  • Opened CMD.EXE (there's an icon for it on the desktop), entered the command net use LPT1 \\server-pc\lexmark /persistent:yes (I had sent it to her in email), and read to me the complete error message that appeared ("Error 66: The network resource type is not correct.")
  • Closed CMD.EXE, right-clicked the icon, chose "Run as Administrator," and replied "Continue" to the UAC prompt
  • Retyped the command without error and confirmed it ran successfully
  • Went into the POS system, selected a quick report for printing, and confirmed it printed.
Boy, it would be nice if all people who weren't "all that good with computers" were as "incapable" as this lady!
 
"When it falls over with a deadlock we just throw it back after deleting the things that generate the emails that alert us to the problem"
"Oh" Thinks, "that's not right."
Turns out the restart functionality has about a small chance of starting in the right place, otherwise, who knows?
Pointed it out, how to fix it, put it down as a good day's work
 
Blue Mountain said:
A parallel port is a 25-pin female connector that takes a cable with a male end. The serial port started out as a 25-pin male connector that takes a cable with a female end, but it was quickly replaced with a nine pin variant because serial uses fewer wires within the cable, needing fewer pins.
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Yes. After my last post, I remembered that printers, which used to mostly use parallel ports, used the male connector on the cable. IIRC, PC's used to have two serial ports (COM1 and COM2 were the DOS device names), and frequently, one of these would be the nine pin female variety, and the other would be the 25 pin male variety. The gender refers to the connector on the back of the PC (usually both serials and the parallel were all on one expansion card on desktop systems). I also remember the "PS2" connector, which was, for a time, used by both mouse and keyboard. These were identical connectors, but were not interchangeable. Connecting the mouse to the keyboard connector or vice versa could yield some interesting results.
 
I think that PS2 sockets didn’t last as long as getting a free usb to PS2 adapter with every USB keyboard. I have vague memories of when I had an office kitted out as an NT test cell that they allowed the PCs to boot without the “no keyboard found. Press f1 to continue “ error. I may be misremembering. I do that.
 
Wudang said:
I think that PS2 sockets didn’t last as long as getting a free usb to PS2 adapter with every USB keyboard. I have vague memories of when I had an office kitted out as an NT test cell that they allowed the PCs to boot without the “no keyboard found. Press f1 to continue “ error. I may be misremembering. I do that.
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I do remember that error. I never figured out how you were supposed to press f1 with no keyboard.

The most amusing think I remember with the ps2 connectors, was, on a work computer, plugging in a ps2 barcdode scanner wedge. The "wedge" was a device meant to connect between the keyboard and computer into which a barcode scanner could be plugged, such that scanning the barcode would cause the characters encoded by the barcode to be input as if from the keyboard. I set up the wedge, and found that scanning barcodes produced a series of rapid mouse movements and sometimes clicks. On further examination I discovered that I had connected the wedge between the mouse and the computer, instead of between the keyboard and the computer.
 
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CORed said:
The "wrong gender 25 pin serial port" was actually a parallel port? It's been forever since I dealt with those things, but my recollection is that a parallel port and a 25 pin serial port used the same connector but on the back of the computer one was typically male and the other was female (I don't remember which was which).
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Yes, exactly. Serial ports were male, parallel female, of which I was completely ignorant at the time.

Oops! Ninja'd a day ago!
 
Blue Mountain said:
Yesterday I was assisting, over the phone, the owner of a clothing store in a different province. She's using a an ancient DOS point of sale system originally written by a friend of mine, and is only one of three remaining businesses in the world using it. (Not that it ever had a huge user base; perhaps thirty over its entire career.)

The problem was she had purchased a new printer to replace one that had died. But the new printer has a USB interface, while the old one was parallel. This is an issue because DOS (actually the DOS layer in Windows 7) can talk to the parallel port directly as LPT1, but not to newer USB devices. The solution is to share the printer, then issue a command to direct LPT1 to the share.

She warned me she wasn't very good with computers and asked me to be patient. While getting the printer set up under my guidance, this nice lady who "wasn't very good with computers" successfully accomplished the following tasks (I was telling her what needed to be done, and she was doing the actions):
  • Opened the Control Panel, found the computer name, and read it back to me
  • In the Control Panel, found the printer, got its properties, read off the printer name ("Lexmark 1242 Series"), changed the name to simply "Lexmark" and saved the change
  • Turned on printer sharing, then closed and re-opened Control Panel to verify the printer actually was being shared
  • Opened CMD.EXE (there's an icon for it on the desktop), entered the command net use LPT1 \\server-pc\lexmark /persistent:yes (I had sent it to her in email), and read to me the complete error message that appeared ("Error 66: The network resource type is not correct.")
  • Closed CMD.EXE, right-clicked the icon, chose "Run as Administrator," and replied "Continue" to the UAC prompt
  • Retyped the command without error and confirmed it ran successfully
  • Went into the POS system, selected a quick report for printing, and confirmed it printed.
Boy, it would be nice if all people who weren't "all that good with computers" were as "incapable" as this lady!
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Nicely done!

I had a client who is still using a POS system custom written for their store in FoxPro, with the source code lost in the Katrina flood. So old that it wouldn't even run on 32-bit Win7. I once tried setting it up in a VirtualBox XP VM. It ran, but was so sluggish it was unusable, and I couldn't figure out why. I wound up giving them a half-dozen cloned XP Optiplex 360s that I had from another client, to pull out of the closet as their systems died. I had to pull out some old redirection tricks like you did as well.
 
Wudang said:
I think that PS2 sockets didn’t last as long as getting a free usb to PS2 adapter with every USB keyboard. I have vague memories of when I had an office kitted out as an NT test cell that they allowed the PCs to boot without the “no keyboard found. Press f1 to continue “ error. I may be misremembering. I do that.
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That's my favorite error message! :) Whoever wrote it must still be chuckling to themselves.
 
HHellpop said:
That's my favorite error message! :) Whoever wrote it must still be chuckling to themselves.
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These days "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue" makes some sense because you can probably plug in a USB keyboard, press F1, and unplug it again. But hot swap keyboards weren't a thing when the message was first used.

Keyboards with a PS/2 connector can be hot-pluuged (I've done it a fair bit) but the connector and associated protocols weren't designed for it. On older systems there was the potential to damage something by hot-plugging. If you damaged the port itself then the "Keyboard not found" error could well become permanent, although I've never seed it happen myself.
 
Blue Mountain said:
These days "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue" makes some sense because you can probably plug in a USB keyboard, press F1, and unplug it again. But hot swap keyboards weren't a thing when the message was first used.

Keyboards with a PS/2 connector can be hot-pluuged (I've done it a fair bit) but the connector and associated protocols weren't designed for it. On older systems there was the potential to damage something by hot-plugging. If you damaged the port itself then the "Keyboard not found" error could well become permanent, although I've never seed it happen myself.
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I never knew that the motherboard could be damaged by unplugging from those older ports, but I guess it's similar to how an electrical socket can be damaged by unplugging something without turning it off first.

I started consulting in the days of Netware 3.11, when simply unplugging the network cable while the PC was running would bring about the original BSOD in beautiful black!
 
Gah. It happened again. I really hate this.

A T1 will transfer a call to me because the caller is being really difficult and rude. I talk to them and they are perfectly reasonable and polite. There is a pattern to these occurrences, and it is very distinct. They only ever occur when the T1 is female.

I'm quite sure about this, and it is borne up by my 15 years of experience. Some people, when calling for tech support, do not believe that women are capable of understanding technical issues, and are much more comfortable when talking to a man.

I can't say that I'm surprised, exactly, but I am disappointed.
 
Out of interest, does anybody know why buying the correct RAM modules is so difficult? I mean, the way that there are a million different modules that look identical but work or don't work in machines?

The last couple of weeks I've been upgrading a couple of my Linux machines. Mr Ubuntu Jr is a Dell Latitude laptop and there was no problem. Mr Ubuntu Sr is a Dell Optiplex minitower and I had hell's own job finding modules that would work. Ordered two different kinds that were "guaranteed" to work but only got the beeps of death as the machine refused to boot. On the advice of a specialist I ordered some that were advertised for a brand of motherboard I'd never heard of and they worked first go.

More than 25 years I've been fiddling with the innards of PCs and it remains an utter mystery to me.
 
Wudang said:
I usually use the memory checker tool from Crucial tbh.
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Me, too, but I use Kingston.

Once bought RAM for a Dell from them, using the bus specs to determine which module. Had problems with it, called Kingston tech support thinking it was bad. The rep asked me what computer it was for. He said that they had system-specific RAM for pre-built PCs that were guaranteed to work. He charged me only the difference between the two modules and I returned the one I'd bought. Worked perfectly. Have never had any problems in the 20something years since then using their selector tool.
 
malbui said:
Out of interest, does anybody know why buying the correct RAM modules is so difficult? I mean, the way that there are a million different modules that look identical but work or don't work in machines?

The last couple of weeks I've been upgrading a couple of my Linux machines. Mr Ubuntu Jr is a Dell Latitude laptop and there was no problem. Mr Ubuntu Sr is a Dell Optiplex minitower and I had hell's own job finding modules that would work. Ordered two different kinds that were "guaranteed" to work but only got the beeps of death as the machine refused to boot. On the advice of a specialist I ordered some that were advertised for a brand of motherboard I'd never heard of and they worked first go.

More than 25 years I've been fiddling with the innards of PCs and it remains an utter mystery to me.
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Dell keeps moving back and forth between my nice list and my naughty list. In a lot of systems, mostly their older tower and minitower builds, they used rather proprietary stuff that makes getting replacement parts difficult. But my current laptop's a a Dell and it's working great. They also make decent servers, although I haven't worked with them very much.
 
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