Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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TragicMonkey said:
On my work laptop? Nothing interesting. My department is required to have our cameras on during Teams meetings, in order to "increase engagement". By which they mean they suspect us of goofing off during calls. But Microsoft Teams seems to be rather hardware-intense and seizes way more of the memory than you'd expect, and when the video is in use the fans kick on high and quite fail to do sufficient cooling: an hour on a video call gets one corner of the laptop significantly hot to the touch. I'm sure it's aging the machine rapidly but it's not my property and not my policy so I'll just have to get new laptops faster than should be necessary.
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Microsoft Teams is the only application I've ever used on my MacBook Pro that causes the CPU to start throttling because it's overheated. Even games aren't as intensive as using Teams with an image for your background.
 
TragicMonkey said:
On my work laptop? Nothing interesting. My department is required to have our cameras on during Teams meetings, in order to "increase engagement". By which they mean they suspect us of goofing off during calls. But Microsoft Teams seems to be rather hardware-intense and seizes way more of the memory than you'd expect, and when the video is in use the fans kick on high and quite fail to do sufficient cooling: an hour on a video call gets one corner of the laptop significantly hot to the touch. I'm sure it's aging the machine rapidly but it's not my property and not my policy so I'll just have to get new laptops faster than should be necessary.
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Technically, it is doing on-the-fly video compression to optimise your internet data transmission. It is turning your high quality webcam video into lower quality Teams video plus adding any fancy background effect. That's CPU-heavy work which burns lots of electrons which creates the heat.

If this is indeed harming your work laptop, use that to advantage. Cover the webcam lens with tape and say it burned out. So soz, no vid.;)
 
Dear Users,

1. I have zero, like literally zero, control over a 3rd party website implementing dual factor authentication. I don't care that it slows down your "workflow" (**** I hate that term so ******* much) and couldn't do anything about it if I did care. Which I don't.

2. You're in the medical field, so get used to that, it ain't going to less common no time soon.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Technically, it is doing on-the-fly video compression to optimise your internet data transmission. It is turning your high quality webcam video into lower quality Teams video plus adding any fancy background effect. That's CPU-heavy work which burns lots of electrons which creates the heat.

If this is indeed harming your work laptop, use that to advantage. Cover the webcam lens with tape and say it burned out. So soz, no vid.;)
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Interesting. So not using a background effect causes less work to be done? I haven't been using any-- I'm rather proud of my stately living room with its elegant proportions and tasteful artwork (painted by me) so I've been letting the camera show as-is, where most of my coworkers use the Teams silly backgrounds of space planets or fake offices. (I'm not saying you live in filth, Kathy, I'm just saying that by hiding your background you're not proving anyone wrong).

But if the camera busts then they'd just issue me a new laptop. The sillier the policy, the more firmly my company adheres to it. Make a mistake and kill a few patients? Never mind, accidents happen! Wear open-toed sandals where you're not allowed to? Official write-up and firing if repeated. (Not that I've done either of those things myself, although I would be much more likely to murder a ton of people than I would be to wear sandals when not in walking distance of a beach.)
 
TragicMonkey said:
Interesting. So not using a background effect causes less work to be done?
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Yep. A bit less.

I haven't been using any-- I'm rather proud of my stately living room with its elegant proportions and tasteful artwork (painted by me) so I've been letting the camera show as-is, where most of my coworkers use the Teams silly backgrounds of space planets or fake offices. (I'm not saying you live in filth, Kathy, I'm just saying that by hiding your background you're not proving anyone wrong).
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Our house always looks like "life lived at full tide" - a beachcomber's sorting bench and exploded laundry basket in an unpainted hovel. My usual WFH-wear is my favourite builder's hi-viz hoodie (because it is comfy and warm). Combined, they are not exactly the best look for business meetings.

But if the camera busts then they'd just issue me a new laptop. The sillier the policy, the more firmly my company adheres to it. Make a mistake and kill a few patients? Never mind, accidents happen! Wear open-toed sandals where you're not allowed to? Official write-up and firing if repeated. (Not that I've done either of those things myself, although I would be much more likely to murder a ton of people than I would be to wear sandals when not in walking distance of a beach.)
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Proactive failure mode required. Just screw up their meetings a few times. Toggle between video on & sound off, or video off & sound on. Never both on. Then they get either a productive monkey, or video of you gesticulating silently in a Vogue living room. One is useful. The other is, frankly, slightly disturbing...
 
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Another reason why I've retired.

The concept that it is a good idea to put all your data and systems into the hands of another organisation that cares four fifths of **** all about your organisation is just mind boggling.

Not to mention that it's another country that is famous for attacking other countries for their resources.

Hey Microsoft! Turn off Australia, they're not selling oil and gas to us at the price we want.

:(
 
Well, this is fun: soon we'll need an authenticator to authenticate the authenticator we currently use. I foresee no possible problems, complications, or absurdity with this.
 
novaphile said:
The concept that it is a good idea to put all your data and systems into the hands of another organisation that cares four fifths of **** all about your organisation is just mind boggling.
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It's just the old "thin client" model from the late 90s redone. And to be fair, it mostly works very well indeed. But when it breaks, it affects everyone, which the old on-prem Office model did not.
 
arthwollipot said:
It's just the old "thin client" model from the late 90s redone. And to be fair, it mostly works very well indeed. But when it breaks, it affects everyone, which the old on-prem Office model did not.
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You can calculate a very rough but eye-opening comparative cost of this outage.

Outage_cost = Number_of_staff_affected * hourly_rate * hours_outage

In a big organisation, you get, say 200 staff at $100/hr average out for 2 hours = $40,000

So once again, how much is the difference between M365 and on-prem licensing??
 
Norman Alexander said:
So once again, how much is the difference between M365 and on-prem licensing??
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That question is waaay above my pay grade.

Anyway, you also have to figure in percentage downtime, which is much lower now than it used to be before we upgraded. Outages used to be pretty common when we had all our data stored on local file servers. Now, on Sharepoint and OneDrive, they're hen's teeth.

I've said it before - when your entire business model is built around providing online access to data, when that stops your business has a very good motivation to get it working again ASAP.
 
arthwollipot said:
That question is waaay above my pay grade.

Anyway, you also have to figure in percentage downtime, which is much lower now than it used to be before we upgraded. Outages used to be pretty common when we had all our data stored on local file servers. Now, on Sharepoint and OneDrive, they're hen's teeth.

I've said it before - when your entire business model is built around providing online access to data, when that stops your business has a very good motivation to get it working again ASAP.
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That's fine, unless your online service MUST be 24x7x365 such as a hospital. Which is what I support. Having patient-critical data and applications "offline" for even a few minutes is simply not acceptable.

"Never down" local storage and services are what we support. Ours has been non-stop since 2008. That's 100% uptime for 15 years, including replacing every server with newer models and adding a petabyte of high-performance SAN storage.

Meanwhile, we have been migrating admin services to cloud, and...bingo. Outage on Azure, M365, and Teams, which underpin some of our critical administrative services. Questions are going to be asked at the ministerial level, apparently. :rolleyes:
 
I'm more used to company owned data centres with IBM and HSBC. I worked with the NHS UK and again they needed their own systems. The company I worked for used AWS to develop systems for the NHS as AWS was approved by the NHS for data storage and processing and we could shrink and grow our estate as needed. With our tiny budget the ability to switch off a few server instances and stop being charged for them made a massive difference to the bottom line.
On the other hand the HSBC data centre I worked at had a business case to have 2 separate connections to the electric grid so the chances of losing all power was negligible. On the other other hand the data centre at what was then IBM UK HQ used to lose power as they used water from the lake it was beside to cool the computer rooms and a local nutter kept throwing big sheets of polythene near the inlets to block them. It made the local pub landlords happy at least.
For business critical though I'd always recall the old rule about involved versus committed.
 
Norman Alexander said:
That's fine, unless your online service MUST be 24x7x365 such as a hospital. Which is what I support. Having patient-critical data and applications "offline" for even a few minutes is simply not acceptable.
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Sure. That's very much not the usual situation, though. The vast majority of clients of Microsoft's cloud solutions are not like that.

This particular outage occurred just as I was finishing my last day before a 4-day weekend, so I never found out how long it lasted. I'd be pretty surprised if it was more than an hour. During a non-peak time when almost nobody was using it. That amount of sloppiness is more than acceptable when as I say the downtime is exceptionally rare compared to the old system.
 
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