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

[Norman Alexander]

This sort of crap is why I prefer to build my stuff on open source tools, with some care taken to ensure long-term viability. I have Perl programs and shell scripts I wrote twenty years ago running on my computers. MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres don't break their APIs every five years. And if you really, truly need an older version, chances are you can get a binary in an archival repository somewhere, or attempt to compile it from scratch. (Unfortunately, lots of libraries move forward and deprecate old functionality, so there's no guarantee the program will compile cleanly and link.)

Heck, if you need an old release of Linux, chances are you can find that in a repository, too. Unfortunately it may not run well on modern hardware.

I have a very useful picture viewer on my system (xv) and the last official release was 3.10a back in 1994—almost 30 years ago. But because the author made the source code available, and there's sufficient interest in the program still, I can run a patched and updated version on my computers in 2023.

I can probably unpack a tar archive compressed with gzip that was created 30 years ago, while a backup made with proprietary software from a company that went out of business three years ago could well be inaccessible forever.

There's a reason that Windows is unknown in spaces outside of business, like the software that runs the internet, embedded systems, small computers like routers and smart TVs, mainframe computers and supercomputers. It's way too dependent on the whims of one company that appears to be genuinely hostile to its users.

Make that "VERY interested in keeping customers as ongoing customers." Windows goes obsolete for exactly the same reason that your whitegoods fail after a fairly predictable time (i.e. outside the warranty period). If they never failed, you would never buy anything new.

Simples.

 

[arthwollipot]

This sort of crap is why I prefer to build my stuff on open source tools...

Well that's nice for someone who has the knowledge and resources to be able to do that. And who doesn't require their stuff to interface and be backwards compatible with existing products. And whose tools don't have to be used by people who "don't need to know how this computer crap works" and just want to do their jobs.

Sorry if I sound a touch bitter, but I have to deal with what I have come to refer to as "developer privilege" literally every day.

Developers do an absolutely essential job and I should be more appreciative of them. But it can be hard sometimes when their response runs the gamut from "why don't you just write a script?" to "you should use Linux."

 

[Blue Mountain]

My Documents are all Google Docs.

What's your fallback if Google decides to lock you out of your account?

 

[Blue Mountain]

Well that's nice for someone who has the knowledge and resources to be able to do that.

For me, the problem is that Microsoft has a huge stranglehold on the personal computer and office space, and they're the ones actively causing these issues by making wholesale changes to their operating system and office products. One should not have to be a developer or an advanced user in order to use software that's more than a few years old.

And who doesn't require their stuff to interface and be backwards compatible with existing products.

I'm a little uncertain what you're saying here. A well-developed system should either be backwards compatible with previous versions, or have a well-developed migration path that can bring an old version up to date with the current one. WordPerfect was famous for being able to open even the oldest WordPerfect documents and rendering them correctly.

What JoeMorgue was complaining about is the fact Microsoft has ended support for old products, but which are critical tools for doing the job he needs to do. If instead the system had been built with open source software (if that was possible—the Microsoft products may have had features not available in their open source counterparts, if indeed such things were even available) and had been developed with an eye toward it being possible to port the system to a new platform, he wouldn't be stuck these problems.

I'm currently right now scouring the internet for a good, standalone exe file for Microsoft CLR types for SQL Server 2012 because it's the prerequisite for another prerequisite for a third prerequisite the program we are actually trying to install needs to run.

I need Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 (no longer supported) but that needs Microsoft System CLR Types for QL Server 2012 (no longer supported) but THAT needs Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 which I can't install because the installer says it's already part of my OS and it is no longer supported.

And I'm only hoping that when all of those are (somehow) installed the actual installer will work and stop asking me for perquisites.

Note what's no longer supported:

• Microsoft CLR types for SQL Server 2012 - That's a decade old now, but why aren't those compatible with the newer SQL Server
• Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 - Why isn't Report Viewer compatible with whatever equivalent product Microsoft has now? Or did they just abandon the product?
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 which I can't install because the installer says it's already part of my OS and it is no longer supported. Again, WHY? Why can't Report Viewer 2012 work with the latest version of the .NET framework?

And whose tools don't have to be used by people who "don't need to know how this computer crap works" and just want to do their jobs.

The problem is past this point. Car analogy: I don't really know how my car works. I can't tune its engine; I can't update its computers; and I can't run diagnostics on it. I basically expect it to "just work:" the engine starts when I ask it to, and it gets me from point A to point B.

But the automobile industry as a whole doesn't upend itself every five years. Sure, the petrol I pump into my car is probably better than it was twenty years ago, but that same petrol will still run a twenty year old or even forty year car. My car's tires aren't three generations out of date and I have to search the web to find replacements. I can still park my car; the technology required for that (a small plot of land) hasn't fundamentally changed to, for example, a glass surface that every car more seven years old can't park on, and all the parking lots are switching over to glass.

Sorry if I sound a touch bitter, but I have to deal with what I have come to refer to as "developer privilege" literally every day.

It's tough to disagree with this. Computers are unusual in that the general population works with them all the time, but experts have a huge advantage over non-experts. It's not like doctors or lawyers, whose expertise is also vary valuable, but people generally have only limited interaction with them.

Developers do an absolutely essential job and I should be more appreciative of them. But it can be hard sometimes when their response runs the gamut from "why don't you just write a script?" to "you should use Linux."

It's not so much developer "privilege" as it is developer shortsightedness. The response "Why don't you just write a script?" is a reflection of something that's second nature to a developer, just like a lot of things are second nature to a skilled tradesman.

Also, there are a lot of crappy developers out there, so you're not far off having a jaded opinion of them. They might be one of the reasons JoeMorgue is having the problems he described: a developer or two just threw a project together with no forward thinking about how its components could be deprecated or become unavailable during the project's expected lifetime. Or the lifetime turned out to be considerably longer than planned.


My rant was about Microsoft's notorious lock-in and keeping its customers on a continuous upgrade treadmill to keep the dollars rolling in. Companies the world over have bought into that mindset hook, line, and sinker. It's created a dystopia where one giant American company has the personal and business computer market by the balls, and to top it off people get upset when it's pointed out that it doesn't have to be that way.

 

[arthwollipot]

...and to top it off people get upset when it's pointed out that it doesn't have to be that way.

Good luck changing it, though.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Well that's nice for someone who has the knowledge and resources to be able to do that. And who doesn't require their stuff to interface and be backwards compatible with existing products. And whose tools don't have to be used by people who "don't need to know how this computer crap works" and just want to do their jobs.

Sorry if I sound a touch bitter, but I have to deal with what I have come to refer to as "developer privilege" literally every day.

Developers do an absolutely essential job and I should be more appreciative of them. But it can be hard sometimes when their response runs the gamut from "why don't you just write a script?" to "you should use Linux."

Also, the insistence that Linux is "easy for users" when all they have to do is pop up a command prompt and type in stuff like:

find . -name '*[+{;"\\=?~()<>&*|$ ]*' -exec rm -f '{}' \;

 

[Wudang]

Also, the insistence that Linux is "easy for users" when all they have to do is pop up a command prompt and type in stuff like:

find . -name '*[+{;"\\=?~()<>&*|$ ]*' -exec rm -f '{}' \;

Or maybe just use the Search bar in the file dialog?

eta: I had my 10 year old using linux on an old laptop with Libre Office and she had no trouble doing homework and surfing the web. I didn't need to teach her grep or awk.

 

[TragicMonkey]

I wish I worked for some of you guys' companies, where ideal solutions are allowed. Everywhere I've worked the orders weren't "devise the best possible method to do these tasks, using all your abilities to make the solution future-proof, fool-proof, expandable, and able to evolve". Everywhere I've worked the orders are "we need X now, do it however you can so long as you get it done now. Then we need Y, and we need that even sooner than X but do X first!!" I've left behind me at various companies miles of Perl scripts and notes on how to wrangle things through fast and dirty processes to get results. I've never had a boss who cared about methods, everybody wants results.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I don't think the "LOL just completely recreate the company you work for's entire IT structure" has ever actually been a solution.

Yes throwing out our entire Windows Server Active Directory and Exchange Schema and expecting the Little Ole' Ladies who the upgrade from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013 nearly drove them mad it yanked them so far out of Plato's Cave and just running everything off of a Linux is absolutely a viable option for me and would totally be worth it to both myself and the company in order to show Microsoft, wait excuse me Micro$oft, there that's better, a lesson.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Also, the insistence that Linux is "easy for users" when all they have to do is pop up a command prompt and type in stuff like:

find . -name '*[+{;"\\=?~()<>&*|$ ]*' -exec rm -f '{}' \;

Two quick questions:

• Do you know what that command does?
• How do you do the same thing in Windows Explorer in exactly one step?

What you showed is an example of advanced stuff, useful for getting things done quickly and efficiently. These days, everyday tasks that most users want to perform can be done from the desktop.

Guess what—there are things you can't do in Windows from the desktop as well, and have to go to cmd.exe or PowerShell. Not to mention someone who's proficient with those can do a lot more than just a Joe Average user.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I don't think the "LOL just completely recreate the company you work for's entire IT structure" has ever actually been a solution.

That's because companies have made the decision to go with Microsoft out of the gate, and are now stuck with massive vendor lock-in.

Yes throwing out our entire Windows Server Active Directory and Exchange Schema

Active Directory is one area where the Windows infrastructure has no useful counterpart in Linux. I'm not too familiar with Exchange. My understanding is from a system administrator point of view, as an email server it sucks big time. It might be better as an integrated email, calendar, and task scheduling solution. Linux can do that, too, and possibly at the scale Exchange does it.

... expecting the Little Ole' Ladies who the upgrade from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013 nearly drove them mad it yanked them so far out of Plato's Cave

And why was that? Because Microsoft threw out years and years of learning and forced the user to learn a new interface! This is different from switching to another product how?

... just running everything off of a Linux is absolutely a viable option for me and would totally be worth it to both myself and the company in order to show Microsoft, wait excuse me Micro$oft, there that's better, a lesson.

In my last job the desktops were Windows and the back-end ran on Linux. That included the file server, email server, the VoIP telephone system, Virtual Machine system, and our test, build, and production environments (the company, still in business, has a web-based product.).

Now, it was a small company with an average employee count of 15. Scaling that up to a 250 person operation would be doable. A hospital with 2,500 employees and a proprietary Windows-only patient management system that must use SQL Server, not so much.

 

[catsmate]

ETA: Turns out another tech saved offline exe copies of the old software to our software depository for just this situation. Still stupid we have so many old dependencies though.

I do that routinely.

 

[malbui]

I wish I worked for some of you guys' companies, where ideal solutions are allowed. Everywhere I've worked the orders weren't "devise the best possible method to do these tasks, using all your abilities to make the solution future-proof, fool-proof, expandable, and able to evolve". Everywhere I've worked the orders are "we need X now, do it however you can so long as you get it done now. Then we need Y, and we need that even sooner than X but do X first!!" I've left behind me at various companies miles of Perl scripts and notes on how to wrangle things through fast and dirty processes to get results. I've never had a boss who cared about methods, everybody wants results.

I’m sure I’ve told this story here before but what the hell. Nobody ever reads what I write anyway.

Many many years ago I was doing some consulting work at a company and we discovered late on that there was a problem assembling data for monthly reporting. I threw together a script late on a Friday evening that seemed to do the job and we all agreed it was acceptable as a temporary solution.

Several years later I was back at that company, this time as an external auditor. We were having trouble following parts of the month-end processes so I got one of the people to walk me through the technical side. There as a key part of the data wrangling was my script, not updated, not documented, not anything. I was both proud and horrified.

 

[ZirconBlue]

I don't think the "LOL just completely recreate the company you work for's entire IT structure" has ever actually been a solution.

I spent a few years working for a company that supplied components to various Tier 1 automotive companies. We had an up-to-date SAP system running most of our operations. Ford, GM, etc. were still running systems that looked like they were created in the 1980s, if not earlier. When asked about it, they basically said that, given the size of their operations, changing to something new would be too costly and disruptive to their operations. I wonder if any of them took the opportunity to upgrade during the recent covid and supply chaind disruptions?

 

[Norman Alexander]

Two quick questions:

• Do you know what that command does?
• How do you do the same thing in Windows Explorer in exactly one step?

What you showed is an example of advanced stuff, useful for getting things done quickly and efficiently. These days, everyday tasks that most users want to perform can be done from the desktop.

Guess what—there are things you can't do in Windows from the desktop as well, and have to go to cmd.exe or PowerShell. Not to mention someone who's proficient with those can do a lot more than just a Joe Average user.

I think you missed my point. This was what some Linux developers expect Joe Average to not only understand but be able to construct and use routinely. That is, learn another language proficiently. Because they learned it and find it easy, so they expect everyone can.

When all the user wants is to "push a button" and let the computer do all the complicated stuff to give them a result. They don't know or care if it is bash, Powershell, Urdu or Hollerith punch cards doing the work.

Btw, yes, I do know what that command does...more or less.

 

[arthwollipot]

eta: I had my 10 year old using linux on an old laptop with Libre Office and she had no trouble doing homework and surfing the web. I didn't need to teach her grep or awk.

I have mentioned previously that I installed Ubuntu on my desktop machine at home for a while. It worked perfectly and I could do everything I wanted to do. Until one day it stopped working and I had absolutely no clue how to fix it.

 

[arthwollipot]

*facepalm*

Someone just escalated an incident about Command Prompt being disabled.

Yes. Command Prompt is disabled by security policy in our environment. Tough titties. Use Powershell instead.

The worst part of this is that the T1 should have already known this, and according to the notes, was advised to escalate it by a T2.

 

[Trebuchet]

I used to have a reasonable ability to manage a VAX. Today I can't manage Win7, let alone 10.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I have mentioned previously that I installed Ubuntu on my desktop machine at home for a while. It worked perfectly and I could do everything I wanted to do. Until one day it stopped working and I had absolutely no clue how to fix it.

One thing I've discovered Linux, and Ubuntu in particular, is there's lots of useful information out there on the web. With Windows, a lot of the time I search for a problem and all I find are people asking the same question but not getting any answers. Or the answers that are supplied don't work, because they're all along the line of "well, I don't know what the problem really is, but you can try this ..." That's because some parts of Windows are so arcane not even Microsoft knows any more how they work.

 

[Norman Alexander]

I used to have a reasonable ability to manage a VAX. Today I can't manage Win7, let alone 10.

I can do all three.

*smug*