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[Continuation] Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11

catsmate

No longer the 1
catsmate
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One of our T1s summed up the situation pretty succinctly recently:

>have one _a admin account

>invent password manager account account _c

>create two more admin accounts not managed by _c that mostly replace _a
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Question: does being aware of the seagull manager approaching lessen the impact of the sea gulling?
 
At best I think you can brace for the impact, and then when they're gone you can go back to normal.

Might have a whole lot of seagull **** to clean up though.
 
It's amazing how many variations there are of the request to retrieve from the database data that was never put into the database. People really do think it's magic! I blame Oracle for naming themselves that.
 
Listen people. We've all had the experience of having a problem that just doesn't happen when "the fixer" (mechanic, doctor, IT guy, whatever) is there to see it happen.

But there's a limit. If I've made 5 onsite visits over nearly a month, sat there for a full hour each tme, and you still can't replicate the problem while I am there we are firmly in "What do you expect me to do exactly?" territory.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Listen people. We've all had the experience of having a problem that just doesn't happen when "the fixer" (mechanic, doctor, IT guy, whatever) is there to see it happen.

But there's a limit. If I've made 5 onsite visits over nearly a month, sat there for a full hour each tme, and you still can't replicate the problem while I am there we are firmly in "What do you expect me to do exactly?" territory.
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Took ten years to get facilities to replace the circuit breaker for a main power phase that would drop out on one particular piece of our equipment. Went over it all with them in 2013, they confirmed the phase was being lost before the equipment an asserted that they would look into replacing the breaker. Now two plant owners and ten years later, still the same issue, spend half a day with them while they are trying to blame our motors for drawing too much current and nobody knows a thing about what went on (facilities wise) in 2013. Fortunately the phase drops again while they are there and at the breaker panel they find the breaker arcing when touched and finally replace it.
 
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Yeah but this isn't a case of you tell me there's a problem, I do something and claim that will fix it, and the problem returns.

I still haven't seen the problem actually happen.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Yeah but this isn't a case of you tell me there's a problem, I do something and claim that will fix it, and the problem returns.
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Right, it's a case of I tell you there's a problem you confirm there's a problem and say you might do something that can fix it. Ten years later the problem returns with a vengeance, no one knows what if anything was actually done before, so we have to go through the whole 'show me' dance again.


JoeMorgue said:
I still haven't seen the problem actually happen.
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The facilities guy this last week almost walked away without seeing it this time. We hooked up a monitor and were all about to walk away when the phase dropped out again. I was working with their night team the night before where they were down at the panel and I was up at the equipment and every time they just touched the breaker, when the phase was out, it would kick back in. The only way I can now figure that they just didn't see the arcing when that happened is because they just weren't looking for it or really anything on their end.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Yeah but this isn't a case of you tell me there's a problem, I do something and claim that will fix it, and the problem returns.

I still haven't seen the problem actually happen.
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Closed.
Resolved: Non Repro.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Listen people. We've all had the experience of having a problem that just doesn't happen when "the fixer" (mechanic, doctor, IT guy, whatever) is there to see it happen.
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We called them "consultant hands". They're very powerful.

The software/hardware/system can occupy all possible states that the user/operator thinks are possible.

The expert knows how the system behaves so well that the probability of occupying certain stupid error positions is near zero and those states are never reached when the expert is observing.


Ask them to take a video of the problem happening. I'm interested in whether or not an expert viewing the video at a later time is powerful enough to collapse the state of the system.
 
Whenever someone calls with a problem and the problem mysteriously can't be replicated when they're on the phone, I always take credit.
 
Having sorted a few weird problems in my time, I recommend looking as deep as possible by resource constraints.

Sometimes the user doesn't want to admit what they're doing, hopefully because they can't see the relevance.

Being able to remote to people's desktops sorted some for me, along with the instruction to call me directly while it is happening.

The culprits can be weird.

e.g. a specialist pdf editing suite (not in use but running in the background), two different versions of excel running on the same computer somehow created a library conflict with my application, music playing software that decided that it needed to own 'all the threads', etc.

However, my takeaway from recent years was:

1. It's firewalls
2. It's certificates
3. It's firewalls and certificates
4. It's firewalls, certificates and supported encryption standards.
 
"You say you got an error message on your computer when you did this earlier?"
"Yes, but it's not doing it now."
"I see...tell me, do you see any error messages somewhere else in the room? The actual windows, maybe? The wall? When you close your eyes do you see error messages?"
 
I’ve had to log a support call with a service desk this weekend, which is rare for me as I can fix a lot of things.

My elderly FIL’s elderly desktop has just about given up the ghost, so I offered to replace it with a far newer machine. I acquired the beast, installed and updated everything standard, and headed up to their place on Saturday to install it. Not many things to do: install the couple of printers; copy over years of data from backups; and install very specialist piece of software he uses for his main hobby.

First two were easy if a bit slow.

The third…

We couldn’t find the installation media for the software but no biggie. You can buy and download it online, and so I figured we’d do that and take advantage of the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version at a lower price than buying it anew.

So I do that. To get to the download page, I needed to provide two code numbers, one from the new purchase and one from the old installation. I had these numbers but brilliantly the fields on the web form were labelled the wrong way around.

Once I’d downloaded and installed the software, I had to activate it. Naively I’d have thought that having established my bonas for the download would have been enough. But of course not. I needed to register the purchase with the French subsidiary of the software provider, from whom I’d downloaded the stuff because my FIL is happiest in French. After that I needed to create an account with the American parent company who actually develop the software.

Inevitably something has gone wrong somewhere the activation code I have received is not being accepted when I try to use it.

No doubt it will get sorted out in time but I’m baffled that in this day and age it can be so needlessly complicated to activate a bit of software that only costs a couple of hundred bucks full price.
 
The Man said:
Right, it's a case of I tell you there's a problem you confirm there's a problem and say you might do something that can fix it. Ten years later the problem returns with a vengeance, no one knows what if anything was actually done before, so we have to go through the whole 'show me' dance again.




The facilities guy this last week almost walked away without seeing it this time. We hooked up a monitor and were all about to walk away when the phase dropped out again. I was working with their night team the night before where they were down at the panel and I was up at the equipment and every time they just touched the breaker, when the phase was out, it would kick back in. The only way I can now figure that they just didn't see the arcing when that happened is because they just weren't looking for it or really anything on their end.
Click to expand...

That's not a certain radio frequency warehouse in DeKalb, is it? For months/years we had an issue where their RF would kack at random, and somehow they always blamed the system software. Well, they finally put sniffers on the lines and did a bunch of other stuff at the warehouse (we handled all programming support remotely), and finally found it was some breaker like the above. I finally stopped getting those particular 3am support calls.
 
alfaniner said:
That's not a certain radio frequency warehouse in DeKalb, is it? For months/years we had an issue where their RF would kack at random, and somehow they always blamed the system software. Well, they finally put sniffers on the lines and did a bunch of other stuff at the warehouse (we handled all programming support remotely), and finally found it was some breaker like the above. I finally stopped getting those particular 3am support calls.
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Naw, but amazing what some high powered RF can do. I once lived in a apartment about a quarter mile from a 65 thousand watt transmitter. I had these three way touch to switch living room lamps. At about 2am or so they would just start cycling trough the settings. I had to replace the touch system with 3 way switches so it didn't look like a disco in my living room at 2am every night.
 
alfaniner said:
That's not a certain radio frequency warehouse in DeKalb, is it? For months/years we had an issue where their RF would kack at random, and somehow they always blamed the system software. Well, they finally put sniffers on the lines and did a bunch of other stuff at the warehouse (we handled all programming support remotely), and finally found it was some breaker like the above. I finally stopped getting those particular 3am support calls.
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Oh! Oh! Oh!

Forgive me if I've mentioned this before...

I was working at a mainframe computing site, that had very complex security systems around the site.

(Movement sensors, heat detectors etc.)

The alarms kept false triggering in the building's ceiling space.

After months of replacements etc. not curing the problem, the security company sent some technicians with 'microwave detectors'.

They traced the source of the 'signal' that was triggering the alarms, to a snack bar a couple of doors up the street.

When the snack bar was busy, the owners and workers were starting and stopping their microwave ovens by opening the doors of the ovens. Each time they did that, they would release a burst of microwave energy that was sufficient to trigger the detectors in our ceiling space. (I'm assuming that we had microwave emitters and detectors up there as part of motion detection or perhaps smoke detection.)

(Those microwave ovens were on a shelf at head-height in the snack bar, to this day, I wonder if the users ended up with cataracts from that practice.)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0039625788900884
 
How's this for an official instruction?

Under the heading "How do I delete folders (from a shared mailbox)", one of the reasons a folder cannot be deleted:

There are too many deleted folders in the deleted items folder; Delete all the deleted folders from the deleted items folder and it should allow you to delete more folders.
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arthwollipot said:
How's this for an official instruction?

Under the heading "How do I delete folders (from a shared mailbox)", one of the reasons a folder cannot be deleted:
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Other than the 'Delete' after the semi-colon that seems fine.
 
It lives!
"Catch-22” is a provision in army regulations; it stipulates that a soldier's request to be relieved from active duty can be accepted only if he is mentally unfit to fight. Any soldier, however, who has the sense to ask to be spared the horrors of war is obviously mentally sound, and therefore must stay to fight.
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Yo dawg I heard you like deleted folders so I put some deleted folders in your deleted folder so when you need to delete some folders you can delete the deleted folders from the deleted folder and then you can delete your folders.
 
I tell you what. We've done some pretty significant updates to our ICT environment in the time since I've been working for this department, including some updates to the OS. The project to update all Windows 7 and 8 computers to Windows 10 was not seamless, but it seems to me that it was a lot better than the current Windows 11 rollout.

We appear to be getting a remarkable number of (usually) very minor, very specific issues that are only affecting Windows 11 computers. Example: headset microphones plugged into regular audio jacks and the internal microphones of laptops return very quiet sound regardless of audio settings, while USB headset mics are normal. Also, if multiple monitors have different scaling settings, the Snip & Sketch tool just ******* doesn't work. This is consistent, and common, and predictable. And, apparently not something that UAT for the new OS picked up.
 
arthwollipot said:
I tell you what. We've done some pretty significant updates to our ICT environment in the time since I've been working for this department, including some updates to the OS. The project to update all Windows 7 and 8 computers to Windows 10 was not seamless, but it seems to me that it was a lot better than the current Windows 11 rollout.

We appear to be getting a remarkable number of (usually) very minor, very specific issues that are only affecting Windows 11 computers. Example: headset microphones plugged into regular audio jacks and the internal microphones of laptops return very quiet sound regardless of audio settings, while USB headset mics are normal. Also, if multiple monitors have different scaling settings, the Snip & Sketch tool just ******* doesn't work. This is consistent, and common, and predictable. And, apparently not something that UAT for the new OS picked up.
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Clearly had the wrong test subjects. They probably picked experienced users who would not be overly phased by and capable of dealing with all those fiddly issues you get with a new OS release. They would not be concerned that the Start button is a different colour, and the icons look a bit different, or that Office 365 is a different look to Office 2017, etc.

Instead, you really do need to pick the dumbest of the dumb that you can find. The ones that Helpdesk quake at taking their calls because they are mindbendingly chaotic and timewasting brainspaces. The impenetrably stupid ones who should not be let loose with a plastic fork for fear of harming themselves. The scared and timid ones who flinch badly when the icons move about on the screen (auto arrange). They should be your test group. Because they invariably find ALL the little operational gotchas and problems like neodymium magnets.
 
Having spent the weekend installing a new machine for an elderly relative who was beside himself with panic because not all his favourite shortcuts were in exactly the same place and because the icon for Excel has changed, I agree completely.

When I was prepping this new machine and applying all the updates, it did report that it was ready for Windows 11. I chose not to install it because I knew I’d never cope with the meltdown that that would generate.
 
I'm still using Windows 10 Pro on my home laptop. I can't think of any reason to upgrade to Windows 11. I guess it's been around long enough to be stable, but I'm not going to risk it.
 
I have this one user who is just flummoxed by any change whatsoever. She will call in, sounding like she's close to tears, saying "Oh Eric, I just don't know what I'm going to do. Yesterday the 'Email' was on the left and the 'Chrome' was on the right, but now 'Email' is all wonky and nothing works. It doesn't open my email when I click on my email."

And it turns out that she accidentally dragged the Email shortcut to the right of Chrome, but was still clicking on the shortcut on the left... clicking on "Chrome" and assuming that since it was in the place of the email icon, it would open email, regardless of what the labels or icons actually said. And she would literally be holding back tears, talking about how if she can't get her email to work she can't send out her Ebay orders or Tupperware orders or Avon orders or whatever it is she sells. She almost brings me to tears whenever her name shows up on caller ID.
 
Yalius said:
I have this one user who is just flummoxed by any change whatsoever. She will call in, sounding like she's close to tears, saying "Oh Eric, I just don't know what I'm going to do. Yesterday the 'Email' was on the left and the 'Chrome' was on the right, but now 'Email' is all wonky and nothing works. It doesn't open my email when I click on my email."

And it turns out that she accidentally dragged the Email shortcut to the right of Chrome, but was still clicking on the shortcut on the left... clicking on "Chrome" and assuming that since it was in the place of the email icon, it would open email, regardless of what the labels or icons actually said. And she would literally be holding back tears, talking about how if she can't get her email to work she can't send out her Ebay orders or Tupperware orders or Avon orders or whatever it is she sells. She almost brings me to tears whenever her name shows up on caller ID.
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My instinct is that this user may also have a visual or cognitive impairment (that she may or may not be aware of).
 
alfaniner said:
I'm still using Windows 10 Pro on my home laptop. I can't think of any reason to upgrade to Windows 11. I guess it's been around long enough to be stable, but I'm not going to risk it.
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I have 10 on my high performance gaming machine, which I am not using at the moment but have plans for, but 11 on my laptop. Both work.

The biggest annoyance I have with Windows 11, which I have mentioned before, is the inability to put the Taskbar on any side of the screen other than the bottom. Vertical real estate to me is more valuable than horizontal real estate.
 
So we just had a weird issue. Peoples' USB devices suddenly stopped working. Keyboards, mouses, headsets - all their USB stuff. This appears to affect pretty much everybody on Windows 11, and judging from the way our call volumes spiked, all at the same time.

We now have a fix that involves a gpupdate and Intune sync, but damn that was ******* weird.
 
We had an odd one yesterday. One of our apps generates pdfs of account statements and suddenly started producing ones containing empty page after empty page. This was seemingly caused by having removed from users’ machines a font that is long since deprecated and in theory not used anywhere.
 
novaphile said:
My instinct is that this user may also have a visual or cognitive impairment (that she may or may not be aware of).
Click to expand...

If so it's shared by a lot of people.

More likely IMO, some people are so convinced that they're not 'computer people' that they don't contemplate what they're doing, it's all by rote memorisation. To open their E-mail they click on the icon at x,y and that's as far as they're internal processes go.

They're uninterested in learning how to use their device and basic troubleshooting and are often enabled by managers in a work environment, as mentioned at the start of the OG post and span all ages.
 
Mongrel said:
If so it's shared by a lot of people.

More likely IMO, some people are so convinced that they're not 'computer people' that they don't contemplate what they're doing, it's all by rote memorisation. To open their E-mail they click on the icon at x,y and that's as far as they're internal processes go.

They're uninterested in learning how to use their device and basic troubleshooting and are often enabled by managers in a work environment, as mentioned at the start of the OG post and span all ages.
Click to expand...

Having seen that acronym a lot lately, I finally had to look it up. In context I thought it stood for "Original Guy".
 
malbui said:
We had an odd one yesterday. One of our apps generates pdfs of account statements and suddenly started producing ones containing empty page after empty page. This was seemingly caused by having removed from users’ machines a font that is long since deprecated and in theory not used anywhere.
Click to expand...

I had a weird font-caused error years ago with a very old application. Turned out that if a particular font was installed on the user's computer the application would attempt to use it but fail for some reason, causing a complete crash of the application. But if the font were absent from the user's computer the application would cheerfully use another font with no problems. I could only speculate that back in the early 90s when that application was created the font in question was different from a later version in some way. But I got some very odd looks when I explained the fix for a crashing surgical supply inventory application was uninstalling a font from Windows.
 
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