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Cont: Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11

arthwollipot said:
Exactly. Excel is great at what it is designed for - number crunching.

What really annoys me is where someone has used Excel for text-only data. Excel is for numbers! If you want to use words, use... well... Word. The Table functions in Word are fantastic.

Use the right tool for the job, damn it!
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Most times, I'll still use Excel because it lets me lay things out exactly the way I want them, without having to fight the software.

JoeMorgue said:
Microsoft.

Make up your mind if scrolling "up" goes backwards in time or scrolling "down" goes backwards in time.

In Teams I scroll up to see older messages. In Outlook I scroll down to see older e-mails.
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arthwollipot said:
You do know that you can change that, right?
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Indeed. Outlook defaults to Newest on Top, but I always change that immediately when I get a new computer.
 
arthwollipot said:
I count myself very lucky that I have never had a DBA job. The whole field looks like an absolute nightmare.
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Yes indeed. I fully agree with both points.

I've worked closely with quite a lot of DBAs over the years and their mental state is roughly akin to that of submariners (i.e. a continuous feeling that they are about to be instantly crushed to death by forces utterly beyond their control.)
 
My experience has been that Network Engineers and DBAs both bring a certain amount of arrogance to any interaction. However the the netadmin's arrogance is a smokescreen for their comical degree of ignorance. Whereas the DBA's apparent arrogance is really a hard won understanding of the problems and their solutions.

So I will patiently listen to a netadmin's ranting, before quietly implementing the correct solution. But I will do whatever a DBA tells me needs to be done.
 
theprestige said:
My experience has been that Network Engineers and DBAs both bring a certain amount of arrogance to any interaction...
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For me, it's developers. They have a tendency to assume that because they can write code they understand everything about how a large enterprise network works, that everything can be fixed just by coding it out of existence, and that anyone who doesn't understand their highly technical details must be mentally deficient.

I'm generalising, of course. There are some devs who are absolutely lovely. But whenever we get a difficult caller, they are 80% either EAs or devs.
 
arthwollipot said:
For me, it's developers. They have a tendency to assume that because they can write code they understand everything about how a large enterprise network works, that everything can be fixed just by coding it out of existence, and that anyone who doesn't understand their highly technical details must be mentally deficient.

I'm generalising, of course. There are some devs who are absolutely lovely. But whenever we get a difficult caller, they are 80% either EAs or devs.
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Good grief!

If the Enterprise Architects don't know what they're doing it makes me wonder how they got there...

Actually, you have me wondering now. I have this vague idea that Centrelink had some 'Enterprise Architects' who were completely non-technical.

They created something like an 'enterprise information model' that contained gems like 'Job' and 'Plan' being linked by a 'Job Plan'.

If anyone found a use for their output, it didn't happen while I was there.

One member of that small team was an alcoholic that chugged Listerine at his desk all day, so that may have contributed to the lack of value in the model.
 
I and others have encountered a few people with job titles like Enterprise Architect who have simply been promoted to it or claimed they'd been doing that job who are barely systems analysts. Terms like ADR mean nothing to them.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Meh, let everybody use whatever works for them. So long as they don't try to bother me with their nonsense, it's all good.
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I've sometimes found it very difficult to have to take over on a user's computer. While I can do many things on my own device practically blindfolded, it's always been a Hidden Object game trying to find how where the hell they put their standard icons.
 
alfaniner said:
I've sometimes found it very difficult to have to take over on a user's computer. While I can do many things on my own device practically blindfolded, it's always been a Hidden Object game trying to find how where the hell they put their standard icons.
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Reading this, it just popped into my head, hacker breaks into an office, sits down at the computer, and is flummoxed not by any passwords or other security, but by the fact that he can't figure out what the hell this person did to their interface.


Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
 
rdaneel said:
Reading this, it just popped into my head, hacker breaks into an office, sits down at the computer, and is flummoxed not by any passwords or other security, but by the fact that he can't figure out what the hell this person did to their interface.


Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
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:thumbsup::thumbsup::D
 
rdaneel said:
Reading this, it just popped into my head, hacker breaks into an office, sits down at the computer, and is flummoxed not by any passwords or other security, but by the fact that he can't figure out what the hell this person did to their interface.


Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
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They'd surely have that problem with me.

On Windows desktops, I'd customise them to have no desktop icons and nothing in the auto start menu.

The state of my desktop when I left would have been even worse than that.

No matter what hack you can apply locally, there's no way they could have got into Secret Server or the associated connection manager.

It would have been a case of "Erm... Let's try a different one."

At one stage, Security Branch offered to install Suse linux on my computer but I didn't want to add to Desktop's headaches.

For the last two years, I was working from home and connecting via Citrix running on Debian. Good luck to any hacker trying to work through that!

(Trying to work out what software to start, what values to type into prompts, and managing the TFA and all of that assumes that they'd been successfully able to log into my Debian desktop.)

At every stage of the process, there is nothing 'saved' on my PC or home desktop.

Even if they'd been able to fire up Debian, log in, find and start Citrix, and find the Citrix server to connect to...

...they'd still have to guess the IP address of one of the computers that I could jump to to start getting access. (And then they'd have to find Secret Server etc.)

I've almost forgotten all those IP addresses, give me another 12 months and they'll be gone.

The last time someone tried to use my computer (at home) they said:

"Uhhhhh... Where's windows?"

:)
 
"It's Unix! I know this!" (probably mangled the quote, never saw the movie...)

I'd be reasonably comfortable with a *nix command line, but sounds like you have a lot of required knowledge in your head.

I also tend to use the command line a lot more than the other developers in my team, I often get impatient when they are mousing around trying to find the menu entry for a command that would take 2 seconds to enter... or they need to install SQL Server Management Studio to run a simple SQL query, when Windows PowerShell these days has a SQL query available. Can't recall the last time I installed the Management Studio.
 
I still use the command line for one or two things in my job, but most command line functions have now been replaced by gui apps.

But again, I'm not a DBA or a sysop and I'm not scripting. I'm using the scripts that others have written.
 
grmcdorman said:
"It's Unix! I know this!" (probably mangled the quote, never saw the movie...)

I'd be reasonably comfortable with a *nix command line, but sounds like you have a lot of required knowledge in your head.

I also tend to use the command line a lot more than the other developers in my team, I often get impatient when they are mousing around trying to find the menu entry for a command that would take 2 seconds to enter... or they need to install SQL Server Management Studio to run a simple SQL query, when Windows PowerShell these days has a SQL query available. Can't recall the last time I installed the Management Studio.
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Even with other Windows systems I tend to use the Run box (via Win + R) to start stuff like Word and Excel rather thn the awful menus.
 
Both of my Linux boxes at home are running the Irish language GUI and I’ve aliased the crap out of standard system commands to stop me from making stupid errors. Always fun when I have a visitor.
 
I tend to use the terminal on linux because I started with BSD in the early 80s, ran some AIX servers in the 90s and tested software on AIX, HP, Solaris (and more?). Then later Linux. All had different management GUIs, though at least in 90s most ran CDE, so rather than remember how the different GUIs worked I could stick to the common commands.
Much like my experience with DBs, I try to stick to SQL 92 standard which works everywhere.
 
Darat said:
Windows Key type "note" enter - if they ever change that I'll get very cross.
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I have backlit LED keyboard with replaceable keycaps. I asked Logitech if they had a penguin keycap that I could use in place of the Windows one. They didn't. :( I looked into getting one from a third party, but for some reason didn't like the options.
 
Blue Mountain said:
I have backlit LED keyboard with replaceable keycaps. I asked Logitech if they had a penguin keycap that I could use in place of the Windows one. They didn't. :( I looked into getting one from a third party, but for some reason didn't like the options.
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Print your own label for the key. I did that when I remapped the second Windows key to be Compose.

ETA: Okay, might not look so good backlit.
 
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