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

[arthwollipot]

I'm struggling to remember exactly the purpose of the first dongle I encountered. Something tells me that it was for a digital camera, but if so it must have been one of the early ones since it was some time around 1994. I doubt the reliability of this memory.

 

[theprestige]

Today I had a developer complain that a function call to my service wasn't behaving as expected. I looked up the vendor docs, and told him which function call he should use to get the desired result.

He replied by saying that his call should already give him the desired result.

So I had to tell him, "you're using an undocumented call, and it's not behaving the way you expected. I recommend using the documented call."

This is not a conversation I should ever need to have with a grown-ass man supposedly skilled in the art.

 

[arthwollipot]

I've found that "transparency" and "accountability" are magic words when people are asking why they have to follow procedures and use documented methods.

 

[theprestige]

I've found that "transparency" and "accountability" are magic words when people are asking why they have to follow procedures and use documented methods.

Very true, but irrelevant here. This was purely a "that's not how any of this works" situation.

 

[Faydra]

Very true, but irrelevant here. This was purely a "that's not how any of this works" situation.

Had a conversation today about a script that grepped through a log for a specific string and exited with a code of 1 to indicate a failure.

The person requesting I fix this said we should just change the job to indicate that an exit code of 1 should just be considered a success.

I tried to tell them... the original author of this script thought it important enough to fail the job if this string was found.

Fell completely on deaf ears. They just wanted to "fix the script", not understand why the script was designed to fail if that string was found.

I finally just gave up trying.

 

[malbui]

I'm struggling to remember exactly the purpose of the first dongle I encountered. Something tells me that it was for a digital camera, but if so it must have been one of the early ones since it was some time around 1994. I doubt the reliability of this memory.

My first exposure to dongles was circa 1994 when using ACL, data analysis software I still use today. You needed the dongle plugged into your parallel port to get access to the full functionality of the software. With one single dongle for the whole regional IT audit team, you can imagine the fun and games we had when we were dispersed across various clients hundreds of miles apart.

 

[Wudang]

Thank you very much for taking the time to give such a clear description. I remain to be convinced that the new way of doing things is necessarily better than the old, but it's not something I'm going to worry about since I haven't done any development this millennium and I'm unlikely to do any serious work in IT again. The 'tl;dr' description is pretty much what I was taught we should do when I did my BSc in Computing (40 years ago), find out what the customer wanted first; we called it systems analysis in those days. Plus ça change...

Did my Post Grad Dip in CS in 83/4 so another old fart here. I've used Jackson structured programming, cleanroom, "it'll be fine in a few more 30-hour debugging sessions" etc and Agile really is the best. The problem is that like other paradigms someone reads a half-assed description which they misunderstand half of and then work with and/or criticize that.
We had to take ages to train our PM as he was old-school. He protested that what we were doing allowed users to sneak in new requirements. And we said yes and if they are needed we can fit them in the workstream. You run in short "sprints" where you have clearly defined achievable deliverables. It assumes a higher standard of programmer - not just someone who churns specs into code. I sometimes make the analogy like the difference between an old-fashioned infantryman with no idea of the big picture standing in line and doing what he NCO tells him and modern elite doctrine where every trooper knows the goal, understands his teams role, and improvise and adapt to changing circumstances in pursuit of the main goal. In contrast I remember meetings in IBM where developers were shocked to find what their code was used for.

 

[Wudang]

This is not a conversation I should ever need to have with a grown-ass man supposedly skilled in the art.

One of the things you'd hear me saying on a regular basis working in a big banks mainframe world "So let me get your bug report straight. Your application worked. We changed nothing. You did a new release. Your application stopped working and you don't know why but somehow it's my fault?"
One interesting thing I noticed. Almost never did you see a competent guy working in a team of numpties. You'd find whole areas where nobody had a clue. How anything got done in some areas baffled me.

 

[Tolls]

It's the rate of change that matters, I think. The basic principles have been around forever. What Agile does is tighten that feedback loop as much as possible.

Yep, it's the latter that's important.
All the requirements gathering in the world rarely succeeds in getting at exactly what the user is looking for, so being able to take it in baby steps and present them with something they can play with really does help. Also, it tends to result in less of a mountain of worthless documentation at the end of it all.

Right, not her fault.

If the people you work with, who you presume know something about what they are talking about, tell you "just ask for a dongle" then what do you expect her to do?

I'm lucky. I've been through lots of contracts and so know that, in fact, very few people you will end up working with know what they are talking about. It's an art to find the ones who do.

 

[zooterkin]

I remember meetings in IBM where developers were shocked to find what their code was used for.

Oh, yes! Like the German Air Force using an X.400 mail system to pass planes between air traffic control centres...

 

[phiwum]

Had a conversation today about a script that grepped through a log for a specific string and exited with a code of 1 to indicate a failure.

The person requesting I fix this said we should just change the job to indicate that an exit code of 1 should just be considered a success.

I tried to tell them... the original author of this script thought it important enough to fail the job if this string was found.

Fell completely on deaf ears. They just wanted to "fix the script", not understand why the script was designed to fail if that string was found.

I finally just gave up trying.

Perhaps you should have explained bit to use NOT or != to him.

 

[Dancing David]

And sometimes you get a request that just makes you laugh. Just received this email:

I love that!

 

[JoeMorgue]

Back when I was in the Navy I once got a trouble ticket that said "Printer malfunctioning because a mouse has shredded all the paper and made a nest in the paper try while the building went unused for a long period."

 

[theprestige]

Back when I was in the Navy I once got a trouble ticket that said "Printer malfunctioning because a mouse has shredded all the paper and made a nest in the paper try while the building went unused for a long period."

Now that is an awesome ticket. What brings a smile to my face is when the humor in the ticket arises organically from the situation.

Ms ThePrestige just got a ticket saying, "please remove Mark Smith's middle name from the directory service, as it is causing confusion."

Pretty straightforward. She pulls up his record, and discovers that with his middle name, his first two initials end up being "M. D." He works in a hospital. As a medical assistant (MA). Showing up as "Smith, M.D." would, indeed, be confusing. And also amusing. Ms TP is pretty sure the person who filed the ticket understated the problem on purpose so that she would discover the humor herself in the course of fulfilling the request.

I suspect there may also have been a bit of laconic euphemism involved. "Causing confusion" probably translates to "there's one jerk MD in our department who's extremely butthurt that a lowly MA is running around with M.D. after their name."

 

[The Greater Fool]

Back when I was in the Navy I once got a trouble ticket that said "Printer malfunctioning because a mouse has shredded all the paper and made a nest in the paper try while the building went unused for a long period."

Back in the 90's (I guess), I worked at a Quarter Horse race track where the back-office IBM AS/400 (about the size of a thin two drawer file cabinet) had a nest of field mice in the bottom. It was discovered during an upgrade. I got the system sans nest, but the smell persisted. Still worked fine for years.

 

[paulhutch]

I'm struggling to remember exactly the purpose of the first dongle I encountered. Something tells me that it was for a digital camera, but if so it must have been one of the early ones since it was some time around 1994. I doubt the reliability of this memory.

I remember all too well because it was fall 1992 and as Chief Engineer I convinced management to pay $2000.00 to get Protel for Windows Advanced PCB software and another $2000.00 for a new workstation to use it on. The stupid parallel port security dongle refused to work. Turned out those new fangled on the motherboard parallel ports were not compatible with the dongle. Had to add a separate ISA bus parallel port card to get it working.

 

[phiwum]

I remember all too well because it was fall 1992 and as Chief Engineer I convinced management to pay $2000.00 to get Protel for Windows Advanced PCB software and another $2000.00 for a new workstation to use it on. The stupid parallel port security dongle refused to work. Turned out those new fangled on the motherboard parallel ports were not compatible with the dongle. Had to add a separate ISA bus parallel port card to get it working.

So these serial and parallel port dongles were just to prevent unauthorized use of software, or what?

 

[grmcdorman]

I remember all too well because it was fall 1992 and as Chief Engineer I convinced management to pay $2000.00 to get Protel for Windows Advanced PCB software and another $2000.00 for a new workstation to use it on. The stupid parallel port security dongle refused to work. Turned out those new fangled on the motherboard parallel ports were not compatible with the dongle. Had to add a separate ISA bus parallel port card to get it working.

So these serial and parallel port dongles were just to prevent unauthorized use of software, or what?

Generally. Copy protection/"DRM" has been around for a long time.

 

[TheGnome]

Now dongles have appeared in quite a few posts, they seem to be of some interest.

As I feel partially responsible for what I regard as a slight derail, I offer this Wikipedia article for those wanting to know what they were.

 

[novaphile]

In one of those absurd co-incidences... at Heat request (what we call trouble tickets) landed on me last week, because someone couldn't connect to one of our environments via a laptop with a NextG dongle...

Turned out to be a firewall problem, but it was fun to look into for a while.

This makes me want to look at the Telstra NextG devices and see if they have the word "dongle" printed on them.

Edited to add:

Just found this on Telstra's website:

Get started with a SIM Kit or Pre-Paid device

Choose between a modem to connect multiple devices at once, a dongle for laptops or a SIM for everything else.