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

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THEM: I'm getting ERROR 101 when I connect to POINT A.

ME: What's the actual error message?

THEM: "ERROR connecting to POINT B: ERROR 101"

ME: ... That's not POINT A. How did you read the error message but also not read the error message?
 
theprestige said:
THEM: I'm getting ERROR 101 when I connect to POINT A.

ME: What's the actual error message?

THEM: "ERROR connecting to POINT B: ERROR 101"

ME: ... That's not POINT A. How did you read the error message but also not read the error message?
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I get a lot of that. I run our SSO server.

People can't seem to grasp that the SSO server authenticates you then sends it on. After that, the problem is on the target server, not SSO.

But now, if a website is SSO-enabled, EVERY website problem comes to me first.

"I went to the site but this graph isn't displaying properly. I think it's an SSO problem!"

Think I can make a civil case for pain and suffering? (Mentally) unsafe working conditions?
 
arthwollipot said:
And let's not forget that the computers that run air traffic control at busy airports and stock exchanges don't generally need to be shut down either.
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Assuming they are running suitable software in the first place. At one employment, we were slightly alarmed to discover that the German Air Force was using our X.400 email server for passing planes between air traffic control points, when there was no guarantee of delivery, and certainly not of any delivery time frame.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Also, VMS was pretty legendary for its uptime record. Typical uptimes were in the order of hundreds of days, sometimes years. The apparent record uptime for a VMS cluster is one at CERN, which we understand has been running continuously since about 1985. So that's well over 30 years.
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Blue Bubble said:
Even more ancient bearded VMS guru here :)

I think you're mistaken re CERN; I think you're referring to the (possibly) apochryphal story of the Irish Railways system (see, amongst others, this thread started by me in news://comp.os.vms from 2006).

One of my biggest customers (systems are a split-site disaster-tolerant cluster in London and elsewhere in south England) currently up since July 2011 (same customer as in comp.os.vms thread, different systems (Alphas and Itaniums)).

I'm sure there are other VMS systems at the same customer that have been up for much longer than that - and many of these systems run flat-out.
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I have a Windows XP desktop. (Years ago it became my secondary PC, now it is thirdish.) I still use it frequently. Way too sentimental not to. (Using it now actually!) (XP was the OS I knew, and still know, absolutely inside and out 100% until fairly recently with Windows 10 as well)

Since 2003 it has been off less than 100 total hours max. It's probably closer to around 40. (I know I remember replacing the power supply once, it was off around 12 hours then because I was too tired to do it until the next day.) It has always been plugged into a UPS. On an average year it is only off for minutes, which would be during a few reboots or furniture moves.

The current uptime is 2819 hours (117 days). I'm fairly certain I had it on for over a year before, and am sure I've been in the 200s (it was in the 200s the one before this one).

And for a couple years it was folding proteins 24/7, running "flat-out" as Blue Bubble says.

I have used it online frequently since I bought it. Still to this day. Never had virus protection unless you count noscripts and adblockers. Just don't click on danger. It's that easy. (Being in IT helps to know what is danger though.:)) Though I would scan with Kaspersky maybe twice a year, rarely would it find anything, no even a false positive.

As far as I remember I only got malware on this PC two times, easily removed with a Kaspersky scan both times. One was an Adobe Flash exploit, kind of hard to avoid that one. Knew instantly as soon as it ran what had happened.

I have never noticed any problems after the supposed end of XP support (they still did many security updates for years afterwards). I still get the "Support is Ending in April" (2014) pop-up every month. I'm too sentimental to check the "never show this again" box, and it (KB2934207) apparently was not coded to stop appearing after April 2014!

I have never ran a registry cleaner on it either. I've installed and uninstalled countless programs on this machine in the last 17 years. I have a feeling thatit might have the most bloated XP registry in the world.
 
This is The End said:
I have a Windows XP desktop. (Years ago it became my secondary PC, now it is thirdish.) I still use it frequently. Way too sentimental not to. (Using it now actually!) (XP was the OS I knew, and still know, absolutely inside and out 100% until fairly recently with Windows 10 as well)

Since 2003 it has been off less than 100 total hours max. It's probably closer to around 40. (I know I remember replacing the power supply once, it was off around 12 hours then because I was too tired to do it until the next day.) It has always been plugged into a UPS. On an average year it is only off for minutes, which would be during a few reboots or furniture moves.

The current uptime is 2819 hours (117 days). I'm fairly certain I had it on for over a year before, and am sure I've been in the 200s (it was in the 200s the one before this one).

And for a couple years it was folding proteins 24/7, running "flat-out" as Blue Bubble says.

I have used it online frequently since I bought it. Still to this day. Never had virus protection unless you count noscripts and adblockers. Just don't click on danger. It's that easy. (Being in IT helps to know what is danger though.:)) Though I would scan with Kaspersky maybe twice a year, rarely would it find anything, no even a false positive.

As far as I remember I only got malware on this PC two times, easily removed with a Kaspersky scan both times. One was an Adobe Flash exploit, kind of hard to avoid that one. Knew instantly as soon as it ran what had happened.

I have never noticed any problems after the supposed end of XP support (they still did many security updates for years afterwards). I still get the "Support is Ending in April" (2014) pop-up every month. I'm too sentimental to check the "never show this again" box, and it (KB2934207) apparently was not coded to stop appearing after April 2014!

I have never ran a registry cleaner on it either. I've installed and uninstalled countless programs on this machine in the last 17 years. I have a feeling thatit might have the most bloated XP registry in the world.
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Just an FYI, most "registry cleaners" will cause more problems than they solve; especially the general purpose ones that will "make your system run faster and better!". There are decent programs for specific things (clean up poorly uninstalled programs, for example, or specific registry errors), and some that do a guided clean (requiring the user to know what should and shouldn't be removed) that can be better, but the automatic ones that do everything for you? I wouldn't touch one if I had to.

ETA: And that wasn't specifically directed at you or anything, just jumped off your post to talk about the topic :D
 
We had a "thing" on Monday night, surprised that it hasn't made the papers. Comms centre went down and the third party's system failed over to the same Comms centre.

Oops
 
Gee thanks, Business Management, for introducing an error into a script that was intended to send an email to all staff who haven't used their RAS token for over 12 months that in fact sent it to everybody who has a RAS token regardless of whether they use it or not, telling them all that their RAS access is about to be removed.

We're only just getting our heads above water after that sudden flood of calls.
 
arthwollipot said:
Gee thanks, Business Management, for introducing an error into a script that was intended to send an email to all staff who haven't used their RAS token for over 12 months that in fact sent it to everybody who has a RAS token regardless of whether they use it or not, telling them all that their RAS access is about to be removed.

We're only just getting our heads above water after that sudden flood of calls.
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Awesome! Plenty of pre-release testing, I see? They should work at our place! This is BAU for some of our stuff.
 
Just recalling way back, when we operators controlled the system using a dot-matrix-printing console. One of our newer guys had just found out about UDCs (User Defined Commands), i.e. shortcut abbreviations.

I only found out after making a typo, intending to PRINT a file, that he had made a shortcut. The single-letter -- "P" -- to initiate the PURGE command.
 
alfaniner said:
Just recalling way back, when we operators controlled the system using a dot-matrix-printing console. One of our newer guys had just found out about UDCs (User Defined Commands), i.e. shortcut abbreviations.

I only found out after making a typo, intending to PRINT a file, that he had made a shortcut. The single-letter -- "P" -- to initiate the PURGE command.
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*SUBMARINE DIVING KLAXON SOUNDS*
 
Ah, testing, who needs that?

Many years ago I was part of one of Europe's first Windows XP deployments (not by choice) for a certain government agency that I'll not name due to the likelihood of a long and slanderous diatribe resulting.

They had what I'll call 'satellite offices' dealing with certain legal issues involving member of the public (and legal professionals, lots of them).
These...offices uses a rather elderly DOS based database whose exact ownership was uncertain due to it's history involving a number of buy-outs, liquidations and one large fire. Basically it had been obsolete ten years earlier but still, in the manner of DOS programmes, worked reasonably well.
Naturally the programme didn't understand networks or long paths so liberal use of SUBST and NET USE was required to connect to disk and print resources.
[For the uninitiated NET USE was a DOS {and is a Windows shell} command to connect to network resources. For example NET USE R: \\SERVER\SHARE\FOLDER created a drive letter R: that was actually on a completely different computer]

The...people testing the database application couldn't get it to run but I managed to do so. It had been a while since I'd seen a programme installer offer CGA, EGA and Hercules video options but by tweaking I managed this.
I suggested that they test the network aspects thoroughly (and of course put this in writing in my documentation).
Naturally they didn't.

Now I knew, being in touch with Microsoft, that certain things had changed under XP. One of these was the ability to redirect physical ports. This is a bit technical but to DOS (and DOS apps) LPT1 was the first parallel port (i.e. the chunky connector used main for printers). The database didn't use a printer connected via this port, instead they mapped it to a network printer using something like
NET USE LPT1: \\SERVER\PRINTER

Except this didn't work under XP. Oops.

They found this out, not during testing, but when they were doing a pilot deployment in a certain geographically remote location. Which meant they couldn't print out certain legal paperwork.
Important legal paperwork.

Panic ensued. Blame was thrown around frantically (a certain large consultancy company was involved). Microsoft was screamed at and dragged a specialist in the site. He couldn't understand (or fix) the problem.
[It wasn't that difficult, merely obscure and undocumented]

After a while they found, by accident, that the problem resolved itself it if granted people administer rights. Which was against policy but a newspaper had printed a story about the result of the problem and the government agency was panicking.
This worked until an under-skilled employee managed to delete some rather important files.

So I got dragged in to fix the problem. It was actually fairly straightforward, normal users couldn't (under XP) re-map ports that actually existed to virtual (i.e. network) ones. Disable the parallel port and the problem was fixed until a better solution was put in place.

Test. Then test some more.
 
My current employers have an extremely complex IT setup with a massive IT department maintaining applications and some platforms and a partner organisation providing other platforms, network services, and stuff like mail.

This year has seen a big focus on user awareness on the part of our partner organisation.

A few weeks ago they decided to run a test. Without warning any of us, they sent a phishing mail to a subset of users to see what would happen.

A lot of the recipients did the right thing and flagged the mail to Support without clicking on the active link.

Support reacted quickly, forwarding the mail to every user with instructions not to click on the link. Without removing or editing the link in any way.

The next IT Steering Committee meeting saw some interesting exchanges.
 
Most of our Tier 1 agents are uni students. I imagine that's reasonably common in Service Desk environments.

It's exam season.

We have a grand total of six agents present today. Supporting approximately 10,000 users.
 
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