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

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Callback to the very first post in the thread. :D

JoeMorgue said:
Dear Users.

- "Oh I'm not a computer perso..." SHUT UP! Just shut up. Your entire job consists entirely of things that are completely done on a computer. This cutesy poo passive aggressive "Oh I'm not a computer person" line whenever I try to explain anything to you is insane. You don't get to remain functionally (and oddly proudly) intentionally ignorant of the core conceit of your entire job.
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JoeMorgue said:
I'm not talking about archiving stuff to survive an asteroid strike.

I'm talking about killing a tree just to have a physical copy of something transitory that you and literally everybody else who will ever look at it can view just as easily online.

I'm talking about one little ole' lady typing up something in an online program, printing it out, walking it over to another little ole' lady who then types up a copy... in the exact same online program.

I'm talking about the same document being printed out, scanned back in, sometimes 4 or 5 times in its lifecycle.

I'm talking about printing out copies of webpages.
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I remember watching an Access database being used to print off labels that were stick on index cards.
 
arthwollipot said:
Inertia and conservatism.

In an old job I did everything I can to encourage people to reduce the amount that needed to be printed, up to and including making and distributing PDF copies of absolutely everything relevant.

In the leadup to our annual conference, the secretariat typically spent an entire day printing of thousands of pages of the conference documentation. I made all of it available to conference attendees as PDF documents, and do you know how many people took that option? None of them. Not one of a hundred and fifty attendees in each of the the five years I worked that conference took the paperless option.

People like paper. That's all there is to it. Paper is seen as more reliable, more relevant, and - strangely, in my opinion - more secure.
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I, in the Before Time anyway, attended numerous conferences, seminars and trade shows (OK it was mainly for the swag :D). People always handed you reams of paper about their products. Unless it was really interesting it never left the hall/site. However a thumbdrive with the catalogue/PDFs (or in Ye Old Days a thing called a "CD") was kept. Today all I want is a card that gives me contact information for a human, a website and perhaps a QR code or similar. Preferably on a credit card sized thumbdrive.

Your paper catalogue takes up capacity I would be filling with snacks, thumbdrives, water bottle, t-shirts, pens, torches, power banks, USB cables and other stuff.
 
malbui said:
That’s a more practical suggestion than most of what the geniuses in our infrastructure group have been coming up with.
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Get a bunch of steel wafers. Have the text printed on the wafers using a solid-ink transfer like the old Phaser series. Then etch the wafers with ferric chloride. Seal the wafers in glass to keep out moisture. Voila, information storage that will last >2000 years.

Swap steel wafers for copper-coated silicon if you want.
 
Yalius said:
Get a bunch of steel wafers. Have the text printed on the wafers using a solid-ink transfer like the old Phaser series. Then etch the wafers with ferric chloride. Seal the wafers in glass to keep out moisture. Voila, information storage that will last >2000 years.

Swap steel wafers for copper-coated silicon if you want.
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Alas, solid ink transfer to metal will smear easily. And the Phaser was never ultra-high precision printing. So the resulting bits/cm-squared is low. Thus you would need trillions of metal wafers, and cubic fortnights of glass to seal them in. Then you have the problem of reading them 2000 years later. Unless you train your robot eyes well in advance.

A better solution is more likely to be a properly etched DVD or Blu-ray technology. They estimate 100-200 years on a shelf. More if properly sealed. Much better bits/cm-squared, and even though Blu-ray is already deprecated, it's readable.
 
I did spend time at a medtech company whose products were subject to FDA regulation and they were required to be able to provide data and results going back years if necessary. The solution found there was to keep the original hardware in a state of readiness on another site, with procedures and instructions for periodic boot tests and for operations tasks just in case.

For my current situation I'm thinking in terms of periodically upgrading to newer platforms, media and software support as technology progresses. I have no idea how things will look in even 20 years, let alone 150, especially given how things have changed since I started working in the field in the early 90s. I figure that the best I can do is to leave to my successors all the data, properly checked and verified and indexed and labelled, in formats and on platforms that they can continue to access.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Alas, solid ink transfer to metal will smear easily. And the Phaser was never ultra-high precision printing. So the resulting bits/cm-squared is low. Thus you would need trillions of metal wafers, and cubic fortnights of glass to seal them in. Then you have the problem of reading them 2000 years later. Unless you train your robot eyes well in advance.

A better solution is more likely to be a properly etched DVD or Blu-ray technology. They estimate 100-200 years on a shelf. More if properly sealed. Much better bits/cm-squared, and even though Blu-ray is already deprecated, it's readable.
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That's why you etch with the ferric chloride; the ink is only there to mask the substrate, who cares if it smears after the text is etched into the metal? And you're preserving data as plaintext, it will be human-readable for millennia, unless we forget how to read. Not sure what the actual data being preserved is, but this method will most likely outlive humanity itself.
 
Some years ago I made several grand renting a PC with working 5.25" floppy drive to a company to recover several boxes of old diskettes....
:D
 
Yalius said:
That's why you etch with the ferric chloride; the ink is only there to mask the substrate, who cares if it smears after the text is etched into the metal? And you're preserving data as plaintext, it will be human-readable for millennia, unless we forget how to read. Not sure what the actual data being preserved is, but this method will most likely outlive humanity itself.
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I'm sure your method would endure until the heat death of the solar system. :thumbsup:

Just that to encode even a single page would require significantly more effort, time, materials and expensive storage space than just preserving the original electronically. It's economically nonviable, unless it is reserved for only the most critical documentation...like a Trump speech.;)
 
Norman Alexander said:
I'm sure your method would endure until the heat death of the solar system. :thumbsup:

Just that to encode even a single page would require significantly more effort, time, materials and expensive storage space than just preserving the original electronically. It's economically nonviable, unless it is reserved for only the most critical documentation...like a Trump speech.;)
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Well... yeah. I didn't even mention Phase II, where the wafers are put into orbit.
 
malbui said:
I did spend time at a medtech company whose products were subject to FDA regulation and they were required to be able to provide data and results going back years if necessary. The solution found there was to keep the original hardware in a state of readiness on another site, with procedures and instructions for periodic boot tests and for operations tasks just in case.

For my current situation I'm thinking in terms of periodically upgrading to newer platforms, media and software support as technology progresses. I have no idea how things will look in even 20 years, let alone 150, especially given how things have changed since I started working in the field in the early 90s. I figure that the best I can do is to leave to my successors all the data, properly checked and verified and indexed and labelled, in formats and on platforms that they can continue to access.
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I was going to opine that this is more of a process and procedure problem than a technology problem. Set up a process and procedure of migrating the well formatted data every five years to a then suitable long term storage medium and evaluate whether the format of the data requires updating or if the data needs to be extracted into a new format.
 
I really wish the callers would have all of the details about their issue before calling. I just had someone call up with an error in the protected environment. When I asked them what the error message was, they said "hang on, I'll just log on".

Logging on to the Protected environment takes several minutes, which was dead air, wasting both his and my time.
 
Also, different call, how is it possible that someone whose job title is "Director of ICT Operations" cannot understand why we are unable to provide a precise timeframe for a very open-ended issue?
 
catsmate said:
Some years ago I made several grand renting a PC with working 5.25" floppy drive to a company to recover several boxes of old diskettes....
:D
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About 20 years ago, my Mom handed me some double density (360 kylobyte, IIRC) 5 1/4" floppies that contained some documents that she had produced in the '80's (IIRC) on a Wang Word Processor, and asked me if I could possibly retrieve those documents. At the time, I actually had a PC with a 5 1/4 " drive (which were already getting pretty scarce by then). The Wang Word Processer was a mini-computer based system with character terminals dedicated to word processing. The PC I had was dual booted with Windows and Linux. I was able to get binary garbage to output to the screen or a file from the floppy drive device files in Linux, but never was able to get anything I could make any kind of sense out of, nor was I able to find on the internet any information regarding the file system or data encoding that Wang Word Processors used on floppies, so I was unable to get anything remotely usable or understandable off of those floppies. I don't think I ever got them to mount so that I could see anything remotely resembling files on them. I have no idea what sort of file system those old Wangs used, but I suspect it was something that neither Linux nor Windows recognized.
 
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CORed said:
About 20 years ago, my Mom handed me some double density (360 kylobyte, IIRC) 5 1/4" floppies that contained some documents that she had produced in the '80's (IIRC) on a Wang Word Processor, and asked me if I could possibly retrieve those documents. At the time, I actually had a PC with a 5 1/4 " drive (which were already getting pretty scarce by then). The Wang Word Processer was a mini-computer based system with character terminals dedicated to word processing. The PC I had was dual booted with Windows and Linux. I was able to get binary garbage to output to the screen or a file from the floppy drive device files in Linux, but never was able to get anything I could make any kind of sense out of, nor was I able to find on the internet any information regarding the file system or data encoding that Wang Word Processors used on floppies, so I was unable to get anything remotely usable or understandable off of those floppies. I don't think I ever got them to mount so that I could see anything remotely resembling files on them. I have no idea what sort of file system those old Wangs used, but I suspect it was something that neither Linux nor Windows recognized.
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Could have been a bit-endian problem too.

But have you seen this?

https://retrofloppy.com/formats/
 
CORed said:
About 20 years ago, my Mom handed me some double density (360 kylobyte, IIRC) 5 1/4" floppies that contained some documents that she had produced in the '80's (IIRC) on a Wang Word Processor, and asked me if I could possibly retrieve those documents. At the time, I actually had a PC with a 5 1/4 " drive (which were already getting pretty scarce by then). The Wang Word Processer was a mini-computer based system with character terminals dedicated to word processing. The PC I had was dual booted with Windows and Linux. I was able to get binary garbage to output to the screen or a file from the floppy drive device files in Linux, but never was able to get anything I could make any kind of sense out of, nor was I able to find on the internet any information regarding the file system or data encoding that Wang Word Processors used on floppies, so I was unable to get anything remotely usable or understandable off of those floppies. I don't think I ever got them to mount so that I could see anything remotely resembling files on them. I have no idea what sort of file system those old Wangs used, but I suspect it was something that neither Linux nor Windows recognized.
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Their file system was completely proprietary, and they never shared it, for fear that they would lose business to third party vendors. (NB: It didn't work the way they expected. They just went out of business.)

Companies which offered file conversion services that included Wang files I suspect owned Wang word processors.
 
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Grrrrr. People who get data fifth-hand and try to use it to mean something it doesn't. No, you can't use report X for purpose Y: X was narrowly tailored for a highly specific purpose and as a result it doesn't include that which is necessary for Y. And no, you can't complain about it because nobody ever told you you could even see X, much less use it for Y. Oh, Wendy forwarded it to you? Then complain to Wendy because she sent you a recipe for cherry tarts and you thought it could be used as a blueprint for building a train station.
 
arthwollipot said:
I really wish the callers would have all of the details about their issue before calling. I just had someone call up with an error in the protected environment. When I asked them what the error message was, they said "hang on, I'll just log on".

Logging on to the Protected environment takes several minutes, which was dead air, wasting both his and my time.
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I think they always figure their problem is an error in "the system" that the helpdesk knows all about, and they're just calling to get an ETA and flex their muscle about how unacceptable it is.
 
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