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

[catsmate]

I'm getting rather tired of phone calls that sound like someone is using speaker and talking from the other side of the room.

Some enterprise phone systems have sufficiently granular settings that a user can have their speakerphone access removed.....

continued from http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=352419

Posted By: jimbob

 

[arthwollipot]

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

 

[Norman Alexander]

I'm getting rather tired of phone calls that sound like someone is using speaker and talking from the other side of the room.

You do the same. Then they can't hear you and will come up to the phone and yell "CAN YOU HEAR ME??!" You can then yell back "NO!! STAND CLOSER TO THE PHONE!!"

 

[Filippo Lippi]

Question: does being aware of the seagull manager approaching lessen the impact of the sea gulling?

 

[Norman Alexander]

Question: does being aware of the seagull manager approaching lessen the impact of the sea gulling?

Throw a hot potato fry into a far corner and check...

 

[arthwollipot]

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.

 

[arthwollipot]

Edit: Hey, my first duplicate post!

 

[TragicMonkey]

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.

 

[JoeMorgue]

//dup//

 

[JoeMorgue]

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.

 

[The Man]

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.

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.

 

[JoeMorgue]

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.

 

[The Man]

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.

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.

I still haven't seen the problem actually happen.

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.

 

[catsmate]

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.

Closed.
Resolved: Non Repro.

 

[BowlOfRed]

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.

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.

 

[arthwollipot]

Whenever someone calls with a problem and the problem mysteriously can't be replicated when they're on the phone, I always take credit.

 

[novaphile]

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.

 

[TragicMonkey]

"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?"

 

[malbui]

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.

 

[alfaniner]

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.

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.