User:
My test machines can't access a share when using the newest test version of the software. They're still able to access it on the older version. Your team owns the machine the share is hosted on can you take a look?
Me:
Yes. Yes I'm sure the problem is with the share.
He's answered his own question just by saying it!
"The old version still works, but the new version doesn't, obvs it's the share!"
Fucking morons.
I told them to try pinging and tracerting the hostname and ip address for the server and let me know what they get
these guys aren't actually smart enough to do those things so I don't expect to hear back until after my last day
after the email thread chewed itself overnight they did manage to find their own resolution
they had--for some asinine reason--put an entry for this server into hosts.txt with the wrong IP
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
User:
My test machines can't access a share when using the newest test version of the software. They're still able to access it on the older version. Your team owns the machine the share is hosted on can you take a look?
Me:
Yes. Yes I'm sure the problem is with the share.
He's answered his own question just by saying it!
"The old version still works, but the new version doesn't, obvs it's the share!"
Fucking morons.
I told them to try pinging and tracerting the hostname and ip address for the server and let me know what they get
these guys aren't actually smart enough to do those things so I don't expect to hear back until after my last day
after the email thread chewed itself overnight they did manage to find their own resolution
they had--for some asinine reason--put an entry for this server into hosts.txt with the wrong IP
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
I had a similar conversation with one of our parent companies, where they were just like "you could just put that Citrix pointer in the hosts file on all of your PCs" ... for 400 PCs. And then when they change the IP two years from now, I have to fix that. No, I will put it in DNS and people can deal with the cert mismatch.
I mean, do you guys not have an easy way to edit the hosts file across an arbitrary number of PCs?
I'm sure I could figure out a way to do it via GP, but no, that's not going in the hosts file. And then on the DNS side, they use the same .com domain for this internal site as they do for their external web sites.
Specifically, to explain further, this was access to their Citrix site at citrix.abcd.com (ABCD being their company name), which has an external IP and an internal IP. If you hit the external IP, you're forced into two-factor auth, where we don't have access because we don't have SecurID tokens on their side. If you hit the internal IP, it's just username/password. The cert for the site is issued to citrix.abcd.com so when I add a DNS entry on our side to point citrix.wxyz.com to the internal IP (WXYZ being our company name), there is a cert mismatch. Okay, so let's say I set up a conditional forwarder abcd.com domain on our DNS server for that one alias to point lookups for citrix.abcd.com to the internal IP? Well, since abcd.com is also their external domain and since basically 60% of our employees are also ABCD customers, it would try to access the internal IP of www.abcd.com (among multiple other sites), which is firewalled off between us, on a fairly restricted firewall that I don't control. So they suggested putting it in the hosts file.
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Wait, why aren't you doing split dns?
+1
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RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
I don't control abcd.com, and the only access I have is to abcd.com via external internet DNS. They are obviously using split DNS for their clients. I don't see how split DNS would make a difference on our side. Maybe I'm missing something. Our side of the DNS is fine. All of our external sites use a completely different domain than our internal sites. Again, I could setup a version of abcd.com on our DNS, but that comes with its own issues. If there is a way to do that in Windows DNS, but then only have citrix.abcd.com point to their internal IP and force all other *.abcd.com to perform the lookup on the internet on our upstream ISP DNS, it's beyond me. I wear too many hats to dig in that deep right now.
Argghhh. Spent all morning back and forth with the NetOps guy here at the university. We are swapping over to using Google Compute engine for our app (dear god we've been in the process of transitioning for like 6 months now) and since you can't send email from the VM instances to prevent spam bots, you have to go through a 3rd party providers like Mailgun. Despite knowing we would be moving off of the university's systems well, well before we registered a domain, the decision was made against my recomendation to register it through the University's registrar, which means we have to join the queue with everyone else when we need to update something, rather than just doing it myself.
Part of the mail stuff is getting the domain verified by adding a pair of TXT records, the SPF and DKIM ones. Because I was having them add a bunch of other subdomains now, while I had their attention, I formatted everything to look like this:
So, the DKIM is set to point the to something._domainkey.subdomain.domain.com with a value of "k=rsa; p=reallylongcryptokeyhere". So it just Has. Not. Been. Working. I added a personal dummy domain and tested it out, worked fine. So I keep emailing the Netops guy, and he seems "convinced" that the answer is pulling out the "K=RSA;" part. I am against it but hey, go ahead and try it, you deal with this stuff way more than I do. Doesn't work. Finally includes a print of what he put into the entry...
I probably won't call him back, I really don't have time to devote to a sales call, shame.
Sales calls, in general, are horrible. I hate getting them, I hate making them, they're a drain on my life. When a potential customer gets my phone, I cringe because I know that my current projects just got pushed back another hour.
Thankfully, my coworkers have been doing their damnest to keep them off my plate lately. Miraculously, more is getting done!
Does anyone know how to make external data connections in Excel use relative paths instead of full UNC paths to a SharePoint site? The statistical reporting workbook I've been assigned to learn and take over was initially set up with 6 separate data connections, all using a separate mapped drive, all pointing to the same folder on SharePoint. I whittled it down to a single mapped drive, but then it'd require other users on the team to have the mapped drive.
"Why not just create a batch file to map the drive?" I asked.
...because we don't have local admin permissions to run batch files. This is the first time in my career that I don't have admin access. It's the first time that I hate not being a sysadmin. I feel... inadequate, violated, garbage tossed to the side of the road, like someone just bit their thumb at me sir.
I'm hoping that after a few more weeks, the SharePoint devs (a subset of their IT) will realize that I'm not an idiot and can be trusted with said access. But anyhoo... any thoughts on relative paths for data connections?
EDIT: I've changed it from a mapped drive to full UNC path, but I'd still like to have relative paths because it not only make more sense, but should the directory get moved (which is highly possible given the changes made around here), it'd be nice to just have things work instead of changing the data connections. Also I'm just incredibly curious how to do this, and efficiency is a fantastic thing.
Le_Goat on
While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
What about a recorded macro that goes out and 'resets' the relative path (you'd run whenever you move the workbook around - or just on launch maybe)? Or just have a variable that goes out and finds the current folder of the excel file?
dim myPath as string
myexternaldatafilename = thisworkbook.path & "\filename"
It looks like the 'real' answer is to use the data model and use that as the data source.
EDIT: Assuming we are talking about pivot tables - not sure what you are doing inside the sheet
But as far as I know, there is no way to make Excel behave so that it will use relative paths for external data inherently - IIRC this has been a complaint for awhile. The answer is always use UNC paths or blah blah.
It looks like the 'real' answer is to use the data model and use that as the data source.
EDIT: Assuming we are talking about pivot tables - not sure what you are doing inside the sheet
But as far as I know, there is no way to make Excel behave so that it will use relative paths for external data inherently - IIRC this has been a complaint for awhile. The answer is always use UNC paths or blah blah.
The workbook imports data from multiple workbooks into multiple sheets, then we use a macro to do a few other sorting things, followed then by using pivot tables.
That reason you gave was the reason why I switched to UNC paths. It works, but now it just feels like there should be a better way.
While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
It looks like the 'real' answer is to use the data model and use that as the data source.
EDIT: Assuming we are talking about pivot tables - not sure what you are doing inside the sheet
But as far as I know, there is no way to make Excel behave so that it will use relative paths for external data inherently - IIRC this has been a complaint for awhile. The answer is always use UNC paths or blah blah.
The workbook imports data from multiple workbooks into multiple sheets, then we use a macro to do a few other sorting things, followed then by using pivot tables.
That reason you gave was the reason why I switched to UNC paths. It works, but now it just feels like there should be a better way.
This is the motto on the bottom of my coat of arms.
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
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lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
Seems Dell can only have one dispatch for a computer per day. A laptop had an issue that they diagnosed as a motherboard issue (the battery wouldn't charge even with multiple adapters) so they put it in for a new motherboard but later on the video card started blue screening it so I had them diagnose that and they said it was probably bad BUT they can't send another dispatch for another part until the first one is done. So, I would have to cancel the first issue and then have them diagnose it all over again so they could put both dispatches (motherboard part + new video card) in one.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
What, you guys don't just bully the tech into letting you not go through the whole diagnosis process? It works for me about 75% of the time. "Yo, look, I know what's going on with this thing, just send a motherboard and a tech."
What, you guys don't just bully the tech into letting you not go through the whole diagnosis process? It works for me about 75% of the time. "Yo, look, I know what's going on with this thing, just send a motherboard and a tech."
Dell has been getting more strict over time with their call center people following the script more closely. 5-6 years ago I could get them to abandon the script about 90% of the time when I told them "I have a laptop with this error code, I've done [these steps], I need a new [random part]."
Now I'd say my success rate with that is about 30-40%.
Yeah, I had a batch of 7 Dell monitors that were bad. There was a known issue with the model, where the screen would turn off at times. I worked with them for about a week (EDIT: I looked at my notes, looks like it went on for months, actually) to get them replaced as problems occurred. They kept sending me the same fucking model, which kept exhibiting the same fucking behavior. They gave me one replacement that was a newer model, with a slightly smaller screen. I kept trying to tell them, "Yes this, please just do this from now on.", and they wanted to play monitor roulette some more, instead.
I eventually barked until I got a supervisor, and I let them know that I was done working on this problem, I was just going to eat the cost of the monitors, buy some Asus monitors instead, and as the person in charge of purchasing IT equipment for our company, I wasn't going to buy Dell equipment ever again.
They called me back a few times later, trying to "make it right" by asking me to play monitor roulette some more with the same damn model. I was very nice with the guys who called me, because I used to work in a call center, so I understand their pain. They gotta do what they're told. No intelligence allowed, and all that. But I asked them to drop the case, and to please make a note that Dell's policy towards returns, when I've replaced the same unit 6 times in a row and keep getting the same defective model back, needs changing. Someone should be able to look at that situation and make an intelligent decision.
I mean, these guys must have shipped me about 11 monitors before I put the brakes on. And paid for my shipping 11 monitors back to them. That's colossally stupid.
I'd have issued a chargeback and informed them of the appropriate lemon laws that apply.
They had eaten up enough of my time already. I'm already wearing about 7 hats right now, I don't need to fuck around with monitors and paperwork and other bullshit. I need to be working on network design and putting more shit in the air.
I don't control abcd.com, and the only access I have is to abcd.com via external internet DNS. They are obviously using split DNS for their clients. I don't see how split DNS would make a difference on our side. Maybe I'm missing something. Our side of the DNS is fine. All of our external sites use a completely different domain than our internal sites. Again, I could setup a version of abcd.com on our DNS, but that comes with its own issues. If there is a way to do that in Windows DNS, but then only have citrix.abcd.com point to their internal IP and force all other *.abcd.com to perform the lookup on the internet on our upstream ISP DNS, it's beyond me. I wear too many hats to dig in that deep right now.
Can't you just setup a forward lookup zone for citrix.abcd.com with an A record of the internal IP? All other abcd.com domains will go outbound.
I don't control abcd.com, and the only access I have is to abcd.com via external internet DNS. They are obviously using split DNS for their clients. I don't see how split DNS would make a difference on our side. Maybe I'm missing something. Our side of the DNS is fine. All of our external sites use a completely different domain than our internal sites. Again, I could setup a version of abcd.com on our DNS, but that comes with its own issues. If there is a way to do that in Windows DNS, but then only have citrix.abcd.com point to their internal IP and force all other *.abcd.com to perform the lookup on the internet on our upstream ISP DNS, it's beyond me. I wear too many hats to dig in that deep right now.
Can't you just setup a forward lookup zone for citrix.abcd.com with an A record of the internal IP? All other abcd.com domains will go outbound.
Yeah, I guess that might have worked. I didn't think about making the zone a level deeper. Since we have a DNS based trust, I didn't want to mess with it too deeply. The way I have it setup now, our users can use the shorter URL and deal with the cert mismatch.
Maybe I can get my boss to replace them with ubi's offerings!
Maybe I can also get some switches too!
We have a remote office that just came online so we're installing Ubi cameras there in a couple of weeks.
Fun fact, Charter can run out of installation money for their contractors at the end of the year. We had them scheduled for 12/30 and they never showed up. Seems Charter ran out of budget for the year so they cancelled my install and pushed it back to March.
lwt1973 on
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
Maybe I can get my boss to replace them with ubi's offerings!
Maybe I can also get some switches too!
We have a remote office that just came online so we're installing Ubi cameras there in a couple of weeks.
Fun fact, Charter can run out of installation money for their contractors at the end of the year. We had them scheduled for 12/30 and they never showed up. Seems Charter ran out of budget for the year so they cancelled my install and pushed it back to March.
How the fuck is that your problem? lol
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Posts
If you have users who use lastpass you should know about this.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
after the email thread chewed itself overnight they did manage to find their own resolution
they had--for some asinine reason--put an entry for this server into hosts.txt with the wrong IP
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
I can make http://poopfromyourbutt.com/ point to google.com if I wanted too.
Isn't that part of ITIL?
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I think so?
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I do.
But I can't conceive of a scenario where it makes sense to do this.
Specifically, to explain further, this was access to their Citrix site at citrix.abcd.com (ABCD being their company name), which has an external IP and an internal IP. If you hit the external IP, you're forced into two-factor auth, where we don't have access because we don't have SecurID tokens on their side. If you hit the internal IP, it's just username/password. The cert for the site is issued to citrix.abcd.com so when I add a DNS entry on our side to point citrix.wxyz.com to the internal IP (WXYZ being our company name), there is a cert mismatch. Okay, so let's say I set up a conditional forwarder abcd.com domain on our DNS server for that one alias to point lookups for citrix.abcd.com to the internal IP? Well, since abcd.com is also their external domain and since basically 60% of our employees are also ABCD customers, it would try to access the internal IP of www.abcd.com (among multiple other sites), which is firewalled off between us, on a fairly restricted firewall that I don't control. So they suggested putting it in the hosts file.
Could it be done? Sure. But it isn't worth it.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
Part of the mail stuff is getting the domain verified by adding a pair of TXT records, the SPF and DKIM ones. Because I was having them add a bunch of other subdomains now, while I had their attention, I formatted everything to look like this:
- Name: "xxxxx" | Type: "TXT" | Value: "Your Info Here"
- Name: "xxxxx" | Type: "TXT" | Value: "Your Info Here"
- Name: "xxxxx" | Type: "CNAME" | Value: "Your Info Here"
So, the DKIM is set to point the to something._domainkey.subdomain.domain.com with a value of "k=rsa; p=reallylongcryptokeyhere". So it just Has. Not. Been. Working. I added a personal dummy domain and tested it out, worked fine. So I keep emailing the Netops guy, and he seems "convinced" that the answer is pulling out the "K=RSA;" part. I am against it but hey, go ahead and try it, you deal with this stuff way more than I do. Doesn't work. Finally includes a print of what he put into the entry...
:x :x :x :x
How annoying.
The most dreaded phrase on any software marketing website is "Contact us for pricing"
Sales calls, in general, are horrible. I hate getting them, I hate making them, they're a drain on my life. When a potential customer gets my phone, I cringe because I know that my current projects just got pushed back another hour.
Thankfully, my coworkers have been doing their damnest to keep them off my plate lately. Miraculously, more is getting done!
"Why not just create a batch file to map the drive?" I asked.
...because we don't have local admin permissions to run batch files. This is the first time in my career that I don't have admin access. It's the first time that I hate not being a sysadmin. I feel... inadequate, violated, garbage tossed to the side of the road, like someone just bit their thumb at me sir.
I'm hoping that after a few more weeks, the SharePoint devs (a subset of their IT) will realize that I'm not an idiot and can be trusted with said access. But anyhoo... any thoughts on relative paths for data connections?
EDIT: I've changed it from a mapped drive to full UNC path, but I'd still like to have relative paths because it not only make more sense, but should the directory get moved (which is highly possible given the changes made around here), it'd be nice to just have things work instead of changing the data connections. Also I'm just incredibly curious how to do this, and efficiency is a fantastic thing.
dim myPath as string
myexternaldatafilename = thisworkbook.path & "\filename"
Something like that?
EDIT: Assuming we are talking about pivot tables - not sure what you are doing inside the sheet
But as far as I know, there is no way to make Excel behave so that it will use relative paths for external data inherently - IIRC this has been a complaint for awhile. The answer is always use UNC paths or blah blah.
That reason you gave was the reason why I switched to UNC paths. It works, but now it just feels like there should be a better way.
This is the motto on the bottom of my coat of arms.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
Dell has been getting more strict over time with their call center people following the script more closely. 5-6 years ago I could get them to abandon the script about 90% of the time when I told them "I have a laptop with this error code, I've done [these steps], I need a new [random part]."
Now I'd say my success rate with that is about 30-40%.
I eventually barked until I got a supervisor, and I let them know that I was done working on this problem, I was just going to eat the cost of the monitors, buy some Asus monitors instead, and as the person in charge of purchasing IT equipment for our company, I wasn't going to buy Dell equipment ever again.
They called me back a few times later, trying to "make it right" by asking me to play monitor roulette some more with the same damn model. I was very nice with the guys who called me, because I used to work in a call center, so I understand their pain. They gotta do what they're told. No intelligence allowed, and all that. But I asked them to drop the case, and to please make a note that Dell's policy towards returns, when I've replaced the same unit 6 times in a row and keep getting the same defective model back, needs changing. Someone should be able to look at that situation and make an intelligent decision.
I mean, these guys must have shipped me about 11 monitors before I put the brakes on. And paid for my shipping 11 monitors back to them. That's colossally stupid.
They had eaten up enough of my time already. I'm already wearing about 7 hats right now, I don't need to fuck around with monitors and paperwork and other bullshit. I need to be working on network design and putting more shit in the air.
Once, I walked in to get tech support, and I never came back out.
Can't you just setup a forward lookup zone for citrix.abcd.com with an A record of the internal IP? All other abcd.com domains will go outbound.
PSN - sumowot
Maybe I can get my boss to replace them with ubi's offerings!
Maybe I can also get some switches too!
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
We have a remote office that just came online so we're installing Ubi cameras there in a couple of weeks.
Fun fact, Charter can run out of installation money for their contractors at the end of the year. We had them scheduled for 12/30 and they never showed up. Seems Charter ran out of budget for the year so they cancelled my install and pushed it back to March.
How the fuck is that your problem? lol