Hrm, one project I have for next year is to re-architect the awful backup solution that is currently in place here. I can tell it's going to be a bit of a fight, becuase when I was explaining my rough idea to my manager (who is very old school in some things), I had a tough time explaining to him that on a disk based backup you don't need to do a full backup every night. He seems to think that the only "full" backup will only ever be the very first one you take.
I've always had problems with differential backups.
Oh I don't think you do differential every day for eternity, but here we currently do a full backup, to tape, every night. It takes 16 hours to do. That... isn't ideal.
I volunteered to work the 31st since there's all sorts of last minute year-end stuff other teams are doing so they need support
got put onto a DL for the IT year end support team so we can coordinate
now my inbox is just filled with spam from all the apps support people
holf fuck y'all sit next to each other just talk
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
Also, looks like I get to set up another Ubiquiti system. 12ish AC-AP-PROs, a few switches and a gateway.
I'd kinda like to use the in-wall things since it's a new building, but I don't know the reliability of them.
I recommend always ceiling mounting Unifi AP's. While you can wall mount them and have some success, the omni is perpendicular to the base, and the radiation pattern is always going to spread 2x as far perpendicular to the antenna.
So when you wall mount it, you're going to maybe cover your room, and maybe the room above and below, but you won't get as good of a "spread" across your building.
Here's some radiation pattern stuff for the UAP-AC, but it's the same on all of them:
EDIT: Shit, you can't do that. Okay, go here: https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm?calledFromFrame=N
Grantee Code: swx
Product Code: -uap
Search
Click Detail on any of the products listed SWX-UAPAC
Click on the Antenna Spec for either 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz.
Ew! Those look like a neat idea until you realize that! Like I see the diagram of the office with like 9 of those plugged in and I wonder what kind of fucking environment they tested that in. Like was every wall shielded with aluminum?
I am putting some APs in our warehouse and I've found 54 rogue access points in my area. I had a spare Nanostation M2 so I could do a spectrum analysis, and the noise floor is -65 dbm. Meaning I need a -35 dbm signal to get a nice 30 SNR, which is the point where the antenna gets de-sensitized.
10:1 that at least half of those rogue APs are fucking cable and dsl modems belonging to old people who don't even know that shit is on.
The client I work on has a site in a fairly large office building in NYC. The rogue AP list and spectrum (particularly 2.4GHz) are a nightmare. It's almost a miracle that anyone's 2.4GHz wifi works in a situation like that.
I'm in a flat warehouse building surrounded by 2 other businesses and a bunch of houses. Then that's surrounded by more houses. Which basically means this is how bad the residential area is getting. There are a ton of trees, too, and they're apparently not enough to absorb all that energy.
When friends come over to my house only 3/4ths of them can use my WiFi, and it's entirely because I just have my 2.4Ghz shut off. Noise floor at my house is -80 dbm.
They ask me how to get better WiFi these days, and I'm like, "Move away from all these fucking people."
I can't say enough about Google Wifi for home use purposes. Replaced my old one router setup with three of them and now I've got perfect coverage everywhere in the house (whereas I had good coverage maybe 50% of the house before). But spectrum congestion isn't something I'm dealing with -- I think I can see one maybe two neighbors' SSIDs from my house. I'd be interested to know how it fares in a more congested environment.
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RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
Hrm, one project I have for next year is to re-architect the awful backup solution that is currently in place here. I can tell it's going to be a bit of a fight, becuase when I was explaining my rough idea to my manager (who is very old school in some things), I had a tough time explaining to him that on a disk based backup you don't need to do a full backup every night. He seems to think that the only "full" backup will only ever be the very first one you take.
We use EMC NetWorker and do fulls once a week, with incrementals nightly, all to disk, and then do a scheduled clone to tape once a week. It (NW) can be cumbersome sometimes, but it fits our environment pretty well.
We have a nonprofit client that ordered a dozen USB signature pads for adding signatures to PDFs. We'd first ordered one as a test, since they're non-returnable. Our POC tested it successfully on their TS.
I was roped in last minute since someone was out sick, and deployed the following order to the rest of the users. We then learned that our POC was a local admin on their TS, and it doesn't seem to work for anyone without admin rights.
Cue working with the developer for months until they finally admit defeat. CDW says they will take a return, minus a 30% fee.
Fuuuuuck.
I support a bunch of sig pads on Citrix. Haven't needed admin rights to make it work. What brand did you get?
I've always had problems with differential backups.
Oh I don't think you do differential every day for eternity, but here we currently do a full backup, to tape, every night. It takes 16 hours to do. That... isn't ideal.
We do. ShadowProtect configured for Continuous Incrementals, backup jobs run every hour of every day and are consolidated in ImageManager such that you have more granularity for more recent restores (hourly images saved for 3 days, daily images for 3 weeks, etc). Uploads off-site as it's written.
I rarely ever cut a new base image after the initial setup.
We have a nonprofit client that ordered a dozen USB signature pads for adding signatures to PDFs. We'd first ordered one as a test, since they're non-returnable. Our POC tested it successfully on their TS.
I was roped in last minute since someone was out sick, and deployed the following order to the rest of the users. We then learned that our POC was a local admin on their TS, and it doesn't seem to work for anyone without admin rights.
Cue working with the developer for months until they finally admit defeat. CDW says they will take a return, minus a 30% fee.
Fuuuuuck.
I support a bunch of sig pads on Citrix. Haven't needed admin rights to make it work. What brand did you get?
We have a nonprofit client that ordered a dozen USB signature pads for adding signatures to PDFs. We'd first ordered one as a test, since they're non-returnable. Our POC tested it successfully on their TS.
I was roped in last minute since someone was out sick, and deployed the following order to the rest of the users. We then learned that our POC was a local admin on their TS, and it doesn't seem to work for anyone without admin rights.
Cue working with the developer for months until they finally admit defeat. CDW says they will take a return, minus a 30% fee.
Fuuuuuck.
I support a bunch of sig pads on Citrix. Haven't needed admin rights to make it work. What brand did you get?
Windows 7 systems connecting via RDP to a TS running 2008 R2 on the same LAN.
It's the Adobe and Word plugins that aren't working; a user will click to place a signature, trace the box, and then it immediately disappears. All of the diagnostics work and users can sign in the test app. Been working with support since Ｓｅｐｔｅｍｂｅｒ with no resolution.
We're running ours with a specialized financial app, which uses a lot of Adobe and IE assets to fill out forms presented in the app. The biggest stumbling blocks for me were making sure the devices were always presented on the same com port, and getting the port mapping from host to client handled correctly. We were running on thin clients and they didn't have the ability to declare a com port for a device. It was always assigned dynamically and the Topaz stuff wants it to be static. I mean, once you used the DemoOCX and found which port it was on and configured all the software for that port, it would probably stay that way, but if the thin client rebooted there was no guarantees. So for all the loan officers I had them swap to PCs.
I don't have any actual plugins running outside the Topaz driver itself. If you've got the devs throwing their hands up over this.. Yeah I don't know what to tell you. From my end, if the DemoOCX recognizes the signature and the software doesn't, I call the software vendor. Unfortunately your software vendor is Microsoft and Adobe, and... good luck there.
Cog on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
We're running ours with a specialized financial app, which uses a lot of Adobe and IE assets to fill out forms presented in the app. The biggest stumbling blocks for me were making sure the devices were always presented on the same com port, and getting the port mapping from host to client handled correctly. We were running on thin clients and they didn't have the ability to declare a com port for a device. It was always assigned dynamically and the Topaz stuff wants it to be static. I mean, once you used the DemoOCX and found which port it was on and configured all the software for that port, it would probably stay that way, but if the thin client rebooted there was no guarantees. So for all the loan officers I had them swap to PCs.
I don't have any actual plugins running outside the Topaz driver itself. If you've got the devs throwing their hands up over this.. Yeah I don't know what to tell you. From my end, if the DemoOCX recognizes the signature and the software doesn't, I call the software vendor. Unfortunately your software vendor is Microsoft and Adobe, and... good luck there.
Yuppp
They had us reinstall the plugins a few different ways, didn't seem like they had much organization or interest in diving in too deeply.
I'm supposed to change around a bunch of backup stuff today.
Boss is gone for the morning.
I don't know the credentials to the backup service account. It isn't documented anywhere. I could reset the password but that'd break everything else that relies on it.
Really hoping the boss knows that password.... (and that he comes back soon)
maybe they're doing that thing that some small businesses do where they try going as long as they can without paying bills to get more interest in their bank accounts
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
I typed in the service tag to get to the warranty page where I clicked on the chat support link where I typed the service tag in to the issue description. Your agent doesn't need to confirm if that is the correct service tag.
This is why I just start my prosupport chat sessions with "I need you to send a tech to replace a thing"
80% of the time it works every time
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
+1
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RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
So, guess who had to deal with a CryptoLocker virus at midnight on Saturday night and spent almost 5 hours cleaning it up. Here's a hint: it was me. Luckily I was notified by my DFSR backlog notifier script about 20 minutes after it kicked off, so it was only able to hit a small percentage of our files. Just happened to be up finishing Inside on the PS4, or else it would have run all night. Web filter logs indicate that at some point the guy ended up on a fake news article about a Secret Service Agent claiming that Obama is a Gay Muslim. Not sure if that was the cause or just a payload delivery object, but still, c'mon, dude.
Honestly I think this rep is drunk. After that last salvo they went quiet for six fucking minutes, and then gave in on dispatching a tech. They asked for a contact name and address, and I gave them a name and then an address and then they asked for a name again.
EDIT: You know, we bill by the hour so at some point here getting this shit replaced on warranty is going to end up costing them more than just buying a new fucking computer would.
No it wasn't a language barrier, I don't think. There was another 5+ minute silence and I finally got sick of it and asked what I was waiting on because I'm billing my client for the time and they're wasting my client's money and I got fucking prompt service after that.
My legitimate guess is they were working multiple tickets.
The issues with Dell phone support i've run into over time is that it seems there is less leniency on them going off script. It used to be that if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about they'd get off script real quick and just help you get what you already know you need. Nowadays there's a lot less of that. Every rep gets graded on every aspect of the call, and I'd put money on the "following the script" part of the grades getting weighted much more heavily recently.
The issues with Dell phone support i've run into over time is that it seems there is less leniency on them going off script. It used to be that if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about they'd get off script real quick and just help you get what you already know you need. Nowadays there's a lot less of that. Every rep gets graded on every aspect of the call, and I'd put money on the "following the script" part of the grades getting weighted much more heavily recently.
on paper it looks better because you can chart money leaving faster if the techs can just hop off and send a replacement hard drive, if you cut down on it, they frustrate the end user to get off the line and just pay themselves because it's quicker and you need it yesterday... this is legit a metric a lot of the large companies use, because on their economies of scale we're talking tens of millions of dollars of savings
but, the other side of that is, you're eating up a lot more money on training and babysitting because someone's gotta analyze those metrics, so you turn a $50 hard drive into $100/hr worth of labor, which is a lot harder to show on a powerpoint because there's a good chance Chad from accounting doesn't understand the nuances of businesses or accounting
bowen on
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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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
My conversations with Dell always go
"Hi this is That_Guy with XYZ IT. We're a Dell certified partner. I've got this machine here with a bad X. I need you to send me a replacement."
90% of the time they just capitulate. Sometimes I need to talk down to them a bit before they give in. Every once in awhile they want to go through troubleshooting but I usually manage to shut down any line of questioning pdq.
maybe they're doing that thing that some small businesses do where they try going as long as they can without paying bills to get more interest in their bank accounts
I think the not paying bills thing for small businesses has more to do with solvency than trying to earn dickall on the float. Having pretty much only worked for small companies the reason why they haven't payed you the last 3 paychecks is cause they don't have the money to, likely cause a customer or 4 haven't paid yet. I don't think MS is trying to get that tree-fiddy by playing silly buggers with their vendors.
No it wasn't a language barrier, I don't think. There was another 5+ minute silence and I finally got sick of it and asked what I was waiting on because I'm billing my client for the time and they're wasting my client's money and I got fucking prompt service after that.
My legitimate guess is they were working multiple tickets.
Alternatively, a supervisor could have recently brow-beaten them for not troubleshooting enough. Give him a few more calls like that and the pain of unnecessary troubleshooting will overcome the pain of getting in trouble for not doing it.
It was probably also partially the difference between server support and PC support. 90% of the time I contact them it's for server shit, even if it's a hard drive replacement, and they're going to assume if you bought a server it's not so your Nana can see pics of your dog on facebook or whatever. Gimme a god damn hard drive.
PC? As far as they know you're a mouth breather. They must assume nothing.
DO YOU SEE THE MOUSE? CAN YOU PUT YOUR HAND ON THE MOUSE??
Still though. 45 minutes when I give instant, concise answers to their questions and I've tried everything they suggest and then some....
I've seen someone hold a mouse like it's a tv remote, point it at the screen where they want to click, click the button, and then not know why it's not working.
I've seen someone hold a mouse like it's a tv remote, point it at the screen where they want to click, click the button, and then not know why it's not working.
Posts
Oh I don't think you do differential every day for eternity, but here we currently do a full backup, to tape, every night. It takes 16 hours to do. That... isn't ideal.
got put onto a DL for the IT year end support team so we can coordinate
now my inbox is just filled with spam from all the apps support people
holf fuck y'all sit next to each other just talk
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
at least IM if you're gonna do it
I'm in a flat warehouse building surrounded by 2 other businesses and a bunch of houses. Then that's surrounded by more houses. Which basically means this is how bad the residential area is getting. There are a ton of trees, too, and they're apparently not enough to absorb all that energy.
When friends come over to my house only 3/4ths of them can use my WiFi, and it's entirely because I just have my 2.4Ghz shut off. Noise floor at my house is -80 dbm.
They ask me how to get better WiFi these days, and I'm like, "Move away from all these fucking people."
Sounds like someone needs a local IRC server.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
@Cog Topaz. What do you use?
We do. ShadowProtect configured for Continuous Incrementals, backup jobs run every hour of every day and are consolidated in ImageManager such that you have more granularity for more recent restores (hourly images saved for 3 days, daily images for 3 weeks, etc). Uploads off-site as it's written.
I rarely ever cut a new base image after the initial setup.
@TL DR Topaz! Windows or something else?
Windows 7 systems connecting via RDP to a TS running 2008 R2 on the same LAN.
It's the Adobe and Word plugins that aren't working; a user will click to place a signature, trace the box, and then it immediately disappears. All of the diagnostics work and users can sign in the test app. Been working with support since Ｓｅｐｔｅｍｂｅｒ with no resolution.
I don't have any actual plugins running outside the Topaz driver itself. If you've got the devs throwing their hands up over this.. Yeah I don't know what to tell you. From my end, if the DemoOCX recognizes the signature and the software doesn't, I call the software vendor. Unfortunately your software vendor is Microsoft and Adobe, and... good luck there.
Yuppp
They had us reinstall the plugins a few different ways, didn't seem like they had much organization or interest in diving in too deeply.
Boss is gone for the morning.
I don't know the credentials to the backup service account. It isn't documented anywhere. I could reset the password but that'd break everything else that relies on it.
Really hoping the boss knows that password.... (and that he comes back soon)
Somebody at Microsoft forget to pay the electric bill?
They appear to be up for me.
I typed in the service tag to get to the warranty page where I clicked on the chat support link where I typed the service tag in to the issue description. Your agent doesn't need to confirm if that is the correct service tag.
Dell support: Is that light on the front or back of the PC?
It's.... on the... fucking... motherboard....
80% of the time it works every time
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
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
Cog: How do you think I noticed the light on the motherboard?
Dell: Could you try unplugging the power supply from the motherboard and plugging it back in?
Cog: I already tried removing the power supply entirely and putting a different one in.
Dell: Is the power button sticky or hard to press?
Cog: No, and I removed the front bezel and tried the power switch itself directly without the button in the way.
WHAT ELSE YOU GOT I DO THIS SHIT FOR A LIVING COME AT ME
EDIT: You know, we bill by the hour so at some point here getting this shit replaced on warranty is going to end up costing them more than just buying a new fucking computer would.
it's a language barrier, because $10 says they're not based in the US, England, or Canada
No it wasn't a language barrier, I don't think. There was another 5+ minute silence and I finally got sick of it and asked what I was waiting on because I'm billing my client for the time and they're wasting my client's money and I got fucking prompt service after that.
My legitimate guess is they were working multiple tickets.
but it's really hard to contextualize "the power button" across cultural and language barriers
especially when you tear it apart and use a paperclip to jerry-rig the fucker
on paper it looks better because you can chart money leaving faster if the techs can just hop off and send a replacement hard drive, if you cut down on it, they frustrate the end user to get off the line and just pay themselves because it's quicker and you need it yesterday... this is legit a metric a lot of the large companies use, because on their economies of scale we're talking tens of millions of dollars of savings
but, the other side of that is, you're eating up a lot more money on training and babysitting because someone's gotta analyze those metrics, so you turn a $50 hard drive into $100/hr worth of labor, which is a lot harder to show on a powerpoint because there's a good chance Chad from accounting doesn't understand the nuances of businesses or accounting
"Hi this is That_Guy with XYZ IT. We're a Dell certified partner. I've got this machine here with a bad X. I need you to send me a replacement."
90% of the time they just capitulate. Sometimes I need to talk down to them a bit before they give in. Every once in awhile they want to go through troubleshooting but I usually manage to shut down any line of questioning pdq.
What is this "interest" thing you speak of?
https://www.ally.com/bank/view-rates/?INTCMPID=HP_NAV2_RATES
Alternatively, a supervisor could have recently brow-beaten them for not troubleshooting enough. Give him a few more calls like that and the pain of unnecessary troubleshooting will overcome the pain of getting in trouble for not doing it.
PC? As far as they know you're a mouth breather. They must assume nothing.
DO YOU SEE THE MOUSE? CAN YOU PUT YOUR HAND ON THE MOUSE??
Still though. 45 minutes when I give instant, concise answers to their questions and I've tried everything they suggest and then some....