so I think I've mentioned this in the past but we do quarterly phishing tests here. we get reports of users who click the link, and those users are autoenrolled in training that is mandatory to complete.
Today we had a user fail the test email, and then report the email she got telling her she was enrolled in training as a phishing email.......
My wife's IT department doesn't have a lot of experience with hardware (she works at a University, so I suspect half of said department is students, but that could be a sweeping generalization). She ordered a new laptop recently and they tried ordering her a docking station. It said "Universal" so they just ordered it.
The laptop interfaces fine, but in order to charge through the docking station, she needs a USB-C connection
And her laptop doesn't have USB-C
I tried to help her out and find a proper docking station that would work, and my only conclusion is that Dell's site pertaining to accessories is a hot fucking mess.
I think they are trying some shenanigans of returning/replacing the docking station with something else that will charge and/or providing a second power adapter.
As much as I want to accuse that particular section of the IT department, they are pretty much forced to buy E-class laptops ("built specifically for education"), and Dell's level of service is what it's been for the past 20 years.
Many of the manufacturers have stopped making actual docking stations and have moved toward these USB port replicators. They're fine, but not great.
so, same as the proprietary docking stations then
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
My wife's IT department doesn't have a lot of experience with hardware (she works at a University, so I suspect half of said department is students, but that could be a sweeping generalization). She ordered a new laptop recently and they tried ordering her a docking station. It said "Universal" so they just ordered it.
The laptop interfaces fine, but in order to charge through the docking station, she needs a USB-C connection
And her laptop doesn't have USB-C
I tried to help her out and find a proper docking station that would work, and my only conclusion is that Dell's site pertaining to accessories is a hot fucking mess.
I think they are trying some shenanigans of returning/replacing the docking station with something else that will charge and/or providing a second power adapter.
As much as I want to accuse that particular section of the IT department, they are pretty much forced to buy E-class laptops ("built specifically for education"), and Dell's level of service is what it's been for the past 20 years.
Couple things:
First off, Dell's service is actually really good. I've worked with them for 12 years and never really had an issue, especially in a corporate environment.
now to the story at hand. If the computer doesn't have USB-C, than it is likely that a dock won't charge it by itself. The only docks that can charge a laptop are the ones that use the old school port on the bottom of the laptop, and USB-C. the other kind of docks are "universal" which just mean they use USB (non C) to connect to the laptop, which doesn't provide power.
so on the off chance that her laptop has the old school e-port on the bottom of it still, an e-port dock will charge the laptop. Otherwise, no, she'll have to have a separate power adapter. It isn't likely that the laptop has it as Dell has been phasing that out over the last 18 months.
If the laptop does have the e-port on the bottom, it'll look like this:
I would have expected Dell's CS to catch this and recommend the proper docking station (assumption 1: that the station was ordered the same time as the laptop; which upon further questioning, seems not to have been the case)
I would expect Dell to recommend a replacement, which doesn't seem to be happening, at least so far. They seem to be wanting her or the IT team to order a replacement part. (assumption 2: this may be happening already and I'm not privy to it)
I would expect either IT or Dell to provide or recommend a second power adapter
I would have expected Dell's CS to catch this and recommend the proper docking station (assumption 1: that the station was ordered the same time as the laptop; which upon further questioning, seems not to have been the case)
I would expect Dell to recommend a replacement, which doesn't seem to be happening, at least so far. They seem to be wanting her or the IT team to order a replacement part. (assumption 2: this may be happening already and I'm not privy to it)
I would expect either IT or Dell to provide or recommend a second power adapter
it should be IT's job
I mean assuming the laptop supports a proper dock then yeah, it should be listed as like, an accessory when you go to buy it
but picking proper accessories for work laptops is like... what IT is for
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
We do mostly consumer break-fix with some light small business MSP stuff.
There are so many things wrong with this one.
New client (not one of our MSP clients) comes in to our consumer facing storefront. Has laptop with damaged screen. Okay. Oh, also, this laptop is mission critical and runs their SQL server of which they have no backups and they have $200,000 riding on it getting done before the weekend is over.
Okay, whatever, it's a common older dell, so we stock that LCD.
The great thing about USB-C is we get to see the rise of mass market docking stations that can actually do shit well (like multiple monitors) and even have built in GPUs. It'll be less about "dropping in" and having it click into a slot and more "plug this cable in and use all these external ports now" type things.
USB-C is a great thing and I'm hoping it catches on in the business world.
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
The great thing about USB-C is we get to see the rise of mass market docking stations that can actually do shit well (like multiple monitors) and even have built in GPUs. It'll be less about "dropping in" and having it click into a slot and more "plug this cable in and use all these external ports now" type things.
USB-C is a great thing and I'm hoping it catches on in the business world.
yeah it's still in the growing pains part but like
at least there's a chance since it's collaborative work on a shared standard
meanwhile our laptops with the standard dell port they've used for what, 10 years?, still get random bullshit where they won't sleep/wake/use monitors/etc
Aioua on
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
I would have expected Dell's CS to catch this and recommend the proper docking station (assumption 1: that the station was ordered the same time as the laptop; which upon further questioning, seems not to have been the case)
I would expect Dell to recommend a replacement, which doesn't seem to be happening, at least so far. They seem to be wanting her or the IT team to order a replacement part. (assumption 2: this may be happening already and I'm not privy to it)
I would expect either IT or Dell to provide or recommend a second power adapter
I can confirm that there is no docking station that will both charge the laptop and provide port replication. She will need to use a separate power adapter.
In order to simultaneously charge and provide extra ports, the docking station needs to connect by either USB-C, Thunderbolt, or a Dell port replicator interface... none of which are present on the "education" line.
As for why Dell didn't catch this... I dunno. Unless you're directly working with a sales rep, Dell isn't going to catch anything. Ordering from Dell's website is like ordering through any other ecommerce site, like Amazon or NewEgg. They're not inspecting their orders for internal compatibility.
Honestly this was the job of your wife's employer's IT department, or whatever desk jockey is pretending to be IT this week.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I really liked the e-port docks and I haven't had problems with them since Windows XP.
But I'm willing to give them up if it means I get more laptops with external GPUs.
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can toss my phone down into a USB-C adapter and it charges it while also giving me full access to a PC environment with an external video card.
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
Network guys took down a big chunk of our datacenter by fucking around with a production firewall. Knocked several MSP clients offline.
Apparently it took them a direct phonecall from one of the managers after a fucking hour and a half to decide that maybe they should load the old config back in the firewall.
Like.....
.... how is that not the instant reaction
"What? We took down part of the datacenter?--JESUS CHRIST WE NEED TO RELOAD THE OLD CONFIG"
EDIT: Oh and they were doing it without a change control.
I think someone might get fired over this. Some of the clients didn't even notice. Some of them very much did and are very hot about it.
Network guys took down a big chunk of our datacenter by fucking around with a production firewall. Knocked several MSP clients offline.
Apparently it took them a direct phonecall from one of the managers after a fucking hour and a half to decide that maybe they should load the old config back in the firewall.
Like.....
.... how is that not the instant reaction
"What? We took down part of the datacenter?--JESUS CHRIST WE NEED TO RELOAD THE OLD CONFIG"
EDIT: Oh and they were doing it without a change control.
I think someone might get fired over this. Some of the clients didn't even notice. Some of them very much did and are very hot about it.
You can use this story while you onboard the replacement team!
Network guys took down a big chunk of our datacenter by fucking around with a production firewall. Knocked several MSP clients offline.
Apparently it took them a direct phonecall from one of the managers after a fucking hour and a half to decide that maybe they should load the old config back in the firewall.
Like.....
.... how is that not the instant reaction
"What? We took down part of the datacenter?--JESUS CHRIST WE NEED TO RELOAD THE OLD CONFIG"
EDIT: Oh and they were doing it without a change control.
I think someone might get fired over this. Some of the clients didn't even notice. Some of them very much did and are very hot about it.
You can use this story while you onboard the replacement team!
"And this here holds the bodies of the last guys who took down the datacenter. Trust me, you don't want to end up like them."
Had a client (a legacy one, a Catholic school) get an odd version of ransomware on their mail server.
I say odd because it didn't propagate across the entire network.
So, we blow out the entire thing by removing the infected drives, put in some clean ones, and right in the middle of me installing Exchange server, I get booted.
I log back in immediately and apparently interrupted someone copy/pasting a thing called "vpn.exe"
None of the other tech companies they deal with were logging in that day, neither was anyone at the school.
So, yeah, passed that shit on up the ladder to a security company. That's outside of my wheelhouse.
Well, one of our DBAs just managed to run this on a production database.
DELETE FROM transactions WHERE transactionID IN (SELECT transactionID FROM transactions)
ALWAYS WRAP DELETES IN A TRANSACTION DBA GUY
I mean if you're running queries directly on the database, you aren't SELECTing first to make sure you are DELETEing only the right things?
I think, even if you do that, you still want to do it in a transaction so you can either roll it back or commit it once you figure out if you like it or not.
My wife's IT department doesn't have a lot of experience with hardware (she works at a University, so I suspect half of said department is students, but that could be a sweeping generalization). She ordered a new laptop recently and they tried ordering her a docking station. It said "Universal" so they just ordered it.
The laptop interfaces fine, but in order to charge through the docking station, she needs a USB-C connection
And her laptop doesn't have USB-C
I tried to help her out and find a proper docking station that would work, and my only conclusion is that Dell's site pertaining to accessories is a hot fucking mess.
I think they are trying some shenanigans of returning/replacing the docking station with something else that will charge and/or providing a second power adapter.
As much as I want to accuse that particular section of the IT department, they are pretty much forced to buy E-class laptops ("built specifically for education"), and Dell's level of service is what it's been for the past 20 years.
We use Dell D6000 'docks' (really port replicators) and while they have a USB-C cable they also will work over a USB 3. I have one connected to my non-USB-C ultrabook (E7450) and it displays 2 monitors etc etc. It will not charge my laptop but I simply plug in the power supply for the laptop. It will charge over USB-C but it is limited to like 75 watts.
Dell does not make the E series docks anymore and they are getting difficult to find through resellers as well.
The most annoying part for me with the D6000 is that you have to open your laptop to turn it on. I am not sure that is the case when using the USB-C, but there is no power button on the replicator - maybe some kind of wakeon setting would take care of that.
So my work laptop did the "bluetooth hardware completely disappears from the OS" thing again and I tried the built-in help link. Rather than have a hardcoded link, it goes to Bing and searches for a phrase, and the top hit for that is right now an EXTREMELY shady site. Totally couldn't see that happening.
"Feral, we need XYZ done by yesterday."
"That's a pretty big project and would take 20-40 hours depending on the details. My team just doesn't have the time right now. Can we do it in February?"
"No, it has to be yesterday. We'll hire a contractor. Can you coordinate with them?"
"Coordinating with the contractor will still take 10-50 hours depending on the details."
"What? Why?"
*throws a copy of The Mythical Man-Month at the other person's head*
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Just because 10 women can give birth to 10 babies in 9 months...
Doesn't mean 90 women can give birth to 10 babies in 1 month.
that sounds like defeatist talk
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
+5
RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
Y'all, I'm exhausted. Spent 19 hours over the weekend upgrading the mail server. Came in today to finish up a few things on the upgrade like getting some shares set up for a few users, and immediately got broadsided by a whole other crisis.
Apparently when our consultant set up Oracle for one of the most important applications earlier this year, he left the service accounts set to expire...which happened today, locking people out of the application entirely. So I send an email to above consultant and to our professional services guy at the company who kinda ran the project for us (and has been working with us for like 20 years). Oracle guy's email bounces, and professional services guy's email has an out-of-office reply until 1/8... While I'm working on quickly learning Oracle/SQLPlus user account stuff, I get a coworker to call PS guy, and he gets his voicemail, because to be fair, dude's on vacation. So anyway, I got to go through about 8 Oracle accounts, try to remember their passwords, reset them, unlock them, and change the user profile to never expire...on both test and production, which had different passwords of course.
And literally the second I test it out and I am sure it is working, I get a call from PS guy. Yeah, Oracle guy left the company, and PS guy just took a promotion. Since he's been working with our company since I was in high school, he knows our implementation inside and out. Just ugh.
Huh... Chrome logged me in to the VLSC with the credentials of my previous employer, the consulting business who hired a dickhole manager and became unbearable. Didn't notice until I went to the relationship summary to look up a product key.
They have *drastically* fewer clients than they used to.
I really wish I knew what was going on with our hosting services (I...think that's who handles this), but every day, web service is snappy and quick until about 1000. Then it bogs down to the point it takes "internal" sites nearly 3 minutes to load ("internal" means it's an external URL I have to visit, but has a *.mil or *.gov address) and external sites take longer, if they load at all. Then at 3pm, things pick up again.
Add in the fact that most of today, pages were mis-loading or loading incompletely nearly to the point that the coding was exposed (is that the right term?).
I understand it's 100% because of load, but an organization this big should not have these problems. The worst part is, I have no idea who to bitch to about it.
Posts
Today we had a user fail the test email, and then report the email she got telling her she was enrolled in training as a phishing email.......
The laptop interfaces fine, but in order to charge through the docking station, she needs a USB-C connection
And her laptop doesn't have USB-C
I tried to help her out and find a proper docking station that would work, and my only conclusion is that Dell's site pertaining to accessories is a hot fucking mess.
I think they are trying some shenanigans of returning/replacing the docking station with something else that will charge and/or providing a second power adapter.
As much as I want to accuse that particular section of the IT department, they are pretty much forced to buy E-class laptops ("built specifically for education"), and Dell's level of service is what it's been for the past 20 years.
so, same as the proprietary docking stations then
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
First off, Dell's service is actually really good. I've worked with them for 12 years and never really had an issue, especially in a corporate environment.
now to the story at hand. If the computer doesn't have USB-C, than it is likely that a dock won't charge it by itself. The only docks that can charge a laptop are the ones that use the old school port on the bottom of the laptop, and USB-C. the other kind of docks are "universal" which just mean they use USB (non C) to connect to the laptop, which doesn't provide power.
so on the off chance that her laptop has the old school e-port on the bottom of it still, an e-port dock will charge the laptop. Otherwise, no, she'll have to have a separate power adapter. It isn't likely that the laptop has it as Dell has been phasing that out over the last 18 months.
If the laptop does have the e-port on the bottom, it'll look like this:
I would have expected Dell's CS to catch this and recommend the proper docking station (assumption 1: that the station was ordered the same time as the laptop; which upon further questioning, seems not to have been the case)
I would expect Dell to recommend a replacement, which doesn't seem to be happening, at least so far. They seem to be wanting her or the IT team to order a replacement part. (assumption 2: this may be happening already and I'm not privy to it)
I would expect either IT or Dell to provide or recommend a second power adapter
it should be IT's job
I mean assuming the laptop supports a proper dock then yeah, it should be listed as like, an accessory when you go to buy it
but picking proper accessories for work laptops is like... what IT is for
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
There are so many things wrong with this one.
New client (not one of our MSP clients) comes in to our consumer facing storefront. Has laptop with damaged screen. Okay. Oh, also, this laptop is mission critical and runs their SQL server of which they have no backups and they have $200,000 riding on it getting done before the weekend is over.
Okay, whatever, it's a common older dell, so we stock that LCD.
Get the repair done, and see this:
I mean if you're running queries directly on the database, you aren't SELECTing first to make sure you are DELETEing only the right things?
The difference between their basic support and their paid support is basically like the "me vs the guy she told me not to worry about" meme.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
USB-C is a great thing and I'm hoping it catches on in the business world.
memes in my system admin thread
.. nice
yeah it's still in the growing pains part but like
at least there's a chance since it's collaborative work on a shared standard
meanwhile our laptops with the standard dell port they've used for what, 10 years?, still get random bullshit where they won't sleep/wake/use monitors/etc
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
I can confirm that there is no docking station that will both charge the laptop and provide port replication. She will need to use a separate power adapter.
In order to simultaneously charge and provide extra ports, the docking station needs to connect by either USB-C, Thunderbolt, or a Dell port replicator interface... none of which are present on the "education" line.
As for why Dell didn't catch this... I dunno. Unless you're directly working with a sales rep, Dell isn't going to catch anything. Ordering from Dell's website is like ordering through any other ecommerce site, like Amazon or NewEgg. They're not inspecting their orders for internal compatibility.
Honestly this was the job of your wife's employer's IT department, or whatever desk jockey is pretending to be IT this week.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But I'm willing to give them up if it means I get more laptops with external GPUs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can toss my phone down into a USB-C adapter and it charges it while also giving me full access to a PC environment with an external video card.
Apparently it took them a direct phonecall from one of the managers after a fucking hour and a half to decide that maybe they should load the old config back in the firewall.
Like.....
.... how is that not the instant reaction
"What? We took down part of the datacenter?--JESUS CHRIST WE NEED TO RELOAD THE OLD CONFIG"
EDIT: Oh and they were doing it without a change control.
I think someone might get fired over this. Some of the clients didn't even notice. Some of them very much did and are very hot about it.
You can use this story while you onboard the replacement team!
"And this here holds the bodies of the last guys who took down the datacenter. Trust me, you don't want to end up like them."
ladies
We use Dell D6000 'docks' (really port replicators) and while they have a USB-C cable they also will work over a USB 3. I have one connected to my non-USB-C ultrabook (E7450) and it displays 2 monitors etc etc. It will not charge my laptop but I simply plug in the power supply for the laptop. It will charge over USB-C but it is limited to like 75 watts.
Dell does not make the E series docks anymore and they are getting difficult to find through resellers as well.
The most annoying part for me with the D6000 is that you have to open your laptop to turn it on. I am not sure that is the case when using the USB-C, but there is no power button on the replicator - maybe some kind of wakeon setting would take care of that.
Our docks have power buttons, but I usually just open my laptop and power it on that way, so I can leave it open for the 3rd monitor.
I've performed a root-cause analysis on your issue.
They just want to see everything you type. Is that so bad?
"Feral, we need XYZ done by yesterday."
"That's a pretty big project and would take 20-40 hours depending on the details. My team just doesn't have the time right now. Can we do it in February?"
"No, it has to be yesterday. We'll hire a contractor. Can you coordinate with them?"
"Coordinating with the contractor will still take 10-50 hours depending on the details."
"What? Why?"
*throws a copy of The Mythical Man-Month at the other person's head*
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Doesn't mean 90 women can give birth to 10 babies in 1 month.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
that sounds like defeatist talk
Apparently when our consultant set up Oracle for one of the most important applications earlier this year, he left the service accounts set to expire...which happened today, locking people out of the application entirely. So I send an email to above consultant and to our professional services guy at the company who kinda ran the project for us (and has been working with us for like 20 years). Oracle guy's email bounces, and professional services guy's email has an out-of-office reply until 1/8... While I'm working on quickly learning Oracle/SQLPlus user account stuff, I get a coworker to call PS guy, and he gets his voicemail, because to be fair, dude's on vacation. So anyway, I got to go through about 8 Oracle accounts, try to remember their passwords, reset them, unlock them, and change the user profile to never expire...on both test and production, which had different passwords of course.
And literally the second I test it out and I am sure it is working, I get a call from PS guy. Yeah, Oracle guy left the company, and PS guy just took a promotion. Since he's been working with our company since I was in high school, he knows our implementation inside and out. Just ugh.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
They have *drastically* fewer clients than they used to.
I cry no tears for them.
Add in the fact that most of today, pages were mis-loading or loading incompletely nearly to the point that the coding was exposed (is that the right term?).
I understand it's 100% because of load, but an organization this big should not have these problems. The worst part is, I have no idea who to bitch to about it.
FTFY