Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client ON CALL No week at The Regis ter is complete without a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the peaks and troughs of the tech support experience. So let's get going and meet this week's contributor, who we shall Regomize as "Gerald." He took us back to an early moment in his …
Should we bomb them at oncall@theregister.com with "On Call" Tag missing on article overview in https://www.theregister.com/Week/ ? And the tag not visible / missing on the article? Same for whome....
The story itself is a classic: Not even the most basic checks were done... Hope they charged extra for "lazyness stupidness combined with to high decibels"...
And the formerly clean, straightforward (on the mobile version of the site, anyway) home page has succumbed to clutter. The last holdout for good design has fallen.
Worse than all that, the text has shrunk and I can't fix it -- my browser's Zoom feature zooms the top-of-page banner, but leaves the actual article text blissfully untouched, i.e. at the limits of readability for me.
(The comments pages are still OK for now, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.)
Really, The Register, you of all people? Do you really think that you know better than I do what works best for my eyes?
It's really quite simple: Don't. Override. The user's. Preference. Let them decide how big they want their text.
Article text zoom works here (Waterfox), so that part might be your browser of my noscript-ublock config combination... Why are they loading shit from twitter, k5a.io and so on in first place. Don't check on samsung.com how many external sources are loaded, you need a vertical 8k display (at 100%) to see the full list.
"Hope they charged extra for "lazyness stupidness combined with to high decibels"..."
I once included an "aggavation surcharge" line item on one of my invoices and sent it the the customer's billing department. They paid (including the surcharge) but I never heard from them again. Which, given that I had already decided not to work for them ever again, killed two birds with one stone.
I'm not against change (and I understand why supermarkets annoy customers by rearranging their shelves) but I'm not sure why El Reg had to change. The new layout doesn't seem to add anything - if anything, it detracts from the previous serendipitous presentation. Since my ad blocker cuts out a lot of the dross that appears when I disable it, I'm guessing it might lead to more ad views. But the site is starting to lose its charm...
Must admit, "Gerald" also deserves a small amount of stick for not seeing a network problem and immediately checking the network cable. He only noticed it was unplugged when he prepared to remove the PC for further diagnosis.
I've come across plenty of machines in my time where the little plastic locking catch of the RJ45 plug had snapped off, meaning the network plug could easily detach itself. Hence one of the first things you always check for a wired networking issue is "is the patch lead plugged in".
I find that so many have to be broken to get the damn things out of the port. Cheap badly made ends or issues with the ports ?
I have some spare ends here and a switch that I can guarantee will be an absolute bugger to get a cable out of and more often or not has meant the clip snaps.
Some of the nicely moulded ones where that is that mould over the clip, they are the spawn of the devil
I used to have NUC's here on site in certain applications\functions & the network cables were always a right female dog to remove.
One day by happy chance I noticed a long pair of pliers from the shop floor in the metal recycling bin, one of the grips was broken off, this "modified" pair of pliers actually turned to be very useful in this for removing said "stuck" cables without cutting the cable.
Funny you mention the intel NUC in particular. I used to maintain a large fleet of them at work, and have a few around at home for tinkering purposes. As a result I've worked with the original Celeron 847 units right up to NUC12, and more or less all generations in between.
Without fail the RJ45 port on the back always seemed too small and never wanted to let go of the latch when disconnecting the jack. I've come across it on other PC's before but never quite as consistently annoying as on NUC's.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen more RJ45 cables with the catch broken than I have with it intact."
I kept a pair of side cutters for those (and crossover cables before auto·sensing switches.) A cheap pair of large scissors also work. Otherwise the blighters keep turning up if you just toss them in the bin uncircumcised as it were.
I suppose a keen chap might get some new RJ45 plugs and some Krone tools and replace the plugs but unless your employer has mistaken you for a monkey, your time would cost more than a new cable especially when purchased in bulk.
Pinging 127.0.0.1 doesn't tell you much and I think even pinging the IP address of one of the interfaces doesn't get routed in the Linux kernel but is pretty much the same as localhost.
"Pinging Loalhost will tell you whether or not you have a working IP stack
If the networking stack isn't working, that's a pretty egregious to have at install when the box should have been tested at the shop to be working. The vast majority of the time there's no need to have a separate network card as motherboards come with at least a gigabit ethernet port and often 10gb.
What did the person that installed the box do? Just punch up the power switch, see a LED, turn it off and bolt for the pub?
At work I've got a box of phone cables that came with some old PBX units, each of which has been supplied with a deliberately shortened catch lever which is just long enough to act as a latching mechanism when you plug the cable into the socket, but doesn't then protrude out at all beyond the face of the socket thus preventing easy removal.
As a way to deter random fiddling from people who shouldn't be able to get anywhere near the PBX once installed, if the addition of the screw-down socket cover wasn't enough of a deterrent, it works really well, but as a way to really annoy anyone who *does* need to move the cables from one socket to another, it works even better... So yeah, for these cables I've taken to just cutting the entire catch off and using them as latchless plugs, making sure to pay attention during system testing to make sure they remain in place.
This. If he could ping himself and nothing else, he should at least have asked a local network admin to check that the port was up and configured properly. One would assume that in that process either "Gerald" or the network admin would have discovered the layer 1 issue.
he should at least have asked a local network admin to check that the port was up and configured properly.
I really wouldnt go bothering the network admin with "Is this port live / configured?" until after I'd confirmed the cable was plugged into it
if pinging localhost worked, then I would check that there were lights flashing on the network card. At which point, in this illustration, someone would have noticed that the network cable was not attached. At least one would hope that some one would notice.
Not to mention that if "Gerald" has built and configured it he should know if it using a static IP or DHCP.
If DHCP a quick check should tell him if it is getting an IP address and try pinging the gateway/router or even the DHCP server.
If static, he should now at least one IP address he can try pinging over the network.
I'm not sure how pinging localhost (if that is indeed what was meant by "home") is going to do anything useful.
I worked at a shop that did custom web hosting back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The commercial internet was in its' infancy, and most companies only new about it from Superbowl ads, or what their kids at university told them.
One company, a small firm that did custom metalwork, really only used the internet for email to their suppliers and customers. They hired a web designer to set up a simple web site, basically a brochure. They were nowhere near ready to do online sales, credit card processing or the like. This was basically a simple "here's our address, price list, phone number, and email... give us a call" site that was common in 1990s. After the web designer (one of the executive's kids, or a friend of the kids) finished up, he contacted us to host the thing. He registered the domain, set up the records, pointed to our IP. All we did was set aside a dedicated IP address, and gave him an SSH account to admin the site.
The Monday after it went live, we started getting phone calls from the company. They were livid that the site was down. No one in the company could reach it. I checked, and the site was fine, but they insisted that not one person in the office could reach it, and they were able to see the beta site last week, so obviously it was our fault.
I asked them to email me a couple of details, like their gateway IP, so I could see if they appeared in the logs. The exec indignantly replied me that he had just told me that the site was down, so obviously he couldn't send email. What, were were stupid?
We had nothing to do with his email, and I told him that. Since all of the emails we had from them were Hotmail addresses, I didn't even know what his ISP was, so I asked.
"What's an ISP?", he asked.
Well, there are dozens to choose from, but for tech illiterates (and boy, were these guys tech illiterate) there were two major players in the Toronto region: Bell Canada and Rogers Communications. Which one is your office with?
"Well, we were with Bell, but we cancelled that when we switched over to you".
Their web designer hadn't explained the difference between web hosting and service providers. So far as they were concerned, they had switched "internet providers". And given that our monthly fee to host a one page banner add web site was a lot less than Bell charged for a dedicated ISDN line, they thought they were saving money by "switching" to us. They were quick shocked, and offended, to discover that web hosting didn't include ISP services, and they'd have to sign back up with Bell at a new, higher rate.
This is but one of the reasons I got out of customer-facing positions and went back to development.
IIRC this was about the time that home ISP's, even dialup ones, would give you 20 MB of web space to play with. Those were fun times.
This would have been a big learning experience for them, that business accounts don't all work that way, and that you as the web hosting was reachable from the internet but their office wasn't since they had cancelled their service.
I had a short stint of trying to manage a web page for a parent/student organization where someone with much more web skills had bought a few layers of services. It still doesn't make a ton of sense to me, there seemed to be a content-management service that rides on top of web-hosting, and possibly DNS from a third place. And analytics.
Thanks for reminding me to check. My website has grown dramatically - From 5.8MB to 6.7MB. I just modified a couple of high resolution PDFs, and neglected to "linearise" and "reduce size" them. It's not the world's prettiest site, but its static HTML and single CSS file was hand built with a simple text editor. Cloudflare keep offering to add bells and whistles; but the $10.46 I pay a year is quite enough for what I need, thank you.
I'm not sure if the Bell commercial ISDN service handed out web space the way the home service did at the time.
Even if they did, it was bad enough that the president of "Met Fab Limited" (not the real company name, of course) was jamesmith@hotmail.com and the salesman was metfabsales@hotmail.com. The salesman, at least, had enough savvy to put the company name in his email. But they didn't want a web site name like www.sympatico.ca/~joesmith/index.html, they wanted www.metfabsales.com, and Bell didn't support names, so far as I know.
Around 2004, I had a friend who registered a domain name, and used the redirect to point to her Sympatico personal account, and Bell got very pissy about not supporting domain names that didn't include the Sympatico name, for some reason.
"IIRC this was about the time that home ISP's, even dialup ones, would give you 20 MB of web space to play with. Those were fun times."
I've been shopping for a new host and finding that where the one I have now gives me 30 free email addresses per domain, many others allow 4 before charging extra (cost not listed). They also charge below cost for the first year and triple the rate for the next. Lock yourself in by using our award winning proprietary site creation tools that won't let you move your site intact if you want to leave.
I did find one host that offers a phat package with no set limits on email accounts, space and bandwidth. The middle plan even allows a big wodge of domains (BYO). It's a few bucks more per month than I have been paying, but the introductory rate is the normal rate and the next tier up is a reasonable increment. Their T&C's are very clear about not being allowed to run a warez or pr0n site with any of the basic plans or anything else that uses more than the average amount of resources. On one hand, it can be dodgy to have no definitive guidelines, but on the other, it's highly unlikely my usage would trigger any alarms.
"This was basically a simple "here's our address, price list, phone number, and email... give us a call" site that was common in 1990s. "
Still a really good idea until you have a site ready to go. I still see pointless holder pages that tell me a new site is being constructed. Why? Until that goes live, leave the old one up sans anything that doesn't work.
Presumably this was another I.T. guy from his company?
I can only imagine the amount of "reaming" and shouting that guy got , hopefully before being sacked .
Maybe he wasnt as "technical" as our hero , perhaps his job title was "installer" rather than "builder" and he might not have been able to diagnose more complex issues but if he cant diagnose that he hasnt plugged the NIC in, what the hell is he doing in the job?
Also this could have been easily solved over the phone by whoever took the call from the angry customer much more quickly than making our hero drive 120km.
Failure all round basically .
In his place, I would have made quite a show of it.
Point to the network cable coiled up on that wall.
Go over and stand next to it, like a hostess on The Price Is Right, and pose next to it while displaying it with both hands.
Taking it off the wall and plugging it in.
Standing next to the now-connected computer and, once again, showing it with both hands.
One can only dream . . .
"network cable is actually connected at the other end, and connected to something useful at that."
Or worse, actually connected to something slightly more than useful.
Always a mistake to use vlans to separate maintenance networks from those of the great unwashed on the same switches.
Quite (ahem).
It's very much like when you ask someone what browser they're using and they answer "Google".
I have spent twenty of our 36-year marriage educating my wife as to the difference. The Internet is the highway. Your browser is the car. Google is just a roadmap.
You don't sit on your roadmap to get to your destination, now do you ? If only we could.
That said, my dear better half has actually clicked to this message and, when she has yet another problem on one of the many shopping sites she is regularly on (hey, she's retired - gotta do something with all that time, right ?) and I ask her what browser she is using, she now correctly responds Chrome, or Brave, or Firefox as is the case. Then we get on with troubleshooting whatever the flavor of the problème du jour is which, more often than not, happens to be due to some stupid modification in the website that has nothing to do with the Internet or her laptop, but hey, I'm the (literally) resident IT guy, so . . .
Think we are all the same. I also get moaned at why sites don't work, why is this not working - as if I know (We work in IT so therefore must know everything about any kind of IT)
I love it when her banking app does silly things. She does the usual but at least I can say "I don't work for xxxx you do, so ask someone at work". worryingly, she seems to be the most IT literate at her branch and is her mums IT guru :(
I just changed our main TV and SWMBO is not happy with me because now she doesn't know how to get the weather station without blankly poking at the new remote. Sigh... this is why I won't get rid of our Tivo, she knows how to run it. And knows how to run the Roku we used to have hooked up there. Change is not something she enjoys... especially technical change.
.... if 'Gerald' was wild? Or if he was absolutely livid!
Ah a classic case of Keep It Simple, Stupid - something I forgot during a 3hr website outage last week. Just like Gerald we had an issue with technology so dived right in looking for a technical issue...ignoring the simple "Is it actually plugged in?" of Geralds case or the "Has someone just unpublished the file the website say's it can load?".
So easy to jump to and get tunnel vision on the assumption that it's either someone else's problem, so you can kick it to another team, or it must be some really complicated technical issue and forget to check the obvious basic stuff first.
Many years ago when I was doing desktop work, I had a problem with a couple of PC's in the HR department. Often as is the case it meant getting under a desk, tracing cable and maybe into a floorbox.
One of the prim and propper HR ladies said "Are you going to look inside my box".
My head still hurts thinking about that after my reaction
In one place I was a H&S reviewer - basically 1 morning a month I would walk around looking for any non-compliance. Consequently, I used to look under desks for cabling that could tangle peoples feet, or extension blocks on extension blocks, etc. The desks were combined in groups of 4 with above desk partitioning, but only the small desk drawers at each corner underneath.
At the desk groups where ladies were in residence, I always asked them to stand up before I looked under the desks. One day a low 20's year old intern said "I'm not getting up and you can look up my skirt if you are that way inclined". I was extremely careful not to allow any eyeline that might cause that effect, and made it obvious to the other ladies that was what I was doing.
She must have gotten quite a talking to from the other ladies after I left, as every time I went near her area of the office (even when not doing the checks) she would jump up like a startled Rabbit.
Anon: as who wants to admit to being a Health and Safety reviewer on a Tech forum?
I'll admit to it. As Deputy Head of an LEA off site teaching service I did H&S checks weekly with more in-depth ones once a month.
I didn't want my teams getting injured, I certainly didn't want the kids getting hurt.
And anyone who thinks that H&S is just a pain, or that risk assessments are just an annoyance has never had responsibility for the welfare and care of others..
And it really pisses me off now if I'm working in some place with blocked fire exits, out of date extinguishers and mains leads that aren't ever checked. I might be long in the tooth, but I earned my pension and wish to enjoy it for many more years.
All H&S and OSHA (for this side of the pond) rules are written in blood. Yes they're stupid at times, but so were the people who caused the rules to be written in the first place. When I grumble about how inane they are, I try to stop and think about the poor sucker (or idiot, or both) who got hurt doing something and bite my tongue.
The cluster of desks in a call center (UK Rail Enquiries) where the operators "hot swapped" from cluster to cluster, shift to shift.
Swapping PC's on unused stations in a call center meant I didn't get to ask permission, just get on with it.
There was one young lady that liked to entertain herself by crossing her leg & rubbing her heel against.... while giving out train journey information.
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Could it be that there were multiple network connections? Maybe there would have been 1 network connection for the PC to access the web and the outside world while the other coiled network cable was for connecting to the data collection equipment/network.
I've seen/heard of circumstances where the equipment is setup/installed at different times by different vendors and it could have been a case of someone being "helpful" or a "not my job" situation.
The above would explain why Gerald could ping home but the system wasn't working as intended therefore they regarded it as faulty.
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When I tried to log in just now (7:20pm Sun 10 May) after a routine purge of cookies, etc., the system told me that my email address did not exist. I've been a signed up member of TheRegister for several years.
To prove that the sytem was actually quite correct, I was able to create a new account using the same email address without receiving a "email already exists" error
