Posts by Andy A

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thermostats

I had a bottom-of-the-range 1972 Hillman Avenger. It had controls which allowed fresh air for the head while the toes were toasty.

No computers involved, just a batch of plastic paddles inside vent tubing.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

NOT on a server, but on Win11 PCs. The little patch supposedly for a bugfix for Win11 turned out to be a multi-gigabyte install file for Svr2025.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Fast fix, done slowly

Call came in from a user unable to log in on his Win98 laptop. A popup from some driver was covering the logon box.

Rang the user explaining that the fix would only take him a couple of seconds, only to be told "It's your job to come down here and fix it."

So first task was to visit the break room and brew a hot beverage.

Second task was to sit around drinking said beverage while conversing about news and gossip.

Third task was to head outside - oh good, the rain has stopped and the sun is out - and walk the half mile to the building where the user's office was.

Knock on user's office door. User decides that he will take his two visitors to the office next door, As they enter that office, I am given permission to approach his laptop.

Alt-Tab, Esc

I knocked on the door of the user's fresh location and put my head around it before it had even closed.

"I told you it was a very quick job" I announced, smiling.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: The solution. . .

Both my parents spent time working at a large (originally government-owned) manufacturing site. Loads of people had nicknames. Some had real names known only to the payroll department.

One middle-management chap was known as "The Sherriff" because he regularly announced "I'm just shooting off to...". One chap was known as "Black Pudding" because he had once warmed up his lunch in the urn of hot water intended for brewing tea. The origins of "Spongecake" were anything but politically correct. My mum, it turned out, was known as "The Duchess of <building name>".

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

I do reasonably well in French, and have some basic German. I was once in German-speaking Switzerland, and ended up explaining to a French tourist that he was not mistaken, and that the fries/chips at a take-away really WERE that expensive. Neither of us made a purchase.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Of course it's difficult to maintain. Just imagine the extra coding needed to add in endless pop-up ads!

The /detectnow stopped working after Win7. The /reportnow still does something, though it can be quite a feat to work out what.

It always seemed strange that there was no /help option, and that there was never any error notification. /Slartibartfast produces exactly the same output as /reportnow.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Putting your foot in it

"Safety shoes" were a requirement forced upon us at one place. I found a comfortable pair and rather than changing at work as most office staff did, wore them full time from leaving home each morning - I didn't see any point in wearing out personal footwear for the journeys to and fro. The cost went on expenses, and I then learned that there was an "allowance" for twice the price I had paid, so I got further pairs every six months.

By the time I left for pastures new, I had four pairs in reserve.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: How about automating insults

Back in Ye Olden Days, we had a data prep job which required multiple character set conversions. The final stage was to produce a non-standard magnetic tape on the last 7-track tape deck in the company. The tape would then be shipped off to the customer.

Unfortunately that tape deck was in Birmingham, so the data was sent down the leased line using RJE (Remote Job Entry).

Operators being what they are, they were in the habit of ignoring instructions. They would allocate a 9-track unit, or forget the Write Permit Ring.

I devised JCL which counted the number of stupidities, and produced more abusive comments. The job logs showed that one set of operators reached Level 6 before surrendering. Because I had control of the OS, I could suppress their ability to abandon the job, something which was kept secret from them.

Icon because the customer was a brewery, and I had to visit several times during testing! =============>

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: I remember seeing some OLD datacenters

One place I worked instructed me to clear out a load of such ancient cabling under the machine room floor.

I spent my spare time over a fortnight extracting piles of electronic archaeological artefacts.

Then an early departure on Friday to officially dispose of all that wiring, complete with a management pass to get it past security. There's a lot of good quality copper in data cabling, and the proceeds were put to good use. ================>

Re: This kind of semi-random, intermittent error is such a pain to diagnose

In the days of 286 machines, one place I visited to do an upgrade mentioned that another machine had a fault.

It would not boot first thing in the morning, but having been left switched on, it would boot about 10:00.

It being only 9:15, I took the lid off it to look for obvious faults. I pushed down each of the socketed chips on the motherboard.

The processor went CLICK.

Apparently things expanded during the warm-up lap, and made contact for the rest of the day.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

Yesterday evening I was doing a banking transaction for my aged aunt.

I inserted the card in the ATM and entered the PIN. As I keyed in the fourth digit of the PIN I was greeted by a familiar twirling circle and the "Restarting" text from a scheduled (or manually initiated) Windows 10 reboot.

Who the hell at Santander reboots an ATM with a transaction in progress? It was not the middle of the night, it was at 18:05.

Of course there is no method of retrieving the card. Being stuck in the machine, it is not handled by staff ever again. All I can do is sit on the phone for two hours to cancel the card and request a new one, which will be "in about 5 working days". That's a whole week for a 98-year-old to be without

Since the branch closed at 16:00, the mean time between reboots for Windows 10 on Santander ATM PCs must be in the order of 2 hours.

Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up

It is still feasible, and there are 3rd party options to give you back Win10, Win7 and probably even WinXP shells.

However every time you get a fresh release of Windows, MS insists on removing them and giving you the desktop designed by people who never progressed beyond using crayons.

Re: When will users decide that enough is enough?

----- if that fails a VM.

That means you are still running Windows, complete with everything you are complaining about.

AND you have to maintain Linux as well.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: What replaces applets?

It's about 20 million lines of <this month's shiny language>.

(and it won't be compatible with next month's OS rollout)

I'm afraid that some update will incorporate the equivalent of DEL \*.CPL /s /f /q

They won't incorporate ANY controls that they removed into "Settings".

After all, nobody ever used them because they never existed.

Microsoft have long ignored common sense when it comes to usability.

Who decided that to safely eject removable media you need to click on a child's drawing of a cat?

Or that the symbol for "there is no World Wide Web" should be a picture of a globe?

Re: Nothing like breaking things that always worked.

"While the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible."

And access to those settings will never be provided in the Settings app, because somebody with coloured pencils thinks they are "just too technical".

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

Strange pricing!

So for 23€ each you can visit the two museums individually.

OR

For an extra 6€ you can buy a ticket to let you visit the two museums.

Pick one.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

It's the unexpected things which cause drive failures

I had a site in the late 80s where one particular machine would get its drive (MFM in those days) scrambled. We would visit and run the low-level format on the drive, restore the software and all would be well for the next couple of weeks.

Then I was there on a different job when someone came out of their busy operations room and said "It's happened again".

So I got to see the PC in its normal environment rather than having it extracted to the quiet outer office.

On top of the processor box was an old-fashioned telephone with a loud bell. When it rang the magnetic field killed the contents of the rotating platter just beneath.

I nipped a hundred yards down the road and bought a new telephone handset complete with electronic squawk. It cost less than the fuel for a single trip to site, and we made more profit from the support contract after that!

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

We had several teachers who could reliably hit a miscreant when throwing over their shoulder. No need to turn away from the board.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Simple.

There are 10 people in a certain group, including yourself.

10% fewer people results in 9 people,

10% less people results in 10 decapitated corpses.

Pick one.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Motorola brick

My first car phone was a Motorola- a huge box bolted under the passenger seat.

On hols in Normandy (1984 D-Day anniversary), I was surprised to find I could use the cells in the Channel Islands from the Cotentin peninsula.

A couple of days later I was amazed to find that I had good reception round the northern beaches, using cells in the Isle of Wight.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

My car's engine is idling in 3rd gear at 20 mph. That means I'm using twice the fuel (and hence producing twice as much pollution) as when idling in 6th gear at 40 mph. Most commercial vehicles will produce similar effects.

Just slapping a limit on because of "policy" rather than looking at the actual road conditions, seems rather stupid.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: What the hell is a meter?

In UK church registers, until the 1810s, children were "baptized" rather than "baptised", so we are dealing with what passed for officialdom then.

Re: What the hell is a meter?

I'm afraid that "tyre" is a modern UK English spelling. The steel band around a wooden carriage wheel was (and still is) a "tire". I think the fresh spelling was intended to show how new-fashioned the pneumatic rubber things were. Of course it may just be a reference to a place in Lebanon.

Re: What the hell is a meter?

I know, the Americanisation Americanization of everything has gotten terrible round here!

FTFY

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: Games

Apricot used Rodime hard drives. Often these would fail to spin up on a cold morning but would work OK later on. It turned out that condensation on the platters caused enough surface tension with the head to stall the motor.

The OFFICIAL work-around was to slap the right-hand side of the box. This caused the heads to bounce, and the platters to start to spin.

The Apricot's predecessor, the ACT Sirius 1, had a bad batch of hard drives. They had undergone low-level format in a California summer, and were unusable when lower temperatures shrank the platters.

BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit

No.

I AM SPARTACUS !

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

I used to be part of a small team supporting a customer with over a hundred Netware servers. Novell certification was a job requirement.

We had a standard question when interviewing for the team.

"You have Netware 3.12 server with 80 users. You need to take it down to replace a disk drive. How do you do it?"

Most would spout the Official Novell Answer - "At the console you use the DOWN command followed by EXIT".

Bye bye candidate. You missed the important information. There are now 80 ANGRY users.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Burned Cow Bones

It isn't just the Underground, it's London in general. I spend some time working Mon-Fri there and heading back to the north of England on Friday evenings.

The stuff coming out of my nose was just beginning to clear when I had to head south again on Sunday evening.

One place I supported was in Whitehall. If ever I needed to open up a PC case, the procedure was to unplug it and head out to the balcony. Make sure you are upwind before opening the cover. This was in an office where no-one smoked!

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

There's a chap on YouTube called the LockPickingLawyer who is VERY adept at showing this sort of design failure.

Re: German tomfoolery

I used to support a multinational with strong connections to Germany. QWERTZ keyboards are ALMOST the same as English ones. Close enough so that when you relax a little, the differences bite you.

It's still not as bad as sorting out how Windows deals with modem connections when you are working with menu items you can't decode, all of which seem to have words with two dozen characters in them. I had to remember the order they appeared on a UK machine.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

One thing Anheuser-Busch mention in the US but not outside is how their "beers" are filtered over activated charcoal.

This ensures that any possible flavo(u)r is removed.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Re: Installation media

But then you'll have to cough up for a licence from MS.

The one you had running natively won't do, because its hardware profile is wildly different from the VM.

Re: Linux's moment

I'm happy to use any OS as long as it runs the app I REALLY need,

Linux refuses to even think about running the installer, WINE refuses to touch it.

The developer has retired through ill health, so NO chance of a "native" version, though that might have been difficult because it relies on an MS database system.

Re: Linux's moment

If he only way to get a feature to work inside Linux is to run actual Windows inside a VM, then running actual Windows is easier.

The same is true no matter which OSes are involved. Want some Linux feature inside MacOS?

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Re: Tea and coffee

I had a filter coffee machine for yonks. Usually on the corner of the desk. Simple rules - I don't care who drinks it as long as when I want some there's some left. If you empty it, fill it up again. Coffee is in the drawer; training provided if needed.

Good arabica coffee is quite cheap. I varied it - sometimes Guatemalan, sometimes Kenyan, sometimes Columbian...

When I changed sites, it took less than a fortnight to get our office converted. Quality coffee meant visits from staff who would tell us all the important gossip.

Then we had a visit from the MD of our outsourcing company, having a meeting with the client.

"I notice that you have decent coffee" she commented. "Is this because I was coming?"

"No, we always try to be civilised."

"How do you organise it?"

"If it's running low, one of us will go and buy some."

"In future, you put it on expenses. At the big office, they the machine on free vend. You should benefit too."

Our arabica probably cost the same per cup as the horrible machine concoction. And it became part of our Ts & Cs!

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

I was impressed when a place I worked at came up with their Official Smoking Areas.

Many workplaces pander to smokers, providing things which look like bus shelters. Not this place.

In the various yards they painted red squares with 4m sides. In each there was an ashtray on a stand.

Nothing else.

No chairs, no protection from the wind, or the sleet which came with it.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

I've noticed that some TV stations send you the 4K version of any programme you have asked for on catch-up, and rely on the equipment at your end to do any conversions.

It doesn't matter that your set-top box can only do 1024p or that your link can only just cope with 720p. You just have to put up with ten seconds of video per minute elapsed, because they can't be arsed.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Priorities

I know any number of organisations who have implemented exactly that. There's a feature labelled "Chat" which replaced the old FAQ section, with a perfectly equivalent lack of relevance to the real world.

Re: Priorities

It's amazing the number of times when, as the only person on site capable of addressing the situation when something important has gone TITSUP, some high-up DEMANDS that I attend a two-hour conference call to discuss why the fault has not been cleared.

Naturally this both raises the blood pressure and forces a return to Step One of the fault-finding and repair process.

It was doubly frustrating when I couldn't turn the mobile phone off because I needed its meagre light to see inside a server, the building's lights being on a timer and it being "after hours".

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: Mehbe

I remember a computer from about 1960 with the useless-sounding instruction "Branch if approximately equal".

It's actually wonderfully useful if you are working out trigonometric functions by iterative series.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: The rumored traditional IBM script for that...

I used to phone the person who logged the call and ask them to check the cables around the back. "Maybe the cleaners have dislodged something." Usually the office was some hell hole last visited by a cleaner in 1963.

Giving the user a chance to save face by blaming someone else, however imaginary, saved a lot of time wasting visits.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Re: compared with how much they (supposedly) save

Don't we know it! On one job, two of us supported about 400 users.

Servers and important comms racks had UPSs fitted. We monitored these, looking for the "battery failing" status lights.

Should one of these appear, I would wander half a mile down the road to a shop which dealt just in batteries. "Can I have six of these please?" "The ones we have are an extra Ampere-Hour. Is that OK?"

I would hand over about 75 quid, then submit the receipt as expenses. The UPS was back to full usability inside the hour.

Then a fresh contract, and we moved across under TUPE.

At the next UPS light, I did the usual. Cue the beancounters going ballistic. They will approve it this once, but never again.

A few weeks later, another UPS flags itself. I follow the Official Process, and log a fault for the central Server Team. Nothing happens. I check after a week and the call has been mysteriously closed. I ring the helpdesk and go ballistic. THREE calls later, and a whole month of escalations later, a Purchase Order is raised.

Another four weeks later, a parcel arrives, sent airmail from APC in the USA.

Inside is a set of batteries, of exactly the same brand sold by the battery shop down the road, but costing three times as much. The cast of the airmail shipping was over £90.

Re: Excellent!

One of my employers had a horrible time accounting scheme which we could only access by phone. Once connected, we would spend a stupid amount of time pressing buttons to report our activity in tenths of hours. We had to quote 7-digit project codes, which expired without notice and had to be replaced by a new code for exactly the same thing. We normally found out about the expiry the week following their use, and had to spend another age hammering in a correction.

We normally logged a whole hour of our time to an Admin code, until it was randomly withdrawn. Being told that we had to then needed to log this time to "work for the customer", we emailed upper management asking why "admin for our company" should be paid for by the customer - and we copied the customer's management in. A fresh code magically appeared.

We were also instructed that the weeks timesheet HAD to be submitted before midday on Friday, and HAD to include all activities for Friday afternoon.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Re: The Story of Mal ...

The worst spaghetti COBOL that I've ever had the misfortune to deal with was a system which was supposed to be doing its last ever run.

The system was being retired, but, as always, there had been a delay and it unexpectedly had to be kept going into the next financial year. The documentation as to what input was needed to do this was nowhere to be found, so I was brought over to decode the source listing.

In the first ten pages I found eight occurrences of "ALTER <label> TO PROCEED TO <other label>" statements. Some GOTOs were ALTERed more than once.

It was horrible. I gave up. I ran off to get some anaesthetic. ====>

The woman who had previously done this admin task was paid some ridiculous sum to return and generate the single punched card needed.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

IT can be a dirty job!

I've worked in lots of places where the kit got filthy. Two different companies were in railway engineering.

At one site management refurbished an office space in the middle of the shop floor. New cabling, the works.

Two days later the fashionable pale grey carpeting could only be seen in the unreachable corners.

Another site had a failed print server. I found it under a desk and extracted it. Having unplugged it, I took it to the sink at the far end of the same office and turned on the tap. After a great deal of scrubbing I could actually examine the box, (and see my fingertips again). The problem turned out to be the network flylead, which had been crushed between the wall and the leg of the desk. With a fresh supply of packets it was ready for another few months.

Re: Smokers in the 90s

About 2005 we were tasked with a one-off upgrade job at a BAT place, because we happened to be in the same town. The reps were to bring in their "touch-screen" WinXP machines and get extra RAM and fresh software. We also used a cleaning solution and lots of wipes.

Knowing the smoking policy at their site (yes, just as above), I printed off a few large NO SMOKING signs before heading over to their site.

Thankfully, everyone there obeyed the instruction.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Plausible...

Twas the Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1 which had "singing" 5.25" floppies.

They squeezed 1.2MB onto the same media as "standard" 360K drives by having a lot more sectors on the outer tracks than the inner ones.

This was done by changing the rotation speed by using a stepper motor rather than one with fixed speed. Just use more steps per second as the head moves outwards. The encoding of the sectors remains the same.

RLL changes the way that bits are recorded onto the media; it is the changes in magnetisation which are important, rather than the direction.