Posts by Anne Hunny Mouse

NHS looks to the market for advice on one system to replace two separate, giant Oracle ERP and HR systems

Hopefully it will be better than the existing systems.

Both the Oracle finance and MyESR are hideous

Smoke on the Tyne: Blaze at BT exchange causes major outages across North East England

Re: Openreach network architecture

From experience BT's idea of resilience and diverse routing is not necessarily what you would think.

Had 2 circuits for a network with diverse routing. Initially they routed via different exchanges but both went through the same exchange elsewhere in the area.

Hence when said exchange had a fire (Denton Burn, Newcastle) lost both circuit and access to that network.

Other circuits for other networks were properly diverse and only lost resilience.

BT's response was we only provide resilience to the point of delivery, the circuits may share a common exchange on the route..

Carliol Square exchange originates from the 1930s so may not but up to date for latest fire suppression

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

Re: chewed wires

In one job, we had fibre to PCs

Didn't matter how carefully we ran the fibre and other cables, some users had an amazing ability to get the fibre wrapped around the chair cadtors and chewed up.

They would then be surprised that they lost connection on that machine...

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

Re: I still highly doubt there ever was a machine with 2GB running Windows 95.

When 95 launched the price of RAM increased due to demand.

Price rocket after Kobe earthquake.

Seem to remember paying around £100 for a single 8Mb SIMM.

So 2Gb would have been extortionate even if you could find a machine to take it

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Bad button location

Cisco released a field notice on 36xx/38xx switches not to use cables with those protective plastic bits over the retention clip near the status button as it might cause the switch to factory reset ..

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-notices/636/fn63697.html

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

Dali's Laptop

A year or two ago we had a faulty laptop come in which looked like Dali's Laptop. A medical consultant had put in on a hot stove

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Re: Well, two switches maybe would have still filled half a rack?

We used to use the metal backed asset labels which were hard to remove and left a mark if someone removed one.

However, these were deemed too expensive and replaced by standard plastic labels which can be very easily removed, leaving no trace on the equipment.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Solaris 10

It won't stop you running rm * in /usr/bin

Thankfully it will still let you run most of the OS commands you have just deleted...

... Giving you a chance to retrieve most them via FTP (symbolic links don't work well) from it's sister server on another site until you can do a restore from tape.

Good test to show your backups for the backup server work

A sprinkling of Star Wars and a dash of Jedi equals a slightly underbaked Rise Of Skywalker

Already remade

They have already done it, it was called The Force Awakens...

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: And this is why...

Wasn't just pickups, Ford UK used about 6 keys for the Cortina.

Knew of a UK Gov related data centre which regularly had accidental shutdowns as the shutdown button was where you would expect door release to be.... In addition it was the data centre without resilience as they were too tight to pay for it.

On another note, recently picked the locks on some Telecoms NTE cabinets that nobody had keys to.

One was in the process of being removed, the other needed the coaxes switching and hadn't seen an engineer for years

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Beautiful

It happens with our Sh1trix XenApp servers, not sure if this is recommended design.

Bad news is that it is still Sh1trix, which is also now horribly expensive.

Outlook annoys me as unlike most apps which remember the last save location, Outlook always reverts to your Documents folder on startup

Mandatory electronic prescriptions was the easy bit in NHS paperless plans

Re: £300 million?

My local CCG made everyone go electronic, the argument being someone would have to approve the request and avoid over ordering of medicine. I doubt this happens much, if at all.

As said elsewhere, the secure nature of the prescription pad adds to the cost.

Certain members of society are keen to get their hands on blank pads so they can create their own prescriptions (or sell the pads to others so others can).

In some areas / clinics the printer trays for prescriptions have locks on to deter thieves.

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

I always fancied my job title being Consultant in Unified Networks and Telecoms.

Switch about to get real: Openreach bod on the challenge of shuttering UK's copper phone lines

They will probably supply some form of ATA to do SIP conversion.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Re: I could train 1st line to be fluent in 'user'

We tell users constantly not to go to us direct and go through the help desk ( lots of things can be fixed by lots of people in our team, it prevents queue jumping, may be on holiday). That way it's logged, more than one one person can pick it from queue

1st line to user: Sorry, don't no anything about that. I would contact X direct....

Yeah, you're not having a GSM gateway, Ofcom tells hopeful operators

Re: CLI

"We used to have a GSM gateway but binned it in the end as call costs via SIP carriers dropped through the floor."

Same here. Support was terrible from the provider and even the rates we started getting on ISDN circuits were cheaper than the gateway. The rates available on SIP are even lower.

I think the GSM gateway business has largely disappeared. We told the company we weren't using it and they were supposed to collect but never bothered. It went in the WEEE skip.

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

His punishment should be to have a phone spam service set just to plague his numbers...

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

Re: Routing turned out to be the issue

Our Hospital CT machines wipe the WiFi out in one of the main corridors when in operation...

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

Re: Email is ever so helpful ...

I once sent an email to the wife ending Regards.

Hell hath no fury...

Ticketmaster tells customer it's not at fault for site's Magecart malware pwnage

Web designers

From experience most web designers are only interested in making the site pretty with little thought of usability or any understanding of code.

This they will stick any old code in without checking it worked. Many designers I knew used to disable the script error pop up so they wouldn't see the error...

The best one was a site that complained they never got any messages from their contact us page.

I pointed out that the submit button had no script associated with it so iit would never send an email

:facepalm:

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

Our helpdesks specialities

Our help desk has 3 specialities:

1) Answering calls but not logging or telling users to contact us direct. The user then contacts us direct, which they shouldn’t do and then get told to log it with the help desk. At this point we found out they had contacted the help desk.

2) Totally ignoring users emails ( probably deleting them). Normally find out when the user forwards the original request.

3) Logging things which shouldn’t be logged (some seriously stupid non IT stuff).

They have excelled in getting such talented staff.

Despite being 3 levels of hierarchy above them I log more calls than some of their staff...

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Have you ever fixed a non-problem for a user?

Have you ever fixed a non-problem for a user?

Every F**king Day

Joys of the NHS.

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

19 years since I ran NMR as a post grad. Day to day work was on a 250 MHz and 400 for more specialised work (often used by the supramolecular group).

I can remember Glaxo getting the first 750 MHz machine in the UK

around 94-95.

It was taken out of action for some time after the photographer taking publicity shots got closer than allowed and the magnetic caused their equipment to smash into the machine...

Mac users burned after Nuance drops Dragon speech to text software

Apple did allow MacOS on non Apple boxes.

Before Jobs came back and secured investment from Microsoft (check the iMac launch event video), Apple kept themselves afloat by flogging the Tanzania motherboard with PPC CPU to beige box firms to make Mac clones.

The Mac magazines at the time recommended them over the Apple ones.... (better price, spec and build quality)

Apple were saved by relaunching as a lifestyle brand

Re: Apple won't allow it's OS to be run similarly on a Windows machine

But Apple did allow their OS on generic boxes once.

Before Jobs rejoined (and Microsoft invested to help bail them out), Apple kept themselves afloat by selling the Tanzania motherboard to beige box companies to make Mac Clones.

At the time the Mac Mags recommended buying them over the Apple ones.

F5: Don't panic but folks can slip past vulnerable firewall servers, thanks to libssh's credentials-optional 'security'

Cisco advisory for CVE-2018-10933

https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20181019-libssh

Microsoft returns to Valley of Death? Cheap Surface threatens the hardware show

Ipad

Very rarely used as a productive device in my experience.

Sort your spending habits out, UK Ministry of Defence told over £20bn black hole

The other thing with MOD procurement is that many things have to be on an approved list, which takes time and money to get on.

Coupled with MOD SA's homework checkers endlessly rejecting documents for missing a full stop, by the time something is installed it is EOL or obsolete.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

My parents did the same thing with Windows 95 on a 486...

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

When I read the headline, I thought dodgy mascerator pump, so wasn't too far away.

I've seen dodgy motors cause issues with PC's and networking before.

Microsoft officially hangs up on old Skype phones, users fuming

SIP implementation often isnt standard between Vendors, each having there own variations. Interworking between different systems often leads to missing features and the connection being dumbed down to a wet piece of string.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Doesn't add up

One of the things reported on PM on Radio 4 that early on when people scanning boarding passes were getting incorrect destinations on the screen. They reported that someone flying to Sweden got 3 different incorrect destination when the card was scanned.

It was also reported that at least initially BA's phones weren't working at Heathrow but I would have thought they would have had some local survivability in place if the phones couldn't register to the systems at the data centre, with a backup local breakout to PSTN.

My best (albeit poor) guess that it is more likely to be network related. Faulty router(s)?

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Air lines

Used airlines in chemistry labs for cleaning keyboards. Used to work quite well....

Avaya files for bankruptcy

I haven't used Avaya Red for a few years (but I still get called for advice) and it was a great product for Contact Centres with bullet proof reliability. Was never a great fan of the Nortel stuff though.

In the middle of the roll out of CUCM and not impressed, in some ways our retiring ISDX is better....

I haven't thought much of Lync either and unsure of Unify's direction post take-over. I've been doing telecoms long enough to know there is no perfect product out there and I also know it is a dying industry and look at other options.

This bankruptcy has been coming for a while due to the loans / credit coming to an end and needing renegotiating. It's not as final as a UK bankruptcy and several of the US airlines have been in and out of Chapter 11 over the years (I think they all the major ones filed for Chapter 11 after Sept 11).

The difference with Nortel is that they previously had to sell most of their assets after doing an Enron and surviving on credit which disappeared with the financial crisis.

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

Need more details....

I think we will have to wait to see the extent of the free Windows, will it be limited to certain editions and/or licensing models.

Will you have the ability to register for the update but apply it later? (receiving a key?).

I think their intention is to try and use OneDrive. Office 365, the Store and selling data mined from Cortana (or using it for targeting ads) for at least home users and possibly SME's but I cannot see larger businesses using those services.

For the hardware makers they don't necessarily have to provide working drivers and software for Windows 10 for old kit which generates sales of new printers etc.

Amazon: Time for a new Kindle Fire, this one's sold out

Not just the Fire but Kindle Touch 3G

The Kindle Touch 3G is currently showing as unavailable and they don't know when it will be back in stock on the Amazon UK site . http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindle-Touch-Screen-Display-Globally/dp/B005890FOO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346401683&sr=1-1

Maybe it's getting an update but it's a relatively recent model.

12 of the best... mice

Trackman Wheel

The Trackman wheel is fantastic, I use them both at work and at home but they do need cleaning about once per week.