Posts by Anne Hunny Mouse

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

SLIC SLAC

We still had mainly channel and codec cards rather than the modern SLIC SLACs when our DXs finally went the distance a few years ago. (Past EoL)

We were completely in the dark ages as we had HPT cards and a couple of SIP trunk cards

Re: Live Printer

Just remembered - as it meant 240V was going down the network ports, it killed the switch stack.

We presented Estates with a large bill to replace.

Re: Live Printer

Some contractors at work put some new sockets in an office but got the earth mixed up with another wire.

Cue live PC cases and dead PCs

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Wang

There was also a Wayne Carr working the NHS a few years ago.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

In the early 2000's I remember a Doctor in a Hospice using his deleted items to store emails..

Was fine until the AV flagged an email virus and his deleted items was emptied...

Have accidentally deleted /usr/bin on a Sun box. It continued run file. Just FTP'd the files from it's identical sister server on the other site and restored a backup the next day to fix the symbolic links.

Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

Same here. Have a phone system which requires Java for the web access (a lot easier than the command line). It is not an old system, last upgraded 2021.

There was an exercise by a project team to collate sites which needed IE Mode. However, looking at the list produced it included several URL's and sites which don't work in IE.

Luckily it's not my project.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Re: Why a "retired farmer"?

In my days as a Chemistry Postgrad, we were classed as employees from a H&S perspective.

This meant attending a 2 hour Fire Safety Lecture about the University Fire System each year...

Only 5 minutes was relevant as the Chemistry Building had a separate fire system.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

I'll just fire up the DeLorean

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: The "fun" of Tech Support.

To paraphrase House, "Users lie"

If someone says they haven't done anything, they have:

a) Done something silly and don't want to admit it.

b) Done something but cannot remember what.

c) Both of the above.

Re: Full names please.......

Have known people with following dodgy names

Anna Beaver

Wayne Carr

Susan Lavery

I know a medical consultant whose parents decided it would be a laugh to give her the initials HRH.

In the family she is nicknamed The Queen.

The best one was just a surname: Porcelloni

In Italian it translates as Big Pigs.

Umbrella company Parasol Group confirms cyber attack as 'root cause' of prolonged network outage

Sounds like they need some ICT contractors in to sort out the mess.

Wonder if they know where to get any?

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: Wrong number

Some area codes you have to dial the full DDI even locally due to lack of numbers meaning 0,1 and 9 ranges can be used.

e.g. 01642 or +44 1642 (for E.164 people) is one of these and has 01642 0 numbers,

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: Batteries not required

I do too, including photo copies of passports.

UK health secretary confirms end for NHS Digital, architect of the GP data grab debacle

Health is devolved to Welsh Assembly and Scottish Governments, hence only England.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Been on calls were it took longer to join the conference than to fix the issue, but you had to let everyone discuss it for an hour first.

Education Software Solutions tells school customers: We are moving to 3-year licensing contracts and so are you

There isn't a lot of choice in the market though.

Often schools don't have a choice - determined by the LEA / MAT

Sometimes schools may use a different system but some things need to be done in SIMS by the LEA.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Loss?

You missed SQL which is a huge moneyspinner

MoD: Our networks are in 'unacceptable' state and both data and IT bods are stuck in silos

DII?

Wasn't DII supposed to deal with all this segregation.

Yes, I know it was #!@@

Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage

Good luck to both of them.

Wondered if they tried:

Restarting their marriage.

Seeing if there are any updates for marriage.

Installing the latest feature update for marriage....

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

Now it's done by email and web forms.

Now I have to spend several hours reexplaining simple requests.

Doesn't help that sometimes adding an update in Service Now then magically disappears from the ticket.

Sending an email in you'll be lucky if the ticket is updated in a week.

For technical faults it normally means doing all the troubleshooting and providing log analysis.

(That reminds me I need to do this this weekend to show a vendor their crap product and worse knowledge base is broken and crap).

Still beats speaking to agent clearly doesn't understand a common language, know anything about the product and can't vary from a script.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Pugs, golden retrievers and IT equipment do not mix

Your neighbours need some of those fancy cat flaps linked to their cats collars.

Internet Explorer fails to make the cut, banished from Microsoft Teams for good

Java

The big hold up for many people is Java or possibly Flash.

Yes, there is Edge IE mode but it's still IE's engine.

Cannot find another browser that still supports Java.

Can't give up Java without losing ability to access critical systems.

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.