* Posts by EmleyMoor

14 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2013

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

EmleyMoor

My retailer did something similar to me...

Many years ago I bought a new PC from a local system bulider who had frequently helped me out with odds and ends in return for my expertise where he needed it. However, he had connected the flying serial ports with the leads the wrong way round on the I/O card. He had also not explained how ramshackle the case, motherboard and card setup was, nor warned me not to undo the VLB cards myself. I had to remove the card to correct his mistake, but then found myself unable to get it back in, and the graphics card also adrift. He had to come out and reassemble it all. He and his friend between them often had problems like this - but if they gave me one to assemble it was always correct.

PC repair chap lets tech support scammer log on to his PC. His Linux PC

EmleyMoor

Re: For the phone scammers ...

I left one on hold for a few minutes once while I went and reset the Sky box, which my partner had told me had crashed, at about the same time I answered the call. The scammer was still on the line when I got back.

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

EmleyMoor

Muddled phone numbers

Many years ago, a factory had new letterheads printed, bearing the telephone number WED 1560. The problem was, this was actually my mum's number and the factory's was WED 1650. Cue lots of calls asking for people at the factory. The letterheads were reprinted - at some expense especially as the number would soon change to 556 1650.

A plumber with a blowtorch is the enemy of the data centre

EmleyMoor

UPS woes

I worked for a large ISP whose data centre was about 300 yards from the NOC office, and I was one of the 24 hour team. The data centre had a UPS, which was supposed to telephone my team with a voice message "Clarkes Avenue UPS failure" (Clarkes Avenue is a pseudonym), if a potential show stopper fault developed. More often than not, the message would be four quiet beeps of successively lower frequency instead of the voice message.

Anyway, the batteries developed a serious fault causing a hydrogen sulfide build-up in the data centre office. The UPS was decommissioned, replaced with a new one in the data centre itself, consisting of a multitude of individual UPS stacks. It had not been fully commissioned.

One Sunday afternoon, during my shift, the alarm company called to say "The alarm system is reporting fire, this is a landlord response." - so off I went to Clarkes Avenue. On arrival, I found that smoke escaped from the door if I opened the one into the data centre. I closed the door and called the fire brigade, also reporting to my shift partner. He raised the issue with the duty management team.

The fire brigade ventilated the building, There was no actual fire but the control box for "blue 2" UPS had had its plastic case burned off. That UPS was in bypass, as it happened. I had to stay at Clarkes Avenue for most of my shift as the alarm was not resetting - the engineer eventually came out and unwired the fire circuit, then reconnected it, and all was well.

Another, different UPS was installed at Clarkes Avenue a few weeks later.

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

EmleyMoor

Pigeons

I used to work in a university building in the centre of a fairly sizeable city. I had been advised on my starting day never to leave any room vacant with windows open due to the pigeons that would otherwise fly in and create havoc with the computer equipment. It was a well known rule, and was even written into the notes that equipment damage caused by pigeons would be charged directly to the person(s) in charge of the room in question. I did occasionally find pigeons in the building, mostly in the offices of Professors!

EmleyMoor

Pigeons causing trouble

I worked in a university building in the centre of a fairly large city once, on the 3rd and 4th floors of a building. Not surprisingly, there were lots of pigeons about. On numerous occasions all computer technical staff (there were 5 of us) had to remind people, often Professors, not to leave the windows open when vacating a room AT ANY TIME, no matter how long you intend to be gone.

We typically said "it only takes a moment for a pigeon to get in here and do no good at all to the computer(s) you have in here" - often after finding a pigeon in an office we'd been called to or asked to visit to carry out an upgrade or something.

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

EmleyMoor

If I've left it like that, it's for a reason

I'd gone away for a few days, leaving my computer, which was also the family fax machine (which may or may not have been relevant to the issue) on. I'd also left the top cover *off* the trackball as there was a problem with one of the optical parts which meant it wouldn't move well horizontally with the cover on. I intended to obtain a new one as soon as I could find a suitable one.

For some reason, my sister needed to use my computer for something, so she called me (either on my mobile phone or possibly where I'd gone) for some guidance. During the call, she complained that the trackball was difficult to move horizontally. I thought "Oh, it's worse now" - no, I got back to find she'd refitted the top cover!

If I've left a cover off, there's a good reason for it. However, I'd now *hide* such a cover because of this incident.

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

EmleyMoor

Problem not exactly caused by another service person, but with something that they sold

I had built a pretty good computer for my dad, and he had decided to buy a new printer. Now, had he asked me first, I would have told him one make not to get - hint, the name is an anagram of the name of a Barbarian - but he bought one from the friendly guy at our local computer shop. It just would not print when attached to the computer, and for some reason dad was not prepared to get the guy at the shop to deal in the first instance.

(Note, I'm not saying that a printer by the firm whose name sounds similar to a horse racing venue, or one that sounds like a sauce brand, would have worked in this case, but I am saying I'd have advised against what he went for anyway.)

I took a spare machine with me, knowing I might need to do a backup at least. In the end it turned out to be a rather good job I did.

After a backup, nuke and pave, the printer *still* would not print. I swapped the, fortunately similar, motherboards between my machine and dad's, and the printer worked. So, now dad involves the guy at the shop. Obtaining a new motherboard, CPU and two sticks of memory, I set about rebuilding based on that. All went well, until I installed a sound card. Now all manner of faults were occurring, lots of app crashes.

On this occasion I had to admit defeat, after several attempts. The guy at the shop, as he had supplied some of the parts, was very willing to help, but not exactly of the opinion it could be down to what he'd supplied, until he tried it. The motherboard performed perfectly, until you added a sound card - any sound card, not just the one I was trying.

The machine came back with yet another replacement motherboard, and with dad's sound card fitted and working, and the printer also working. The rest of the weekend was taken up with restoring old files and reinstalling software. This turned out to be the third in a sequence of "it must be your mistake" incidents with this supplier that had culminated in an apology. After a chat with a friend who had helped set him up in the first place, he even offered me a few "near end of line" parts free.

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

EmleyMoor

Users will always ignore *something*!

No matter what the situation, there is always some aspect of it some users are sure to ignore. There will always be the ones who save stuff in the wrong place, the ones that don't take the subtle hints error messages contain, the ones that still fail that point even after you've explained it, and the ones who have to organise their own backups or have none and then lose everything simply because they couldn't be bothered, or wouldn't tell you it wasn't working.

Then come the ones who, at least for a while, do everything *right*, praise you for providing them with such a good machine, then have some kind of disaster that results in an insurance company replacing your well designed and tested machine with a "not quite up to it" one... even after you've corrected all the simple mistakes, it still has a substandard core component that is causing crashes or spontaneous reboots, so you tell your user "You need to get Acme (or whoever) to replace (said part), or you are going to be at severe risk of a major breakdown." - you repeat this advice every time a spontaneous reboot, or a disk error at startup, are reported, for more than a year. Then it happens: the system spontaneously reboots, and, despite being very much "in Windows", reports that the drive it's running from is apparently unformatted (clear poppycock!). You then state "Right, order (part) from one of my approved suppliers, and I'll attend as soon as possible after it arrives. Expect me to be there all day, if not more than one!" Cue debate about whether the need for the part is fact (because all the diagnostics have been clearly pointing to it) or opinion (because your user is too tight to go spending money just on your say so, and refused to go to Acme (or whoever) with what they considered "your opinion") and then say "Well, if you don't order the part, I'm not touching it. See if our friend Fred at (approved friendly local computer shop) can deal." - this normally results in the part being ordered. When it's all sorted, then cue debate about why there are no backups - the answer being "The machine was not reliable enough to back up, due to that faulty part."

I'm pleased to say, in the worst case I dealt with, the computer in question was well kept for the rest of that owner's life.

User rats out IT team for playing games at work, gets them all fired

EmleyMoor

Having to play a game as part of a fault investigation

I worked for an ISP once that had started running some game servers. One day a report came in that our Quake server was continually repeating the same level. Now, everyone on my team was expected to be able to play a bit, for testing purposes, but on this day it fell to me. I went to our only suitable machine at the time, fired up the game and proceeded to play.

The fault, it turns out, was incorrectly reported. The level had a very hard to reach exit, but I eventually managed to amass a sufficient frag count, reach it and make the game move on. I played through two more levels just to make sure it wasn't repeating.

What I missed out was that one of the bosses came by, when I'd been playing for about 45 minutes. He noticed, but my boss stated it was a fault investigation - I had to find a "hiding place" in the game and give a progress update. It took well over an hour to get out of that level!

Angry user demands three site visits to fix email address typos

EmleyMoor

Idiots not retaining bounce messages

Occasionally, attempts to email me fail. This has been going on for years... at times it has been overzealous reaction to a "server busy" message, at other times misreaction to a rejection for being malformed. There are also instances lacking explanation.

Why? Because NOT ONE of the affected senders has EVER bothered to keep a bounce message to show to me. I have specifically requested of one of the worst offenders that they now do... they are yet to have email bounce since they were asked.

One of the affected senders is a well known market research service, and I am a member of one of their schemes. You'd think they'd know how useful bounce messages are!

The other is a housing association, and none of the staff who email me are particularly IT savvy, hence my instruction to them.

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

EmleyMoor

User name schemes gone pear shaped

I worked in a department of a university where an originally apparently sensible scheme (within department staff) had been in place but obviously had gone wrong. Under the scheme I could have been "phil", "philip" or "pmr", with the latter being the most desirable. Unfortunately some idiot had allocated that to someone who should have been "prb" (note that this was NOT the only odd one), so I couldn't have it. ("prb" was in fact what he wanted, and was available.) My immediate superior decided to introduce a new rule whereby department staff would have unprefixed usernames otherwise similar to the prefixed ones used by students and also by staff in the other departments of the faculty - three surname letters and first initial. Under this new rule, I was "reyp". I hated it, but one of my duties involved setting up accounts for new staff. It only happened once all the time I was there, but not surprisingly I used the same rule. The user had wanted "dj" but that was prohibited by security policy. I had no middle initial on file for him, but even if I had, would still have allocated him "johd" as a protest against my own user name.

If I had stayed in that place and been promoted to my immediate superior's position I might have started the potentially longwinded process of re-rationalising user names. What made it worse was that student user names were "current year only", and they needed new ones each and every year!

The micro YOU used in school: The story of the Research Machines 380Z

EmleyMoor

Re: Reset Button

Boot up (B or X) then at the A> prompt, Ctrl-F, then J103.

EmleyMoor

Never actually used one in earnest...

My only 380Z experience was the one we had as a fileserver for our network of 480Zs. I know there was also one in the science department - one with 8" floppy drives, no less - but I never actually used it.

With the right extras, the 380Z could produce wonderful coloured output - not like the 8 colours of the 480Z.