Slashdot Mirror
The Oft Frustrating Job of a Sysadmin
I_Love_Pocky! writes "Sysadmin Co. is a hilarious site built by some sysadmins at an ISP to help them vent their frustrations with dealing with non-tech types. This site is gives a hilarious picture of the daily frustrations of dealing with the inept. I am interested to see if these stories strike a chord with other admins out there."
I'll never forget, he said "There was no way to know that the backups were failing without looking at the log file." This statement was made 17 months after the backups stopped working....
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Then again, I have found that treating my userbase as people, and not as trained monkeys, tends to have better results than trying to be mister 31337 BOFH.
Can someone point me to something truly funny on that site? I've clicked through techisms and bossisms and have yet to crack a smile, much less ROFLMAO.
They sure can keep a server running great, can't they...
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I need to check to see how may pages of users trying to open up virus stories there are.
This site is gives a hilarious picture of the daily frustrations of dealing...with slashdotted sites.
I know its daily for me.
was a lady running a Mandrake system asking me about saving files to a disk. She was having troubles and thought that maybe automount wasn't working. I went over there, put in a disk, and copied the file.
Her problem - she hadn't put a disk in the drive.
Chaos will always win out over order because chaos is more organized
Archive.org mirror.... http://web.archive.org/web/20030714083852/www.sysa dminco.com/main.php
Seems to still work, haven't tried loads.
I find it funny that a site designed by a bunch of sysadmins to vent their frustrations will likely be very frustrated when /. hammers it into the ground.
This post have been here for less that 5 mins and i'm already getting mysql_connect errors!
-Kilka
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. -Chomsky
I worked support for a long time. I don't think the users are inept...I think they just have other interests besides computers. I mean, if a brain surgeon or nobel prize winner calls for help on setting up dialup networking, are they a idiot user? I don't see doctors making websites about what idiots we are when we call them for medical advice.
Nope, just their site, it seems.
Site not hilarious, not well designed either. Have to scroll to read more than a half dozen lines of text in a story. It basicaly a small handful of stories about customers that don't understand DNS. As a sysadmin type, I was sorely dissapointed. Not only that, but the site melted almost right away. Yawn, next?
Biggest Sysadm hangup: Getting slashdotted.
I am a student working at a helpdesk at a university, one day we came in to a voicemail from a user where they apparently thought they hung up the phone but they hit the 3 way button and well ill let you guys listen for yourselves.
http://s.bouncybouncy.net/call/
I imagine the customers on the same box/pipe must be screaming bloody murder now that it's been /.ed
I love the quote of the day on their site: /home/garweb/inc/connection.php on line 15
:)
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in
Connection could not be established
I think that was funnier than any qotd I've ever seen
I really love the one about the sysadmin whose server got slammed by Slashdot and absolutely could NOT figure out how to farm the load, so instead they just put up a page with basically nothing on it. That one's my favorite.
can best be summarised by this quirky, crazily off-beat cartoon
good for a larf...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
n/t
Seriously. I remember reading those "tech support humor sites" where they would go off on idiots while at the same time illustrating a huge amount of technical illiteracy themselves. One of the worst was a guy who chastised a woman for calling her PC's case (I.e. the big metal box part) the "engine.", while he called it the "CPU". Neither one of them knew the correct term, but the woman was at least thinking about it and coming up with terms on her own. The tech support guy was an idiot.
Yeah, there can be stupid users out there. There can also be idiotic sys-admins. At my high school, I once lost half a semester's work on a video project due to their (moronic) synching software crashing halfway through. (When you logged on, you're files would be copied over. With my hundreds of megs of video files this could take five minutes. If the upload failed, and you logged off, you would have a blank folder copied over to the system.
I went to the sys-admin's office and told him that my files were gone. He disappeared into his office for a few minutes, and came back out and said "yup, they're gone." I'm like "do you do backups?" and he's like "backups?"
bleh. if they had any brains, they'd be designing these systems, not servicing them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I_Love_Pocky said the word "hilarious" twice. The site isn't even mildly amusing.
Not that I've read TFS, but I'm sure all the jokes are nice and old. Does anyone really want to be reminded about the Kazaa-groking, virus happy CEO?
"But I've always used that number." she says.
"But now we are to use this other number." I reply.
"But for 5 years I've always used..." she goes on.
Fuck it, I just change the quickdial she uses to the other number. How they manage to use SAP every day without completely fucking things up is way beyond me.
What is the point of the internet?
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Connection could not be established
Too many connections in
wow, these guys sure are some ub3r 31337 sys4dm1n5.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
they've obviouly been eaten by zombies. probably shortly after they got hired.
It's not just the lusers who are lusers. Sometimes, the internal support is pretty terrifyingly inept, too. I speak from experience. Hit my site. You'll see. Oh, you'll see.
Check out the Gnu Know your System Administrator field guide and Top 100 things you don't want the sysadmin to say ...
That reminds me of this comment from earlier today, which gives the top 10 reasons for committing seppuku (a Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment)
.vbs & .exe attachments at the mail server because he is an amature (read: terrible) coder. Moreover, his amature programs cause as much if not more trouble than the virus-laden attachments he keeps opening. He also has crazy ideas about putting "stamps" on email.
-----
Here are the top 10 reasons:
10) You've just been ordered to migrate from sendmail to Exchange server.
9) Your boss, let's just call him Bill, insists upon being given root priviledges, in spite of the fact that he constantly breaks things even with mere user priviledges.
8) Your boss won't let you filter out
7) You are told by your boss, who (mis)read a computer security advisory to put the company webserver (which handles online sales) on a non-standard port "so the hackers won't be able to mess with it."
6) Your boss expects you to find a way to make your Solaris servers, with tons of ancient, crufty legacy code which is vital to the company, run ASP pages just so they can use (read: justify the rediculous expense of) some crappy B2B application they bought without consulting IT. Preferably sometime next week.
5) Your boss thinks that some 'internet accelerator' software (read: spyware) should be made mandatory for all employees to improve productivity.
4) Your "security policy" is more like a list of who to blame for what.
3) Your boss is negotiating a SCO IP license, since "any publicity is good publicity."
2) Your boss thinks you should be more thankful, because the management is so "IT-savvy" and always ready to help you out.
1) You ignore all this bad advice, pretend you took it anyway (he'll never actually know...), and waste your time posting on Slashdot instead of working.
I really think calling it CPU is defensible.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cpu includes cpu
2. Occasionally used (although less and less) to refer to the
system unit.
so Nyaahhh
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
After about a month on the job, my boss came to me one day and said, "What do you use to read your email?" I reply, "Well, in windows, I use eudora, and in unix, pine. Which system did you mean? (everyone had a solaris and windows machine)" "Unix", he says, "Show me this pine program, I've been using this program, I forget the name, and the problem is, whenever I get an attachment it screws up the screen and I have to scroll past it. " So I show him pine, and as im leaving I say, "Just out of curiosity do you recall the name of the program you were using?" To which he replies "Oh yea! Its called .... um ... TAIL!"
Sure enough, the poor SOB had been running tail on his mail spool to read his mail. His spool was 150 megs and had every email he'd recieved since the lab opened in 1991 (this was in 2000).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Yes, several other people have mentioned this but, I think I'm probably one of the only ones who sat there for a minute trying to determine whether or not this was part of the site or an actual error... =p
/home/garweb/inc/connection.php on line 15
Connection could not be established
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
>bleh. if they had any brains, they'd be designing these systems, not servicing them.
Would you mind filling us dummies in on why you hadn't made your own backups?
I have a PhD cust who spends like 400 a month for ISDN as opposed to DSL (it is available to him) and I always shamefully get his transferred calls:
PhD: Look I know what I'm doing I have a PhD and I'm telling you your system is erratic
Meanwhile the guy has his modem set to dial his own phone number AND HE USES CAPS ALL THE TIME so his username/password is almost always the issue. This after I've spoken to him like umpteen who knows how many times. He also has a T1 at his company and always calls:
PhD: my router isn't working and I'm getting very tired of your company doing this to me.
Meanwhile he disconnects his routers to put on wireless switches, faxes, jams phone cords in his ethernet ports, tries to jam his T1 cord into his phone, tries to make calls through his T1 you name it. I have no pity for people you have to explain things over to a trillion times. Users suck
MoFscker
I named a computer 'BUTTHEAD' once. It was the mail server. Unfortunately, this was my first mail server, and when I first built it it became an open relay. (Yes, it was Exchange. Bite me, I'm not a sysadmin.) We were blacklisted from a site. The CEO came into my office and said I had to change the name of the server immediately because the term 'BUTTHEAD' was offensive, and we were getting filtered for it. I just rolled with it, figured it was better that he the name of the server was the problem, as opposed to creating a security risk.
On a brighter note, shortly after they hired a full-time sysadmin once again!
"Derp de derp."
...supposedly technically literate people can't handle a good slashdoting.
This is a serious question, not a troll or an attempt to start a fight....
Here it is: How would you "farm the load", "load balance", or otherwise prevent a slashdot effect on a small to medium size web server? Say you are running Apache, MySql, PHP, or some other scripting language on a small to medium sized box. You only have one webserver to work with. what steps can be taken to prevent slashdotters from bringing a site to its knees? Any suggestions?
"It's not just the lusers who are lusers. Sometimes, the internal support is pretty terrifyingly inept, too. I speak from experience. Hit my site. You'll see. Oh, you'll see."
Hmmm...
Doctor: The patient is a glutton for punishment, and suffers from low self-esteem.
All I can say is thank god for rescue disks. it was pretty evil when the login function got rm.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
"What do you think your username WAS?
(Note: If you don't know what a BOFH is, go read the chapters here)
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I interviewed for a web-admin job a few years ago. They asked me "How would you troubleshoot a blue screen of death?" With a smile on my face, I replied "I'd press F1 and ask Clippy!" Ah we all had a good chuckle at that. Heh. Didn't get the job, though.
"Derp de derp."
"You only have one webserver to work with. what steps can be taken to prevent slashdotters from bringing a site to its knees? Any suggestions?"
Redirect to Goatse.cx.
j00 4|23 73|-| F$(|||\|9 1337!!!!1111oneoneone!!!!!1
Here's links to google cache mirrors for the site:
:-)
techisms
bossisms
qotd
I need the karma
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
... because it's a university network system? Where would he back up to anyway?
SIG: HUP
God that's helarious.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
KOTOR! :-D Sysadmin savior everywhere. Atleast now that it's out on PC. Go HK-47. ;)
Informatus Technologicus
I was once at my parents' place. They just bought a brand new CD burner and my dad was interested in backing up his files. Specifically, he had a lot of contacts and e-mails in Outlook. He asked me to check the state of his backup to see if he had done it properly. The result? One "Microsoft Outlook.lnk" on a single CD-R. He had dragged the outlook shortcut to the CD in an attempt to "back up" his outlook files.
System Administrators are basically doing nothing now. New software packages are rarely installed, usually only upgraded when a new exploit comes out. New rollouts are very rare.If the system is good, then it rarely breaks. The job of a SA is basically go over log files and 'monitor' systems. Trivial things like fighting spam, monitoring and adjusting spam filter rules is now a top concern. All I never hear is SA's whining about spam: IT IS TRIVIAL CRAP. Once the SA starts whining about spam, he's basically saying that he knows he doesn't do shit all day, and makes a big deal out of the one thing that is saving is job. If he spends 5 hours of a day watching a mailog, the boss has to think he's doing something right?
"We demand that you notify us of system crashes beforehand."
Scary part, I was working at a High Energy Physics research lab. I said, "No problem, but I'll need a Higgs Boson to do it."
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I'm too frustrated with work to talk about it. Wait, why am I reading slashdot. Argh!!!
What exactly does a cow orker do?
What is involved in orking a cow?
What does one gain by owning a cow orker?
Should I consult a vetrenarian to determine when and if my cows should be orked?
In your honest opinion where is the best place to get an orker and which brand/model do you recommend?
If I ork a cow will I go blind?
*sigh*
To clarify, the post above was humour.
I know what the text represented, and I caught the humour inherent in that useage.
It's just Karma, but I hate being misunderstood.
*sigh*
(Humour, never apologize, never explain.)
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
dont forget the dialectizer, nothing like reading /. in redneck mode.
http://rinkworks.com/dialect/
Not your typical Sysadmin story...
I work for a large auto parts retailer (nope, not Auto Zone!).
Each of our stores has a Linux system in it, using Comtrol serial boards to run the serial terminal and printers in the store.
One of our stores decided to do some rearranging, and wanted to move the main counter a few inches. The counter isn't bolted to the floor, but it does run the full width of the store, and is pretty much permanently wired for electricity and serial connections where it is--it's not meant to be moved.
So, what did the store do? They moved the counter. With everything on it. With all the terminals and printers on said counter plugged in. And turned on.
The employees heard a few 'pop's and looked up to see smoke coming from all the terminals.
The best we can figure is the main power line running into the counter was punctured or otherwise shorted, shorting hot to either ground or neutral. Naturally, the terminals weren't on any sort of surge protectors. I doubt this would have helped, though, unless they had good Triplite or another good name-brand surge protector on it (which won't happen--too expensive--yep, the usual story).
The incident didn't just destroy the terminals on the counter, though! It made it's way through the serial lines and destroyed every piece of serial-connected equipment in the entire store.
The serial card looks like somebody took a blow-torch to it. I really wish I had a picture of it to post here, but I haven't taken one yet (it's hanging on our 'wall of shame' at the moment).
Amazingly--somehow--the PC is fine. I've had it running stress-tests for 3 weeks now, with no problems. There are scorch marks around the PCI connector and in the bottom of the case. Most of the ICs on the serial board were reduced to nothing but ashes instantly--the rest blew into pieces.
off the network? if it was important to him? i mean, why did they wait till the stuff was fried before finding out about the backups? You just trusted that it would happen? Did you ever see stuff come off tape? How would you know if it was supposed to work? Why just assume and blame the admin? If you didn't make sure it was ok you're as much to blame. By the sound of it, the question posed made the admin admit there was never any such thing, so how could you have any expectation?
I am a user on a university network. Due to some evil twist of fate (and issues involving pay and seniority), our machinist was actually a computer guy his whole prior career who also is skilled with machinist stuff. Our department sysadmin was a machinist prior to his current job. On one hand this is good... the machinist is a linux geek too and thus we get along great. He has pushed aside professor's "emergency" jobs to do minor-by-comparison lab jobs for me. Our sysadmin really shouldn't be behind a computer. And he is very abusive of his position of power over everyone's computers. Many grad students come to me for help instead of him because of his incompetence as well as attitude, and many a time I have correctly diagnosed a problem the first try that later he spends weeks trying to "fix" only to be wrong about three times. And during blaster, he threatened to remove me from the network until I proved I had installed the patch for it (I have my own personal laptop that is registered on our network). I had a hell of a time telling him that there was no patch against the blaster worm for Slackware. So, I guess my point is that I really wouldn't mind a strict sysadmin who actually knew what he was doing. He'd (or she?... there have got to be some out there) would make a great person to interact with and I'd have a lot of respect for them. But there are some out there that are worse than the user base that they are supposed to administer over... and those type are greatly resentful of those who know more than them (some people have suggested that perhaps some of his additional attitude towards me is gender-related, but I really would like to think the best of people). *sigh*
But hey, thumbs up to all you good sysadmins out there (we had a great one in my division when I worked in government). I know it's not an easy job.
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Connection could not be established
I want a new mouse!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm a human being!!! I have a college education!!!!!!!!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I guess he meant hosted with a LISP
I read it that way too when people don't hyphenate.
The most dangerous sysadmin is the one who believes that he's dealing with inept people when the real ineptness is found within. Whole corporate IT policies are dictated by these people *all* the time.
The guy who is in charge of our Solaris NFS network and UNIX development tools goes over to Bangalore this week to set up our "replacement" facility. I get an email on Monday:
"I keep getting a 'portmap' error when I try to mount an NFS drive. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong."
I am *NOT* in support. I am *NOT* in IT systems administration. I am a systems programmer. I am his client. Why is he asking me, a user, how to do what he gets paid to do?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"The Oft Frustrating Task of a Slashdotter" (aka trying to read /.ed stories)
or
"Here, try to Read this One!"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
so much for mysql:
/home/garweb/inc/connection.php on line 15
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in
Connection could not be established
Check it out: Adminspotting.
Here is some ascii art that a coworker where I work made back in 1998. Actually the systhug.com site itself was our attempt to try to organize some sysadmin information. Back then, we even tried to make a pseudo-union type deal, called the Local 202.
I know people like to post about dumb things they have heard sysadmins say, but the fact is, that to most of the people they deal with, they are speaking chinese anyway. I work in a high end facet of computer graphics, and there is a point where a problem can be so complicated you just do not want to waste the time talking about it to the end user. I have also worked as an A+ cert'd tech and sysadmin in the past.
You just make some shit up, in fact, sometimes we would just make shit up to crack each other up, or to see what we could get away with.
There is nothing like having your boss tell you that he is getting errors, and you toss out the bait "Sounds like an ID 10 T error." And *BAM* he strikes "Yeah I had heard about those ID10T errors in {insert OS here}." [I'm sure you have asshole..]
Nothing quite like having the boss tell the other tech crew about how you helped him when he had an ID10T error either.
The ip address used on the main page just happens to be one owned by the company i work for...odd
Are there websites out there for car mechanics to make fun of their customers who bring in their car for a tune-up?
How about a website for chefs that makes fun of people who don't know how to cook?
This was several years ago - before DHCP. As sysadmin, I kept the list of IP addresses assigned to the computers.
Newbie tech, right out of school (I'll call him 'D.') comes up to me, while I'm in the middle of something.. he says "I'm working on the machine in shipping, and I need its' IP address."
I say "no problem", point to a piece of paper, and say "they're all on that piece of paper". He takes the piece of paper, copies down the number, and goes away.
A few minutes later, he comes back, and says "that must be wrong - it tells me that it's in use."
I tell him "that's weird - I'll come take a look at it in a few minutes."
So I finish what I'm working on, and go to shipping.. I ask "D. said there was a problem with your machine." They shrug, and said "it's working OK right now." Just to be sure, I take a look at it, and the IP address is correct, and the machine is working fine, so I go back to my desk.
Two hours later, D. comes back to my desk and asks if I'm done yet.. I tell him I went to the shipping computer, and it was working fine.
He tells me "No, I'm at my bench, setting up a new system for them, and when I enter the IP address and connect to the network, it tells me that the IP address is in use."
I guess he skipped the class where they talked about IP addresses having to be unique.
Another good one from this week was a user who called in to complain that she conneted to the internet fine, but didn't get any webpages after connecting. I asked what she clicked on to connect, and she said the shortcut to her connection. What did she click after that? Nothing. I advised her to open Internet Explorer and click on things.
I don't really mind users who are ignorant, but competent. I do mind users for whom I have to repeat SMTP, not SMPT ad infinitum, or who phone in to basically have me read error messages back to them. Willful ignorance is what is bad, be it in regards to computers or anything else one deals with. At least attempt to understand what's going on with the device you paid $2000 for. Don't assume that just because you pay your $20 monthly fee that you'll have your hand held everytime you are too lazy to read the message that pops up in bold text a foot in front of your eyes.
i think their website design and lack of usability,standards speaks volumes about their competance
but anyone who cant fix their car/dentistry/surgery/beatmix/play instruments/ etc
are idiots too right ?
Doing y2k support for retirement homes. My wife ask the retired gentelman to discribe the computer? "Is it a Dell? A Micron? Any lables on the computer?"
She hears him looking under the desk. A few minutes later? "No Miss, I don't see any labels."
She then asks "Is it a Compaq?" He fimly replyed. "Oh No!! No It's full size computer, Miss"
That site doesn't need to be dynamic. A 486DX66 serving static pages can saturate a T1.
If your site "needs" to be dynamic, does your front page *really* *need* to be dynamic? Re-generate the front page from a cron job every 60 seconds- that's probably dynamic enough, and will save you a zillion database hits.
At a government office where I worked once (best places to get this kind of story, near as I can tell), one of the techs (who I sat near) came in and told everyone to gather 'round. He said he just got back from a half-hour conversation which consisted of him explaining to a user why the print-screened copy of an application window she had put in Word wouldn't respond to its buttons being clicked. "It's like a calculator and a picture of a calculator. You can't press the buttons in the picture and expect it to work, can you?" A larf was had by all.
Now, being a technically-inclined programmer, I rarely have reason to deal with techs. Most of my problems, I successfully deal with myself. Therefore, unfortunately, most of the interactions tend to be about disruptive hardware upgrades or else special handling for me because I need more access than is standard in the organization. At one place I worked, not only could you not install your own software by default, but in fact had no access at all (much less write access) to most of your own C: drive. They give me more permissions grudgingly and eye me with suspicion, and even then only after being so ordered by a mutual superior. So naturally I tend to see them as fascist policy-drones. Too bad, that; we'd probably be good geeky buddies otherwise.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"Who needs to read computer manuals when I've got a son who's a computer geek!". Something I overheard a while back and decided it would make a cute 'toon. Here it is.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
I don't have a funny sysadmin story
President ISES
(International Society for Elimination of Sigs)
Yep.
...Can't build a site that can keep from being slashdotted
Jeezus!
And I though I was the only one who had an idiot doing the very same thing at my company.
But we've got plans for him (mu-ha-ha!)
*ring*
"Tech support"
"Hi, My Internet Explorer isn't working, and neither is My Outlook!'"
"Sorry ma'am, but we've been Slashdotted and our pipe is full at the moment."
"What on Earth does the plumbing in your building have to do with My Computer?"
...true story.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Now this is OK to say Luser b/c it was a vendor.
After meeting vendor wants to see my "intrastructure"... so I take him to the server room which due to some repairs has a HUGE A/C unit with a big silver pipe going into the ceiling. Geek that I am I have affixed a sticker on it that says "UNIX".
We go over server sever and their functions and he points to the A/C and says, "Oh you guys run Linux?"
"No just regular old Unix."
"So what's the bad boy do?"
"What's it do? Look at it! Look at the pipe on that thing!"
"Oh yeah..." he says knowingly, "What's the specs?"
"This sucker is pushing 250,000 BTUs."
"Wow! Man on a Windows box that'd be BSOD City."
"Yes. Yes it would."
We didn't buy his product.
This
They have the internet on computers now?"
"My writing is as clear as mud,but mud settles&clear streams run on&disappear"
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Connection could not be established
THIS STUFF IS GOLD!
Karma: Non-Heinous
You know, not everyone knows what sys admins do--- that's why sys admins are paid. Just yesterday where I work I witnessed a sys admin refuse to help with a machine that needed a bios update. He insisted that since he was not the "official adminstrator" of it, he couldn't touch it. Now, this machine is "adminstered" remotely. He stood there and told my boss- to her face, that a "good" sys admin would know how to do a bios update remotely.
Huh? WTF?
There's no need to take advantage of people and act like a jerk about things. I've dealt with far too many rudy and cocky sys admins in my day.
[FromTheMorning]
One time when I was doing tech support for an ISP. I was walking a user into doing an ipconfig from the command prompt and had to give her directions to where every letter was on the keyboard. And when I asked her to hit the enter key, she asked, "Where's the enter key?" I was like OMFG. It's only two of the largest keys on the board. At least try, to look at the keyboard before giving up!!!
That's nothing. We had a vendor do the same thing- he was apparently on a conference call to his boss, and his boss made him call us for an update. The voicemail went as normal, and then there was a click-click.
"Yeah, I got his voicemail, the guy wasn't around." They then proceeded to discuss how they'd handle selling us on something, so on so forth.
It was so priceless I yelled for my boss to come over, hit the "start over" button and within minutes everyone in the department was giggling with glee that a vendor was not only stupid enough to not know how to work a phone, but to also talk about a customer behind their back. We never did tell him, or give him our business, for that matter :-)
The three-way calling reminds me of a story from a book- I forget which- where the author was at a college which got three-way calling for free. The author's friend would, for fun, flip open the phonebook to a random page, plant his finger down, call the number wherever his finger landed. When the person answered, he'd say "Hang on a sec!", put them on hold, and then dial the other number and say the same thing, then connect them. The conversations were reportedly priceless once you got through the universal part, which was: "Hey, why did you call me?" "I didn't call you, you called me!" "No I didn't!"...
Please help metamoderate.
.....
.....
(16:13:55) hackeduser25: omg i cant belive they did this to me
(16:14:35) stephen samuel: precisely what did they do?? All I saw was on the guest log page.
(16:14:53) hackeduser25: they put porn on it and changed everything around
(16:15:19) hackeduser25: im gonna havet to do it all over again it took me months and now i must re-type it all
(16:15:23) stephen samuel: Do you have a backup copy at home?
(16:15:29) hackeduser25: im gonna have a panic attack...no
(16:16:05) stephen samuel: It's possible that (most of) the original stuff is still there.
(16:16:18) hackeduser25: i know the site is frozen
(16:16:35) stephen samuel: How do you do updates??
(16:16:49) hackeduser25: easily but i cant access my account!!!!!
(16:16:52) hackeduser25: cuz they changed it all
(16:17:30) stephen samuel: You may want to get to the people who host the site and ask them to reset it back to what it was yesterday... (at least the password).
(16:19:26) stephen samuel: In the meantime, I'd suggest that you come up with a password that's not easily guessable.
(16:19:48) stephen samuel: Did you have an 'easily guessable' password?
(16:20:19) hackeduser25: well it was password.
(16:20:47) stephen samuel: That explains why you got slimed... It's the first password that a hacker would try.
(16:21:13) hackeduser25: omg great
(16:21:15) stephen samuel: Literaly -- it's the absolute MOST used password by newbies.
(16:21:27) hackeduser25: oh well great then
(16:21:49) stephen samuel: justasec.. I'm looking for my file on how to create relatively secure passwords....
(16:22:13) hackeduser25: k
(16:24:24) stephen samuel: http://www.bcgreen.com/solaris/passwords.html
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Just because we specialize in very linear concepts, it doesn't absolve us of the requirement to communicate clearly and civilly.
Just think of the $$$$, and you can tolerate any user situation (well, almost...)
My job is too hard! BOO FUCKING HOO
So Pure. So Simple.
It's Art
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just be happy you have the job. There are thousands who'd like be in your position (or have it transferred overseas). Try not to waste any "employment karma" loathing your users; it might seep through the facade.
The comic strip User Friendly often visits the topic of frustrated sysadmins. Good for a laugh. I have and recommend all of the books.
That guy's my personal hero (kept me sane during those long 3 hour blocks of no tech support calls).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
I love when taking calls at a dialup ISP when they say initially that they can't get on the internet, when after about 10 minutes of telling them to go here or go there because they can't dial up because they are on their home phone that they have forgotten their yahoo.com email password and can't get into it anymore!
But there's a difference between healthy venting and obsessive, pointless bitching. Not sure which kind this site represents.
"Many sys-admins don't realize that the people they work for often have technical skills in other areas and simply don't have time to deal with computers."
Which is exactly WHY the machines are locked down.
"It's sort of like being a mechanic. People do all sorts of stupid shit with their cars, but that doesn't make them stupid people. It just means they have little technical expertise dealing with cars."
I've heard that smoking near the gas tank doesn't indicate stupidity. It just means they have little technical expertise dealing with cars.
"That said, I *do* tend to have little patience for people who won't read a manual. I tend to take a very DIY attitude towards things - that's the most frustrating part of trying to explain computers to others. If people would read the document that read 'README' or read the error message instead of panicking when one occured, 95% of all computer problems would be fixed instantly."
Be nice if they dealt with the computer.
You know you are a sysadmin when you hear the phrase "users are losers" and don't think of drugs.
A guy comes up to me. "I need something removed from this floppy."
"Ok, no problem. What?" - I display the directory.
"Report2.doc"
shift-delete, enter.
"Aaaargh, I meant just a few lines from inside of the file!!!"
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Sat in a meeting with a Senior VP who was trying to convince everyone that you could replace a 8 way 400 MHz Sun E4500 with 1 PC.
His reason? Because 8x400MHz = 3200MHz, so all you would need is one to two 3 GHz processor intel system.
It was hard not to laugh...
Although I had been programming for a few years ,I had to go to a local business college to get a piece of paper to get in the door of job applications (*this was in mid 80's).
In the introductory course, the reference material all called the box the CPU. Being dumb, I called a teacher on this, and soon learned my mistake. On the tests, I told them what they wanted to hear, and continue to call it 'the box'.
My best nitwit call was a new user on windows 95, using office 97. She called me severely upset because she was working on a 'program' called 'untitled', and when she went to delete the 'program', could not find it.
I work for a local public school district. I showed up one of the buildings in the district, and talked to a local tech who had the strangest request.
It seems a teacher needed to send an attachment in an email, and didn't know how. The tech ended up going to the teacher's classroom, and opened up their email client... then asked "Where's the document you want to send?" The teacher then handed the tech a sealed envelope.
True story.
It was a professor that once said something like,"Computers are designed to make people feel stupid when in fact it's the computer that's stupid."
If one was truely smart, one would understand when a non-technical user was explaining a problem or making a request. Otherwise one would just make jokes with the others who also cannot in order make one's self feel superior when in reality one's not...
...especially if it's one's job!
I am not a sysadmin.
a link to slashdot...
/home/garweb/inc/connection.php on line 15
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Link to server lost, unable to reconnect in
Connection could not be established
Your job is to help these people do their jobs. Don't bitch about helping someone or doing your job, that just makes you look like an ass. Do you see doctors whining about moron patients? And if you have I'd suggest getting a new doctor.
Our big boss is totally computer/technology illiterate. Let me show you the depths of his abyssmal knowledge of the most simple of tasks...
These are things he says to me...
My son just sent me this digital clock can you set it up for me?
This fucking printer never works! My response-Do you see the toner light flashing? That means it's out.
The reason he gets so pissed is because he prints every email everyday and then goes in the woman's bathroom to drop a stinky load while reading through them. No joke!
He keeps a minimum of 5000 emails in his inbox and around 5000 in sent and another 10000 in deleted. Yes it's a lovely thing along with his constant crashing of outlook (it doesn't need much help)!
Our top MCSE (oxymoron) will take down the network mid-day while warning no one and usually has problems getting it back up yet our big boss refers to him as the "GENIUS".
I never understood how pop-ups tricked people until I saw our big box click on one that said "YOU HAVE WON!". I was enlightened to say the least.
The rest of the users I support, around 80, are unbelievably computer illiterate...to the point of myself just letting them talk about what they think they know so they will just stfu!
For example one guy was trying to convince me how DVDXcopy rips dvd in mp3 format and he finds the quality superior to DVD.
WTF?
As usual I just listened till he left since it's pointless to respond because these fucking idiots know they are right.
One of the funniest things that happened was when our top MCSE (Oxy Moron x 2) opened an infected attachment and set in motion a massive virus outbreak. File servers, mail servers, beepersystem, phone systems, etc. all dead in a matter of minutes as we run M$ shiite and it was unpatched.
Yet another fucking no brainer!
Does anyone here just throw out big tech terms just to see the user you're talking to implode from their lack of trying to comprehend something well beyond their comprehension?
Here are my favorite questions to ask even before getting started on solving an issue.
Is it plugged in?
Are you logged in as yourself?
Do you know your name?
Do you know what printer you printed to?
Did your parents have any kids that lived?
How can you be so fucking stoopid?
One last thing....
Our big boss is an unbelievable, accidental bug finder no matter what he uses. He can break any and all software/hardware you throw at him and have no idea how it happened but the funniest thing ever involving him wasn't really him but to me personified his luck with pc's, etc.
This is short and sweet...
I was going through my email and received and email from him. I clicked on the email and in that instant the power blinked in the building and went out for hours. I know this has nothing to do with him but can anyone actually prove it?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
[68.107.238.169@sysadminco.com]$ ./slashdotted
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I think the sysadmins are largely responsible for these clueless users making silly requests. Not on the admin-level necessarily, but on the executive tech type level. Let me give you one example.
With Win2000, when you print a document, a printer icon appears on the system tray. Double-click this icon, and the network printer you're using shows up and lists the currently queued jobs. So if a document doesn't print out, take a look at the printer, figure out what user is holding up the line, and ask him to cancel. Or if you accidently print 10 copies of your overheads for a talk, you can easily cancel your own print job. Took about 10 seconds start to finish. It always seemed to work, and was never a problem. My guess is that is occasionally took a sysadmin 15 minutes to solve a problem caused by someone canceling the wrong job. Time is money! So naturally, the admins "improved" it.
How? Well, they removed the ability to view the current queue of jobs. So now we can't cancel our own print jobs, or figure out who the bastard is who's holding up the line. What do we do now? Call our support desk. Enter our employee number, choose the correct option from a choice of 5, wait on hold for one of our sysadmins, tell him or her the problem. Tell them the name of the printer. Verify our employee number. Job is cancelled. The last two times I've done this, it's taken about 10 minutes of my time, and about 2 minutes for the admins. And my time costs the company a lot more money than the sys admins time. But the costs for running the support center went down, so it must be good!
Honestly, this is more descriptive of the level of Dilbertism present than a general indictment of admins. To tie in with the original post, this is what causes user frustration. Thinks work fine, someone who "knows better" changes things to make them supposedly better (but actually just more complicated), and the user gets frustrated. Waiting on hold for 10 minutes to cancel a print job (when I should be doing other work) is really frustrating. Add in instances where the admins re-start computers which are in the middle of hours-longs computations without bothering to check in with the users, and it creates generally feelings of hostility towards the tech support staff.
So you want smarter or nicer users? Spend a little time understanding how the admin actions affect the end-user before implementing brain-dead improvements. I suggest doing this by asking them.
Yep, you're right. That does sound like moronic synching software. And backups would seem to have been a good idea.
Then again, this was a high school we're talking about. Nobody dies, nobody loses any money, life goes on in the rest of the world if students lose some files.
The parent poster doesn't mention when this anecdote dates from. If he was doing video editing not that many years ago, he might well have been soaking up a significant amount of the school's total available networked storage, and backing it up might have represented an 'unreasonable' expenditure of time and money for the local sysadmin...who might have also had teaching duties, but also had to repair vandalized equipment, manage hardware from new to eight years old from six different vendors running three different operating systems, and plead for funding from the school board.
The sysadmin might have made backups of 'critical' stuff to keep the network and frequently used applications running, but figured that most students would only use the network for doing research and writing papers small enough to fit on a floppy.
If I was going to do large, long-term work on a network that seemed held together by chewing gum and prayer, I might be tempted to ask the sysadmin about it. If I was going to do a project that sucked up significant shared storage resources, I might mention it out of courtesy, too.
And the parent poster has learned a valuable lesson about keeping backups, hasn't he? (The rest of us have all been burned by a drive failure or the like once, and then we learned.) Bummer about losing half a semester's work, but going two or three months without making a backup...?
I'm a graduate student, and I know that the networked storage at my institution is mirrored instantaneously offsite, and backed up to tape every evening. I don't take it off the network until it's been burned to two CDs--one for the office and one offsite at home--as well as a live copy on my local hard drive. (Everyone checks their CD backups periodically, right?)
~Idarubicin
You've just been ordered to migrate from sendmail to Exchange server.
That one works in either direction. I'd regard the nasty things like nitro myself. If it's working doooon't screw with it. Exchange and Sendmail? That's like trying to choose between a root canal and a rectal exam.
My old man's a VP, so I guess that makes him an exec.
He works 12 hours a day and takes monthly trips back & forth to China, busting his ass to get engineering projects done on time and under budget with less money while trying to protect people's jobs.
And guess what? Most of the engineers he employs are his friends. Do you think it's fun for him when the president tells him to lay off 5-10% of his workforce every year following the Jack Welsh (of GE fame) churn & burn strategy?
In short: try being an exec before slamming them. Some of them do far more work in one day than you may ever do in a week.
Not that the "Fortune 50 IT Exec" is all roses either. Realize that a lot of sysadmins work in a thankless job where they have to explain the same concepts over and over to the users they are supporting just because the end user is too lazy to read a book or to understand. Convince your "Fortune 50 HR Exec" to hire smarter/more willing to learn people.
For me, the worst, most frustrating part is having to wear too many hats.
I find it really difficult to simultaneously do development and administration work.
For me, development work requires focus. I don't think I am too whacky there.
As an administrator, working on a collection of networks that have evolved over quite some time since well before I started working here, I have to be constantly vigilant and constantly available to deal with issues as they arise. I like to be proactive, finding and fixing things before they become an issue.
These (development and administration) are, I feel, incompatible.
If I am to do good development work, I need a clear head and focus; I can't keep being interrupted to deal with disasters ('Help! I deleted a critical database file! You have to restore it *RIGHT*NOW*!!!!!').
Doing proactive maintenance work takes time; if I am busy doing development work, I don't have time to do enough proactive maintenance.
And believe me, we *need* proactive disaster avoidance work.
I think that more division of labor is required; I mean for heavens sake, its one of the first principles that programmers learn!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Any org that doesn't trust their programmer (good or bad) to write to their own workstation's disk...well...
I gotta wonder...which came first, the bad programmers or the bad policy?
Blar.
One of my own favorite sysadmin stories comes from when I was doing support in a General's staff office. The user had been having problems with her computer so I had the computer unplugged while I had it opened and was replacing the modem.
In the middle of the procedure, a device on the desk next to us starting this warbling noise-- user jumps a little bit and says "What does that mean?".
"Well, seeing as that device is your phone, I think it means that someone is calling you."
I'm a software engineer for a huge ass company and when I noticed that one of our main corporate sites was down (I needed to retrieve a package from it), I thought I'd call our IT/IS department and let them know about it.
"What is your operating system?"
"Uh... linux. Debian, actually."
"Sorry, we don't support that. Click."
Of course, I wasn't calling in about anything to do with linux, my computer or anything else. I just wanted to let them know that blahblahblah.blah.com was down and hadn't been responding. What idiots!
I know we shouldn't make fun of the users, but everyone should watch Saturday Night Live - Nick Burns - Your Company's Computer guy. Funny stuff.
My bro's get a kick out of it, when I say that while helping them with their computer probs.
Are there only 5 skits? I've seen
- Billy Bob Thornton (the best one)
- Jamie Fox (very funny)
- Callista Flockhart
- Jackie Chan
- Jennifer Aniston
--
"Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary."
- Wrongly credited to St. Francis of Assisi
http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger
I think I misread the boss as being the male and the employee being female. Oh man, glad this is slashdot because I would catch a lot of hell for that kind of mistake in a less-all-male arena.
SysAdmins that are non technical, or are lying cheeting bastards like FOX INTERNET (www.foxinternet.net) talking to a technical person, treating the technical person like they are not a technical person... Really boils my blood..
...
.. eventually
===Story:===
---background/ attempted solution---
nowadays some idiots put up spam blockers that block mail from peoples own web servers... so we can't run our own mail servers without having problems galore...
Well, enter my mom, who was suckered into prepaying for 3 years dial up internet, and my dad who believes that one should pay for their email accounts to ensure operability... and her email costs $$/hour after the initial time is used up!
My dad has multiple, full time ISP accounts. So I set up a computer to do internet connection sharing with those, and dial out whenever it's needed. Saves mom having to dial out on her laptop.. right???
WRONG!!
Fox Internet (foxinternet.net) didn't let her send mail from her account while dialed up to a different ISP... With the encrypted login! no less!
So I call tech support, They say it can't be done, that we MUST send email from their dial up connection..
Call marketing: yeah, that should be possible,
Call tech support, so, we need to send email...
It can't be done
escallation
hi, can you hook us up with some form of authentication so that my mom can send email from her computer wherever?
It can't be done..
I have a howto right in front of me.
please enable it
that would be opening our networks to attack
ARRGGGE@!!! Set up some sort of SSH thingie! my mom has Outlook Express, and I'm not switching her to your web mail, because it's not IMAP and so she won't be able to reply to emails that she has already recieved and downloaded...
it can't be done
we arn't going to do it, it's against our policy
is your policy to screw your customer?
no, we can't have spam stuff
lets arrange for a refund
Broohahahahaha
So you want people to go arround singing "Fox Internet Sux Fox INternet SUX"
that's being childish
you not providing the service promised to your customers is childish, I'm being musical, and talking directly to you rather than telling the world the " Fox Internet Sux... Fox Internet SUUUuuxx"
click.
Call tech support
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Read the ____ error message -- what a concept!
I was adminning a lab full of Suns, and one guy emailed me and said that he got a "filesystem full" message, but he didn't have a key to the room with the file server so he couldn't reboot it!
"Why on earth would you reboot a machine for a 'filesystem full' error?"
"Because you always reboot machines to fix problems!"
Now it wasn't like it was /tmp that was full, in
which case a reboot would at least fix
the problem, if sloppily.
Turns out he was raised on Windows, so in his
thinking, System Problem -> Reboot, automatically.
(We saved him in time, and got him into Linux,
Solaris and FreeBSD, so he turned out all right.
He may even be reading this now.)
Move immediately to the middle east. you'll fit right in
it used to be called Sysop
"Where I work we assume the clients can be comprmised at any time and we protect the servers. We also have ways of reinstalling the clients at a moments notice in a very reproducable way. Its surprisingly easy and much more secure than locking down the clients and trusting them. It also doesnt hinder the users. "
It's suprisingly easy when the clients are smart terminals, and the work is at the server. History repeats itself. Users have had their chance to prove themselves with smart clients (3 decades). This trend has proven that they have failed. To amend: "Use it, right or lose it."
Read Donald A. Norman's book "The design of everyday things." You'll find that the fault lies with the designer of the door.
I'm confused about how to use the menu on their website. Sysadmin plz contact me. :D
I think we get the picture already. Users are easy to hate.
However, witnessing firsthand the smug, whiney, holier-than-thou attitudes of such a large proportion of the admin crowd, apparently they're easy to hate as well.
step 1) put a typo in clients.conf so radius dies altogether
step 2) fix the typo, but leave the IP mangled so your NAS doesn't work
step 3) fix ONE of the typos, leaving the other for good luck
step 4) ???
step 5) profit!
These guys are great... and they're in eastern Washington, too!
In one past life of mine I worked for a scientist of international fame in the area of seismology (he helped to design a system to give advanced warning of earthquakes in a geographical zone where this can actually be achieved).
:-)
Anyway, he was jealous of his colleagues all whom have been connected to the internal network (all of them had Sun 3 workstations or Macs, all of them easily networkable) and demanded to be connected as well.
The probleem was that his pee cee did not have a network card. I dutifully proceeded to enable PPP through his serial port to allow email and a half decent acces to UNIX terminal.
He complained bitterly about the speed, and in spite of my explanations this figure of international name could not understand why a cable should be slower than the other
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It must be some one from Microsoft.
Remember the browser wars (and lawsuits)? Microsoft and Bill Gates claimed they didn't know what a browser is.
Who will guard the guards?
When I started my new job at the local council I enjoyed a leisurely starting period. Whilst browsing the intranet I noticed a number of PDFs. Unfortunately I didn't have Acrobat Reader installed. I searched the intranet and there was a link to a download of Acrobat Reader. Very hepful I thought. I downloaded the executable and ran it. As it tried to write to C:\Windows, up came an error and it wouldn't install. 'Rightly so' I thought to myself. I emailed tech support (the next room along) with a brief description of the problem and (mistakenly I now believe) my diagnosis; I can't insall Acrobat Reader as I don't have administrator rights. I got a reply with a link to the Acrobat Reader executable on the intranet and advice to just "click and install". Two weeks later I saw a guy come in from outside our buiding to do some work on a machine. I didn't know what his title was but he seemed to be fairly high up, so I thought I'd try my luck. I asked if he was free for a moment, and sure enough he came over. I explained the problem I had and told him (again misguidedly I believe) my diagnosis. A blank look. "I think if you log in under your admin account and I show you which icon to click on it should work." I smiled encouragingly. He seemed much happier with this and we managed to resolve the issue.
Fortunatey for me about a month after this incident we got a tech support guy who doesn't smoke crack.
I think it is time to outsource the Bullshitters. The CEOs, CFOs, VPs, and other non-essential non-producing assholes.
Some one in India can sit at a desk and play solitaire just as well all day too for a lot less cost.
Who will guard the guards?
Notes that people may take are useless (for them). I use screen shots. You know the old a picture is worth a thousand words. Anyone competent can then follow instructions. The people who can't .... well.
Who will guard the guards?
I became a SA because it is easy for me (many things are). I like challenges and I don't even look at it like work. I probably spend more time bullshitting with users than I do actually working which makes it more enjoyable.
I also try to explain issues to people in terms they can understand (like IP address like a phone number, port number like a phone extention, etc). But the true id10Ts are easy to spot and I don't bother with them. I've seen somewhere that 10% of users consume 50% of support time. I'd say it's true, but it all pays the same.
Who will guard the guards?
Maybe I'm just an SA Nazi.
In my opinion, in most shops (not all) sound and speakers have no business purpose. I only allow them to be deployed if a true reason exsists (or the big bosses ask for them). For the most part, it would just encourage users to waste company resources (bandwidth, storage, etc) downloading and listening to musak.
Who will guard the guards?
I remember meeting some asshat many years ago who had a PhD and a JD.
Turns out he basically got it off the back of a match book cover. start to completion for both was like 18 months. He didn't know basic stuff that I did (I have a BS).
Bottom line: There are stupid people everywhere, some with acronyms at the end of their names and it is not just limited to MCSE, CCNA.
The key is to be able to recognize these people for what they are in 5 minutes or less.
Who will guard the guards?
So could the system admins here please realize that us users just want to do our work, with as little hassle as possible? Try to make that possible, hard as it sometimes is. And remember, while you are important to the company, so are your colleagues. Yes, even that cute secretary who opens every single attachment and whose best two attributes are sticking forwards (you could think of here as the "morale officer").
And could the users, in return, perhaps treat their sys admins as real people? Because, you know, they are. Next time you have a computer problem, call your system guy over, _honestly_ tell him what happened ("I opened the attachment"), and then offer to get him some coffee while you are waiting for him to fix your machine. A bit of appreciation goes a long way to establishing a good working relationship, and it will guarantee you get a top response time in future problems.
I worked lapdance (laptop) tech support for a major PC maker back in '97. There was a specific product that every time (99%) a call came in it was because the hard drive had failed (OS not found).
Well, virtually the only call I ever got for that product model that wasn't a failed hard drive was some guy working on his PhD thesis (I forget what his issue was). I solved his problem and was bullshitting with him when he mentioned that he had his thesis on the PC.
If I'd have to told him anything about this issue with this model (and some one heard it) I'd have been fired before I could hang up. So I told him, "You know sir, anything of significant importance should be periodically backed-up".
I hope he heeded that advise.
Who will guard the guards?
I'm sick of sys admin "humour". They aren't the only people who have to deal with a clueless "general public" everyday. Nor or they the only people held to tight deadlines etc.
It appears they are the only people who complain of the above problems who actually have time to write endless tracts on the subject however.
I know, this may come as a surprise to many sysadmins, but you are in the customer service business. Your function in life is to make sure that people can get their work done as efficiently as possible. You may regard marketing and sales as a menage of moronic monkeys, but they bring in the money--you don't. If they ask you for something, even if it sounds stupid to you at first sight, you have to listen patiently, be nice, and figure out the best way in which they can be helped. If their request doesn't make any technical sense to you or can't be implemented, explain to them in the nicest possible way why and try to come up with another solution in cooperation with them.
MS-DOS - far more evil than bash.
If it was bone cancer, I understand that is one of the more painful deaths possible. Sorry to hear that.
I guess the $100K basically boils down to what's a life worth? I'm thinking a little more than that.
As for the HMO and doctor lying and altering records, my experience is that is human nature.
I wish you & your uncle the best.
Who will guard the guards?
The amusement from sysadmin/techsupport vs luser websites is usually derived from the consistent insanity of the guy requiring help, and the tolerant, patient way in which the sysadmin tries to deal with it. Unfortunately this site does a better job of highlighting how impatient, intolerant, and disdainful some sysadmins feel they have a right to be. The blurb uses the word "hilarious" twice. I'm not really sure why - I found it quite sad.
Although I must admit I haven't tried viewing it in lynx to see whether adding in some colour contrast makes the site navigable.
News flash: All jobs are frustrating. All jobs involving other people are at times irritating. A professional gets on with it and takes pride in rendering the best possible service. By contrast an oh-so-busy sysadmin appear to prefer writing scredes of text on the subject and posting to slashdot. Odd for people who are so desperately busy.
Given the attitudes displayed in this thread I will make one other comment.
Whenever I have been put through to a "contracted out" support service in India/Eastern Europe I have been treated with courtesy, consideration and efficiency. You may not wish to believe this, you might like to believe these people don't have the knowledge or the skill to fix problems, but it is true. On this showing the more IT services that are contracted out, the better it will be for the average "luser".
Next time there is a thread about "outsourcing" you might like to review this thread as a point of comparison.
A number of times clueless owners or CEO have totally ignored everything I've advised them on and bought shit which it is then my job to implement and support.
Example: replace a SQL based financial database with an Access Database for many times more than the cost to upgrade to the latest version of the SQL one. Not to mention waste several thousand dollars for tech support from the SQL provider to help the porting to access (which was by itself more then the upgrade cost).
I'm at a loss. Oh well, it all pays the same.
Who will guard the guards?
If you look at some of the posts above, the correct answer to fix a windows BSOD is to reboot (just joking).
Who will guard the guards?
Back in '97 when I was working phone support, a user call to say that they had just bought their new computer, initially configured it, backed it up (to floppies) but during the verify floppy number 157 (or something like that) had failed to read (bad disk).
I told him to only backup data (such as my documents, etc.)
Who will guard the guards?
It is probably outlook.pst but... depending on what version it originally had and then upgraded to, etc. I always do a search for *.pst myself (look at the file dates, etc). And don't forget archive.pst
Who will guard the guards?
Sorry, but what kind of idiot puts up a web page with such colors (dark green on black) and then complains about his customer and/or boss stupidity??? Your page is unreadable on my monitor.
I think the primary question is what is the stupidist thing anyone would ever try to do with this.
SAs (M$) should know outlook either stores in a *pst or the priv.edb
Believe it or not I have a group of attorney who use M$ Mail. I haven't even seen that since '96 (pre exchange).
You can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink. And you can lead a human to an idea, but you can't make hime (or her) think.
Who will guard the guards?
I'd guess the VPN (or there may even be a firewalling of the VPN) is not functioning properly as you wouldn't want to have NFS directly accessible on the Internet.
Just my 2 cents.
Who will guard the guards?
You can get the same useful info out of 2K & XP if you turn off the automagically reboot feature (my computer->properties->advanced->Startup and Recovery Settings->uncheck automatically restart. That'll show you the BSOD with the driver and system file diagnostic, ala NT BSOD.
My Dell that I'm running Redhat 9 on cannot boot from any HD but the primary master. I expect better from Dell (everyone else can do it) too, but what can you do? I don't need windows XP (even though I have a license for it anyway)
If I'd sold this machine to an End User (EU) I'd just say, "fucking Dell". But I say that anyways.
Who will guard the guards?
One memorable incident was when one staff member sent another woman (who was theoretically at a position of the same level, but was younger) with a broken leg in a cast down the stairs to repeat the demand for a longer phone cord at a time when I and several others were furiously trying to get ALL the companies comms servers going again so customers could connect (which is something every employee in the building knew - and most could visualise a meter showing lost $ ticking over fast). In that situation a very nasty woman was proving her place in the pecking order by making unreasonable urgent demands on two people over a trivial issue. Various unprofessional threats were made to my chest hair (I'm serious folks) by several middle aged women that I had never met before and a nasty little guy who had the attitude that the whole world hated him because he was gay - so he has the right to take it out on anyone.
My contract was terminated after I took an unused printer away from the proximity of the nasty guy - he said it was "HIS", and couldn't understand that it belonged to the company, was paid for out of an IT budget, and that the boss of the person that had been using the printer previously would have a say but not him. The correct way to do things would have been to stroke his feelings, make him feel like the big alpha male he saw himself as in that corner of the office, talk to him in person and possibly swap the unused printer gathering dust with a bigger, more impressive one that was not as functional. The brief, polite but firm email to him on a busy day led to him yelling complaints at the top level of management - probably about attitude.
Putting pizza coupons in letterboxes for a few weeks after that was great fun in comparison, and got me out in the sunshine. Spam, but only on paper.
Currently the only social problems I have are guys bringing in their childrens computers for me to fix, but letting me think that they belong to the company. I probably would have done it anyway, but it really looks bad after you've postponed important work to try to recover a school assignment from a dead hard drive, and you really should be getting back to another site - the time for that is after hours for bonus karma, and working around my own schedule.
I did get "are we there yet" every few minutes on Friday, but it was a workstation used for transferring pay into bank accounts, so the user would get the same from others if I didn't fix it quickly. Working with people that have actually been to a university or have worked outside an office environment make being a sysadmin a lot easier. A guy who drives a truck knows that a computer is not a typewriter, that all kinds of things can go wrong, some can be fixed in seconds and others take serious time.
They have other things to think about, as you intimate in the first line. Computer stuff is trivia and generally someone else can deal with it (this is how 99.999% of the world view it anyway). Is this right or wrong? Who knows, but thats the reality chum.
I look after a Telephone ACD and a few months ago it stopped working.
Us to Boss: Yes it looks like someone reconfigured all the trunks coming in to our cards
Boss: What do you mean ? We can't afford these kind of outages, this is a disaster
Us to Boss: Well we didn't reconfigure anything, have you any idea who else might want to have done this ?
Boss: No, Oh hang on this isn't connected to the work I gave My Deputy to do yesterday would it ?
Us: What work ?
Boss: Well I needed to reverse the direction on all the circuits
Us: Yes, that might explain things. Why didn't you ask us to reverse the direction on our cards as well ?
Boss: I just thought it would work anyway
Us: No, it doesn't
Boss: Oh
Us: So do you know what direction everything is going now ?
Boss: No, I did write it down but I think some it was the opposite of what I wrote anyway
Us: So you have no idea what's doing what now ?
Boss: No.
The company should put them through a BASIC familiarity course when they're first hired.
...and so forth.
This is a phone. Dial "9" and the number to get out. To call someone else in the company, just dial the last 4 digits of their number. We call that their "extension". People can call you on the 1-800-xxx-xxxx number and then type in your "extension" to call you "toll free". But we monitor the bills for the 1-800 number so only use it for work calls.
This is a computer. There is an "on switch" for the "monitor" and the "computer". They are here and here. There is also an on switch for the power strip. It is here. Don't plug anything else into the power strip, ever. This one is only for the computer. The computer will only be usable if all of those are turned on and plugged in. If the computer doesn't turn on and you've checked that it is plugged in and all three pieces are turned on the use the "phone" to call the help desk's "extension". We'll send someone over to fix it.
This is your login screen. This is your username. You will have to change your password every 60 days. Your username goes in this space. Your password goes in this space. Sometimes the machine says you've typed in the wrong name or password. If that happens, check your caps lock key. To the machine, capital letters are different than lower case letters. Machines are like that. If it still has a problem, you might have let your password expire or you've tried too many times to get in with the wrong password. Use the "phone" to call the help desk's "extension" and we'll fix it.
This is a browser. We have it set to "open" our "Intranet page" automatically.
Just a day working with their new boss or some other mentor to teach them the basics of using the tools we provide. It prevents so many problems and mis-understandings.
If you want good tales of sysadmins, The Register's BOFH is substantial.
This site has no content to speak of. You can finish reading all that is worthy - and all that is not worthy - in an hour before you go home.
Once again, Slashdot fail. They favor their friends to post new threads on topics and with sites that just do not deserve anyone's attention.
Several people in here have accused Malda of taking bribes. I personally thought this was ridiculous.
Now I am not so sure. This thread stinks to high heaven.
You, sir, are part of the ignorant culture if you can't understand how sysadmins feel unappreciated and misunderstood because they cannot communicate with users or supervisors who do not understand the nature of a complex system. More proof that Sysadmins need to upgrade their communications skills and to mix with people outside their little subculture.
I'm pretty sure you are misunderstanding what he meant by "produce nothing valuable". This is extremely different from "is not valuable to the company"; "produce nothing valuable" means "creates nothing that can be sold to the customer for profit". The point being that an IT department's sole purpose is to make life run more smoothly for everyone else. Having a stable network servers no purpose by itself; no company's buisiness plan is "We'll set up a company that has a really good IT department, and hope that we magically make money" (excluding, of course, IT consulting companies).
So the point is, being a BOFH means you are doing the opposite of your job; making life harder for the revenue-generating people. The BOFH mindset is "I, and my network, are the most important thing". The good IT mindset is "Making sure that I, and the network, make the things that create profit easier is the most important thing". Sometimes it may look like an IT department is being a pain in the ass; if it's for a greater overall good, then great, but if it's only for the IT department's good, then the IT department is failing.
That doesn't mean that the IT guys should be treated like crap, or given no power/respect; as you say, they often serve a vital role in the company. But unless they are fulfilling that role, they are 100% dead weight, or worse.
i don't get it open relay mail servers are the bain of my existence. almost all the spam i recieve is from them. just set your moms mail account to use whatever isp's she's dialing into's smtp server.
Sysadmins find users thick? Bosses are slow on the uptake? Who would have thought? How long has this been going on??
Welcome to 1985, guys.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Computer geeks are easy to understand if you take the time to think about it.
Geekdom and nerdyness are social phenomenons. A geek compensates for his low self esteem by gathering a lot of knowledge about a very specialized subject. They he confuses his technical superiority with overall superiority. For a geek talking isn't about social contact, it's a way of demonstrating his superior knowledge. This way he fools himself into thinking he is better than all others while in reality he is just wasting his life.
Just look at yourself 10 years later. Spending 4 hours a day posting everywhere about bill gates, evil empires, the power of open source (which means any bug or question isn't answered properly, but with a "maybe you should go back to windows if you're too stupid to learn" or "you have the source, go figure it out yourself, and stop wasting my time") gets you nothing in the end.
Problems arise when those people get jobs as system administrators. In a proper office environment, people help out eachother. Except the BOFH who slams down the phone as soon as you misspel SMTP or makes you go down on your knees to get him to do something simple. He gets paid to work yet he acts like doing any work is a big favor.
These losers don't understand that any system is a black box. Once it works, you don't need to know the details. A project manager doesn't need to understand how IP filtering works in detail when he tells you to set it up in 2 weeks. The sysadmin doesn't understand project management and finances either, but the manager doesn't humiliate him publicly for this.
Contact outside of this narrow vision always leads to frustration and irritation. This can be clearly read in all those reactions. The source is always the unability to show any consideration for others, to place himself as #1 and see all other people as insects that need to be squashed because they prevent him from indulging into his fantasy world. For outsiders, they simply don't care when someone proudly claims running linux on an alpha because he doesn't want intel inside. For outsiders mentioning that in the weekend you spend your time patching the kernel to the latest 2.6 release and need a day off to upgrade libc at home isn't positive, it's negative.
But it's also nothing new. Before computers young kids shielded themselves off from society by becoming electronics or car/motorcycle experts. When other kids socialized, they would work alone on a homebuilt radio or repairing a car. In the 18th/19th century it was literature, poetry, maths. Most poets/mathematicians from that era were really intolerable, especially if they worked at a university. Even today BOFH-like behaviour against students is accepted, even though for example not excelling at linear algebra is not a reason to consider people as subhumans.
Who was that mathematician that claimed that people who didn't understand math were not people but animals ?
Everyone has something to learn. I try not to assume that someone is dumb just because they don't know something I think they should.
What I can't stand are people who refuse to listen. Or assume they know more simply because they are higher on the beuracracy pyramid.
http://www.techtales.com/
the other part is true too...Exchange does come from Microsoft which is... :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
The design, yes it's geeky, but would've been better if they implemented a java command line (or just a simple text box) to change pages. Now the color.. they obviously don't look at the page, such a dark green with a skinny font on black? What were they thinking? Horrible...
If you deal with C:\ drives you're not a sysadmin, you're just a windows weenie. deal with it, weenie boy.
They picked a University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) resnet IP address for their site. What the hell?
This is pretty standard. You should probably steer clear of any ISP hosting an open relay, being as you'll probably find it gets blacklisted before long. Why can't you use the SMTP server of whoever you're connected with at the time?
As a fairly knowledgeable user (ok, I'm a computer programmer), I've had a lot of frustrations with dumbass Sysadmins. They always sit up on their high horse and bitch about stupid users but it definetly works both ways. I guess it's such a shitty job that it often falls to the incompetent to do it.
So, basically, SOD OFF!
ok, i used to work at MS in VC++ support many moons ago. You'd think the customers would at least have some clue, or the ability to work the documentation search engine. My shortest call was:
Visual C++ support, X speaking, how can I help?
Err, yes, is there an API to get the current directory?
Yes sir, it's called GetCurrentDirectory
Oh thanks, bye
or the person who was so dumb that even after looking at samples, then us modifying the samples twice to make it more like they needed - still couldn't get it. We got so fed up with her calls and total lack of knowledge I told her to bring the PC in and I wrote the damn code for her (elapsed time: 20 mins).
Or the people who could phone up 80 times in 30 days (basically we wrote their whole project)
or the programmer who asked 'whats a swap file'.
Or the *professor* who swore blind there was a bug in the C++ compiler, as his overriden function in a derived class was not being called. Only for him to fax in his code and we immediately spotted that he had a spelling mistake in the function name.
Or the woman who whilst we were trying to get her to fix her problem by changing system settings was sighing a lot then said 'i dont know why I am doing this when are you coming out to fix it'.
Or the multi million pound project that was being developed on NT to be deployed on Win32s (a kind of crippled 32 bit mode you could run on Windows 3.1), only for them *not to test it on the target platform until a week before release*. (after much moaning on their part turned out to be bug in their code hitting a limit on win32s)
Or possibly worst of all, continually recieving stupid calls, only to find out that the caller was sat not 20 feet away from us, working on business apps as a developer for the local IT group
There's no point flaming me about any quality of support you've got from MS over the years, I was saying the same stuff from inside and believe me it irked me as much as you.
I've found that giving a fairly simple explanation to the user why they can't have product on their computer usually solves a lot of the user vs. admin problems. We get on well with most of our users, and they respect the policies that we have made, not that they are draconian by any means. This I would attribute to the level of comunication, which comunication is 2 way. When people ask for certain items on their computers we dont just say 'no, bugger off' but we give them a valid reason, as to why, and in most cases also give them a suggested alternative as well. Now you notice I said most of our users, of course you get the ones that just keep bitchin and moaning, but they just get blacklisted, so to speak, and just about any request they make is rejected :)
I know it seems like it's not worth the effort sometimes when they just can't get the point, but overall the more we educate our users the less time we have to spend responding to silly requests.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
This week's bitch and whine thread.
She doesn't have a mail account on the ISP that we dial into... My dad does... but we don't want my mom's email mixed in with my dads.
I was asking for it to be done with encrypted authentication, or a VPN...
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I agree that we need to steer clear of open relays...
;O
but that is what encryption and authentication is for!
She can't use my dad's email account over dial-up for multiple reasons:
We don't know my dad's password.
Also, the stupid folks at FOX INTERNET must be running an open relay of sorts if their only method of keeping a spammer from relaying email is to only accept connections from their dial up server...
That is just about as insecure!
Dial up passwords should not be the same as the mail server passwords!
and thier customers probably get hacked plenty easily and start sending email.
Why not SMTP server of who I'm connected with?
I don't have the password!
and it's my dad's account!
Actually.. I haven't tried it yet... hehe.. but that would be an open relay because untrusted people can send mail over it
note: we have one computer connect to the net automatically... for multiple accounts and users... these users should not be trusted by the currently connected ISP.. unless a password is supplied.
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1) Buy cheap stick of SDRAM from somewhere
2) Install in your machine. Tell no one.
3) Expense it as something like "Computer consumables"
4) Profit!
+++ATH0
"Who has to rebuild it if you fuck it up? Who has to troubleshoot it when your shit stops working on you and you call for support? Who gets blamed for you not being able to meet your deadline because your computer mysteriously crashed? Me. The sysadmin. I do."
Uh. What if you *don't*? What if I fuck it up and you never hear about it until after *I've already fixed it*?
"Dave, dude, I'm such a dumbass. I loaded $DRIVER for my PDA and thought it'd be fine, but it turns out those WHQL certs are there for a reason. Totally hosed my system. No worries though, I reghosted it in an hour this afternoon. Ain't that a PITA, though?"
Usually the real geek users are more than smart enough (and more than willing) to support themselves with just a little bit of info from IT to help (what's the feed for ghostwalk, what's my BIOS password so I can boot from CD, etc.).
+++ATH0
So your mom is incapable of cutting and pasting?
Stopping IPs not on your subnet from sneding mail is standard practise - it may reflect laziness, or it may just be that the extra admin time involved in providing secure authentication just isn't seen as worthwhile, especially if a web mail service is offered.
You sound like a pissed off teenager who has read a couple of howtos and considers himself an expert - in the real world, operational considerations sometimes overtake technical ones.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
This quote was acually sent to me after I sent a manager a quote for some new software:
"Is the annual maintenance cost something we will need tp pay every year?"
I love that. It reminded me of Mad Magazineand "Stupid Answers to Stupid Questions"
We had fun time trying to come up with really nice answers to that question......
"Why not SMTP server of who I'm connected with?
I don't have the password!
and it's my dad's account!"
"Actually.. I haven't tried it yet... hehe.. but that would be an open relay because untrusted people can send mail over it"
You don't need a password and it's not (necessarily) an open relay. Generally if you're logged in on one of their IPs you're automatically verified for SMTP unless they're forcing POP before SMTP. Your mom should be able to retrieve her mail while connected to any ISP but has to use the SMTP server of the ISP she's connected through. They don't (shouldn't) care what info you have in the To: and From: headers.
OTOH, while I'm almost sure you must have reasons, WTF is your mom doing with an IMAP account rather than POP? My mom can barely handle POP email. I shudder to think of trying to explain IMAP to her.
There are several ways to do what you want to do but you have to find someone at the respective ISP with a clue.
well, I did make a stink,
;)
I got very pissed off, to my discredit
1.
but NO, I cannot change my mom's email
2.
Yes, she could cut and paste, but she really doesn't want to do anything differently on her computer, and SHE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO
2.5 ALSO, she keeps a record of all the email that she sends.. this is REQUIRED, webmail doesn't do that for her
3.
The marketing people SAID that we could do this.
4. Web mail sucks
5. I definately acted like a teenager, but I had the restrictions of what I was allowed to do LIKE i was a teenager, and I was really pissed off.
I needed to do one thing, but all of the solutions were bared from me.
As it is, my mom switches the phone, disconnecting everyone from the net, which is way less than ideal.
6. My point still stands that SysAdmins that have charged for a service, should make it happen.. and not hide behind stupid excuses... maybe the software that would allow them to do what I needed was buggy... PUT IT ON A DIFFERENT MACHINE, AND USE SEPORATE PASSWORDS or whatnot...
7. security IS more important that features in most cases, except for when the feature is really really needed.
8. Why is this standard practice? I can log into my moms account and send email as her as it is! This is WRONG... (It might require a packet sniffer)
9. They should allow us to secure our network, they just passed the insecurity on to us!
My mom shouldn't have to trust me for her username and password, neither should my dad, That's why we use logins! (well actual reason is to keep our profiles seporate.. but when I run my teenage pr0n illustrated howto for setting up secure smtp.. I don't want my mom to be able to browse my home directory
10. I've met other sysadmins that DON'T WORK WITH THE CLIENT
I have a need, I say I want to do SOMETHING LIKE this, how do we do this..
AND THAT IS BEING PASSED OFF AS A "BAD QUESTION" ???
The sys admin should not be banging vis head against the desk because of the stupididy of vis clients, the sysadmin bangs vis head because of VIS OWN STUPIDITY...
EVEN WHEN IT's:
Gee, why did my coffee holder retract splling coffee all over my machine?
I can't say that I'd really blame the sys admin for that one...
UNLESS THE SYSADMIN DOESN'T KNOW WHO VE IS SERVING, AND TAYLORS VIS SERVICE FOR THOSE PEOPLE!
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In other words, the pit crew doesn't take the driver's car keys, but they don't hand him an air-driver and ratchet-wrench either.
If your users have their office software, etc etc and whatever else they need to do their job, there's no reason for them to have access to install the latest version of kazaa or whatever.
1. There is also the problem that lots of spam filters check the To: From: addresses of the email... and increase it's spam rating dramatically if they don't match.
2. Yes, she can recieve her POP3 email from anywhere... and that's part of the problem, it makes it LOOK like she should also be able to send.
2. I'm saying that they should require a password, because we leave our internet connection on, and have multiple people using that account... and We don't want to "bless" the email sent from our machines by sending them all through a legit email server... because we might have a few nuts use their accounts for stupid thingss...
3. We want to be able to change the ISP that we dial up to, while keeping my mom's email address... This is illogical to me, but my mom was told to believe that something she pays for is worth more than free services... even if they don't do what they want it to do!
4. IMAP... she is using pop3. I could set her up with IMAP.. If she were using IMAP then web mail would work better for her, because she would be able to access her account from multiple readers and have the messages there.
POP3 sucks when storing emails on the server.
5. I think I hit the "we don't have clueful people, or arn't willing to pass you along" ISP people.
6. I really was trying to be nice.. but after being shuffled arround on PBX and making repeated calls trying to get that cluefull person, and finally getting escalated to the "customer we don't want anymore" arse hole, THEN I started singing and doing juvenile things.
7. Now, KEEP EVERYONE AWAY FROM http://www.foxinternet.net
THEY HAVE BURNT US, THEY WILL BURN YOU TOO.
8. I believe in saying bad things about people who are actively harming the innocent with false advertising and other autracities (spelling yadayada I know)
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