Have you tried turning it off and on again?

[rhowaldt]

ah thanks bones, i now realise you already said it was not connected to the network. should've read better :)

[bones]

Holy fucking shit! Sooo, I boot BBQ Service on this thrice-damned WinXP box, just to find out what the ethernet card is. Open up ceni, bam, there it is right there, a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5751. Connect easy as pie with Linux, of course, surfing around with elinks from liveCD.

"No problem," I says to myself, "I'll just download the Windows driver, install it, reboot (seriously?), and we'll be good to go!"

NOPE. NUH UH. ZIP. ZILCH. NADA. Goddamn you, Bill Gates, take your fucking toy OS and shove it up your ass! *bangs head against desk*

[bones]

Resolution: Got my buddy that works here (as a pressman) to come in and check it out. He's a very savvy Windows guy, he got it all sorted out and set up. Done deal.

[wuxmedia]

Nice. that's dealt with!

very simple day at the helpdesk. Had a few things, couple of password changes, had a funny one -
"help! getting email crashes my computer, not just my computer, couple other peoples too -please investigate.."

so... being as we sent them the email to their computers, I guess it was our fault 8}
happily I left work as that one came up.

[wuxmedia]

email + outlook = BAD

Sadly the title of this topic is the best fix!

[wuxmedia]

Me again.
Had fun today, a customer had decided that his machines had been compromised, so I was assigned to reinstall the centos on them.
They had CentOs 6.4 installed, so I thought they should have that again... however...
Centos 6.4 is a cunt to install using USB, after d/ling it from japan, because the official mirrors didn't carry it, hmm.
Turns out the fix (workaround) was a bit too much for me, one had to partition the usb and - I couldn't be doing with that.
So I moaned at the network manager, he said "just install 6.5 if it's easier", Nice - I like him... So I d/l 6.4, dd to a usb and do the installs. No probs, I have to reap the old IPs, to reuse them, make sure ssh is up and running assign passwords and edit the /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/if-something-eth0 to be as they were before (camera phones are a godsend here)
No nano, so have to use vim... cool, can deal with that...
Get all 4 up and running, remote tested the new long passwords.
done.

Network manager turns to me after all this and says, "you're gonna hate me, but I'm pretty sure those drives were RAID'ed...did you Raid them?"


ARRRGH, reinstall monday then... 8(

[GekkoP]

Just happened. Still laughing.

customer: "I bought an e-book reader, but the e-book has DRM and I need a plugin for blablablablablablah"
me : "have you tried a bit of google?"
customer: "oh yes, I already have the plugin."
me: "ok, I don't understand the issue, then, sorry."
customer: "instructions say to unzip the file. What's this unzip thing? I'm no good with computers like you. Don't tell me I need a Kindle for this." (coming from a guy who already has chromebook, iphone and ipad...)
me: "No worries. 'unzip' means it is a compressed file. Just download the proper application for your OS to decompress it and you're good to go."
customer: "what do you use for these files?"
me: "well, I just write 'unzip' on the command line, but I also got this sort of wrapper that calls the right function to decompress the file based upon its type."
customer: "..."
me: "..."

[wuxmedia]

^ ...It means, "go and buy a kindle"
.zip is like, the oldest form of archive compression... did his eyes glaze over, or was he just in awe of you? Probably both. 8)

Hmph still need to reinstall those CentOs boxen.

[rhowaldt]

@gekko: i must say, it is a tiny bit evil of you to throw out that commandline reference to an unwitting noob. you must have chuckled a bit inside, no? ;)

[GekkoP]

^ oh yes, but of course then I asked him which OS he mainly uses and pointed him to the right tool ;)

[rhowaldt]

^ you are, after all, paid to help people (but nobody said you couldnt have a bit of good clean fun in the process ;)

[GekkoP]

^ speaking of help, just finished with a customer.

Customer: "I want Arch Linux, I hate Windows 8. But let me tell you this: I've been a MacBook user for a while and I plan to go back to it sooner or later."
Me: "Ok, so what do we do? We install Arch Linux or not?" [in my kindest tone, of course]
Customer: "Arch! I want it, I tried installing it following the wiki, but failed."
Me: "Let's do it."

[later]
Me: "We're done. Now you have to pick a DE or a WM."
C: "I want GNOME."
Me: "Sure."

[later]
C: "Ok, I don't like it."
Me: "Me neither, but that's what you told me to install." [always smiling]
C: "What if I want to go with i3? I read your blog and I want to try this tiling thing."
Me: "Sure."

[later]
C: "Ok, it's all black, there's nothing!"
Me: "Of course, this is how i3 looks like now. You need to properly configure it. I'll show you my config file just so you can see what I did."
C: "Oh dear, what does ALL THAT mean now?"
Me: "No worries, man pages and ArchWiki are always there for you."
C: "Oh, ok. Can I call you if I got any problem?"
Me: "Yes, but you chose Arch Linux. So you will often hear me say 'check the wiki'." [kindly and smiling]
C: "You're right. See ya."

See? I can be gentle and helpful. :)

[ivanovnegro]

^ Nice. Let's see what happens next. :)

[wuxmedia]

That's actually interesting, the guy will either sink or swim...and you helped him find his feet etc, thats worthy of praise, if he slips back2mac, then you can tease him 8)

Multiple techsupport LOLs today, more Outlook problems, thankfully as I left.

We have a useful page - http://spymyip.com when we ask customers for their IP, guy replied with the entire bottom half of that page not at all including his IP :)

I toyed with making a topical excuse generator, inspired by the BOFH.
exemplified here: http://www.strauss.za.com/sla/support.asp but pulling a real headline.
rather than the truth, which is - the servers have a hard time running all your sloppy code and all the cronjobs we run to fix them.
as well as defending it from the millions of skiddies attacking it for no reason.

[rhowaldt]

@gekko: well done :)
@wux: good luck :D

[wuxmedia]

windows 8.
Father in law bought himself a new laptop, with win8 on....
about a week ago he figured i'd be around over this weekend, he waited to turn it on until I was there.
major hassle to install. unless you happen to have a microsoft account, which he did not.
well, now he does - but it's useless, as he hates the idea of skydrive and all that guff, and he has a ton of emails he never uses.
but after battling it for a while we got it to recognise his normal account, and for an encore fixed his iPad email client to send as well as receive...

[GekkoP]

Me: "Yes, but you chose Arch Linux. So you will often hear me say 'check the wiki'." [kindly and smiling]
C: "You're right. See ya."

By the way, never heard of him again. Either he is doing fine with Arch and i3 or he just went back to Gnome.

[wuxmedia]

Email #32

Customer migrated from pop3 to IMAP, because multiple devices are dangerous with pop3.
two weeks later, i've logged into his mail, spent hours on the phone,
the first few replies my colleague was 'get a local tech guy to help you'
Later i was 'remove all your accts and start from the beginning.

He now got a local tech guy in - who deleted his accts and started from the beginning...

[wuxmedia]

WP migration:

customer did it all by hand FTP'ed the dir to our server, pulled the posts from the mysql with phpyadmin, very admirable.
I had to fix the SQL, because it didn't have the drop tables in to overwrite
I had to comment the supercache out because it was hardcoded to the wrong URL.
the other guys had to fix stuff, I ask is the site ready to go?
Site still has hardcoded link problems, onl linking to the dev site.

eh you seen this?
http://www.wikihow.com/Export-and-Impor ... press-Blog

Look at that, 3 steps, max of 20 in total....

[franksinistra]

ah networking in windows....
not going to mention some brand new laptops with uefi only bios (no legacy whatsoever), running windows on it is pretty much like running ubuntu. Damn it