Caffeinated-Geek.com

Received a complaint from a co-worker today – the long and short of it is his battery backup (UPS) wasn’t working properly. Upon suggesting that I try testing/replacing the batteries, I was told the batteries were new. I mentioned that since I was working on a customer-affecting issue, I’ll take a look shortly, and asked him to please email me with the battery date on the sticker affixed to the case of the UPS – and that will help determine our plan of action. His response was that “that’s not my job” and to “go look at it yourself”.

I figure he was just having a bad morning, but it brings up the topic of what you can do to help IT help you with your problems (also known as “how to NOT piss off IT”). Without getting into too many intricate details, my list is:

• Be patient. I realize your issue is important, but troubleshooting problems (be they yours or someone who is in queue ahead of you) takes time. Please don’t assume because something isn’t done immediately that you need to follow up by phone or in person – I work on tickets according to priority, then submission date. If you choose to call, you’re probably going to end up in voicemail and getting a call back when I’ve cleaned out my ticket queue. If you come to my desk, you’re likely going to end standing there waiting until I wrap up my current ticket or call.
• Set realistic priorities. At any point throughout the day, I probably have a minimum of 5 – 10 tickets open in my own queue, often many more; that means there’s only about a 1-in-10 chance that yours really is more important than everyone else’s. Continually marking your low-priority issues as an “emergency” will not get them fixed faster, but may get your true high-priority issue you open later pushed to the bottom of the queue.
• Don’t lie. If you changed something that may be related to your problem, man up. If you’re consistently going to let me waste my time troubleshooting instead of coming clean and providing me the whole story, then when the time comes that you have a real issue it’s going to take longer to get resolved since I’ll be spending my time looking to see what you screwed up but won’t admit to.
• Give details and note error messages. Provide usernames, email addresses, and callback numbers. It’s much faster for you to provide the information I need to troubleshoot than it is for me to go back and forth trying to squeeze information from you or wading through a metric ton of server logs. I’m not going to troubleshoot in the dark — if you send a ticket saying “email is down”, I’ll respond with an equally vague message saying “it’s working fine for me”. Doing this one step alone could mean the difference between having the problem persist for a few minutes or a few hours.
• Don’t argue, clarify. If you think I’m wrong about something, ask for clarification or explain that you thought it worked differently, but don’t simply start an argument. Not to be rude, but you called me for help and I’ve been dealing with issues like this for a long time. Almost every time someone wants to argue, it comes down to them not completely understanding the intricacies of protocols and services such as BGP, ATM, PPP, DNS, and SMTP. If you know I’m wrong, explain why and I’ll listen and admit it if so — and we can continue with getting your problem fixed. If you feel the need to have an argumentative conversation, please don’t waste my time – there are plenty of Internet forums out there for you to troll.
• Don’t play the blame game. Bickering about who is at fault for your document getting deleted, your workstation crashing, or your email bouncing is not going to resolve the issue. Technology breaks, mistakes happen, life goes on. Deal with SLA’s per your contract, but AFTER the service-affecting issue is resolved; don’t attack the person on the other end of the phone when it comes to settling the dispute.

Anything else I’m missing?

Complaints, Systems Admin headdesk, lusers

This, my friends, is why MySpace will be the cause of the technological collapse of the Internets.

Total page size (HTML and images): 9.18 megabytes

Mother of God.

All for glittery text, a crummy slideshow, three autostarting videos, pictures of Vin Diesel, and some other worthless drivel…

Complaints, Humor headdesk, myspace

Why do people completely filter ICMP echo?  I have no problem with folks re-prioritizing or rate-limiting it, but outright filtering a VERY useful diagnostic tool for network guys like myself is really annoying.

Anyway, if you do decide to filter ICMP echo packets, please be sure you don’t send an ICMP unreachable from the device that’s filtered:

kgasso@wibbly:~$ ping -c 1 66.131.100.81
PING 66.131.100.81 (66.131.100.81) 56(84) bytes of data.

From 66.131.100.81 icmp_seq=1 Packet filtered

--- 66.131.100.81 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 0 received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss, time 0ms

So, the host I pinged – to test reachability – sent me a response saying that I’m not allowed to do that, confirming what I wanted to know in the first place, that the host was reachable. Uh, yeah… You kinda blew your cover there, buddy.

On second thought, I like this strategy.  I’m going to start answering my doorbell by audibly saying “nobody’s home”.

Complaints, Network Admin, Security firewall

More and more, I find myself getting truly astonished at people trying to push their religious beliefs on everyone. The latest seems to be people pushing to get images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad removed from the English Wikipedia.

To those attempting to get these images removed: Pull your heads out, take a breath, and get a clue:

• It’s your choice to practice Islam. Therefore, it’s your choice of that religion that restricts your choices in regards to viewing images of the prophet Muhammad, not mine nor anyone else’s.
• Islam teaches its followers to accept the religious choices of others. I have a choice to NOT practice Islam, and a choice to look at pictures of Muhammad for historical purposes. I choose to do so. Please don’t attempt to restrict MY rights because of your religious convictions.
• The internet is not censored; you might not like what you see.  If this concerns you, then sign off and put your head into the sand or otherwise lock yourself into isolation.

So, I’m putting all religions on notice:  I respect your right to practice your religion of choice and your right to impose restrictions on yourself for religious purposes, but that does not give you a free pass to inhibit the rights of others.

End transmission.

Complaints censorship, headdesk, religion

Maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age, but I’m really getting tired of overblown Hollywood BS about computer, internet, and telecommunications technology.

It’s Friday night, the wife and I really have nothing planned, so we turn on the TV and watch a DVR’d episode of CSI: New York (“Down the Rabbit Hole”, aired October 24th, 2007). This episode happens to deal with a murder that’s related to Linden Research’s online virtual world Second Life. I know of Second Life, know a few people who hang out in it and make a little money through it, but I personally never really took any interest in it. TV shows are always going to tie in what they believe is “up and coming” right now – I’ve seen a fair amount of it that references sites similar to MySpace, YouTube, and Digg; I’ve also seen quite a bit of name dropping involving Fox and MySpace, since News Corp owns both. However, this CBS and Linden tie-in CSI:NY episode really takes the cake.

I found myself repeatedly yawning and about to doze off at the CSI:NY Second Life in-game cruft – and that’s after sucking down an entire caffeine-filled energy drink. I seriously am questioning if people actually found this entertaining.

Now, to mention the technical inaccuracies. I usually cut TV shows a little slack when it comes to tech issues. Sure, you tracked a cellphone call to an EXACT address in about 30 seconds via some blinking GUI interface without assistance from cellular network technicians, or you were able to match the DNA of an eyelash to the half-sister of your suspect through an elaborately flashy DNA sequence scanning computer, fine. A little glitz with some funky background music is okay; I don’t know everything there is to know about physical evidential forensics and I don’t expect everyone to have supreme knowledge about computers and telecom.

However, there’s a line that I have to draw. This was such a tech-heavy episode that I couldn’t help but to be a extremely critical:

• Finding a user’s exact location from an IP address (even for law enforcement) isn’t a 10 second job involving Google Earth. Doing it 3 times in an episode without so much as a call to a judge, legal process served on an ISP, or a threat of physical violence against some poor sysadmin is pushing it. Yet somehow, both law enforcement and regular users can not only snag another user’s IP (which is not revealed in-world), but almost instantaneously figure out exactly where they are physically.
• Using a monaural Bluetooth headset for audio but going all-out on the wireless numeric keypad to control your SL character seems a little silly. I think I’d prioritize stereo sound over being able to walk around while making my character… walk around.
• With a lab full of workstations, racks full of Apple Xserve’s (from the looks of it), and huge displays, you’d think that a firewall/packet filter would be part of the setup, but nope; one isn’t turned on until after the network is attacked in an online game. Once again, priorities.
• Claiming that a single user can jump between 802.11 wireless access points all over Manhattan from a single location is quite a stretch. I know some RF technicians (and likely some FCC enforcement folks) who would be VERY interested in talking with them.
• Even in NYC, cosplaying weirdos wouldn’t make it very far undetected. Especially when a APB/BOLO is issued for some freak with a bizarre clothing description, weird contact lenses, and spiky green hair.
• Thanks for trying to convince us that every grungy auto mechanic who doesn’t know much about computers can easily design and sell objects in Second Life, and be highly successful at it.
• Having a full-figured female escape through an average-sized laundry chute is beyond ludicrous.

I stick to my guns that the last one is technical; having two objects occupy the same space breaks the laws of physics.

In closing, I just found the whole show to be nothing more than a poor excuse for advertising Second Life. I generally like CSI:NY, but truly hope this isn’t a glimpse into the future of the show — or TV in general.

Complaints hollywood