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

So, a thread about stupid user passwords recently came up on a group that I frequent, and I thought I’d post this here.

We store customer information in MySQL, and have to keep a cleartext password for PPP CHAP authentication. A while back, I did some querying to see just how terrible our users’ passwords were.

Here were some of the more interesting/amusing results (remember, in SQL quotes surround literal strings and “%” is a wildcard):

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers: 32112

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password = “password”: 151

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password = username: 660

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password LIKE “123%”: 364

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password LIKE “%321″: 44

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password LIKE “qwerty%”: 8

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password LIKE “asdf%”: 11

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE password = “********”: 16

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM customers WHERE LENGTH(password) <= 4: 5151

…and I thought our users were doing surprisingly well — until I executed the last query.

Humor, Systems Admin headdesk, password

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

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

Dear user “jerryleecooper” at ZDnet’s talkback forums,

Enclosed is your invoice for replacement of one pair of soiled blue jeans. Please remit payment immediately upon receipt. Said soiling was caused due to excessive laughter in regards to your post titled “Why Linux will not displace Windows” at http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=43

I may also seek punitive damages caused by a thirty minute fit of laughter from your final remark:

“Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.”

Thank you for calling out a community of technical users on something which you have made apparent that you have absolutely no knowledge of.

Sincerely,

Me

(Why have I never seen this post until today? Freakin’ classic.)

Humor headdesk, linux, lusers