IT BS thread

That's pretty sweet then, nice during the fiber outage you didn't get called in in the middle of the night to fix it. We in the same boat on our campus but various different old historic buildings have different levels of power of USPs depending how important the equipment is.

People are always hesitate to change for departments with people who've been there for 20+ years, so our new upgrade across campuses should be pretty fun when the tickets/complaints starting rolling in....all to me.

 

It's a public school district, so I think I'm the only one who noticed. I started getting tons of text alerts at 3AM for every monitored thing I have dropping offline. The fiber is typically so reliable that I worried it was possibly something of mine that had a catastrophic failure, so I drove in figuring I could swap a switch or UPS or something if needed before anyone else got there. I get into my office, can ping the firewall and the core - everything internal is happy, just no internet connection.

I walk back to the ISP's switch and just as I'm getting to it, I see the LED under the fiber out to the road light back up. I should have just waited! The ISP let me know it was a pole a few miles away that took it out.

 

I spoke too soon about not having to go out then need to get a VPN to be able to ping those servers from home, check status of things.

I'm lucky as I'm the new guy in our department and probably be the last person who would be sent out when stuff is down.

 

Power can’t go out.

We’re on two separate transmission grids (building exists at the boundary between two generation/transmission/distribution networks), plus we have a pair of locomotive engines as backup generators and enough fuel to run those for 16 hours. That won’t be necessary because if there’s a critical outage we fail over to our backup site in Philly and business continues as usual.

Austin, Philly, and Chicago have to be nuked to be shut off.

 

Now that is living the dream, wish we had out here in the woods. Also now I wish we had some locomotive engines at my work, as I would refer to whoever's in charge of them as the conductor for now on.

 

We’re a data center - basically a government cloud service provider for critical systems (Veteran health, benefits, and payment systems). Our main server floor is about 8500 square feet, and secondary floor is 2000.

 

Oh, I have a VPN link but when there's no internet connection that doesn't help me. The possibilities were some sort of core switch or firewall failure, power outage plus generator failure, or ISP outage. My brain didn't instinctively go to the simplest cause for some reason, which was the last one.

 

Very true with that situation for the VPN..... feel like that is usually the case with diagnosing when something is down, expect the worst, hope for the best.

 

Well that’s a shocker, rebooting my computer didn’t help me login to a web portal. Thanks IT!

This back to the office thing is going to be the end of me.

 

I have a desktop admin fixing my workstation right as I type this because Acrobat Pro and Adobe Reader had a disagreement and as a result neither will open PDFs.

Sorry Acrobat - you’re gone. I don’t use you and you’re a PITA.

 

And a continual security problem.

 

We use foxit. It’s okay I guess.

I’m getttng old and grumpy enough now to pine for the good old days of 20 years ago before the cloud and having an account for everything was so popular.

 

Jesus. Can’t reinstall Reader because it thinks it’s already installed. Teaching the desktop guy how to search regedit and kill it.

I better back this thing up again - I smell a reimage coming.

 

Just tried logging into a corporate resource provided by an outside company. Tells me I'm not registered. Try to register and it says I already have an account.

Yay.

 

Have you tried rebooting?

 

Have you tried obscene language and threats of violence? I believe it’s Day 1 training in sysad school.

 

I would but I'm in my office and really don't want to meet with security today. I'm afraid I've forgotten that Day 1 training some time ago - along with a lot of other things I should probably know. Thank gawd for Google and Duckduckgo. But screw Bing.

 

I use Foxit Enterprise here - if nothing else, it's less annoying than Adobe Reader.

 

We use pdf xchange from tracker, I have no complaints.

 

Also hi I didn't realize this thread existed, I guess I haven't spent too much time in Off-topic.