IT BS thread

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.

 

Fun times in IT today, doing a system upgrade and our vendor's "working" with us. First time we spent all the time getting all the VPNs, VMs setup but Avaya had just released a new version two days prior. Their engineer assumed the new version was compatible but after three hours of work and tinkering to get our VMs to take the file we learned it was not.

Take two is today and their new engineer is having issues with his microphone on our call........this meeting just started and we got another 4 hours!

 

I actually used Excel 4.0 on Monday

 

Getting a free home upgrade next month

 

Back when I was a hands on Sys Admin, I frequently used a phrase I learned while working in the Small Arms Repair shop at my Maintenance Battalion in the Army - "Get a bigger hammer. It if doesn't fit, force it. If it breaks, you needed to replace it anyway."

 

I had an exciting day on Wednesday this week at work.

I work for a large employer (50,000+ employees). I am in a specialized Major Incident Management group, where we handle very large scale issues that may impact an entire building, or a whole business division..... As with many people, the vast majority of our people have been working form home since early 2020, October 18th was the "Phase 1 Return to the Office" for certain business groups. So we have lots of people back in offices again, all around the country. Most have company laptops and connect to the company network via WiFi. So, all of a sudden, maybe 10 AM Central time on Wednesday, our Service Desk team started frantically chattering (in our shared Zoom chatroom) about receiving a shit ton of calls from users all over the country that they lost WiFi connectivity inside offices. This included our CEO and the executives in the st. Louis HQ building, so it got out full attention.

We started a Zoom call, got the Network support team on. After a short time, they found that in the Cisco ISE application, the entire database of all Wireless network devices for the entire company was empty. Thousands of devices... all gone. Poof! That's why every office building completely lost wireless connectivity (wired was not affected). So, while the Network team started the process of reloading from the latest backup, we got Cisco vendor tech support on the call. They ended up telling us that a bug in the version of ISE that we are running was just discovered last week, where if an admin goes into ISE, uses the filtering to select certain devices, and then perform any action on those selected devices, the bug causes ALL devices to be deleted. Not just those devices you had selected. Now if you just manually select a device - do NOT use the filtering, the bug does not trigger. They got the ISE device database restored in a couple hours, and Cisco is working on a new hotfix for this. That was a fun morning.....

 

The golf cart the IT people used at my school had this as a bumper sticker.

 

Went and took AWS cloud practitioner today, talk about a mile wide and an inch deep. I feel like a more accurate title would be AWS Sales Associate

 

We got rid of standalone printers over the past few years and just have a few big leased Konica MFPs in each building. Now that kids are back full time and remote learning is definitely not on the horizon teachers started buying their own printers and putting in tickets for us to connect them to the network. Nipped that in the bud real quick. Part of the reason we got rid of those was to minimize the support drain that printers are - bringing in a bunch of random consumer grade devices that also probably broadcast their own rogue SSIDs is even worse and that's not happening. Plus every kid has a device, and they were forced to teach with no paper for months while they were home or hybrid - how are they printing often enough where a classroom printer is a need?