Life of a Sysadmin 2008

System installation, or licenses for redistribution

Part of my job is to prep Windows laptops for coworkers; it is my goal to provide laptops fully setup, this means among other things, I need to have Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player installed when they recieve the machine. Unfortunately Adobe wishes to make that a little difficult.

The license for Adobe Reader however does not permit me as IT support for an employee to distribute Adobe Reader on a machine I am providing to the employee. Adobe would want me to simply point the employee at the download site for Adobe Reader.

For me to distribute these products, I am supposed to agree to a different license agreement, one intended for distribution. This likely isn't a problem for most as most IT employees, as most never actually read license agreements. My company however has a clear policy that employees are not allowed to agree to contracts without the approval of the lawyers.

Considering that Adobe is interested in having Adobe Reader and Flash Player installed on as many machines as possible, why must they throw additional obstcles in my way?

Let's touch base, or Harassment

I have spoken with many salespeople in the past week. In the past week, I have spoken with over a dozen salespeople (I sought pricing on business cellphone plans and a new photocopier). I have heard the phrase "I just wanted to touch base" many times. I have grown to have a great dislike of that phrase.

I do believe that every time I have heard "I just wanted to touch base" in the last seven days, it was prefaced by an interrupting phone call and followed by an annoying couple of minutes of a sales weasel not accepting my quite clear and simple statement of "Thank you for the quote, I am evaluating all of the options and will get back to you with questions, concerns, or with our decision." I wouldn't hold the phone call against them if I had not made it abundantly clear to each of these people that email is my preferred method of contact. Worse is that in most cases, it has taken more than a few such phone calls from each of them to get them to leave me alone.

So ignoring the sexual harassment angle of the phrase I am clearly starting to associate the phrase with annoyance.

Sysadmins Law 9, or Backups must be automated

We have a reasonable system to perform backups of laptops that are regularly on our local network. For laptops that live most of their life connected to the office over the internet and through a VPN connection it is much harder. Instead of an automated backup, the user must initiate the backup themselves. Automated messages are sent out when it has been a week without backups. And I talk to them on the phone a few days after that if a backup hasn't been done.

He came into my office complaining that his laptop blue-screened on boot, and it had been crashing regularly for the few days before. Booting off other media quickly showed the disk was failing in a pretty spectacular way. When I inform the user of this, he says, "I guess I should have backed up like you told me to, eh?" Yeah, I guess so.

Which brings me to sysadmin law 9

Backups that are not automated are not done.

Adobe Licensing website, or a total inappropriate use of a PDF

While perusing the Adobe license management website (the place volume license users track license serial numbers), I come across a link to contact support. The link was to this pdf

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Adobe would use a PDF in place of a simple html page.

Drug Running, or an illegal business opportunity

Each week a man in a uniform shows up in our lobby with a locked box. He calls my office, and I bring a locked box out to him and we trade. I realized while I was performing this action this afternoon that it's almost a perfect setup for a drug swap.

I really should stop considering such things at work.

Stopped fans, or Do as I say not as I do.

The fans in electronics are there for a reason; to keep things cool. They are very important. You should never disable them, and you should certainly fix them if they ever stop.

You should never do anything like this...

And certainly never stop a fan with anything metal like this...

Don't Panic, or the burning smell is perfectly normal.

Our facilities liason sent out a company wide email today.

"Please do not be alarmed by the burning smell in the hallway/stairwell/bathroom area. We're aware of the issue."

Good to hear that the plastic burning smell that quickly causes a headache is nothing to be concerned about.

MovinCool, or You should know where to rent one on short notice

The picture above is a "portable" air conditioner. This particular one is rated to cool 17000 btu/hr and is pretty much the largest air conditioner you can run off a standard 20A circuit (it pulls 16A when running). It's one of two (the second one is larger) attempting to keep our second server room cool.

While we had planned on just renting this particular unit until the permanent AC system was installed, it became obvious quite quickly that planning and permitting would extend the rental past the point where it made sense to just buy the thing. We now own two of these (the other requires a 30A circuit), and will hopefully never need to rent one again.

That said, anyone that runs a server room should know where to rent one of these, how long it would take to get it delivered, and how it can be paid for. Our local provider (where we both rented and purchased our units) is Atlas Sales and Rentals. Great guys if you need such a thing in and around Silicon Valley.

Connectors, or the IEC and NEMA make things simple

I was in need of a bunch of specific lengths of power cables to clean up the wiring on one of our racks. I asked my salesman at CDW for "normal PC power cords to go from a typical wall outlet to a typical PC power supply in lengths of 1, 2, 3, and 4 ft".

Apparently that wasn't clear as I needed as I was presented with a quote for not what I was seeking. A little searching (and questioning of my engineer brother), and I learned that I sought NEMA 5-15 plug to IEC c13 cords. And in case you need to figure out the names of a power connector you find on the wall or on a piece of computer equipment, checkout, Wikipedia's pages NEMA and IEC connectors.

Up front pricing, or Stop wasting my time

I was at a presentation the other night where several different vendors were presenting their "virtualization" (complaints about the creeping usage of the term virtualization by marketing people will be saved for another day) products to a group of mostly IT professionals.

After one company finished their presentation, I asked for general pricing information. The representative from marketing deflected my question and suggested I talk with them after the meeting. I could have spoken with them after the other presentations were finished, but I already knew all I needed to know. Their product was expensive, damned expensive. A quick search online confirms this -- pricing starts at $20k, and is realistically $50k for all the pieces anyone consider the product would actually want.

Now, this avoidance of public pricing was in direct contrast to another company;, who answered all of the basic pricing questions one might have with their last slide. They also have it clearly on their website. Good for them.

I wish marketing departments would realize that hiding the cost of their product only annoys technical people. Companies need to provide at public pricing that is at least in the correct ballpark of what I would pay. Sure, if they must they can do silly things like MAP pricing or have an MSRP that is noticeably more than customers actually pay. But at least it lets me get an understanding if I can even consider your product. If you hide your prices and you became legitimately interesting in the marketplace, your price lists will likely end up somewhere like Storage Mojo's Pricing Guide page.

So marketers, please don't waste my time or your time and let me at least figure out if your product is even within my budget before I have to talk to you.

Damaged Users, or Geez does QuickBooks suck

The office manager was updating from QuickBooks 2005 to QuickBooks 2008. With a fresh backup of the data from QuickBooks 2005, we went to import the data in to the new version. "An error occurred when QuickBooks tried to access the company file" when converting a file to QuickBooks 2008 (Error -13,0)".

I guess it's not going to be as simple of an upgrade as I had hoped (or the manual led us to believe). Good thing Intuit has a knowledge base article on Error -13,0. Let's look at the three suggested problems and the related solutions.

Shortcuts on the icon bars to features that are no longer in the product such as the Open PO List: So, if they can recognize that there is a bad shortcut, why can't they fix this automatically? More fun, is that they provide only one possible shortcut that could be causing the problem. Couldn't they at least tell me which shortcut is causing the error?
Damaged Admin user password: Wait a minute, so the password I provided moments earlier to access the backup file (and the step that presented an error when provided the wrong password) isn't good? And they ask me to fix it by simply changing the admin password? How lame.
Damaged Users: I certainly wouldn't have called the office managed damaged. In fact, she's a pretty smart cookie. Oh, I see, it's one of the user accounts that's causing the problem. Once again, couldn't they tell me which user caused the problem? Do they really think it's acceptable to "Delete all users but the Admin user"? I sure look forward to getting all of the users to re-enter their passwords.

With user experiences and support documents like this, I think I can safely predict more posts about the QuickBooks in my future.

Sysadmins Law 38, or Windows vs Linux

When given a choice, the vast majority of the users that I support choose Windows over Linux as their desktop OS. To be more specific, many of the users I support are assigned both a respectably powerful Windows laptop and a pretty darned nice dual screen Linux workstation setup.

The majority of those users use their Windows laptop as their main computer. Nevermind that most of their time is spent in terminal windows connected to Unix systems Graphical apps on small laptop screens. Using windows as little more than a way to display a bunch of windows at once.

Users like what is known, that almost always means Windows.

Evaluation Licenses, or How to annoy a sys admin

I was considering a major upgrade to our backup system (for more robust backups of laptops), but before I committed to making such a large purchase, I sought an evaluation license that would add the extra features to our backup software. With the evaluation license installed, I poked, prodded, and happily tested.

We ended up deciding against the upgrade, and after the 30 day evaluation license expired, my backup software simply stopped working. You see when I installed the evaluation license (which gave permission to use nearly every feature of the software), it overwrote the permanent license that was installed.

Sure there were emailed reminders every two hours for the 7 days before it stopped working. As I had stopped using all the extra features by the end of the 30 days, why couldn't the software just revert to my previous permanent license? Why did I specifically have to go re-install my license?