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.
A manager came to me with a report of what sounded like a failing hard drive. It didn't take me long to see that there was something seriously wrong with the drive. I offered him three options; expensive ($500-3000 with Kroll Ontrack), the inexpensive ($300-700 with Gillware), or the extremely cheap (me trying things that have worked for me in the past).
A call to Kroll Ontrack got me the address to ship the drive to and the information that needed to be included with the drive. It would be $100 to diagnosis the drive. That gets a list of files they can recover and a quote for what it would cost to get the data back.
For this particular drive, it was $1500 to recover the data. It was extra for media to get the data back on. $10/dvd, $2/cd, or usb/firewire drives at about twice market price. The drive turned out to be made by AMS and was shipped in a custom labeled box just for Ontrack.
Between first call and recieving the data back on a drive it was 14 days; several of those days were spent by me getting approval to possibly spend the money, by our lawyer reading their paperwork, and by our accounts payable person arranging payment.
Everything about my experience with Ontrack was well executred. I had a single point of contact for all matters. I was kept in the loop about the processing of the job through the various stages of work. All in all great experience and I would happily recommend them.
About once a week I need to talk to a technical support group with one company or another. Few of these calls are what I would describe as pleasant experiences. One company however has always proven themselves to understand what good customer service is supposed to be.
When I call, the call is answered by a nice lady (I have never been on hold for more than two or three minutes). She wants a serial number to verify your support eligibility (she can look up serial numbers if need be based on company or a person's name), followed by a brief description of the problem. While not a support technician herself, she understands more than enough to collect the needed pieces to create a detailed description of the problem at hand (she does this by taking what I say and repeating what she understands the problem to be in a different way). At no point does she make me feel stupid, nor does she make me feel like I am wasting my time dictacting to a drone who simply types what I say.
From there, she arranges how the technician will get in touch with me and can arrange a specific time if need be. I have always been called or emailed back promptly by a tech. They have always been polite and understand how valuable my time is. As such, they believe me when I tell them I have already tried something and don't ask me to repeat these tests unless there really is valuable information to be obtained that I did not take note of the first time. They have never sent me on wild information gathering quests like many vendors do. The techs always follow-up when they say they will, and they keep me in the loop when a problem is sent up to the engineers for further analysis.
Great job BakBone. Sure most of my support requests end with them being marked "won't fix; works as intended" or some similar such condition; but you sure understand how to run a support group. Thanks for not being another source of blood pressure raising anger in the sea of mediocrity that technical support usually is.
About half of what I purchase at work requires going through a value-added reseller.
In theory a VAR is supposed to add value by selling entire turnkey solutions. Or they might specialize in providing knowledge and support for a particular industry. At the very least a VAR should have in depth knowledge of the products they are selling.
In practice, I find they can rarely answer my questions off the top of their head. I have yet to have one actually provide useful planning assistance for my long term needs. They tend to take three or four days to get me quotes. Where is the added value for me as a customer?
Why do companies wish to share the profit with another party? This should be really simple. Provide decent marketing material; provide fast turnaround for pricing requests; and when a customer is going to drop a few grand, let them talk to tech support to answer the tough questions the docs and sales people can't. Sure this means that they need to have a few more sales people on staff, but I have to believe that the increased profit per sale offsets those costs.
I find this all particularly frustrating, because I have walked into nearly every one of these purchases knowing exactly what I wanted and not needing anything more than a few minutes with technical support to verify some fiddly bits.
While researching backup solutions for our Windows laptops, a coworker
recommend I look into the products of Avamar. My first through was "That sounds
like the name of a prescription drug.". My first glance at the website only
provided further evidence that this was the name of a drug and not a company
that makes backup software
Turns out that they make some really cool software that works out how to not backup multiple copies of the same thing (across different systems even). It also turns out that they are well out of the price range of this particular project.
The story of why I was calling Dell Customer Service will be saved for another day, suffice it to say I had issues that the technical support group clearly could not resolve.
A few minutes navigating the general phone tree, a few minutes with a call manager (aka an operator), I get to the Customer Service phone tree and select the option to talk to a human. A moment later, I recieve the following message;
"Dell Customer Service is currently closed for a company meeting. Please try calling again in one hour." I was speecheless. Which is good since Dell hung up on me at that point.
Along with our nice new air conditioner, we had a new thermostat installed in our server room. The entire display is a giant touch screen.
.
If you click on the image above, you will be able to see a little button in the bottom middle labeled "SCREEN". (Pay no attention to the water dripping off the lower right corner). Being the curious individual I am (and having faith that no option on thermostat could be that bad), I pushed that spot.
As I watched it count down from 30 with the message "OK TO CLEAN SCREEN" shown as it counted, I had a very good laugh. After the 30 seconds, it reverts to the normal display. (Pay no attention to the carefully placed plastic over the thermostat).
We are nearly through with building out a new server room; new racks, power, and HVAC. One of the last things completed was installation of a big red button.
That button will kill all of the outlets above the racks and will send a signal to the UPSes (Remote UPS Power Off Device) to have them turn off immediately. Soon it will be set-up such that the circuit will be trigged if the sprinkler system in the room goes off. The theory here being that it's better to deal with wet improperly turned off systems than wet, likely shorted out improperly turned off systems. Oh, and perhaps it makes an electrical fire less likely.
The button of course screams out to be pushed. I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to push it before we had all of our servers using the power it controls (very anticlimatic just turning off a fan and radio though) . Unfortunately, it was not installed in the best of locations. Well, at least it's in a plastic case and in a limited access room.
update 2007-08-15: a reader sent a link to STI as a source for all sorts of big buttons and such.
We had a power outage at work today. Power was out for at least an hour. My boss was called a few minutes after the power outage happened. Upon arriving, he encoutered a problem. While the keycard reader seemed to have power and even blinked properly upon him waving his card at it, the door lock did not disengage. It seems the card reader system has a battery in it, but the mechanism to power the door lock release is powered by standard building power. Thankfully there were already people in the building to let him in.
I received a report that a machine was powering off erratically. After interrogating the user who made the report, I was reasonably sure that the problem was a matter of an overheating processor. Upon opening the case and powering the machine back on, the cpu fan was indeed malfunctioning. It tried desperatly to spin up, but could never quite work out a full rotation. Prodding provided the final bit of needing information; the bearing had fallen out of alignment.
I still felt the need to double check that the cpu was actually overheating. Instead of doing something sensible like booting into the bios menu and looking at the hardware monitor to see the temperature, I touched the heatsink. Ow.
The image above is letter sized test page from CUPS printed on an inkjet printer from one of our linux workstations. This is the what happens when you print a test page to our 42 inch wide wide format inkjet. Note the letter sized test page in the upper left of the large image.
If you are a fire marshall, building inspector, or hold a similar
position, please skip this post. I received an email from the
office manager explaining that she and several others had gotten trapped
in the bathroom hallway ealier in the day and asking me if I could do
anything about it.
Background: The company I work for shares the bottom floor
of a building with another tenant. The bathrooms are in a T shaped
hallway between the two suites. An interesting property of this
hallway, is that when you enter the hallway, you get locked into the
hallway and need either a keycode (to get into the other suite) or a
security card (to get into our suite). There is an
emergency release (looks like a fire alarm, only it's
yellow) next to the door into our suite.
Now you might be wondering why, what sounds like a facilities problem
was being brought to the attention of IT. She assumed that there was
something wrong with the card reader and thus we needed to fix it since
we manage the security system. This was my first chance to seriously
poke about at the computer running the alarm and keycard system.
Unfortunately I found nothing wrong. So off to investigate the door I
went.
It took me about five minutes to work out the problem. The card
reader was indeed reading each and every swipe of a card, and you could
always hear a noise from the lock mechanism. What was odd however was
that the lock mechanism made two different noises. One when the lock
actually opened properly, and another when it didn't. It was pretty
clear that that the solenoid that released
the lock and allowed the door to open was not working correctly;
probably sticking at times.
It was as I stood there experimenting with the door that the office
manager came and explained how the emergency release was supposed to
work. After activating the emergency release a few times, it became
quiet clear however that this release sends the same electrical signal
to the lock as the card reader, and thus if the problem is with the lock
itself, the emergency release won't actually let you out of the hallway.
Each month I receive dozens of magazines (the picture below shows the pile created by one months worth of magazines that arrived in my mailbox), the vast majority of them are free advertising paid for drivel (my predcessor had a thing for free tech rags). I actually pay for and read regularly just four technical magazines.
Windows IT Pro: I first read this magazine in college when it was called Windows NT Magazine (since 1999 it has gone through the names Windows 2000 Magazine and Windows and .NET Magazine before settling on the current name). Previews of new Microsoft software, reviews of all sorts of enterprise software, and indepth how-to articles continue to make this a must read for all Windows administrators.
SysAdmin: A magazine geared toward the professional unix adminstrator (with details for Solaris and Linux most frequently). Each month is obstensibly filled with articles centering around a theme. While the articles don't always relate too closely to the theme, they are always filled with serious technical know how and real world experiences from the authors.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly: Not a magazine that has much immediately applicable knowledge for my job, but one that continues to encourage me to be paranoid and think cynically about businesses and the world.
Computer Power User:
This magazine aims for the gaming, modder, and obsessive tweaker
audiences. While they do focus a good deal on the latest and greatest
videocards and processors, there are plenty of articles on useful
utilities and troubleshooting tips that make it a worthwhile read. If I
weren't interested in the rest of the articles for my non-work life it
probably wouldn't be worth the subscription though.
"Dear Valued" the email began. Not "Dear Valued Customer", just "Dear Valued". I was being invited to participate in a customer satisfaction survey. Following the provided link, I was presented with a page that didn't give me much faith in the company VMWare had hired.
I can't say that I went any further.
Updated late on 2006-02-24
Hours after I made this post, a product manager from the VMTN sent me an email telling me he has passed along this silliness to the appropriate folks within VMWare and thanking me for using their products.
Needing a variety of power, ethernet, and kvm cables, I send emails to the three vendors I am legally allowed to purchase from. One particular vendor responded very promptly, although it required a few additional emails to get the quote right.
To:salesrep From: sysadmin Subject:Cords and Cables Oh My
It's time to neaten my server benches. Can I get a quote for the following cable order?
16 6ft standard computer power cords
4 3ft cat5e rated ethernet patch cables
4 10ft cat5e rated ethernet patch cables in the same color as the 4 3ft ones.
16 15ft cat5e rated ethernet patch cables
4 3ft ps2 kvm cables
4 10ft ps2 kvm cables
The response to that was a correct quote. This exchange didn't exactly give me confidence in the company, but to make matters worse, the quote I recieved did not include the needed legalese that matched their agreement with the State, and had someone elses name and address in the Bill to and Ship To fields. The final price would have been $531.
The other two vendors were much better in terms of service, but weren't even in the correct ballpark for what I wanted to pay. One gave me a quote for $333 (this being the price after I removed the incorrect inclusion of sales tax; which is wrong both because I am in another state and because my purchases are tax exempt). The other gave me an accurate quote on the first try but wanted $488 for the order.
Going through Cyberguys (where I personally order computer cables) I assembled a shopping cart with all the needed parts in less than 10 minutes for a grand total of $153.
Anyone that knows me would agree that if I don't have something to fidget with, I will find something to fidget with (or worse, take apart). I have had this wad of Silly Putty in my office for about 6 months now. It acts as a medium for temporary artistic endeavors, provides unbreakable stress relief, and can be a relaxing focus as it oozes from whatever form I give it to its natural blob like form.
There is one other benefit that I had never considered before. a blob of Silly Putty can apparently be used to pick up women. Now I have found that woman are much more likely to ask to play with one of the desk toys as I solve whatever problem they came to see me about it. But for some reason the Silly Putty is more attractive to them than any of the other gadgets, gizmos, and stress toys I have. So to all those single guys out there-- Silly Putty, better than a cheesy pickup line.
About a month ago, the State formalized a series of contracts for purchasing computer accessories and peripherals. These contracts effectively state that such purchases must be made through one of four approved vendors. Amusingly I didn't hear about this through official channels, but instead heard of it as it was complained about on a technical mailing list.
A call to the purchasing department of the university clarified a few things for me. As far as the university is concerned, there are many exceptions to the contract (Yes, I have this in writing. My reading of the contracts says there are no exceptions.). If I get price quotes from the four vendors and am able to find what I am purchasing cheaper at another store, I can put those quotes into my purchasing records and buy from the cheaper source. If I need an item now I can go ahead and purchase from any vendor that can meet my immediate need. If none of the vendors could provide the items I wanted, I could order from elsewhere (assuming of course I documented all this in case the department is audited).
So with an immediate need for a replacement battery for a UPS I head to the uber-secret-special webstores for the vendors. The first joy is getting an account on the vendors normal stores and than getting the account marked so that I see I could see the special state pricing. That process was in theory simple (more on that later). Create an account and send them an email to get special pricing applied to the account. With my accounts supposedly setup, I go perusing the stores for prices.
Looking for both the battery I need now and my planned purchases for the next few months , I find that all in the all the prices are bad. Actually what I find first is that the webstores all suck. When logged with my special account most of what I am looking for isn't available. Logging out and using the public versions of the webstores is what reveals almost all of the products I seek and the bad prices mentioned earlier. Perhaps bad is a little harsh. The prices are quite similar to CDW, who never has the best prices, but rarely has the worst (and as a result I almost never order from them).
Amusing Tangent: Finished with being frustrated with a god awful webstore while attempting to make a purchase, I call up the salesrep for assistance. After a couple of rings the other end is answered by a plesant sounding gentleman on what is unquestionably a cellphone. Asking me how he can help me, I explain what I am looking to purchase. He apologies and says it is going to take a moment for him to find a spot to pull over and look up the prices I am after. While finding that place he is chatting about where I work and such. When he hears where I work, he explains he is in town at the moment. He goes on to say that he is currently driving down State Street -- pointing out that he likely shouldn't be driving there as it is a restricted access street gets a pause and then "Oh, I was wondering why there were no cars on the street."
Calling the salesmen from each of the vendors I am able to reasonably promptly get quotes for the various things I am looking for prices for (apparently setting up my accounts to view the State's pricing is much more difficult than it should be as many others at the university are having the same problem). In nearly every case the various vendors do indeed have the best price (often the price is the same as what I can get elsewhere, but the free shipping gives the contract vendors the win). I guess I will end up doing what I do for Dell and after figuring out what I want, I will call the sales rep for the actual price.
The State made up these contracts in an effort to save money. The general belief being if the State promises to give a select group of vendors all of their business, the vendors will provide better discounts. This appears to be true. While there are cheaper places online for nearly everything that I priced, for various reasons I would be unwilling to purchase from those places.
So all in all these new requirements aren't overly onerous, but they are a bit of a pain. The obvious is that they can create more paperwork for some orders. A much greater concern for many is that we will have to forge new relationships and trust with salespeople and that we will be doing our productresearch and pricing elsewhere since the webstores for the four vendors suck in ways that haven't been common on webstores since the turn of the century.
Surprised that a $70 unmanaged 16 port switch has a one year next
business day replacement warranty, I called up Dell Support about a PowerConnect
2016 switch that I have that flakes out (all the lights come on and it
stops
moving packets) on a regular basis.
Tangent: Dell has apparently started using call
managers to route calls. It is their job to collect enough
information to route your call to the appropriate place without needing to
spend 10 minutes going through a phone maze. The first ironic point was
that I spent five minutes in a phone maze before talking to a call
manager, and another few minutes in a phone maze after speaking with them.
The second was that I had more troubles understanding the call manager
than I have had with any other Dell employee (I think it is time for me to
learn a phonetic
alphabet) and thus spent several minutes repeatedly correcting the
lady on the other end of the line.
Once I finally got to a support technician, he quickly acknowledged
that my switch had a problem and then told me his connection to the
support databse was broken. This is not really something I should care
about, but it meant that he might not be able to submit the shipment
request to get me a new switch the next day. He did apologize and
indicated he would email me immediately with his contact information and
would email me again when he was able to setup the shipment. I note that
12 hours after my call (most definately after the end of the technician's
shift) I have not recieved that second email. I also note that standing
in place of this $70 switch right now is a $3000 Cisco
Catalyst 3550.
So the central IT organization on campus is implementing a system to
enable them to send out emergency messages to the primary departmental
technical contacts. This system can call a set list of numbers to notify
you of various campus wide issues. I am not entirely sold that this is a
good idea, but what the hell, I follow the instructions to update my
contact information. While doing as the instructions indicate, it comes
as no real surprise to me that I have a few concerns.
Problems with the system; 1) The database of contact info is not part
of the campuswide directory system and must be maintained and updated by
hand. 2) To update your own contact information you use a shared username
and password. 3) You need to allow cookies to login, but instead of
providing an error message, the login script will simply redirect you back
to the login page. 4) Instead of just editing your own entry, you can edit
the entry of anyone. 5) If you put a home phone number into your entry, it
is made available via the public interface to the list.
And the central IT organization wonders why they get so little respect.
The central campus IT organization manages site licenses for a handful
of products. Back in the days of yore, they provided this software on
floppy and then cdrom. Now it is provided by a web site which
authenticates the downloader with the campus directory. After giving the
site my username and password, I click the link to download the software
and am presented with--
"Illegal Access!!!
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'
[Microsoft][ODBC driver for Oracle][Oracle]ORA-00947: not enough values
/programs/download.asp, line 24"
Having seen similar messages before, I allow cookies from the site,
re-login and all is fine. This is of course broken, I should have
been presented a nice error message explaining something like "You
seem to not have the correct cookie perhaps you are blocking cookies
from this site." Well, all is fine until I try to download
the second part of the package I am after, at which point I am told--
"Central Campus Download Site
There was an error with your download attempt.
You have already downloaded this program. Please re-register if you need to download the program again."
Ignoring the incorrectness of this message (I was downloading a
different piece of the same package), this is a message I should simply
not have recieved. There is no reason to make the user go through extra
steps to assist them logging of information when they could have handled
it inside the application.
These are mistakes that I could tolerate from small time departments,
but not from one that spends more money on trial projects in a year than I
have in my entire year's tech budget.
Update 2005-11-22: I filed this matter as a bug report with the
group that maintains the download system. The case was closed with the
following note--
"While not a critical issue, this seems to be resolved by restarting
the browser and re-logging back in."
My primary system at work is a laptop. It has both a trackpoint (the
IBM name used for the pointing device in the home row) and a touchpad. I
find I am slow and clumsy with touchpads and thus greatly prefer
trackpoints (Dell seems to call them Pointing Sticks). I really like the
grippy feel of a fresh pointing stick cap. When new, using the trackpoint
is an absolute joy. But as they get filled with human goo and dirt moving
the cursor becomes less and less accurate.
The Dell Latitudes I use at work each come with a spare trackpoint
cap. Now seeing as how 4-6 months of heavy use wears one down to the
point of leaving me unhappy, I clearly need a supply of more. Dell sells
Pointing Stick Covers for $11 for two. The saleswoman I spoke with
said that quantity discounts were not available for that part. Thinkpads
come with two different types of trackpoints. One is grippy like the
Dell's and the other is textured rubber. The rubber one is washable and
lasts lasts much longer than the grippy one that once filled with dirt is
unsalvageable.
A month or two ago, while at the University surplus store I came across
a small cache of new in package ones for fifty cents a piece. I purchased
the 9 that I could find in the box. That will keep me happy for a good
while.
I am currently working with two companies to resolve two completely
unrelated problems I am having with their respective software packages.
One company is fairly
small, doesn't use a case tracking system, and has only two technical
support staff. There are no forms, I can call or email them to start
the process. The other company is a
big one. They have a web interface to submit support requests. They
have a case tracking system. There are lots of support staff (they have
shifts they work).
I always enjoy calling the small company. The first thing we do is
make sure both they and I have the same understanding of the problem.
Once that is handled we get to work actually solving the problem. This
process has never once included them asking me to reboot machines
just to see if it solves the problem. It has included requests
for me to run cryptic debugging commands and provide them with the
results. Aside from the extensive debugging abilities they built into
their software, the most intelligent thing they do to make support
easier is to have a license to use Citrix's web based meeting
software to enable them to see and interact with their customer's
computers. I have dealt with them on perhaps a dozen issues with this
company, and all but one was resolved within a few days.
On the other hand, I have grown to hate asking for support from the
big company. I have opened nearly ten cases with them and have only had
two end with what I would call a good resolution. Those two were
simply reports of minor nuisances, one was already known about and fixed
by them in betas, the other was also known about, but a solution had not
yet been implemented. The other cases ended with varying degrees of
failure.
Most of the cases I resolved on my own through nearly blind trial and
error. A couple of thse wild experiments were actually guided by the
VMWare support tech monkey. Most of the time however, the tech
attempted to shift the blame to other companies. One tried to claim my
hardware was faulty (nevermind that the hardware went through the
manufacturer's diagnostics properly and what I was trying to do inside
the virtual machine worked outside of it). Another time I was asked to
verify that the problem occured on a fresh install of the OS with no
other software installed (yeah, as if the problem is likely to occur in
that state). Several of the techs asked me to reboot the host system
(which is kind of a pain as there are several virtual machines on the
host) to hopefully fix the problem.
My most recent
support request was closed by the support
tech as I couldn't provide any further information about the problem.
Now this case should have been put on hold as the problem as it happens
randomly, but when it does happen it makes the virtual machine unusuable
for some period of time (normally a dayish). If it weren't for the fact
that the yearly support license gets me free upgrades I don't
think I would renew next year.
I sit in the hall writing this (thankfully several offices on the floor
are being remodeled and there is a comfortable chair out here). I have
been relegated to lab assistant for our mobile laptop lab.
As this is the first semester for us to be running this mobile lab
and there were still kinks to work out, it would be run almost entirely
by staff and not student lab assistants. And seeing as how I had the
best technical skills to handle difficulties, it made sense for me to be
the babysitter for the laptops.
It is halfway through the class, and I have been relegated to hall
monitor it seems. "Where is room 4208?", "How do I get to the second
floor?", "Where is the registrar's office?"
I hear the class starting to wrap up. Time to trade student ids for
laptops, packup the rest of the cart, and manhandle the damned cart back
to the storeroom.
The answers to the above questions by the way are; there is no
4208, through the double set of doors behind me and down the stairs to the
right, and Peterson Building.
Anyone that knows me would agree that if I don't have something to fidget with, I will find something to fidget with (or worse, take apart). I have had this wad of Silly Putty in my office for about 6 months now. It acts as a medium for temporary artistic endeavors, provides unbreakable stress relief, and can be a relaxing focus as it oozes from whatever form I give it to its natural blob like form.
