Friday, December 22, 2006
Magical Troubleshooting |4:43 AM| I may have already posted about this once before, I apologize if I have
At Dell, I used to work in the printer services department. I was the support line, help desk, whatever. I processed tickets, called people, talked them through shit. Occasionally, something would go wrong with an entirely different department, and it would somehow break our shit, and I'd have to call around to get it resolved.
Dell's ordering management system, DOMS, was older,waaaay older than any existing employees, other than Michael Dell and Kevin. And they certainly didn't write this shit.
It was so old, that no one actually knew how any of it worked. Certainly not the guys supporting it. They had procedures, and fixes, but no understanding of the underlying code/technology. It might as well have been magic, or a religion They were beyond useless. Here's the thing, you'd call in, ask questions, and get totally different answers each time. The only time I needed to call is when, for whatever reason, a printer in one building (Say, RR1) would start spitting out a quote from a guy in an entirely different building (Like, RR3) and it would just keep printing this crap, hundreds of times, no way to stop it.
I'd call DOMS support, and explain the problem, and of course they'd be dumbfounded, saying how that couldn't happen. Over the several calls I'd made to them, I'd collected keywords from whatever complete lunacy the previous tech had claimed was the problem.
When I called in, I'd explain the problem, then I'd start asking questions based around these magical words.
Me: "Okay, the last time this happened, the dude said it was related to...the cluster server. Have you heard of this, this cluster server?"
Him: "no"
Me: Alright, what about, the 'net...forwarding system?
Him: No.
Me: "What about the print relays?"
Him: "Oh! I know what that is, hold on....yeah there was an issue there!"
Me: Thanks.
The next time I'd call, it'd be the cluster, and the guy would have no idea what those previous guesses meant.
At Road Runner
Back when I worked tech support for Road Runner, there was this mythical thing/concept called "The Link"
It somehow connected the billing system (With which we interacted) and these super advanced other servers that the super lazy and angry RDC dealt with.
I don't know what the link was, or looked like, or even its location. Was it a cable? Was it several computers? A network? A monk? Every so often the link would be "down". No explanation. No reason. It would go back up some hours later.
Here's the really interesting part, there was this code box, 2 digits, the action codes. These codes would be sent over THE LINK and do stuff. Most of it we didn't understand. We did know one code did the remote reset on the cable modems, but all the rest of the codes had definitions like
27: Acct In P
35: Reset M
Shit like that.
Now, sometimes, when an account was pretty fucked up, you could perform "The ritual". No one really knew what it did, but it was a series of these action codes: Like, 07, 19, 27,43, 16, 00 And it would fix a lot of problems. It could in some cases cause some new ones, but usually it fixed things. There was debate as to the components and order of the ritual.
You could see it on people's desks, and you could see how different people influenced their neighbors, judging by the ritual on the Post-it notes above their desk. I am not kidding.
There were a couple of the short ones, a couple of really long groupings of these codes. One of my supervisors had a version that was, oh, 15 code groupings long. He swore by it.
I never did find out what we were doing, or what "The LINK" was.
Magic.
(3) comments
Monday, December 18, 2006
Duck-back-less |5:12 PM| I'm re-examining what pisses me off, like, what gets to me. I've realized that there's a lot of subjects, jabs, pokes, and assorted bullshit that just runs off of my back like water. Threats, especially.
Other stuff, attacks on what I perceive as personal failings that I have not yet resolved, alright, those do get to me pretty easily. Issues to which I do not have an easy answer, sometimes totally trivial screw ups, it'll get to me. Bothers the hell out of me.
There have been plenty of people that tried to get under my skin, some spent a very, very long time trying, and they failed, the vast majority of the time.
In any case, I'm thin skinned about certain subjects, and I just didn't realize it. Dammit.
Also
(0) comments
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Make Back Ups! |1:43 AM| I was looking through the logs, and some poor bastard went to this page:
http://www.terminalpacketloss.com/personal/2004/05/hosting-clean-up.shtml
I know I hate, hate HATE when I find a page that had the stuff I was looking for, but now it's all 404's.
And I hate that I lost all that shit. 2 or 3 hard drive crashes, technically one of which was negligence on my part, but all of that shit, all of it, gone. Most of it forever.
I had tech calls no one else did, AND they were in MP3 format, not the fucking .RA format everyone seems to use for those.
Eh. I'm just bitching. But in any case, the moral of the story is MAKE BACKUPS.
(0) comments
Magical Troubleshooting |4:43 AM| I may have already posted about this once before, I apologize if I have
At Dell, I used to work in the printer services department. I was the support line, help desk, whatever. I processed tickets, called people, talked them through shit. Occasionally, something would go wrong with an entirely different department, and it would somehow break our shit, and I'd have to call around to get it resolved.
Dell's ordering management system, DOMS, was older,waaaay older than any existing employees, other than Michael Dell and Kevin. And they certainly didn't write this shit.
It was so old, that no one actually knew how any of it worked. Certainly not the guys supporting it. They had procedures, and fixes, but no understanding of the underlying code/technology. It might as well have been magic, or a religion They were beyond useless. Here's the thing, you'd call in, ask questions, and get totally different answers each time. The only time I needed to call is when, for whatever reason, a printer in one building (Say, RR1) would start spitting out a quote from a guy in an entirely different building (Like, RR3) and it would just keep printing this crap, hundreds of times, no way to stop it.
I'd call DOMS support, and explain the problem, and of course they'd be dumbfounded, saying how that couldn't happen. Over the several calls I'd made to them, I'd collected keywords from whatever complete lunacy the previous tech had claimed was the problem.
When I called in, I'd explain the problem, then I'd start asking questions based around these magical words.
Me: "Okay, the last time this happened, the dude said it was related to...the cluster server. Have you heard of this, this cluster server?"
Him: "no"
Me: Alright, what about, the 'net...forwarding system?
Him: No.
Me: "What about the print relays?"
Him: "Oh! I know what that is, hold on....yeah there was an issue there!"
Me: Thanks.
The next time I'd call, it'd be the cluster, and the guy would have no idea what those previous guesses meant.
Back when I worked tech support for Road Runner, there was this mythical thing/concept called "The Link"
It somehow connected the billing system (With which we interacted) and these super advanced other servers that the super lazy and angry RDC dealt with.
I don't know what the link was, or looked like, or even its location. Was it a cable? Was it several computers? A network? A monk? Every so often the link would be "down". No explanation. No reason. It would go back up some hours later.
Here's the really interesting part, there was this code box, 2 digits, the action codes. These codes would be sent over THE LINK and do stuff. Most of it we didn't understand. We did know one code did the remote reset on the cable modems, but all the rest of the codes had definitions like
27: Acct In P
35: Reset M
Shit like that.
Now, sometimes, when an account was pretty fucked up, you could perform "The ritual". No one really knew what it did, but it was a series of these action codes: Like, 07, 19, 27,43, 16, 00 And it would fix a lot of problems. It could in some cases cause some new ones, but usually it fixed things. There was debate as to the components and order of the ritual.
You could see it on people's desks, and you could see how different people influenced their neighbors, judging by the ritual on the Post-it notes above their desk. I am not kidding.
There were a couple of the short ones, a couple of really long groupings of these codes. One of my supervisors had a version that was, oh, 15 code groupings long. He swore by it.
I never did find out what we were doing, or what "The LINK" was.
Magic.
(3) comments
Monday, December 18, 2006
Duck-back-less |5:12 PM| I'm re-examining what pisses me off, like, what gets to me. I've realized that there's a lot of subjects, jabs, pokes, and assorted bullshit that just runs off of my back like water. Threats, especially.
Other stuff, attacks on what I perceive as personal failings that I have not yet resolved, alright, those do get to me pretty easily. Issues to which I do not have an easy answer, sometimes totally trivial screw ups, it'll get to me. Bothers the hell out of me.
There have been plenty of people that tried to get under my skin, some spent a very, very long time trying, and they failed, the vast majority of the time.
In any case, I'm thin skinned about certain subjects, and I just didn't realize it. Dammit.
Also
(0) comments
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Make Back Ups! |1:43 AM| I was looking through the logs, and some poor bastard went to this page:
http://www.terminalpacketloss.com/personal/2004/05/hosting-clean-up.shtml
I know I hate, hate HATE when I find a page that had the stuff I was looking for, but now it's all 404's.
And I hate that I lost all that shit. 2 or 3 hard drive crashes, technically one of which was negligence on my part, but all of that shit, all of it, gone. Most of it forever.
I had tech calls no one else did, AND they were in MP3 format, not the fucking .RA format everyone seems to use for those.
Eh. I'm just bitching. But in any case, the moral of the story is MAKE BACKUPS.
(0) comments
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