Posts by J. Cook 2271 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007
We actually have a sensible policy (with group policies to back it!) that enforce a five minute idle timer for the screen saver, which also locks the console.
It's built into one of the minimum internal controls that governs how the place operates as well, which is why it's enforced unless you have a REALLY good reason why the workstation shouldn't have the screen saver kick in (digital signage, other specialty apps, etc.)
Heh. that was the first of the 9 month long battles with our internal support team because they were installing the RTM release of Office 2010... in 2017. without applying the requires service packs and updates for it to talk to Exchange. Even after I wrote up a document about how to troubleshoot and diagnose the issue, because all they were doing for 'troubleshooting' was blowing away the user's profile or reinstalling Office (without any of the aforementioned updates) OR re-imaging the machine.
The last of those battles was entirely a "are they running the O365 client installed from the central repo? No? If there's no reason for it, remove the old version and install that one" thing.
... or worse, the plastic part of the screw would strip out, which is one reason why I have a very small pair of locking pliers in my tool kit. ("Vise grips" is a brand name for those)
Then there were the ones that would unscrew the standoffs on the card side- those were a pain to deal with as well, and why I also have a screwdriver with a 5mm (1/4") socket head expressly to reinstall those.
They are called thumbscrews, not "dig out the screwdriver and torque them down like they were car tires" screws, people...
Similar thing in the US, I think - "popcorn" ceilings, which were supposed to reduce the amount of echo in a room, but in reality just ended up drinking SO. MUCH. PAINT. and it was extremely messy to paint on, or just to remove. I think one of the better ideas was to put plastic sheets on all the walls and the floor, tape all the plastic joints to make a sort of bag, then remove the stuff and then just wad up the plastic leaving the walls and floor reasonably clean..
similar, but with "iron on" style t-shirt paper intended for inkjet printers getting fed into a brand-new, 'installed the day before' color laser printer. I had the fun chore of carefully unwrapping a half-melted page from around the fuser assembly, because there was no way this would have been a warranty call.
Sadly, I've had to do a number of investigations regarding misuse of company owned computers. Very little porn, thankfully, but people still try. (and goodness, some of the sites they've gotten caught looking at! Oh, My!)
It's something we warn new hires about, and they have to sign a form saying that they understand and agree to- company owned computers are for company business; while we tolerate a limited amount of personal use (accessing email, research, reading El Reg, etc.) it's not their computer and we do monitor and filter internet usage for both security and productivity reasons.
I'll be brutally honest: If I'm buying things like dishwashers, laundry machines (washer or dryer), and refrigerators, the adage "less features = more robust" comes to mind. I don't care if there's a camera inside the fridge to tell me if the lettuce is turning into mush or if there's an enlightened civilization growing where there use to be a basket of berries and offer to order me more of them. I certainly don't want a screen running an old version of Android that's is filled with bloatware, ads, and something that also looks at the camera inside to snoop on my when I'm taking the last slice of pie and a full can of whipped topping and tattling to my doctor. (or whoever has paid the company enough money for access to the data)
Similarly, I don't want any apps for my laundry set- I have this thing called a timer that I can set when I start a load to remind me when it's done. In any case, I don't have wifi access in the landry room and am unlikely to add a booster just for that, because me throwing a brand new pair of red panties in the same load as the guy's white dress shirts is between me, him, and my taser. :D
And to finish the rant, I don't want a dishwasher that advertises a bunch of different wash routines, but hides all but two of them behind an app (or worse, a paywall subscription service and that will break exactly 31 days after the warranty runs out, at which point the manufacturer has already discontinued all support and spare parts for that model because it was last year's model and the new one comes in brushed matte black stainless and is essentially the same model at the very core but has entirely new parts, requires a new app (which also may or may not snoop on the rest of the stuff on my phone, even if I've told it explicitly to fuck off) and a different subscription service which, like the broken model, is damned near impossible to turn off without waiting on hold for 8 hours so that an AI customer service rep can say "Oh, you need to speak to a human about that; the wait time to speak to one is slightly longer than your estimated remaining time left on this plane of existence" and then disconnect me. (or alternatively, give me an entirely different phone number to call instead of having the ability to blind transfer me over to it; or both.)
... mostly involving Citrix. We had out VAR come in to do a very specific setup involving a load balancer (Citrix Netscaler) and a security appliance made by a large company with a bridge as part of their logo. Neither of us knew the exact process to get the netscaler to do what we wanted it to do, so we called the help desk for Citrix. They kept insisting that it could do it, suggested a configuration, we tried it, it didn't work worth a hill of beans, they kept insisting, we asked to escalate, the second level techs parroted the same thing back to us, and finally we got up to one of the engineers who told us five minutes after reading through three hours worth of logs, escalations, and tries that "no, it can't do what you want it to do, it's not designed to do that."
our VAR was incandescent by the time that happened; after he got off the phone, he had some exceptionally creative entries that I added to my Book Of The Profane and Obscene. Shortly thereafter, we dumped the netscaler for an F5, which took all of 15 minutes to set up and deploy the configuration they were looking for.
Their support group also had no idea how to extend the log file drive on the appliance, because when it filled up, the UI stopped responding and the only way to fix it was to go on the machine's console and manually clear out space, and there was no facility to auto-purge old log files.
I've done the whole entire "ok, give me a minute to do that" [waits exactly 60 seconds] "nope, machine is still emitting ectoplasm and asking for the Keymaster of Gozer. NOW will you send a tech with a new mainboard??" thing with hardware support.
HPE Nimble gets a mention for "when we said we are dropping support for [product line] we mean it- no firmware updates, no documentation, and no replacement hardware from our VARs- you'll have to get replacement hardware on the grey market as refurbished units, NOS from some backwater warehouse in North Dakota that got a case of the things by mistake and manages to sell one when they find the case in the back."
For kudos, since I am naming and shaming up there, NEXSAN's support has been... magical. I called them one day in a right panic because the thing was showing multiple failed drives (due to a firmware bug) and the tech that connected with me set up a screen sharing session, pointed me at a specific web page on the machine, and un-failed the drives, bringing it all back to life. He then gave me a link to update the firmware on the device. Other times I've contacted them for hardware issues, and they were both spot on, had the replacement hardware to me within 72 hours, and also made sure we were good with firmware. (and after we let the support lapse on them, they did inform me that "no you have to buy our disks, because we do things with signed firmware that can't be duplicated; even though you are out of support, we'll cheerfully sell you replacement drives."
Cisco... gets a "meh" from me. If I have bad hardware that's provable in the SEL logs (i.e. bad memory sticks) or a failed drive on their UCS systems, as long as I upload the support bundle when I open the case, I usually (~90% of the time) get a response of "yep, it's broken, where do you want the replacement part sent". The other 10% of the time, I have to play the "reseat failed component" game.
Windows 10 was also a bit notorious for doing that as well, which is why I got tired of going to do a 'let's play' stream with friends only to find that, 15 minutes prior to the start, that the audio decided to stop playing nicely. I ended up going full analog for mic and an iPad mini with a soundboard app connected to it, all going into the computer's line-in jack. (i.e., move the complexity off the computer and into hardware which is well known, well understood, and Just Works (tm).
Once upon a time, many, many years ago, VMware charged per socket for their product. Then they switched to per core, probably because they saw what Oracle was doing with their database product licensing and the railcars of money that (alledgedly) brought in, and went 'we gotta get some of that'.
Then there's how Microsoft does their licensing, but I don't have time to pull out the 6 dimensional hypercube set to try and describe it. /sarcasm
Place I used to work for did something similar; Customers generally did either pre-pay, payment due when job is finished, or at best NET 5 for invoicing. From their suppliers, they wanted net 30 or 60, and would pay on the evening of day 30 or 60; They had a problem keeping suppliers, because they all got tired of the beancounter who was doing that.
Place I'm at now is MUCH better about paying it's bills.
... Oh, kind of like a handful of apps that refuse to work on windows 11, but worked fine in windows 10? Or stuff that worked just fine and dandy in windows 7, but just stopped working or started working really poorly under windows 10 despite it being compatible?
(I won't get into the utter train wreck that is the audio subsystem with windows 10 and 11, only to say that there's a reason why I have a five channel analog mixer on my desk with an analog mic with the entire mess being output into the line-in jack on the machine...)
There's only been three real paradigm shifts with MS on the desktop side:
9x to XP (dropped the old kernel for the NT kernel)
XP to windows 7/8.1 (the former is debatable, but the latter was a major enough shift)
windows 7 to windows 10 (massive UI changes)
Server OS has a couple more:
NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 (UI, much better kernel)
4.0 to win2K (properUSB support and Active Directory)
windows 2003 to 2008 (major UI overhaul)
2008 R2 to 2012 R2 (Another major UI overhaul)
2012R2 to 2016 ( (akin to the windows 7 to 10 move)
There's been a slow decline with versions past 2016, mostly in that it's being shifted into a cloud endpoint, and of course AI being threaded through all of it, regardless if it needs it or not.
I'm honestly not sure what server 2024 is gonna look like, we've not deployed it here as 2022 is still under full support and will be for a while, even if the windows 10 (which it shares code with) is being EOL'd.
It takes time to make foundational changes, especially if it involves buying new hardware to replace hardware that still has some of the shiny on it, but doesn't have the new company's Official Seal of Approval(TM) (*coughs*Nutanix*wheeze*) or involves scaling a knowledge cliff to learn a new product.
They are certainly acting like it.
guess I'm gonna have to learn KVM and either cope with Proxmox's UI, Nutanix's "we'd like to sell you a forklift upgrade for roughly the same price you'll pay for vmware support", Hyper-V and the unreliable mess that is Windows Server (even the core edition), or possibly the Morpheus thing that HPE bought- I need to research that one and see if it's worth adding to the proof of concept I'm running.
Or if the manufacturer cared enough to still support it past five years. (*cough*SONY*WHEEZE*)
(Had a laptop that was pretty damn good for it being a 2002 vintage model- it ran XP without any complaint, the onboard graphics were actually decent enough to do some gaming, and it ticked every box I had at the time. fast forward three-four years, to find that there was a bug in the display driver that caused hard locks, but the drivers from manufacturer of the GPU didn't recognize it because the laptop's OEM (Sony) had a custom BIOS for the GPU; They never provided a single driver update in the 5 odd years that had elapsed between introducing that model to when I discovered this issue. Shame, too, as it was a damned solid machine at the time that was supremely easy to work on, had hot-swappable drive modules, and the option for a second battery which gave it a ridiculous amount of run time for the day.
We dropped Citrix like a hot rock a handful of years ago at [RedactedCo] primarily based on 1) having to re-build a configuration for their load balancer/ application proxy appliance after even minor updates (and other issues with it); and 2) tell us that the product could handle a specific configuration and wasting nearly a week's worth of time between myself and the VAR we had brought in only to find out that it absolutely could NOT handle said configuration AND lying to us repeatedly about it until we escalated to one of the architects for that product.
I have ZERO faith in anything Citrix develops or sells to be fit for any purpose whatsoever.
When I built my new workstation, one of the applications I was trying out for controlling the many ARGB lights inside the chassis used a static window size of 1024 x 1080, which is larger than the monitor I have on my test bench (1280x1024); Made for moving around in the app *quite* annnoying.
(I ultimately ended up controlling the fans using a dedicated microcontroller, because nothing in the PC chassis market was able to do what I wanted it to do.)
Fixed dialog and application window sizes are NOT best practice for ANY platform, period.
More or less correct.
I've been tasked with finding alternatives to vmware in our environment, and of the three viable choices we have (Hyper-V, ProxMox, and Nutanix AHV), the first one might end up being the one we go to, even though it's the least desireable choice- The UI and UX for Proxmox is not exactly friendly to someone unfamiliar with Linux, especially on the configuration side, and migrating machines over will be... interesting. (And not in a good way.)
I'm stalled out with testing AHV, because the community edition of the install ISO up and chose the wrong damn network interfaces instead of what VMware and ProxMox does and ask the user at the keyboard what network interface to configure during the process, so I have to dig up a script post-install to fix that in order for me to finish configuring the damn thing to begin with.
Nutanix would also us rather buy their hardware instead of the validated hardware we already own, so it'd be more of a forklift upgrade costing more than the support contract that VMware quoted us back in March. (And we'd also have to buy additional hardware for what we have anyway, because AHV doesn't like using things like external storage appliances, even if they are on a dedicated SAN.
While there's a probable migration path from VMware to Hyper-V, it's going to involve down time (much like ProxMox's migration process) and adding in the instability of Windows Servers as a Hypervisor, which frankly scares me.
Had to do something similar with a laptop- we had purchased the 'accidental damage' coverage for the unit at the place I was at, and in this instance, the machine had soda dumped into it.
I put a note in with the machine (after pulling the hard drive with had HIPAA-level data on it) that the drive was not supplied for that reason, and outside the scope of the repair. The company was also informed of that when I set up the repair order.
It got repaired and returned, and it sprang to life just fine after I reinstalled the drive on it.
I worked with a guy for a while who we hired from a PMC (Private Military Contractor, aka mercenary / "Private Security" company) who did their IT.
He ultimately quite and went back, because if someone was yelling at him (or flinging lead at speed) he could shoot back.
(One of the many people we had who joined and left because of the toxic boss we had...)
Yeah, someone tried that with me as well, but I had already changed the wake word on it.
Personally, I'm going to be ditching the things here shortly because of the changes to the T&Cs for things, especially now that the madlads at Home Assistant have cooked up a voice assistant that works entirely on-prem, provided a sufficiently powerful box to run it on...
I had, at one point in time, a Lexmark Optra S, which was a 12ppm beast of a machine in it's day. Except I never really used it, and on that printer, the OPC drum portion of the toner cartridge did eventually die on me from disuse.
The other reason I got rid of it was because the process for replacing the paper pickup/feed rollers required almost a full teardown of the damned thing, including pulling the main drive train out.
The HP laser printers (at least the medium to large business class models) were built for long service life- the pickup and feed rollers were super easy to replace, and you got a set of them with a maintenance kit, which was every 100,000 to 150,000 pages, depending on model.
The less said about the "L" series models, the better- those were pretty crap.
Ah, the old Tektronix Phasers (as I used to know them before Xerox bought the technology) and their crayons.
Beautiful print quality, and once they were up to temp, you sent it a print job, and it would crank out full bleed color prints at a rate unheard of for that size and class of printer.
The downsides? a 20 minute warmup/cooldown period, and during the warmup phase, it ate a full set of crayons, which IIRC were not exactly cheap either. And the place smelled like someone had put a box of Crayolas into an oven as well. :D
Fond memories.
Well, there's the whole momentum thing with Exchange, and that it's a reasonable mashup of calendering, email, and contact management in one single application / server. I'm not saying that it's good by any means, but finding a replacement that's not worse is... difficult.
My experience with dealing with Outlook and Exchange is part of the reason why I have grey hairs already. (and dealing with a support team that, at one point, was under the opinion that the RTM release of Office would work out of the box with an up to date version of Exchange without having to have a service pack and a minimum of three critical patches installed to make that connectivity work- this was a 9 month argument that was a major stressor.)
a long time ago at a different employer we ran into a problem where the dial up internet service we were using wouldn't let us cancel service without authorization from the person who had set up the service- said person had passed away unexpectedly, and their replacement was getting things sorted out. We had to get copies of the death certificate in order to cancel each account, or at least until one of the owners of the company contacted someone high up over at the ISP, who agreed to do a "one time" bulk cancellation for us. (There might have been involvement from lawyers, I can't remember.)
The replacement service was much more sensible.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
