How to Fix Your PC

These are just painful... apparently, step 1 is to locate a wrench.

These stock images of people 'fixing' computers are so wrong they’ll give you physical pain - Electronic Products http://t.co/9Lq5f9FizT

— Sverre Holm, LA3ZA (@LA3ZA) April 24, 2015

Hot Jobs in Knoxville

Woo hoo!

Computer and Information Systems Managers are expected to be the hottest job in Knoxville between now and 2020.

IT: As Seen By

In case you don’t reddit, an awesome summary of IT: pic.twitter.com/BRKHgfbG0w
— Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) December 24, 2014

Funny?

Is it just me or are these not funny? I like to pick on users as much as the next IT professional, but so many of these sound like the urban legends of the IT world.

I'm trying to come up with some funny stories of my own, but I'm struggling. I remember the lady that set her coffee on top of our AS/400, but that was more cringe inducing than funny.

Another lady was mad because the replacement for her corded mouse, a wireless mouse, would slide off her angled keyboard tray. Sorry we couldn't bend the rules of gravity for you there. That story was more about how to deal with a difficult users. This lady was very direct and I had to be blunt/tough with her right back. That's just the way she worked.

I'll think on this some more and maybe I can recall an actual funny one.

Truth

I see things like this all the time... usually when someone demands something, it is impossible (given the current architecture or would take a year or a million dollars.) When someone starts by saying "I don't know if this is even possible," it turns out to be a simple request.

My Friends

This week my friends have included:

fixboot
Two XP machines suddenly lost their minds. A little Recovery Console magic got them going again:

"Use this command to write the new Windows boot sector code on the system partition. In the command syntax, drive name is the drive letter where the boot sector will be written. This command fixes damage in the Windows boot sector. This command overrides the default setting, which writes to the system boot partition. The fixboot command is supported only on x86-based computers."

netstat -a
A computer that should be a good machine would take an incredibly long time to open Excel, Word, and Reader files. If you were in the application and did a File | Open everything was quick. Netstat allowed me see that the computer was trying to connect to a server that had been retired. It was just spinning its wheels until it timed out. I ended up adding the old server name to DNS and pointing it to the new server.

Hiren's BootCD
A great general purpose boot disc with lots of tools, but I used it for NTPWEdit 0.3 to reset a customer's password on an XP box. Download here.

Microsoft Program Install and Uninstall Fixit troubleshooter

A client had tried re-installing a tool on his laptop, but it wouldn't complete successfully. It kept throwing an "Error 1706. No valid source could be found for product VeriFire Tools. The Windows Installer cannot continue."  I ran the Fixit troubleshooter from here to clean-up the broken installs. (I had to run it four times as the software showed up four times and each one needed to be removed.)

Lots of other good stuff recently, too... playing with Server 2012, Exchange 2010, a Juniper firewall, a MondoPad, Trend cloud anti-virus, etc.

Craftsman Data Centers

"Farney believes the Ubiquity concept for the Sears Auto Centers would provide a winning template for data centers. While some auto centers are attached to mall-based retail stores, more than 50 are stand-alone facilities, often located on the perimeter of shopping malls. These sites are typically concrete buildings of between 25,000 and 50,000 square feet, with ceiling heights of at least 16 feet."

No word on the lifetime warranty.

Via Slashdot.org

Security

From an unsolicited commercial e-mail...

"Are you concerned with the recent hacking of City Databases"

Yes. So concerned in fact, that I am willing to jump into the arms of the first company that e-mails me with a solution. It doesn't matter the cost. It doesn't matter that I've never heard of you before today. And it doesn't matter that your lack of punctuation and odd capitalization is off putting.

Okay, maybe I am not that concerned after all.

"Basically, IT magnifies power"

I like this quote from Bruce:

"Basically, IT magnifies power"

He is using it to discuss the activities of the Syrian government to deal with dissidents, but I think it applies to more mundane situations - like running a business.

Word of the Day: CamelCase

CamelCase. I use it all the time, but I never knew it had a name. It came up in this discussion.

Battle: .COM vs .GOV

No wonder I think private industry trumps government in most arenas... Whitehouse e-mail down 23% of the time in a 40 day period.

Via Slashdot.org

Server Names

Fun stuff going on over at Slashdot in a post about how to name servers. I greatly prefer a combination of location and function for my server names. A couple of comments did make me laugh - they hit a little too close to home.

From MightyMartian we have:

"Indeed. After years of enduring networks with servers with tree names or GI Joe character names, when it came for me to come up with names for my servers and other network devices, I came up with functional names that describe physical locations, departments, functions, and so forth. That way I have a descriptive network rather than trying to remember which one of the Power Rangers the last IT guy liked the best."

And from Dave Emami we get:

"The Naming of Servers is a serious matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a server has three different names...

... those being DNS entry, IP, and the one which "the server itself knows, and never will confess."

Is the server down?

Bless their hearts. I don't expect my user/customers to know everything about how the IT systems work, but I have to laugh a little when they call and ask "Is the server down?" It makes it sounds like every service (database, e-mails, file, numerous applications) and bit of hardware (servers, switches, routers, firewalls, NAS, SAN) is running on one magic box.

While virtualization has greatly reduced the number of physical servers, I don't see us getting down to one anytime soon.

Not Sure Which is Scarier

asymco From comments: "consumerization" is actually going to reveal itself as "commoditization" of IT as an industryWed, Jan 11 05:42:28 from Twitter for Mac

Of course, my background is on the infrastructure side, which I've felt like has been a commodity for a long time. In the past you outsourced infrastructure to a different company, but kept the techs (maybe the same set of techs!) on-site. Then you outsourced some of your infrastructure support to India. Now you put applications in the cloud. I guess it really doesn't scare me - everything changes and IT faster than others.

I'd still love to get our e-mail in the cloud. I've got plenty to do and off loading e-mail would be a good one.

OT?

Overtime pay? What's that?

No overtime pay for IT workers.

Get the bacon. I'll cover you.

Yeah, it is a commercial for Spiceworks. But, I give them credit for:

• a good, free (ad supported) help desk
• decent production quality on the video
• zombies
• guns (NERF)
• I.T. guys
• bacon

IT Generalists

Scaling lessons from Google’s CIO — Cloud Computing News:

"In the question and answer period that followed, Fried elaborated on these concepts, telling someone that IT generalists are probably born, not made. He said at Google, the company looks for folks that want to keep improving their skills, and even has a program to help give those people the tools to be better engineers when they find those traits in employees. He said the Google culture is one where the general engineers who understand the system have a lot of input and power, which is a cultural shift that organizations that want to build at scale should try to implement."

We are all becoming generalists at our company. When there are so few of us, you have to learn a little bit of everything.