@El_Heffe said:

@Rhywden said:

So? What kind of punishment did you enact? A SLA is worthless without specification of what the guilty party has to pay in case they don't do what the SLA demands.

The OP doesn't actually say who the SLA was with but I get the feeling that it was with their own "central IT" that he describes at the beginning of the story.  Which means there is no "punishment" to be enacted other than maybe trying to get someone fired.  And then there's this:@citking said:

The IT manager leaned back and folded his hands together. "It's just a piece of paper." he said. "I wrote it up and signed it because I thought it would make you guys feel better.

I suspect there actually was no SLA.  The manager just printed it out, signed it and showed it to them, just to shut them up.

Nah.  Nobody would ever do that.

 

It was with our own central IT. So it was like an 8 year old signing a pledge with mom to promise cookies after dinner. When mom doesn't keep her end of the deal then what's the 8 year old to do?

You're right. No one, not even  alazy, inept IT manager, would do something that diabolical.

/snark

 

 @Rhywden said:

So? What kind of punishment did you enact? A SLA is worthless without specification of what the guilty party has to pay in case they don't do what the SLA demands.

Absolutely nothing. That was the highlight of our pointless SLA that guranteed everything but nothing.

 

In a previous job I was both desktop support and server support for a small online college that was part of a bigger college system. Each brick and mortar campus had their own IT infrastructure - switches, servers, and some of the larger ones had SANs and reliable backup systems. At the hub of these campuses was central IT. They provided shared services such as web hosting for each of the colleges' sites, email, Active Directory, licensing servers, etc. Each campus had its own servers for local things like file serving, printing, DHCP, etc.

Our office, having a small staff of 10 people but supporting an enrollment of around 2000 students and growing, was moving from the building that central IT was located in. Before that we were using their servers and such for our needs. With the move, however, we needed to secure a box for file serving, DHCP, printing, etc. So I got one, set it up, and things were going along swimmingly.

Long story short, our campus moved buildings a few times due in part to a failed merger with another division. Meanwhile, I went to work at a brick and mortar campus until they could find a new IT person. In all of this shuffle, the server I had procured was removed and was replaced with a virtual server in a data center that I had no physical or virtual access to.

I came back to the online campus just as they they were preparing to move to a building that they had secured a long-term lease with. From day one I fought to have our old server brought back for the same purposes it had served in the past: DHCP, printing, file serving, etc. This time, however, the central IT manager would not have it. "You can continue to use our services," he said, brow furrowed. "You'll be on fiber at the new location and we have this wonderful new data center that can do everything: DHCP, file serving, print serving, the whole nine yards."

I argued back. "What about redundancy? What if the data center goes down for some reason? We'll be completely offline, which is bad enough, but things are a little worse when you're an online campus."

"Nonsense!" the IT manager said. "The data center doesn't ever go down." This statement was absolutely false because it had gone down a few times while I had been at the brick and mortar campus. But this guy was the latest in a seemingly unending parade of IT managers so I gave him some slack.

Unfortunately, my supervisor ended up agreeing with the IT manager. We all came to the mutual decision though that we should have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place to cover our critical needs.

A few weeks later the IT manager came back with an example SLA mostly filled out. It still had the website branding from the site he had plucked it from. It was missing some essential services that we needed covered and had some services, like Wordpress, that we didn't even use. 

A few days later he came back with a more polished SLA. The website name had been blotted out with some white-out (apparently he didn't know how to use page setup in his browser to eliminate that header but hey, whatever). More importantly though, we were able to get our services listed on there with three levels of support: Critical, which covered services that we had to have or we'd be dead in the water, Medium, which covered some services we could go a few days without, and Low, which covered everything else. The key part of these levels were the response times: Critical had a response time of an hour 24/7 with regular communications at 30 minutes if the issue wasn't resolved. Medium and low had more relaxed times. 

It was 9:04 AM on a clear, sunny Tuesday when the data center went down. The first indication that something horrible was wrong was when our shares became disconnected and we couldn't access files. A few moments later the printers were not responding. Suddenly, internet connectivity started dwindling because the one hour lease times on the DHCP server were expiring (I know, I know - one hour was their "standard" lease time and no amount of arguing would make them budge. Seeing that many of their departments were still using mandatory static IPs because DHCP is 'inherently insecure' I wasn't going to push the issue). So now here we were, an online campus with no Internet, no file serving, no printers, no email, and no word about what was happening and when it would be fixed. 

I got the Internet to limping by assigning static IPs. I created temporary connections to our networked printers to print via IP, something I should have done to begin with I guess since the office was so small. But we still had no file server access. Per our SLA we were due a phone call or some sort of communication within a few minutes of the response time. 

Nothing. 

So I called. "We're busy! We're working on it. Don't bother us"

"Well, what's the problem?"

"We're looking into it."

An hour goes by. I call again. Same response.

Lunch comes and goes. Still no call. I call again. "We're busy! Stop bothering us!"

"Look," I say. "We're dead in the water here without file access. Can you give me any sort of ETA or let me know what's going on?"

"No. We're busy. We're looking into it." The line went dead, 

Eventually the data center comes back online around 4 PM. I go home, stopping at a liquor store to grab a six pack of cold ones to relax after a shitty day.

The next day I go to see the IT manager. He wasn't expecting me and I could tell that I was the last person he wanted to see. But I cornered him in his office and demanded to know why our SLA was ignored. "We both agreed in good faith that you would regularly call me to update me on what's happening!" I said calmly but exasperatedly. "Instead we spent all day being down and I still don't know why."

"A router went down and we had some complications replacing it." he said.

"Well, that's nice, but again, why wasn't I notified and told this? Why didn't anyone call me and keep me updated?"

The IT manager leaned back and folded his hands together. "It's just a piece of paper." he said. "I wrote it up and signed it because I thought it would make you guys feel better. Besides, what happened yesterday will never happen again. The data center usually doesn't ever go down." 

@nexekho said:

When I read the title I thought maybe someone had finally broken one.

Based on my experience one just waits a year or two and, inevitably, the wireless and/or the touchscreen stop working completely. Granted these are machines that had been in a squad car for a year or so but cops+Toughbook=broken just about every time.

@blakeyrat said:

How badass would it be if the box said, "run over with truck".

 

I bet going to the UPS office to pick up a waiting package would be far more entertaining....

 It can withstand water, cars, and jumping up and down on it. Panasonic, in fact, puts it through a rigorous testing process. 

 But when it comes to UPS or FedEx even Panasonic knows well enough not to challenge them:

 I repair laptops in my spare time...by the time they come to me BIOS updating is the last thing possible :/

Sounds like there's going to be a class-action suit thoguh against HP and Nvidia. I'm not mad that there was a manufacturing defect - stuff happens. It's what happens (or in this case, doesn't happen) after the defect is discovered.

I wish we could use the UPD...however in my testing I've found that, more often than not, PCs using the UPD to print end up printing garbage to the printer. This seems to happen on printers both new and old, so until HP gets their act together and QAs that driverwe need to use the specific print drivers.

At work we are currently in the process of deploying Windows 7 Professional x64. The 64-bit architecture was decreed by the CIO who decided on her own that that was the best course of action. Despite an issue here and there with home-built legacy applications that contained hard-coded profile and application paths the deployment is going smoothly. The only real problem continues to be HP and their careless driver naming.

On campus I decided to set up a new print server to work side-by-side with the old 32-bit print server. The plan was to keep both servers running and to load both the 32-bit and 64-bit print drivers onto the 64-bit print server since many older PCs were going to be running Windows XP until the PCs were eventually replaced. Once the new print server was completed I would decommission the old server and point both the XP (32-bit) and 7 (64-bit) PCs to the new server.

For those who have never used Windows to host a print server it works like this: You create a printer object, use your naming convention to share the printer, install the 64-bit driver at the same time that you create the printer, and then use a 32-bit OS to launch Print Management and load the 32-bit driver onto the 64-bit computer. It's a bit cumbersome but it works so long as both of the driver's have the same exact name. 

HP, for those who don't know, ships many of their current printer drivers with Windows Server 2008. So, for instance, a LaserJet P4015DN printer would have a driver with Windows that said "HP LaserJet P4014/4015 PCL6". Installing this on a 64-bit server is no issue. 

Of course, in order for the printer to be installed by 32-bit clients you need to add the 32-bit driver. No problem...I went to HP's site, downloaded the driver, and got this: "HP LaserJet P4014/4015 PCL 6" with the difference being the space between PCL and 6. You wouldn't think this little space would be harmful but because HP can't use the same name for both of their drivers we can't have 32-bit clients print to those printers, as Windows will report back that the printer does not have a driver associated with it

And for those of you who say "The real WTF is that you just didn't edit the .INF file by hand and change it to match." Of course I tried that, but of course after doing that the print driver is no longer signed and thus Windows gets angry. 

So far it appears that this is an issue with the aforementioned P4015 and the CP6015 series of printers. I'm sure there are others. 

The work-arounds that have been tossed about include creating a separate printer object for 32-bit PCs but I think that's sloppy. We also have to use the print server (and not IP printing) because we charge students for printing and use the statistics to manage our yearly toner and maintenance budget.

I just wish HP would get a clue. They used to be the best printer manufacturer out there until Carly Fiorina decided to tank the company some years ago. Now their wonderful, trusty, dependable (but slow) LaserJet 4s, 5s, etc. have been replaced by big plastic pieces of junk. The silver lining to all of this is we have yet to purchase a new toner or drum for our highly-used CP6015 Color LaserJet because every consumable that shipped with the printer has developed a defect. Hell, I've already replaced the formatter (main logic board) in one of them after 4 months.

And don't even get me started on the Pavillion DV2000/6000/9000 series of laptops. One can blame Nvidia but HP's refusal to recall them and do proper repairs just ticks me off to no end.

/end rant

@PeriSoft said:

So, yeah, these extrapolations are absurd, but when you look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't have any baseline, they're not stupid.

The point is to teach them, which is what I did. Nowhere did I say they were stupid questions. In fact, my tag on the OP says otherwise. I just brought up moments that were funny to bring a little sunshine to peoples' lives.You must have come up with the stupid part yourself somewhere.

@PeriSoft said:

And again, as far as the hard drive thing goes... well, the hard drive is an external device that stores data. It's a different form factor than a CD, but so's a memory stick, which provides the same basic functionality. And it also holds data and can be rewritten. Technically, you could use a CDR if you stored the data temporarily on the host machine's drive, though it would be a PITA with limited lifespan.

And no, there is absolutely no way you would use CDRs to store virtual machines. The lag time would be horrendous and you'd need a spindle of them to store the drives (depending, of course, how much disk space you allocate and whether or not it is allocated up-front or not). Lastly, an external hard drive is in no way comparable to a spindle of CDRs. THat's like saying that a monitor is the same thing as a printer since they belong to the same class of device.