Troubleshooting question: Do you have "spam my history" enabled or disabled?
Posts made by izzion
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RE: Retry button loads the first post, not the first unread
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RE: Representative documentation
Not terribly important, but that wasn't my claim. Rather, it was:1. Any site one device can see, all can see.2. And site one device can not see, no device can see.3. Except when using the AT&T cellular network via the one relevant cell phone, where all sites were visible.
I've had problems before where they did something on their side to fix it, but it wasn't widespread. They've never told me what they did, but it seemed like it was just something in a weird state with respect to our connection - including, possibly, something to do with the router/modem.
Not saying that was the claim you were "making". But it's almost certainly the claim that the helldrone heard.
And as far as your "discobug", it's showing normal to me
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RE: Representative documentation
Also, many $majorVendors I've worked with (specifically Dell and HP, but there have been others as well) tend to have their Online Support staffed with more of a Tier 1.5/Tier 2 type tech. And/or they're much quicker to escalate on Chat Support calls.
I think partly because there's a recognition that someone who went looking for the Chat Support option is much more likely to not be afraid of their computer.
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RE: Representative documentation
Pretty much.
And it really happens. We have customers who have notes attached to their permanent file along the lines of "customer will always say they rebooted their equipment, but they never reboot the right equipment (if they're actually rebooting any)".
@Dreikin:
To be fair to Verizon's helldesk, I would have probably started off with blaming your computers or internal network setup too. "Half the Internet is intermittently down, and it's your equipment's fault" is a pretty extraordinary claim, especially if they're not receiving a large mass of calls from your area. Because inconsistent/incomplete outages for one customer are almost always a DNS resolution problem -- a routing problem would be expected to cause a massive deluge of calls due to dozens/hundreds/thousands of customers being out.We had a customer on our FIOS the other day that had their Internet keep cutting in and out. Their router's uptime wasn't going backwards, the ONT's uptime wasn't going backwards, and there were no log entries showing an interface on the ONT bouncing. Of course, the customer was convinced it was our fault. Eventually, through the use of a packet inspection tool (MikroTik's Torch utility), we were able to observe that the customer was using a 3rd party DNS server that was periodically not responding to their requests (I assume there was a rate limiter inline somewhere -- certainly not ours).
Even that took the customer three support calls and effectively two escalations before it got to someone who was able to even start diagnosing. And it still took me the better part of 2 hours of work on it to catch the right piece of information to pin-point the problem.
TL;DR: technology is hard.
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RE: When you shouldn't automate things
We understand. These things happen when you let an automated poster create posts for you.
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
I forgot rule #37 of the Internetz:
Don't use sarcasm or hyperbole
:'(
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
Basically, Microsoft requires the following to go from 8.0 Enterprise to 8.1 Enterprise:
- Download or otherwise acquire a ISO for 8.1 Enterprise installation
- Insert the DVD/USB disk with 8.1 burned on it while your computer is running in the 8.0 Enterprise partition
- Select "Install Windows" and choose the Upgrade option -- basically, just like a new install, except you choose Upgrade instead of Custom and don't lose data or installed programs or anything.
- Let Windows install, then run your updates and be happy.
But hey, it's the first ever officially supported "in place upgrade" by Microsoft!
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
All you have to do to update to 8.1 Enterprise is to get the installer and do a (fully supported) in-place upgrade from within your running Windows 8 installation. A deliberate design choice to give enterprises better control over the deployment of such a potentially breaking update.
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RE: Representative documentation
Not sure I've ever had a customer1 where I could get away with a 3 month investigation delay. But yes, good tactic to combat the PC Magaziner.
1That I wanted to keep, anyway.
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RE: Representative documentation
Working in IT consulting for small companies in the back-of-beyond, I wind up encountering what we've dubbed the "PC Magazine" type. They're a moderately successful entrepreneur, and they haven't gotten where they are by being dumb or being wasteful in spending. So when they need something to improve their networking, they bring in professional help, and then try to help the help by insisting on specific "flavor of the month" solutions that are pretty much the latest buzzword bingo winners. Sometimes you can convince them it's a bad idea, sometimes you can't.
Of course, said ex-coworker who was responsible for our FTTP service fustercluck had a tendency to jump on board with whatever PC Magazine thing the customer wanted to do, so I'm just eagerly awaiting when I get to inherit one of those messes (hello, assisting the customer with installing the Linux Exchange "replacement" when we're a MS Partner shop and pretty much everyone in the building told him to sell Exchange or cut this -- very parsimonious -- customer loose. :x)
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RE: Representative documentation
Ah, yeah. Private consulting is way betterer than general helldesk. At least my current job's helldesk manager is willing to back his support staff up when the "always right" gets rude and belligerent. Having customers know they can get fired makes for a much nicer helldrone experience.
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RE: Representative documentation
Yeah, I've definitely wound up on the wrong end of the "customer assured me he knows what he's doing and didn't." And sometimes we get customers who get extremely belligerent when you try to have them work through things; they're insisting that someone needs to come out (within the next 5 minutes!!!!!!) and fix our broken stuff.
But, in general, if you (calmly, quietly, politely) explain to them that they're going to receive $extraCharge for the service call if you're unable to complete the basic troubleshooting and the problem turns out to be tied to that, they'll be a bit more reasonable. And if they still aren't, then you note the ticket, schedule the service call, and make sure billing knows to terminate their service when they refuse to pay the $extraCharge later. Sometimes haters just gonna hate
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RE: Representative documentation
Well, it's indirectly on my CV -- I'm a business major
But, from having worked the equivalent of helldesk levels 1 and 2 in working up to my current position, the rules I've found for being on the helldesk side of the conversation run to the effect of:
- Remember that the guy contacting you is already pissed off at you(r company), because he's had this problem for a while and has probably already tried some things to remedy it.
- 90% of the time, the person on the other end of the phone is incapable of communicating in tech-speak. Use common terms to describe what you want them to do. (In our case, we often have to talk people through unplugging the power from their Power over Ethernet - PoE - adapter. To get them to find it, we relate it to "grey colored box, size of a bar of soap" or the like.)
- For IT/networking/Internet type things: 90% of users don't use the address bar as an address bar. Know what the Google & Bing search pages are going to look like for whatever string you're going to ask them to type in.
- Never ask them to do something in a way that implies they haven't already done it. Ask, "can you verify X" or "I am required to have you check A, B, C while you're on the phone with me." Most people are civil enough to realize that the helldrone is constrained to following certain steps, and if you reference that, you'll get some subconscious sympathy from them.
And, obviously, when you're on the customer side of the helldesk, getting vulgar or overly pushy with the drone is simply gonna get your ticket binned. Bust out a business argument they aren't going to want their manager to see/hear if the ticket gets escalated, make sure you communicate clearly and slowly, and make sure that you follow their requests (even if "following" means lying down on the couch and counting out 15 seconds while you "reboot" your modem for the 7th time).
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RE: Representative documentation
A) I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, as their support experience in the past has been best summarized as "create ticket, get no useable response, e-mail your assigned sales engineer, wait days, then get a response from escalated support via your sales engineer"
B) If he was stalling, acceptable responses would include:
- Email #1: "To verify, have you checked our manuals, located here: {link}"
- Email #2: "Ok, I think there might be more information on page 63/64 of {manual you didn't already try}, but I'm also going to ask our engineering department for further information."
OR
- Email #1: "I've sent a request to engineering for more information, but while we're waiting, you might also be able to find the answer with our manuals, located here: {link}".
I'm going with the moron-projecting-that-I'm-a-moron theory. Y must u be so useless, helldesk?
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RE: Representative documentation
And representative support conversation (via e-mail):
Me:
I'm trying to recover the configuration of an {shitty rack chassis} that we have in our testing rack -- we lost the documentation for how it got set up. What is the pinout of the cable needed to connect via the serial port?
Agent:
See link: {link to their support site manuals page, which has a configuration manual, an installation manual, some release notes, etc}
Me:
I've looked through the configuration guide, and while it has information about the default serial port baud rate settings, it doesnβt provide me any information about what pin-out I need for the cable connection to my computer.
Agent:
Let me know if page 63/64 is helpful.
Me:
I would greatly appreciate my next contact from you to be the actual pin-out of the serial console port, rather than this "hide and seek" bits of information that is completely incomplete and inaccurate. {More rant about having gone through all of the manuals, including pages 63 and 64, and none of them having the gorram pinout information}
Agent:
Sorry,
Didn't mean to upset you, just trying to help you.
Here's information I received from one of the engineers:
See, now, that wasn't so hard! It only took 3 e-mails over the space of an hour to get the basic pinout information!
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Representative documentation
So, the fiber ONTs I've inherited primary responsibility for are giant steaming piles (actually, I think I just slandered steaming piles everywhere). And the support documentation & support department for the company aren't much better. See:
Reset Button
The unit can be reset to factory defaults by pressing and holding the reset button for less than 10 seconds
will cause a reset of the device. Holding the reset button, until all front panel LEDs turn on, will reset the
configuration to factory defaults and then do a reset of the device.Ai de mi. I think if I ever encounter former co-worker who was responsible for picking these, I'll have to thank him "properly"...
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RE: No good reason
$dynamicRemoteAccessService (LogMeIn, TeamViewer, etc.) doesn't work for you? In my experience, those services go through multiple layers of NAT like Discodevs through introducing new bugs.
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-q61wbWm3c
If my Google-fu hasn't let me down, it looks like as of W8.0 the tiles were resizeable for metro-based apps only (but not for the non-metro ones). The images on the linked video were all medium sized for the non-metro ones.
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
I think it's fairly "learning" -- I set most of mine to medium and whacked all the bloatware tiles (that were, of course, large), and then new pins I make are medium.
Start menu browser; the Desktop's too much of a pain to get at for me 90% of the time -- in fact, at work, I have the Desktop open in an Explorer window just to use it as temporary file space.
Win+Search isn't in my blood b/c I'm newish to W7 -- most of my windows experience is on XP, which predates that shortcut.
As a converted Start Menu browser myself, I can testify1 that it is totally worth the time and pain to get used to the search & pin paradigm
1All testimony guaranteed useless or your money back
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
You do realize they come in like 3 sizes, right? Glasses-not-required, my-glasses-are-on, and I-never-use-glasses. Most of my pins are in the "medium" variety, which gives you 5 boxes down by like 8 boxes across (squares) on a 1440x900 resolution 19"W monitor.
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
The Vista/W7 start menu sucked, because they took out the expando feature. I understand WHY they did it, but it crippled it.
The crippling was a feature, not a bug. The whole migration of the Start experience from XP -> Vista/7 -> 8 has been toward pinning the things you REALLY REALLY need and searching for the rest. Why browse through 2/3/4/5 levels of folders when you can press 2-5 keys and then have what you need right there? (Or have a pin if it's a very high use application.)
My big gripe with this is that it needlessly takes over the entire screen. It may make sense on a tablet or a phone, but not on a desktop.
Which is why the W8 Start screen takes over the screen -- more real-estate for pins.
I, for one, love the extra real-estate -- I have something like 3 different groups of 8+ pins, to help keep things organized into my day-to-day apps, my administrative apps, etc. Just simply no way to make that work in the Vista/7 start paradigm, unless your start bar is like 3 rows tall. I'm kind of sad that they seem to be moving "backwards" some in 10, I hope that there's a way to keep a suitably large Start area for pins.
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RE: Need Help with Office politics
Curiosity question for you and @Yamikuronue ... in your W7 days, were you a Win + Search type, a pinner, a desktop hoarder, or a Start Menu browser?
In my experiences with IT consulting & residential
hellhelpdesk, the people who had the most problems with W8 were the Start Menu browser types. Who were generally the people who thought of themselves as power users (some even actually knew how to use their computer)... the mom & pops -- who were kind of the primary target with Metro anyway -- were either desktop hoarders or pinners (not impacted), or they had learned how to Win + Search, which works at least as well on 8 as it does on 7.In my experience, people in IT-related careers are the worst Luddites (including myself >_>)
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RE: Still receiving badge notifications from muted topic
Hrm, I guess between my mini-topic-drift and imprecise language, I didn't express myself very well...
To summarize my various posts in this thread:
- Discourse's current behavior with respect to the topic "tracking" options:
- Muted: notifies on badge receipt. Topic does not appear in unread list, does not get new post count circles
- Regular: notifies on @mention, direct reply1, badge receipt, and like receipt. Topic does not appear in unread list, does not get new/unread post count circles.
- Tracking: notifies on @mention, direct reply1, badge receipt, and like receipt. Topic appears in unread list and gets new/unread post count circles.
- Watching: notifies on @mention, ALL replies, badge receipt, and like receipt. Topic appears in unread list and gets new/unread post count circles.
1Direct reply: when someone replies to a post you made. As opposed to a reply made to a different poster in the thread.
The original bug report:- Muted says it suppresses all notifications, but does not suppress badge receipt notifications.
The additional clarification request/suggestion (http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/still-receiving-badge-notifications-from-muted-topic/4793/3?u=izzion):
- Improve the copy of all four tracking options to indicate whether badge/like notifications are included in that tracking option.
The suggestion to modify the behavior of the existing tracking options (the same post as above):
- Request to change "Regular" tracking to exclude notifications on badges and likes. This would change Regular to be as follows: notifies on @mention and direct reply only. Topic does not appear in unread list and does not get new/unread posts circles.
I'm not really that attached to the suggestion on changing "Regular". It would be nice for me (because of the likes thread), but I don't think I can actually build a justification to it for a "normal" use case.
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RE: Still receiving badge notifications from muted topic
You wooshed yourself.
For a topic, "Watching" is the level that's supposed to do that.
"Tracking" is supposed to (as I read the copy) generate notifications for @mentions and direct replies (plus, I assume, likes and badges), but not for replies to someone else in the thread.
I haven't even messed with category level tracking settings and how that effects topics, since I'm too lazy to do that detailed of testing, especially on a weekend :P
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RE: Still receiving badge notifications from muted topic
If tracking a thread is notifying on any new post (not just @mention or replies), then that would be a bug compared to the copy as well -- the nice drop down box says "Watching" notifies on all posts, while it does not say that for "Tracking". Can you confirm that the behavior does work that way?
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RE: RAID is the best backup
Well, yes, obviously any RAID works better when fully submerged in water (do you use salt water? it absorbs 77.2% more heat!).
</sarcasm>
We have had customers that do lose the RAID due to drive #2 (or even #3) failing during the rebuild process. Always fun to hear the fallout when they started the rebuild over our specific recommendation to take a backup first (which, of course, has its own "perils", but much lower risk operation than launching straight into the rebuild).
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RE: RAID is the best backup
Another (bigger) issue with a RAID 5/6 is rebuild mechanics.
Because of the parity bit(s), any rebuild on RAID 5/6 must thrash ALL OTHER drives in the array in order to rebuild the data. If you're using a RAID 10, only the "matching" drive on the other side has to be read, which leads to less heat generated during the rebuild, faster rebuild times (no parity calculations, fewer reads, etc etc), and generally lower risk of "OMG everything is gone" when you have to rebuild a drive.
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RE: Still receiving badge notifications from muted topic
Another thing I guess I should have checked closer before the initial report:
- None of the watching levels really indicate which levels should cause notifications when a post you made receives a "like". As-is, all levels "Regular" and above are generating those notifications. I think the copy should be improved to indicate which levels are supposed to generate those notifications.
- Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing "Regular" being @mentions and replies only (and suppressing badges/Likes), but I realize my use case is a little non-standard b/c of /t/1000. But it seems right now that there's really no noteworthy difference between "Tracking" and "Regular" other than the unread counts on the topic list, so maybe that's a worthwhile distinction to add?
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Still receiving badge notifications from muted topic
Expected behavior: "You will never be notified of anything about this topic..." means I don't receive badge notifications for posts in the topic either.
Actual behavior: I get notifications for badges in /t/1000 even though I have it muted. I don't receive any reply, mentions, or "likes" notifications.
Reproduction rate: 100%
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
Hey, don't go pinning the requirements on me. I just TL;DR'd the meta.d thread. Maybe. Assuming I could understand the OP's Engrish correctly.
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
Pretty sure you're upside-down with what the request was, anyway (at least as I read it over on meta.d...)
They want to be able to lock the whole forum down to TL1+, and then more or less prevent auto-upgrade to TL1, and have one thread where anyone can post (the "request activation" thread).
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RE: Daylight saving time
As referenced, the standard DHCP protocol will attempt to renew the same lease at 50% (and 75% and 87.5%) of the original lease time.
Certain older MSoft clients (Win XP, at least originally) would pitch a fit if the original lease wasn't divisible by 8 to get to a whole number of either seconds or minutes. But most modern equipment will handle things just fine -- and potentially generate a fair amount of DHCP traffic.
But if your network falls over by adding 1000 DHCP renewals every 5 minutes, I'd put forward that you probably have an underlying network issue somewhere. Plus, if I understand @lightsoff's current situation correctly, he's already generating a fair amount of NTP traffic that he could then throttle back once he doesn't have to use the NTP kludge to keep the time in sync.
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RE: Daylight saving time
You wouldn't even have to reboot the switches, you could go with a very short lease time on the phone vlan (5, 10 minutes).
Alternately, I'm pretty sure that you could use central provisioning on the phones to update the TZ, but you might generate reboots for the phones when they pick up the provisioning change (for instance, Cisco SPA 50x and 3xx phones will reboot for pretty much any provisioning change, whereas the SPA 525 generally only "refreshes" its SIP module and doesn't do a full phone reboot). The degree to which that's acceptable would depend on how many phones have computers daisy chained behind them.
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RE: Daylight saving time
I can say for sure that not having the time zone on the server auto-update is Doing It Wrong -- the first step in the setup documentation is installing and configuring NTP.
Depending on the phone end points, the most likely "actual problem" here is that the phones aren't auto DST. Cisco SPA phones are whiny little bitches about it, such that you have to 1) have a working NTP connection and 2) add a fairly fugly configuration line either via provisioning or manual config to define your DST rule. Either one without the other is insufficient, and will cause you to "have to" update the
clocktime zone on the phones twice a year. -
RE: How stupid Facebook users can be?
It's not really a "stupid Facebook users" thing, but more a symptom of the "rise of the wizardry" brought on by our increasingly specialized world. As more things get more complex (computers, cars, HVAC systems, home entertainment setups), ain't nobody got time for keeping track of the odds and ends of how things work. After a certain point, the how becomes indistinguishable from black magic, and the end user winds up just mindlessly following whatever instructions they get from a source that seems knowledgeable.
Hell, I'm almost that way with my car. If the mechanic told me I needed to back it out counter-clockwise on odd numbered days when there was a full moon in Jupiter, I'd probably nod my head and try to figure out how to make that happen. (Well, ok, I'm a little more sophisticated than that, but...)
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RE: Let everyone connect as DBO!
Which is, of course, not amazingly well documented either. Their documentation basically references that you have to create the Windows Task, but was apparently written back in the dark ages before service accounts were invented, so doesn't make any reference to the fact that the user the task runs under effectively has to be able to open the desktop client.
Nor does the documentation reference the whole "tasks will run at the lesser of the requested interval or the Windows Task interval", but that is at least disco-coverable.
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Let everyone connect as DBO!
Continuing the discussion from Navicat WTF:
Can you connect navicat to the database by a user without ALTER permissions? This is obviously only helpful if you only use navicat to read the database, unless you fetch a priest and give them ALTAR permissions.
So, the Navicat thread got me thinking about the giant ball of WTF that is our primary billing system (and how our
programmermanager in charge of reporting out of it interacts with it).- The program front-end is a very low-def "look mom, I just learned Delphi 2.0 forms" type of PC app. Mercifully, it is at least 32-bit, so it does run on modern systems, but it relies on making an ODBC connection (and if you let the setup installer create the connection, it defaults to using the Windows native SQLSRV32.DLL driver, rather than bundling the SQL Native Client from TechNet or such).
- The connection that you then make within the program using your ODBC connection requires that the user that connects to the database is DBO. Obviously, no security hazards at all there, we're good.
- Their reporting process allows you to create custom reports... using Crystal Reports. Now, I'm not sure whether this is a program limitation or a limitation of my manager's programmering abilities (though I lean the latter), but the Crystal Reports process as we implement it cannot specify database.schema.table for which table to access. So if you decide to extend the billing system with an additional database for things like inventory tracking (since the inventory tracking in the billing system sucks giant purple dildos), you can't re-use any of the table names, or your Crystal Reports will go boom.
- I suspect the CR limitation is my manager in large part because he persists in doing all of his maintenance tasks manually... in Access... Not to mention whenever he needs to go plumbing for things in order to try to build a report or whatever, he steadfastly refuses to connect with an ODBC connector that is set up with limited permissions (though, since the client that every employee uses on a day-to-day basis always connects with a DBO user, I suppose that's not an escalation in security holes...)
- Their system supports scheduled tasks, for batching payments, sending reports, etc etc. You get a nice little interface within the client where you can choose frequency of trigger, action to perform, the whole nine yards. It kinda looks like what a six year old might re-implement the Windows Task Scheduler interface as. So, the server side runs the scheduler within a service that gets set up at install time, right? Nope! Well, at least the installer (which has to run elevated and all) will create a default scheduled task that you can modify as needed for timing? Nope! You get to manually create a Windows Task Scheduler task! Better still, the task will work as follows:
-- Windows task fires, spawns off a process of the billing system client that logs in as the user the task is running as (hope you remembered to do all the ODBC and other registry entries so that user can open the client!)
-- Billing system client spins up, looks for any tasks which have a "scheduled next run time" <= NOW.
-- Tasks get executed, scheduled next run time updates, billing system client exits, Windows task shows successful run.
-- Things wait for next Windows task firing before anything else will ever happen again. That's right! If you schedule things hourly in the server, but the admin set up the Windows task to run once a week, well then fuck you, your scheduled tasks will run once a week!
Oi. And, of course, this has become the system that runs our everything (authentication for customers, integration with the e-mail servers, etc etc etc). So after a few incidents created because they originally installed this on a C2D (desktop) processor box with non-ECC RAM and a couple desktop hard drives mirrored with the (desktop) motherboard's on-board RAID -- shockingly, as the load on this system has increased this year, the system tends to fall over when the authentication load suddenly spikes! -- I get to upgrade it this weekend.
And for better or for worse, I insisted on "Doing It Right", so we're migrating to a SQL 2014 Always-On AG, and splitting the front end web server to a different VM. *headdesk*
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RE: Milwaukee PC
I will stipulate that I have no serious experience with Airmax in the standard client access bands. We are using Airmax on a couple 24GHz links for backhaul and the links are basically useless, but I think those are frequency interference specific problems, not the protocol or the quality of UBNT gear.
That said, we have used quite a mix & match of:
- UBNT AP with mixed UBNT & MT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- UBNT AP with pure UBNT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with mixed UBNT, MT, and StarOS CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with pure MT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with pure MT CPEs, nv2 mode
And the relative qualities have been basically as in that order above, with what seems to us a quite large gap between the two UBNT AP options and the MT AP options.
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RE: Renewing the contract (Advice needed)
Excepting side three (Reds & Yellows in the 'merkin version)... where the Chance card to doink someone on Red #3 winds up rebalancing the probabilities slightly in the Red favor.
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RE: Windows 10 gets package manager
Hm, I don't know man. I definitely don't have that problem on IE at work (granted, a pretty serious box hardware wise), browsing sites like TechNet, forums.mikrotik.com, the Googles, etc. and 10+ tabs are pretty routinely in my workflow.
Granted, at home, I wind up using Chrome, but that's more because I have some of the "open source guy" in me than because I have any real problems with IE. Plus, private browsing yada yada (since IE got it last).
That, and I CBA to find a good AdBlock for IE.
The techie in me would try to trace the IE processes, keep track of which site(s) cluster the problem. But the part of me that's home playing games right now is definitely way too lazy.
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RE: Windows 10 gets package manager
No, like, full honesty, I've had ye olde grandmother's (not mine, but our typical customer) computer come in with Ask Toolbar, Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Weather Channel Toolbar, and at least 2 Toolbars That Cannot Be Identified on a Celeron Dual Core with Windows 7 and 1GB of RAM... and IE still ran well, once the system stopped paging out all the damn toolbars. The only reason grandma even noticed a problem is that some of the pop-ups started having naked pictures in them.
100% serious, if you're having severe crashes & choking in IE with more than 2 tabs open, then either you're visiting sites with really bad Javascript (hi Discourse!), or your computer needs nuked from orbit before you lose your identity.
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RE: Windows 10 gets package manager
Wait wait wait what?
If your $modernBrowser is choking on 4 tabs then either you have 64MB of RAM to go with that overpriced overclocked CPU, or you need to stop clicking yes to all the "special offers" that come with your purple dildo videos.
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RE: Discourse is slow on Android. Why?
Why not get an Etherkiller in a plausibly deniable fashion? That's fundamentally what our wireless installers do every time they decide they want latest & greatest (read: hear that we got new spare computers in). "Oh man, I'm having a horrible week, and now my laptop just jumped straight off a 60 foot TV tower and I have no idea how it happened"
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RE: Milwaukee PC
To be completely honest, I think a good portion of the "stigma" or underperformance of the UBNT gear comes from the fact that you can literally be brain dead and still set it up in a running fashion. Whereas most other gear doesn't quite hold your hand as much, so it's difficult to set up at all unless you have a basic understanding of wireless & networking theory.
But, assuming a non-brain dead operator, I would expect UBNT gear to perform equally to MT in a radio line of sight, short range (<5mi/8km for 5GHz, <4mi/6.5km for 2.4GHz) setup with a properly limited number of clients and no interference in the area -- either self-interference from many sectors on the same POP or interference from competing devices.
Once you start getting into interference or partially obstructed line of sight, I just haven't seen the UBNT equipment cope nearly as well as MT does. And, to my knowledge, the UBNT equipment doesn't really have any TDMA-based protocol to allow you to work around the hidden node problems inherent in many-client access points & high-gain outdoor antennas. So all-MT solutions seriously outperform, especially for jitter sensitive applications, once you put them in NV2 mode and use the TDMA extensions. Of course, once you do that, you're vendor locked, since you're not operating in WiFi standard mode any more.
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RE: Milwaukee PC
Subject to the two limitations of the hardware, it's a pretty good deal, yes.
- The Access Point unit is a 90 degree beamwidth sector. So if you have one site to the east of your head end and one site to the west, you can't connect them both to the same physical access point using the SXT AP.
- The five clients in that pack come with License Level 3. At that license, the unit can function as a CPE (connect to an access point), or can function in what MT calls "bridge" mode, which is basically an AP that can accept only one connection. To accept multiple connections ("ap bridge" mode) requires License Level 4, which is a bunch of money to add to the unit (typically around $40).
Basically, their pricing model is such that you need to make sure your APs are the higher power hardware that comes with Level 4 pre-installed; buying a Level 3 hardware unit and re-licensing it will be substantially more expensive. Of course, this has a hidden support advantage for them -- you don't get people putting up CPEs with a 14 degree beamwidth antenna and then wondering why the coverage from it is terrible.
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RE: Milwaukee PC
Of course, the other big weakness with fixed wireless is that it's more or less impossible to get good consistent coverage within an urban area unless you can put micro-POPs on every single structure over 60 feet tall. So, as much as I'll gladly proselytize for fixed wireless all day long, I have Time Warner Cable at home because I live in town and all of our POPs are blocked by houses & their trees & the factories/water towers in town.
But at least I live on one of their good loops, so that I don't have to work with their tech support often.
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RE: Milwaukee PC
In general, we've found MikroTik gear to be superior to Ubiquiti in almost every way, and the price point is substantially similar.
We've had very poor results with the UBNT 3.65GHz gear, and we stopped using their 2.4GHz clients about a year ago. Their APs are especially bad compared to MT gear (even in an all-UBNT setup... MT AP with mixed CPEs works better than all-UBNT, and all MT works miles better, as the RTS/CTS mechanisms in their proprietary nv2 protocol do wonders for minimizing hidden node and other fun fixed wireless problems).
In general, my experience is that pretty much all WISPs will start UBNT, b/c it's cheapest. The smart ones figure out the extra 10-20% for MT (or some other gear) is worth the cost.
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RE: Milwaukee PC
In general we don't really compete strongly with TWC/CL/Frontier in price (especially performance/price). We're not doing usage based billing yet, but probably will be soon, and I know a lot of other WISPs are moving that way; peak backhaul is at least as much of a problem (and probably more) for WISPs vs telco-style carriers.
The big thing we win on (and I suspect this is where most WISPs make their hay) is customer service and nimbleness. We need a new POP to relieve saturation or expand the footprint? $5k gets it up and going and another $10k later makes it a big backhaul site if it seeds out. Customer has a problem? He's only one of a few hundred/thousand, not just a number in a completely different (part of the) country from technical support.
So if you're looking for just flat out best peak/marketing performance, I doubt NBN is gonna win hard there. But I'd be willing to wager they're going to be substantially better in the customer service department. And if they're a good WISP, they're probably more focused on keeping performance consistent, rather than just selling you a big top line number that they know they can never hit.
(That said, there are a couple shitty WISPs in my area who sell 802.11g service with a 1x1 802.11a backhaul at 10M/10M 15M/15M 20M/20M packages and then load up 20+ customers on a single AP. If you see a WISP whose packages aren't very asymmetric, keep it at a safe arm's length -- either their engineers fundamentally don't understand wifi, their engineers don't have any pull with management, or they're using shitty and very expensive Motorola gear and are going to be getting it back out of your hide somehow.)
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RE: Milwaukee PC
Satellite internet is good for people out in the sticks who need reasonable upload/download speeds that the land line providers cannot give. Satellite internet is not good for any of the following:
- Streaming video outside the hours of midnight to 6am (hello, massive overages and/or getting throttled 2 days into the month)
- Online gaming
- VOIP (unless you like "can you hear me now over")
- Low cost internet
You might check with http://www.wispa.org/ to see if there's a fixed wireless ISP in your area. If they're network ops are halfway competent (and you don't live in a thicket), a WISP can get you quality reasonably close to land-line for probably less than the cost of satellite. (Full disclosure, I'm a halfway competent network op for a WISPA member in the Ohio area, and we routinely eat Time Warner Cable & Frontier/CenturyLink DSL's lunch.)