So far the guy doesn't necessarily seem to be making any efforts to screw with anyone or myself, so perhaps it is best that we just have the nice non-confrontational talk to set up the borders.. sounds like good advice, thanks
So far the guy doesn't necessarily seem to be making any efforts to screw with anyone or myself, so perhaps it is best that we just have the nice non-confrontational talk to set up the borders.. sounds like good advice, thanks
So I hope this post isn't somehow inappropriate, anyhow.
I'm the sysadmin for our company - the everything kind (windows, linux, network, db) but that isn't such a big problem in itself. We've had a major management overthrow and our old CIO is gone, replaced by a new VP and that person has brought in a old partner as the IT director. This IT director is the very same person who performed the audit of our department which resulted in my former boss kicked out of his department, but that's another WTF.
So this guy demands root/admin passwords, I comply out of respect for his position of course. I did ask him why he wanted the passwords, and he said "I'll be adminning too. I R smart!", so I've gone from the boss being a guy who stays out of our day to day business to a guy who wants to admin the server's the company pays me to admin!
He starts tinkering with the systems and messing with crap, snooping at log files, installing weird packages and asking me a ton of questions and that's kind of bothered me as it seems like he is spending an awful lot of time trying to understand each and every file, service, application, when he should be focusing on management as far as I'm concerned.
Worse yet, when he makes changes he does not tell me which seems disrespectful.
Looking to the TDWTF community for some sage advice if anyone is willing to comment on the situation.
@emurphy said:
Playing devil's advocate here - some of these things have room for ambiguity, depends on tone of voice and such:
@neuralfraud said:
I'm sorry to make you go through all of this""Yea, me too."
At this moment the tech is about to explode in a fit of rage..
This could be "I'm sorry I have to go through it but it's not your fault".
No. Really, he was actually exactly as rude as it seems. My boss actually called after the CEO talked to him (Boss is the CIO) and asked me if it was true that at one point we were having him try different passwords. He actually told our boss that we were making him try different passwords as if we'd somehow flubbed the config and were simply guessing, and not being perfect little servants. Like I said before though, according to my keychain, I was right and the password was correct. This guy types the wrong stuff in, calls our boss and bitches about us.
@emurphy said:
@neuralfraud said:
"Well, We've tried everything, I'm at a roadblock here. this is as far as we can go."
"Ok, I'm going to call your boss, and he'll give you a call back. Bye."
Wonderful, I'm sure that'll accomplish a lot.
This could be "let's see if we can get $TASK done some other way than me accessing my Mac".
Nope. Turns out he just wanted to yell at the boss. After that, the boss instructed us not to call the CEO back.
@emurphy said:
@neuralfraud said:
make sure vmware fusion is running too, he needs to get into his windows desktop so he can get into quicken and pay some bills.
""WHAT?!!!! HE NEEDS TO DO WHAT?!"
And this isn't necessarily the only thing he needed to do. (A CEO running a VM strikes me as pretty unusual in itself, actually.)
Thank our boss for that. the CEO's son is a mac nut, so is our boss. Our boss decides that the CEO is going to be the only person in the company aside from the boss himself who uses mac stuff. I have a macbook and have a little experience with Mac OS X and thats it. At the end of the day, all issues were totally beyond our control. The only saving grace was having the vnc server on that machine so we could access it without the peice of crap MobileME service. I'm sure it works great for "The rest of us", but here's one case where it should have worked and didnt. Doesn't logmein route back through the LMI servers? Logmein doesn't care if you have uPNP or not because it's not required. This is the problem with Mac Nuts. They abandon all reason and logic in favor of a prettier, fancier, "magical" solution from Apple.
I guarantee the only thing this guy wanted to do was get into quicken, and maybe look at some personal photos. Regardless, the guy was on vacation and we need a stricter policy in place, one that may actually make mr CEO think twice before having us jump through rings of fire for his latest little whimsical endeavor. Again, though, I'm talking about a person where despite his income, the company still has to buy him stuff like imacs, tv's, entertainment centers, batteries, cell phones.. At least one of those items doesn't belong on a list of common company purchased items!
Thanks for the insight however, I appreciate it ;)
The last two days have been hell. Our CEO went on vacation out of state and brought his laptop with him of course. He has MobileMe and uses "Back to my mac" to connect to his imac at home, great! except... it doesnt work where he's staying!
The main tech talks to him for about an hour yesterday, finally determining that his wireless router is causing problems most likely because its connected behind a DSL router which is already providing NAT, and his wireless router also also providing NAT from that IP address. Brilliant.
We'd figure we'd make everything very simple and just send up a spare Airport extreme that we had here. He could replace his oddball wifi router with the airport, which was properly configured to simply act as a bridge and let the dsl router do its thing! $50 for overnight delivery, because it was VERY IMPORTANT!
Today the CEO calls the tech after having installed the magical Airport: "It doesn't work. It keeps telling me invalid password when I try to connect."
"Nope, invalid password."
"So, read it back to me please"
"......"
"ok that's right, it still doesn't work?"
"No."
So we think for a minute.. perhaps he can just connect the macbook to the airport and configure it with Airport Utility!
"Do you have an extra cable there?"
"No."
fuck. Now I'm starting to doubt myself, could I have possibly typed a wrong character when setting the WPA password? I looked at the password that was stored in my keychain, and sure enough, it was correct.
"How long is the cable you plugged into the airport?"
"About 15 feet"
"Where does it go?"
"hmm, um, behind the tv.. it's a real BIG tv!.. hmm b.. OOPS.. messed that up!.. ah, on top of this bookshelf here"
Ahh man, this is really starting to sound bad.. we can't have him find some weirdly placed device, unplug the cable and plug it into his laptop and make him go through all of that trouble just to double check some airport settings...
"Ok we're going to have you just hook up the old router and just enable uPNP, I'm sorry to make you go through all of this"
"Yea, me too."
At this moment the tech is about to explode in a fit of rage.. The CEO might as well have just bitch slapped this guy who was only doing everything in his power to help him. what else would we have expected? Respect? Politeness? Sympathy that we're trying in vain to help him in a situation next to impossible to solve without physically seeing what he's got? and oh, heck no, couldn't just set up screen sharing on his macbook! That would be too easy.
So I digress. Back to the story..
"Still doesn't work."
"Well, We've tried everything, I'm at a roadblock here. this is as far as we can go."
"Ok, I'm going to call your boss, and he'll give you a call back. Bye."
Wonderful, I'm sure that'll accomplish a lot. Oh by the way, our boss was also away, at some kind of trade show and couldn't be interrupted!
We discuss amongst ourselves what wonderful ranting the CEO is about to do, and in the meantime, try to see if by any chance anything at their home could be causing an issue - afterall the boss said HE could connect to their computers with HIS mac, so everything was working fine!
After about 20 minutes of checking his time capsule and 3 other airport devices out, and his imac, we still cant get "Back to my mac" to work, but set up port forwarding for the vnc service to get us into the desktop at least.
Just for the hell of it, I thought "Wait a minute, his' wife's computer is there too, and they're tring to use the same service through upnp, and they're both trying to connect to their computers.."
I proceed to log in to the wife's imac, and shut it down when.. suddenly I stare into desktop infinity.
His wife's imac was running a vnc client to his computer which caused a feedback loop when I connected to his wife's computer via VNC. Brilliant. I shut the thing down... Back to my mac starts working! I can see his files from my macbook, I can connect to his computer even! Everything's great! we FINALLY FIXED it - time to let the boss know.
"Great guys! thank you so much, yea, make sure vmware fusion is running too, he needs to get into his windows desktop so he can get into quicken and pay some bills."
"WHAT?!!!! HE NEEDS TO DO WHAT?!"
Thats' right. This guy had two of us working on his issue for 2 hours a day for 2 days. That's equal to having me out of service for an entire day just to help him! Plus $50 in shipping! All of this, for his personal finance which for some reason can only be accessed from a windows virtual machine running on his imac at home.. very strange.
And... the kicker..
he STILL couldn't get Back to his Mac!
At that moment, I told the boss how to just set up a dock icon for the screensharing client, and gave him the ip address to connect to manually.
I'm sorry if this reads more like a rant than a WTF, but again, why am I suprised here? this kind of bullshit probably happens everywhere. Am I right or am I wrong for thinking that this guy just flagrantly abused his position and our resources for his personal enjoyment? I know i'll never be able to actually voice my concern to anyone who actually gives a damn, so instead I post it here for everyone's bemusement. Hopefully I'm not alone here, cuz if so I just look liek a bitch;)
Has anyone ever had this happen to them?
I am in charge of "Enterprise systems" in the company I work for. This includes things like our retail POS systems.
We use one particular vendor who'd recently gotten a contract for a large computer manufacturer with a "buy direct" business model.
While working on upgrading a few test machines to their latest and greatest release, I encountered something interesting - encoded passwords for the admin account. Great! This means it's a little more secure, right?
I didn't want to use the default password, so I changed it.. then it didn't work. I looked in the db and found it was written in plain text. Well that's funny.. did they forget to make their admin module encrypt the passwords?
I had a few conversations with support and ultimately there seemed to be no workaround, gosh! it just slipped their mind I reckon!
I decided that if I knew what they were using to encrypt the passwords, I could just write a script myself and get on with my day. I was a little shocked by the response I received:
"I cannot give out the method for our encryption."
Oh, so what are they doing some custom high-tech algorithm now or something?
First they encrypt everything. Then they break their admin module so I cannot change passwords, then they tell me there's no workaround and that their encryption is top secret.. Something doesn't add up.
Here's the encrypted password:
`clhmA1
When I upgraded the system, I had still been on the old version of the database, and some new tables were not present. This resulted in an SQL error which was displayed on screen. Now I know why they suddenly decided to "encrypt" their passwords.. so I took a look.. I tried a blank password..
A1
Hmm.. so thats funny..
I typed "a" which became `A1
I then type abc which became `abA1
WTF? It's a one-level character rotation with "A1" appended at the end. That's it. That's their top-secret password encryption.
Brilliant. That'll fool 'em! and IF THEY ASK FOR THE ALGORITHM, TELL THEM IT'S TOP SECRET!
So now instead of having a plausible explanation for such a stupid feature, they've gone and made them selves look like a bunch of fools protecting that idiotic feature.
CONGRATRURATION! A WINRAR IS YOU!
I took this photo a while back, but it really does deserve WTF status.
I present:
Can you point out all the WTF's not including the entire car itself?
One of our regional partners were having an issue - an employee of theirs could not log into our intranet anymore.. Their CEO became involved eventually and finally I was summoned to fix everything. I promptly found the problem, fixed it, and sent my reply to let everyone know all was right in the world.
Then there was the reply from their CEO...
"Well men, if you don't know, I done. Thanks for looking into the debts for this"
Perhaps it's time to implement mail goggles?Part of my job recently has been designing, developing, and implementing a scheduling application to be used throughout our stores/intranet/etc - dispite the fact that there are several extremely good commercial products out there, but that isn't the issue... nope. This is merely the platform for the issue!
After having launched the Scheduler in a "beta" test to get feedback from the store managers, I thought things were going rather swimmingly; no major complaints, and any issues were simple and no problem to resolve. After an entire month of Scheduler testing, I got a very urgent email requesting an extremely important "change" to the scheduler:
(name changed to protect the upset) I have a team member, Fannie Mae, that is very upset over the new scheduler and requests a very important change.
Her given name is Fannie and it is a very bad memory name that she would rather forget and does not want to see it on her schedule every week, the other team members are asking her about it and it is not good.
Can you please get her name changed on it so it say Jeanie Mae and not Fannie.
this one is really important.
thanks
After my initial "WTF?" I stopped and thought about the request for a minute.. Here is someone actually requesting that I change the scheduler to make it show ONE person's name differently.. And well, you might think that would be a simple task, right? Not so much since all employee info gets taken directly from .... Human Resources and their software! I know i know.. its coming.. The REAL WTF here is that EVERYONE gets a chance to specify a nickname, which the HR software fully supports, which our systems read, thus if she had actually bothered to specify this important detail, all of this pain and anguish could have been averted.. I, being the wonderfully nice person that I am, double checked her records and amazingly, no nickname was specified in the system. Imagine that!
Personally I would figure anyone who's name caused them so much agony would surely change it?? right??
This might not be the greatest WTF but it is the sidebar, so WTF ever!
This may seem insignificant, but a WTF no less.
We ordered dozens of chipset fans for our entire compliment of POS systems since they fail every so often thanks to filthy conditions and employees who never bother cleaning/blowing out the registers.
While examining one of these fans, I noticed the sticker had something odd written on it..
"KGEAR\n
ENJOY TODAY TOMORROW FEATURE"
Is this some kind of magic procrastination feature or something?
From: <blank>
Date: 9:36 AM
To: All Users
--------------------
On my email this morning there was something called candy I hit it and
something or other about JFK Jr. came up and then a bunch of porn.????
I was finally able to Delete it.
--end--
Well, thank you very much for sharing that with me, the president, the operations folks, the entire company! I am so happy that you were finally able to Delete it!
I wonder what is this lady signing up for to be getting this crap? Perhaps some logfile verification is in order for this user...
Oh, and we continuously run blurbs on email procedure and etiquette, including warnings like "DO NOT USE YOUR COMPANY EMAIL ADDRESS TO SIGN UP FOR ANY WEB SITE AND/OR SERVICE" - they never learn.