Biting my tongue
David Cameron Staples
And indeed you have been in an awkward situation, where you went from
functionally no IT support at all, to having IT trying to help you, but
where the infrastructure was shifting underneath them, so when something
went wrong[0] you were treated to actual people sitting in front of you
and not actually being omniscient and omnipotent on the spot, and this
can, I know, break your faith in us as demigods of technological
inerrancy.
But still, when I am setting it up that your PA can do trivial little
things like scan your pub receipts for your reimbursements, and print
your invoices, minutiae like that, you might like to take the opportunity
at times like this to consider maybe *not* muttering under your breath
that "IT is bloody awful", and "God, IT here sucks", and other such
inspirational messages.
But still, I do tend to agree with you, what with another two people
having accepted packages last week, leaving us with a team of a size
which used to deal with one department now having to cope with the entire
faculty, which faculty having increased demands and all. We are finding
it hard to maintain our standards with an increasing number of computers
under our purview, and fewer and fewer people to do it with.
So here's the deal: We'll take away the burden of your *two* laptops, and
PA's desktop, and MFD, and access to the computational processing server
farms, and you won't have to suffer the gross incompetence of IT ever
again. And you can get back to doing your finite element analysis and
fluid dynamics on an abacus, OK?
By the way, complaining that when your MFD wasn't working as you would
expect, you had to walk a good *twenty meters* down the corridor to the
office printer, yeah, not so much sympathy.
[0] such as when you wanted a printer installed in your office, but
couldn't get it to work properly. It turns out that the University's
central management of the switches combined with the need for a hub in
order to have a phone, two laptops, your PA's desktop *and* your shiny
new MFD out of four wall ports, to fuck us around by setting the switches
to only allow one MAC per port, and it would have been nice if they could
have told us this at some point.
David Cameron Staples
Joe Zeff
> Yes, I understand that you have had issues with IT support in the past.
[excellent rant snipped]
You must be upset. Posting it once wasn't enough?
--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
If you want to do this, the best way is in the nude,
sitting in the bathtub.
David Gersic
> couldn't get it to work properly. It turns out that the University's
> central management of the switches combined with the need for a hub in
> order to have a phone, two laptops, your PA's desktop *and* your shiny
> new MFD out of four wall ports, to fuck us around by setting the switches
> to only allow one MAC per port, and it would have been nice if they could
> have told us this at some point.
The group here that does this sort of thing has announced that they're
doing it Real Soon Now. My purchase request for a big box of "virtual
patch cables" and allocations of a half dozen "virtual switch ports"
has, so far, gone unfilled. And, if fully implemented, I'll have to
choose between having a phone, or a computer, since we run our notwork
connections through our VoIP phones.
And much hillarity has ensued. Some times all you can do is grab the
deck chairs and the popcorn and watch the fun.
David Cameron Staples
> On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:56:00 +0000, David Cameron Staples wrote:
>
>> Yes, I understand that you have had issues with IT support in the past.
> [excellent rant snipped]
>
> You must be upset. Posting it once wasn't enough?
I wrote it once. I clicked "post" once. What the news client and server
did with it after that is outside my control.
Marc Haber
>Then there is a sniversity where they charge a small monthly fee
>for every connected gig wall jack. Of course they only allow one
>mac per port, whaddya expect?
Debugging is so much harder when unmanaged desktop switches pop up
under each and every desk and ones' managed switches' error counters
suddenly become useless. I can fully understand a network dept wanting
to know "there's a desktop switch connected to Port I-40".
Greetings
Marc
--
-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! -----
Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
David Cameron Staples
> On 2009-11-20, Roger Burton West <roger+a...@nospam.firedrake.org>
> wrote:
>> David Cameron Staples wrote:
>>>It turns out that the University's
>>>central management of the switches
>> [...]
>>>to fuck us around by setting the switches to only allow one MAC per
>>>port,
>>
>> Yeah, we have this at $ORK.
>>
>> You'd think they'd never heard of <UI>.
>
> Or they don't want to deal with lusers messing up campus-wide <UI> or
> calling them to come fix <UI>.
Oh, we've considered most of the <UI>, and at least part of the reason I
was so flummoxed was that I've never seen that behaviour in person
before. In the networks we ran, there was <UI> everywhere, such that
people could move desk, or an office could be fitted with a hub, or even
so that people could just plug a laptop into the wall and expect it to
work, because most of the time it Just Did. Now, however, we have to beg
and plead to allow for a hub. We have to beg and plead to have a VLAN set
on a port, so that a particular computer may be used in it. We have to
beg and plead to reenable ports which haven't been used in a while,
because for some reason the central networks goons^Wpeople go to the
effort of turning off ports which haven't been used in a while, which
means that if you've been on leave for too long, you can practically
guarantee that you'll need to lodge a ticket just to be able to use your
own desktop, let alone to plug your laptop back into the network. (Which
is to say, it will still be in our DHCP config, but if the port you
usually use has been turned off, too bad. Worse, if the port has been
moved to a different VLAN from plugins, then it will kindof look like it
works, but not be able to see the DHCP server, which is very much worse
as far as faultfinding goes -- it has connection but no IP: is it a
faulty port, or a faulty network card, or a faulty ethernet driver, or
has the user forgotten which port it should be plugged into, or have
central networks arbitrarily changed the VLAN? Life was so much simpler
when the system was more complicated.)
>
> Ours at least say "we can't stop you, but if you do, don't call us when
> it breaks."
>
> Then there is a sniversity where they charge a small monthly fee for
> every connected gig wall jack. Of course they only allow one mac per
> port, whaddya expect?
In this case I think it is the PHBs deciding to 'manage' the network in
such a way as to 'simplify' things, by turning off all the things which
make a large complicated network infrastructure usable, and thus
expanding the need for manual intervention beyond all reasonable limits.
FFS, the whole *point* of those 'complications' is to *reduce* the amount
of footwork. They've taken what was, when we ran the network, a five-
minute fix, or a zero-second fix because it was set up so that there
weren't problems of that sort to begin with, and turned them into "lodge
a ticket and expect a several-day turnaround".
This does not help perceptions of our competence, needless to say, even
if it is out of our hands. It requires more work and more time and more
understanding of the network to fix trivial problems which didn't even
exist before. And the PHIdiots refuse to listen to reason, because the
current fashion in an economically constrained environment is to
centralise and standardise, because it reduces the local workload (even
when it doesn't), and can be done as well from the central admins (even
though it isn't).
Of course, now you've said it, I imagine that they're preparing us for
just such a system. Remember when universities were about teaching,
research, and the support of the previous two? Now, of course, it's about
competing business units all raping each other in order to prove to
accountants that they deserve their budgets.
Steve VanDevender
> Remember when universities were about teaching,
> research, and the support of the previous two? Now, of course, it's about
> competing business units all raping each other in order to prove to
> accountants that they deserve their budgets.
I think it's always been the case that universities tell everyone
they're about teaching and research, but internally are all about
competing departments and business units raping each other to prove to
the accountants that they deserve their budgets. Also to steal as much
money as they can get away with from anyone who has obtained grants.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH
mikea
> On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:56:00 +0000, David Cameron Staples wrote:
>
>> Yes, I understand that you have had issues with IT support in the past.
> [excellent rant snipped]
>
> You must be upset. Posting it once wasn't enough?
Stereo: one for each ear.
--
Remember, when it comes to commercial TV, the program is not the product.
YOU are the product, and the advertiser is the customer.
-- Mark W. Schumann, in the Monastery
Alan J Rosenthal
>When implemented by non-idiots, the system comes with a bunch of web
>pages where you can stuff without walking anywhere.
What can you stuff, and where can you stuff it?
Brian Kantor
>Still, it's better than calling the help desk, explaining the
>problem to fisrt-line student in terms the techie who'll get the
>ticket would understand...
Here they got rid of all the students on the help desk -- I'm convinced
that was because the students were embarrassingly smarter than the
full-timers.
I think their management mistook _The Peter Principle_ as a how-to book.
- Brian
Shmuel Metz
at 03:28 PM, ab...@127.0.0.1 said:
>I always beleived TPP for manglement is what Mythical Man-Month is to
>software engineering, myself.
Except that FB demonstrated that he did not understand the software he was
using as examples. Take TESTRAN - please!
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
Brian Kantor
>Over here you can't do that: if students can't make that $1.50/hr,
>they'll starve to death. At which point they stop paying for their
>edumacation thus depriving The Pointy-haired Ones of a major source
>of income.
I believe it's still the case that it costs the Sniversity more money
to edumacrate an indergrate than we get from them in fees, so in reductio
ad absurdum we'd be better off if they all left and didn't come back.
I suspect that's part of the reason why this place was a graduate-school
only for a number of years.
That doesn't play well politically, though.
- Brian