Did the last one out turn out the lights?

[Carl Inglis]

No activity in over 7 months (at least not on the newswerver that I'm
using).

Where did everyone go?

Carl

[Mike Andrews]

Carl Inglis <carl....@gmail.com> wrote in <aohfk7l5nfaukke5t...@4ax.com>:

All 43 posts in my leafnode archive:

Date: 21 Apr 2010 14:02:41 GMT
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:38:39 -0400
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:02:33 GMT
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:19:06 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:43:17 +0100
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:28:13 +0800
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:29:45 -0400
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:34:27 -0500
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:49:37 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:47:08 -0400
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:39:11 -0500
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:56:17 -0400
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:57:21 -0400
Date: 18 May 2010 17:16:51 GMT
Date: 18 May 2010 19:42:22 GMT
Date: 18 May 2010 19:47:29 GMT
Date: 12 Jun 2010 14:53:33 GMT
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:37:57 +0100
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:11:05 +1000
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:57:51 +0000
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 23:40:00 GMT
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 13:04:42 +0000 (UTC)
Date: 10 Nov 2010 15:37:43 GMT
Date: 17 Dec 2010 03:32:15 GMT
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 09:44:56 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:37:45 -0000
Date: 11 Feb 2011 21:26:09 GMT
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:42:38 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:46:06 -0500
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:30:23 -0400
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 04:11:12 -0500
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:38:13 +0800
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:57:36 -0400
Date: 01 Jun 2011 18:39:14 GMT
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 13:58:40 -0500
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 09:33:08 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:10:41 -0400
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:23:18 +0000
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:30:15 +0930
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:00:53 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:08:16 +0000 (UTC)
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:06:54 +0930
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:10:35 +0800

So no, not a lot of activity.

--
"Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?"

"Because we use sendmail, son, and they use qmail."
(after a post in the satalk mailing list, during an editor war)

[Kenneth Brody]

Apparently, they've all recovered.

--
Kenneth Brody

[SteveD]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:23:18 +0000, Carl Inglis <carl....@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Where did everyone go?

Oh, we're still here. I'm not sure exactly why I still have this froup on
my pull list, given its traffic, but maybe one day it'll be reoccupied.

90% of the story-swapping places for techs are web forums now, though.


As an interesting metasupport story, though, and on a tangent, I've
noticed over the years that a lot of clients who outsource their support
leave huge holes in the contract, or they just sign whatever the provider
shoves in front of them. This leads to a great chance of being hung out to
dry when push comes to shove, as even if the client's lawyers went over
the contract, there's about a hundred percent chance that they never let
any experienced techs snoop through it before it got signed.

This results in situations like the infamous three-hour onsite presence
guarantee, where the contracting company is contracted to have someone
onsite at the client's location within three hours of being advised of a
problem.

Sounds great to the client - until you realise that there is nothing in
the contract about the onsite representative (a) actually doing anything,
or (b) having any technical background whatsoever.

Cue underpaid dropouts turning up on site to fulfil the letter of the
agreement. Or, if the client is (un?)lucky, a generic low-level tech whose
total diagnostic ability consists of "reboot", and who can't tell the
difference between a standalone PC running XP and a rackmounted array
running thirty virtual and separate flavors of *ix.


But nooo, the client management likes the three-hour onsite presence
clause, even though a smarter person would be asking "Why should we care
whether or not they're onsite or not? We just care about whether we can
keep doing business. How that's achieved shouldn't be our area."


-SteveD

[Carl Inglis]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:56:14 +0800, SteveD <use...@vo.id.au> wrote:

>On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:23:18 +0000, Carl Inglis <carl....@gmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>Where did everyone go?
>
>Oh, we're still here. I'm not sure exactly why I still have this froup on
>my pull list, given its traffic, but maybe one day it'll be reoccupied.
>
>90% of the story-swapping places for techs are web forums now, though.
>
>
>As an interesting metasupport story, though, and on a tangent, I've
>noticed over the years that a lot of clients who outsource their support
>leave huge holes in the contract, or they just sign whatever the provider
>shoves in front of them.

[snip]

A recent example I'm aware of being the case of a company who signed
up for a spam/virus filtering service with an SLA stating no more than
4 false positive spam identifications per 1,000,000 valid emails per
calendar month. The only problem? The contract didn't specify how this
SLA was to be checked, who was responsible for checking it and where
they were to get the data from.

As it happened, one of the sysadmins at one of the branch offices
grabbed the email logs for the first week from the service providers
website and had a look at the actual data. They found over 0.2% of
false positives in one week! The outcome of negotiations with the
service provider is still pending. :)

I think the broader problem is IT staff who:

a/ don't think that one step beyond and
b/ aren't experienced enough in the stuff they are trying to manage to
be in a position to make informed decisions.

[caution = generalisation ahead]
It seems to be the case that a lot of "IT departments" tend to employ
Windows "admins", who may be very good at configuring Exchange, and
managing file permissions, but who have no knowledge or understanding
of SMTP, or SMB, and can therefore have the wool pulled over their
eyes by sneaky salesweasels. This is partly because they don't know
the questions to ask, and partly because they don't even know that
there *are* questions to ask due to Windows' habit of hiding
everything from the "admins".
[/caution]

Carl