From time to time, you just have to have some help in the office. This is especially important when doing something as essential as setting up new servers. When that happens, I know just who to call on for assistance.
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Some days, you simply cannot escape the idiocy in the world. Overnight, someone at the NOC did something incredibly stupid (and for which I still do not have an adequate explanation). Today, someone told me that our interpretation of his explanation was “out of whack” – except that he never explained anything in particular, despite questions phrased in multiple ways to him so we could try to figure out just what the hell he was trying to do. Someone else wanted to know our price on something, even though we tracked her visit to our pricing page, where things are clearly outlined. Since I didn’t get to bed until after 5 this morning, then got back up just after 8, not a good day for the old balance of the mood. Him: “I didn’t get the invoice for this. Look into it.” Us, after seeing it was sent a month and a half ago: ” The mail logs have already rotated past that point, but the client system has the entries for the generation of the invoice and it being sent via email, to the same address everything else is sent to for this account.” We insert the clips from the system log. Him: “So you say it was sent? If you have not logs to say it was sent and I don’t have an email in my box then maybe it wasn’t sent? ” First, no, we don’t “say” it was sent. It was sent. Second, we just provided you the logs from the client app that logged it. Him, after we replied again, pointing out that the system logged it: “You need to look into this, or I’m moving elsewhere.” So, we’re supposed to look into an email the system indicates was generated and that was emailed to you, after just providing you with the snips from the logs that say this? I suppose if we squint juuuussst right, we could probably look right into the abyss of your logic, sure. Last night was supposed to be the onset of several nights of hard freezes around here. With that in mind, I did some harvesting late in the day, thinking this morning would see the pepper plants dead and black. Not so. It only got down to just below freezing, and not for very long, and the peppers were all bright and healthy when I walked around this morning turning off the remote taps. Ah, I thought, another misfire by the forecasters, and another testament to the oddball happenings here in the Bermuda triangle of weather. Tonight, Mother Nature has decided she’ll show us: it is currently very near freezing already, just past real sunset, and the temperature is dropping like a rock in a well. As one of our clients did something incredibly stupid which requires me to go to the NOC, and since I am not a fan of this type of weather, I am not looking forward to wherever this may bottom out – the forecasters say in the upper teens by dawn. I suppose I should have known that the request the user submitted was not quite right, but then again, despite what people think, we do not actually have ESP around here, nor do we claim that we do. Once again, trying to out-user the user has just resulted in the user doing something even dumber than normal. And technically nonsense, too. While watching the bowl games, I’ve been subject to those idiotic “finally fast” commercials, where they’re just certain everyone’s machine is infested with all sorts of trojans, spyware, and viruses, and that’s why their systems run slowly or crash – not because people are loading everything under the sun at boot time, or because Windows crashes as a matter of course over the lifetime of a machine. The dumbest one yet has some woman claiming that a virus “destroyed [my] computer” and she had to “throw it away”. This is stupidity and fearmongering on an epic basis, like the crap that Ron Paul (excuse me, RON PAUL) likes to spew. You don’t throw away a “perfectly good computer” because of a virus, unless there’s suddenly a virus out there that melts the hardware into slag. Clean and disinfect it, or just put a new drive in and reinstall things. Done. Unfortunately, there are people who will buy into this and buy into the “my computer runs 150% faster now” as if the average non-technical person can sense the difference between 10ms and 50ms. It’s things like this that drive us geeks insane. Sometimes, it seems like days just start off badly, as if the world wants to crack an eye at the sunrise, yawn, and roll over for a bit more sleep. This morning was one of those mornings. The plan was to get up in the wee hours, get the smoker going, and have some pulled pork ready by the 1 PM games. I thought I had slept through my alarm, having had only two hours of sleep the night before. Not the case: I simply set it for PM instead of AM in my fog. When I did get up and go to get the smoker going, I found that the smoker portion of my Bradley was not working at all. I also found that I was going to have to go to the NOC to take care of a server that was simply down for no apparent reason and which would not respond to a reboot request. Thinking the smoker issue may have just been built up sawdust in the feeder, I left the heating side of the smoker on, so it would be fully to temp by the time I got back, and hurried off to the NOC. Problem found: blown power supply. Easily enough solved by swapping out the power supply, but a pain in the ass for interrupting my day, which was already not starting off well. Back at the ranch, I finally discovered the motor that powers the feeder arm was simply not working at all. I figured I could just rig something to keep the microswitch in the down position, hoping this would keep the smoker from knowing the arm was not moving. Didn’t work – the timer that feeds the wood expects the switch to trigger and then depress when the motor arm comes around once more. The switch is also not in a position easily reached when the control unit is back together. Alas, no smoking available. But the heat still worked, so I went in to rub down the butt and get it in the thing. I made the rub, using my usual 20+ ingredients, and then dropped one of the bottles straight down on the tile while putting it away, shattering the thing and spewing glass everywhere. Swell. By 9:30, the butt was finally on the smoker. We didn’t eat until the late games were well underway. It was good, but not as good as it usually is, of course. I also made rolls, mom made potato salad, and I’d made a huge batch of barbeque sauce the last time around, so at the end of the day, my sisters, newphew, mom, and I had watched a bunch of football and eaten good homemade food. Not a bad end to a day that started off so poorly. On the plus side, it was another absolutely gorgeous day on the ranch, although unlike yesterday, almost all of which I spent outside, I did nothing outdoors today at all. Tomorrow after getting one of my eyes looked at, I hope to transplant some tomatoes at least to get the last ones out of the flats. From there, I’ll be left with the brassicas and the onions to get into the frames, and will be able to move on to breaking apart the garlic bulbs into cloves and prep for that planting. The great garlic plantout of 2011 is at hand. The question being: why do so many people get the hell out of tech? This is why. User: Mail from (IP) is being blocked. Us: What is the reject message? User: It says at this link that (IP) is listed at (some obscure spam list). Us: What is the reject message? The (IP) is not the mail server IP address, and is not what the outside world sees when mail is sent out. There is no indication in the mail logs of any rejects from (obscure spam list). In between: we look through the logs on the server, and check out 54 different spam listings for the actual, server IP – the one the outside world sees – and find nothing at all. No one else on the same server reports any rejected mail anywhere. User: It says at this other link that (IP) is listed at (some obscure spam list). US: Once again, we need the actual reject message for the mail. The IP (IP) has nothing to do with mail delivery. Only the server IP is seen by the outside world when handing off mail. Places that are rejecting mail will do so with a reject message. That is what we need. User: (Copying us on a whine to his webmaster): Interesting “customer support”. Find me another host, I’m not spending another dime with these rude people, and I don’t care if the server is blocked or not. Us: Asking for specific information is rude? We’re trying to investigate an issue you claim exists when we can’t find any indication there is one. We asked for the reject message, and got another listing that has no bearing on this issue. Clearly, further explanation was required about what we needed, and that’s what we did. Since you haven’t provided a reject message and we can’t find any evidence mail is being rejected to anywhere from that server, we’re considering the issue closed. User: Close this ticket. Your customer support is amazing. Brilliant riposte. You really got us with that one. Thanks for wasting our time chasing down a nonissue. Guess mail from that server really isn’t being rejected anywhere after all. And that is why people eventually leave the tech field. The insistence of problems where there are none and the refusal to follow the simplest of instructions combine over time to form a thousand little stabs into the soul of the tech that has to deal with your asshattery. Last October – after recovering quite a bit from having a chunk of lung removed during the summer – my sister and I planted out 35 pounds of garlic. This July, I pulled up two of the type we had put in.
The third variety, Chesnok Red, is also a strong garlic with a bite, and that one was pulled in late August. It’s currently curing in the garage, awaiting processing. The other two, though, are cleaned and in storage.
Work funnies: one guy saying he was going to “rethink his relationship” with us, because the application he installed once upon a time and apparently hasn’t updated at any point has a component that doesn’t like one of the usual and routine updates run for security reasons. After over seven years with us. Interesting method of dealing with it, instead of simply taking care of your site maintenance, something with which we could certainly assist. Another guy insisting that the server where his site is located is down constantly, when a review of the firewall shows he’s locked himself out via login failures to a password protected area. Under his own site. Aren’t you glad you don’t work in tech? Spring was fleeting. Summer was long, and hot, and humid, and sweaty, and buggy. And vulture-y.
More stuff to come about the summer season. There was a lot of weeding, lots of pickling, and the tragedy of tomatoes. Banner day around here today in “real” work, as well: this morning, someone telling us to fix a problem at their ISP. This evening, someone calling us incompetent - on facebook, no less, where naturally we can’t respond – and accusing us in a ticket of “deceiving” him because we didn’t read his mind about using a nonstandard mail format. Nice bookends to the day. Fortunately, not all of our clients are like that. Captured on the Lazy Dog Ranch timelapse cam that is currently awaiting the unfolding of a sunflower, from March 27 near dusk.
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