Letter to the student who called yesterday

[LostMyMind]

yep, involves capturing a pup from the den mother in blackrock mountain........

All kinds of moral issues there , considering it's really really hard to get the pup without having to kill the momma.

But those pups are skinnable when you kill em. Well, before you capture it to spend the rest of it's life in the bank.

[edicius]

Hello,

There's a little phrase I'd like to remind you of.

Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Hey, I have that same quote on the wall in my office. And I work A/V at a university, so it holds just as true.

Oddly enough, the building I work in on campus has been having unresolved wireless issues for the past month. Called the tech desk once, they rebooted the router, fixed it briefly...and then it started acting up 2 days later. Seeing as I'm one of the only people actually USING the wireless during the summer, I just figured I'd let them do what they need to do to fix it (they're aware that the issue is persisting) and connected a CAT-5 to my laptop. Imagine that. :P

[mattm04]

My school had wireless in the academic buildings, most of the library and some dorm lounges. Over the summer the tried to make 100% of the campus and a public park next door wireless. It did not go well. I just got an e-mail from the IT people saying that "do to some unplanned technical issues the wireless network will be down until further notice. their is no planned restoration time available at this time. For more information go to <it website>"

So that is what happens when you try to make hundreds of AP's play nice in about 1 month, while using two separate contractors, and over the summer also installing new AC in the data center, upgrading to Exchange 2007 for several thousand users, a new Firewall, and a new electrical system/UPS/generator hookups.

[Depot Denizen]

The doubles in the Res halls have two Ethernet ports. We're running gig lines for internal connections, and even to the outside it's blazing fast.

I too, have gotten the "I skin puppies" treatment when we give Mommy and Daddy the news that Junior can't run wireless in the res hall. They can get it everywhere else, but we simply can't get it in the dorms.

Junior's solution? Bring a damn wireless router to the hall and install it. They are never configured properly and tend to bring down half of the dorm, and then they bitch when their intarwebs stops working. Network Services takes great pleasure in harrassing-I mean, shutting down these rouge routers.

Our Back-To-School distribution is this weekend, and the idiots, up until Friday, were still wanting laptops shipped home. That program ended mid-July, and the official deadline ended at the beginning of August. Oh well.

[technical.angel]

Dude, Depot, you're going through everything we're going through.

Of course, on our end, our network admin sniffs the campus weekly and disables the mac of every rouge port he finds.

Then the students say, "My wireless is broken. I need to buy a new one!" And they do, and then it "breaks" too. Heh.

[Broomjockey]

It's weird, we actually allow students to have wireless routers, and there's talk of getting wireless installed in the residence. It's probably going to be a pain to do, but whatever.

[technical.angel]

That means the equipment in your buildings allows for traffic to be routed correctly.

The rest of us aren't so lucky.

If a student plugs in a wireless router, the switch in the building with think that since it's closer, it'll send all the traffic there rather than out of the building to the servers. VERY BADNESS.

This year, I warned all the students that if it happens again, I'll tell every single person who calls exactly why their internet is down, and what to look for to get it back up.

Let peer pressure take care of what takes work for techies to do.

But, yes, please let those grants come through soon!

[Depot Denizen]

Yeah, I hear you Technical Angel. I also field calls at the helpdesk, so I get the brunt of both sides of things.

Network Services did fix the configurations so that the routers wouldn't cause a huge problem, but that seemed to have done nothing for last year.

I don't recall if we sniff the network, it would be handy. We -do- lock out computers if they are infected or they get caught for copyright piracy.

Us techies go through hell, all for the greater good. Have a drink of choice on me!

As hellish as this job can and will be, it's the best job I've had in a long time.

[technical.angel]

THANKFULLY, 22 laptops was enough that my manager let me have our admin asst send her all the work orders instead of me. I used the spare cubicle wall to block me off from the outside world. So now my only task is laptops. Right now I have... 11.

[Depot Denizen]

How do you folks do tech support over there? I'm curious.

Here, we have two ways. Phone support (me) is calling the Helpline, and we open a ticket for the client and attempt to resolve it over the phone. Is successful, ticket's closed. If not, we keep the ticket open and find a solution and work with them. Clients can submit tickets over the network, or email us, which generates a ticket.

Second way is the walk-in clinic. We have an area at the store for walk-in help, open from morning till afternoon. Clients work with the techs hands-on to resolve issues, sometimes they leave it overnight if the machine has to be re-formatted (we have disk images of all the comps we sell, makes reformatting a breeze). Data recovery and hardware check-in happens here too.

Both are free for students/staff/faculty.

[technical.angel]

Pretty much the same. People can call, email (which automatically generates a ticket), or stop by.

The admin asst is the first tier. I am the Gatekeeper. Everything must pass by me (well, pretty much) before being passed up to the other techs.

I also am the only one on student computers because I've been doing this for three years, and I end up helping everyone who tries to help me, so it's much easier for everyone to stay out of my way the first 2 weeks of school and just occasionally throw food or beverages into my cave.

[Geek King]

The admin asst is the first tier. I am the Gatekeeper. Everything must pass by me (well, pretty much) before being passed up to the other techs.

Hey, I got this skinny little guy over here asking for you. He calls himself the Keymaster. Mumbles a lot.