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Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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arthwollipot said:
Sure. That's very much not the usual situation, though. The vast majority of clients of Microsoft's cloud solutions are not like that.

This particular outage occurred just as I was finishing my last day before a 4-day weekend, so I never found out how long it lasted. I'd be pretty surprised if it was more than an hour. During a non-peak time when almost nobody was using it. That amount of sloppiness is more than acceptable when as I say the downtime is exceptionally rare compared to the old system.
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I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable.

Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count.

The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids! :mad: Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365.

Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet.
 
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OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer.

Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message.

Seriously people!

Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file.

That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!!
 
OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.
 
novaphile said:
OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer.

Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message.

Seriously people!

Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file.

That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!!
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One level worse, a screen shot pasted into a Word document. So now you have to open Word, and then hope that the image has enough resolution so that when you export it from Word that you can actually read the text in the screenshot.
 
ob xkcd.

norm_normal_file_format.png
 
Wudang said:
ob xkcd.

[qimg]https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/norm_normal_file_format.png[/qimg]
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Exactly! (Very late acknowledgment of the issue by Randall Munroe, though. :D That's from 2019, and I retired in 2018, and had been having the problem years before that.)
 
Norman Alexander said:
I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable.

Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count.
The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids! :mad: Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365.

Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet.
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Modern accountancy for you.
 
I read a worked example of how one guy was swapping back from AWS to his own servers but I can't find it yet (retweeted by a guy I follow who tweets a lot) but maybe I'll find it. This was a recent post (so recent AWS experience, it changed a lot in the time I used it) and who'd been carefully monitoring usage, costs etc and just couldn't keep it cheap. Priced some Dell servers with redundancy etc and it was significantly cheaper.
I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper.
 
"cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about.

But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises.

Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time....
 
Darat said:
"cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about.

But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises.

Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time....
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This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket" ;)
 
Norman Alexander said:
This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket" ;)
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This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it.

It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that.
 
Ensure control frameworks are implemented in line with risk appetite and provide effective assurance and resilience of our IT services???????
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Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations
 
Norman Alexander said:
I have never found a need to use OneNote.
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As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc.
Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc.
Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads.

eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do.
 
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Wudang said:
OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.
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I found that a useful feature, I wonder why they didn't keep it.
 
Norman Alexander said:
This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket" ;)
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That is a very profitable model for the leasing company.
 
Wudang said:
I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper.
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You'd sort of hope that is the case.

As you get bigger, more and more of what you pay for is the actual hardware and DC costs and (hopefully) the management overhead doesn't scale as quickly. So you're paying for the same machines, plus all the provider's costs.

Only place I'd really plan for such a provider is when your usage patterns aren't huge, stable, or non-decreasing. If you have spiky usage and can scale quickly enough, there's no way that holding that capital on your own for the entire year should make sense. Paying a provider for only the spike would be great.

My last 3 companies have been huge and had more stable (and forecastable) demand. Moving services to a cloud provider would have been very expensive and involved more complex problems because of trying to interface two separate IT departments....
 
Mashuna said:
This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it.

It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that.
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Oh no! That means they can't lease the machine that goes "ping" back from the company they sold it to, so that it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account?
 
Wudang said:
As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc.
Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc.
Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads.

eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do.
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<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."
 
novaphile said:
<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."
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Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable.
 
Wudang said:
Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable.
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Sharepoint very much depends on how it's set up. It can be set up so that it works excellently, if the engineers setting it up know what they're doing. If they don't, it can be a pile of dog's breakfast after it's come out of the dog's other end.
 
Dearest User: I am not a snob. I do not drop the names of important people just to seem impressive myself. However, sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, situations present themselves in which one must --no matter how democratic they are in spirit-- pay a teensy bit of attention to a hierarchy. One such situation might be, oh, I don't know, today when you demanded I "drop everything" to do a Very Trivial Thing for you. User, my dear, I want you to navigate yourself (if you can) to the company org chart. Open it. Find your name. Look three levels above you. See that name? Now look two more levels above them. See that name? The work I'm doing is for their boss. The only thing likely to get dropped here is yourself!
 
novaphile said:
<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."
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I did one of the first EU implementations of it.......
:D
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, this is fun: soon we'll need an authenticator to authenticate the authenticator we currently use. I foresee no possible problems, complications, or absurdity with this.
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Well, since this is a "security" measure, nobody in management will care in the slightest if it make it impossible to get any work done at all.
 
TragicMonkey said:
User, my dear, I want you to navigate yourself (if you can) to the company org chart.
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Due to working for a company that is technically owned by another company, the MS Outlook view of my hierarchy was that I was on level 14. Only thirteen steps below the big, big boss.

(It wasn't quite real. Besides the top 3 being real execs at the parent company, at least two of the folks were admins rather than actual managers). But I was a long, long, way down....
 
BowlOfRed said:
Due to working for a company that is technically owned by another company, the MS Outlook view of my hierarchy was that I was on level 14. Only thirteen steps below the big, big boss.

(It wasn't quite real. Besides the top 3 being real execs at the parent company, at least two of the folks were admins rather than actual managers). But I was a long, long, way down....
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Never trust Outlook. According to Outlook my job title is the one I had four years ago, my desk is located on a floor that doesn't exist in the building I worked in five years ago, and my phone number is a landline to the building I worked in ten years ago.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Never trust Outlook. According to Outlook my job title is the one I had four years ago, my desk is located on a floor that doesn't exist in the building I worked in five years ago, and my phone number is a landline to the building I worked in ten years ago.
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That's just someone failing to maintain the GAL properly.
 
arthwollipot said:
That's just someone failing to maintain the GAL properly.
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I should hope, in the unlikely event I ever have a gal to maintain, I'd do so properly. See that she ate well, and had a nice comfortable place to sleep. Some nice clothes, a few accessories, access to transportation. And we'd talk, that's the key to a good relationship. It can't just be sex and crossbow hunting wild boar in the forest.
 
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