This also works on IT managers if you say “can we use AI to do that?”.
Restarting can be a pain too.
Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I’m not new to Linux, I’ve been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.
Installing arch itself wasn’t that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn’t recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn’t want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.
I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn’t install dhcpcd and I don’t know how to user network manager! No internet, great!
In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when… The boot menu didn’t recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?
“Oh it doesn’t appear… Wait, what’s this? No boot partition found? Oh crap…”
Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they’re called. I deleted GRUB.
Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and… It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.
Usually, I would’ve installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.
I don’t know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)
respecc
I like to imagine an IT person telling someone that story to see whether they understand it or get a stroke, as a way to check if they were telling the truth about being good with computers and having tried everything, or something.
Check if dckpcd is up
IT Crowd was such a great show.
Between the antics, it was too real
The bar is quite low, which is not to say they’re wrong
100% chance you logged off/on
Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.
He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.
I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.
Use 7zip
🤓
I’m not really a computer person
Yes, you are.
seemed logically basic
See. You are.
winzip
Yes, retro.
Did it display the payment nag screen ironically or seriously?
You thinking of WinRAR? I always assumed that was for enterprise use and they knew everyone was content to be nagged.
That’s exactly what it’s for. If you use it commercially without paying winrar will come for you, but as a personal use case it’s just ad ware. You get the product, and deal with their ad every boot. You could pay for it, but it probably the least annoying ad on the internet right now.
And we’ve all moved to 7zip now anyway. Half expecting to be told that’s outdated now too.
Did they ever come for anybody though?
Enterprises are very averse to risks, and it’s very cheap, so it’s a non-brainier. But I’m not sure there’s any actual enforcement there.
I remember hearing that they have gone for companies before, but that was a while ago and, ya know, just something I read that may or may not be particularly accurate.
I’ve thought about it, because I almost feel a little guilty. I’ve used WinRAR for a decent chunk of my life, across a multitude of systems.
I still haven’t, but I think about it sometimes when I see the window.
If you are messing around the inside of a desktop pc, you are already more of a computer person than the average person.
50/50 chance they believe you.
20/80 tbh
This why I ask “can you restart it again, and just tell me what you see, please”
“Did you restart your computer?”
“… yes?”
opens task manager
sees a system uptime of 4 years
I’ll lose my tabs!
And several gigabytes of ram taken by chrome.
“OK then do me a favor, shut it down, unplug the power for 5 second and plug it back in”
Everyone uses laptops that plug into workstations like desktops now.
Yeah, 50% person actually restarted, 30% chance person is lying, 20% chance person just turned the monitor off and back on.
My buddy works IT for a company and that 20% chance is one he encountered just last week!!
I tend to just check uptime before asking this question.
If I see the machine has been up for weeks and they tell me they rebooted it, I know i’m dealing with someone who doesn’t know that pressing the power button on the monitor doesn’t turn the computer off.
Could also be windows fault.
It likes to do soft restarts and not actually restart.
I started telling my users to always hold shift when shutting down or restarting to make sure it shuts down fully.
I explain fast boot to people by saying “for some reason Microsoft went and made the Shut Down button not actually shut down your PC, it really just puts it into a ‘deep sleep’ mode, and to their credit, it lets them say that boot times are faster… But it also means that in order to FULLY restart the PC, you have to click restart… I know it’s a pain”
Usually I get looked at like I’m from another planet, but that reaction means they’ll probably remember it later.
And sometimes fast boot (I’m assuming we’re both talking about the bios setting) causes so many blue screens in windows that it becomes almost unusable.
AFAIK fast startup only affects shutdown, clicking restart will always do a full reboot. Shift clicking shutdown will do a full shutdown like you said, but shift clicking restart will start recovery mode.
I don’t even bother checking. I tell them I’m going to do something on my side that might cause their computer to reboot and then reboot it remotely.
The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.
80 percent chance they reboot it themselves anyways.
100% chance to remember the name
80% seems really low
deleted by creator
I lied while RMAing a video card… kinda.
I spoke with an incredibly nice Indian fellow, and he asked me to try some troubleshooting. I had done all of it before, so I… pretended. But I told him all of the things I experienced when I did those steps (and lied further by giving ample time to pretend to do things.)
He RMA’d it just fine in the end and it works five years later. But I did feel bad about lying. I just didn’t want to take my whole working setup and do the troubleshooting steps again D:
You get a lot of shit MSI, but you did me goodly.
I just recently had a wfh user ship me one of his monitors back because we had exhausted every thing I could think of troubleshooting-wise. When it arrived I unboxed it, plugged it in and the damn thing worked fine. I followed up with him and finally realized he had been trying to push the damn power LED instead of the actual power button.
Searching for a button is sometimes really hard, as manufacturers are quite inventive. But then again, reading an instruction is usually an option even if it is last resort (in the list it’s right after mailing the monitor to the support, it seems)
Thought that was House MD rule number one. Everybody lies. Wait. That means IT lies! How deep does the rabbit hole go?
House lied and not everybody lies.
The rabbit lies too.
How is this about programming?
It’s about IT. Close enough
I didn’t say it was. It’s adjacent, and based on the vote % it seems like most people don’t have an issue with a meme about IT.
“Did you make sure it’s plugged in?”
“Of course I did! Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“You mind just checking for me real quick?”
“…”
“Sir?”
“Never mind, it’s working now.”
I mean sometimes a plug comes loose, its bad but a easy fix.
I’ve unironically had this happen to me, same friend, twice.
They had the audacity to blame me, despite being generous enough to perform some basic maintenance and performance enhancements.
Then when they got home, forgot to plug it back in.
I’ve done it before, although I figured it out before asking for help. We all do dumb stuff sometimes. Just admit it and don’t be a jerk about it!
I had one where yes everything was plugged in but… The power strips never plugged into the wall… They were just plugged into each other.
That one turned out to be an annoying bit of cable management that I wouldn’t have had to do if they would have just left things alone and let me handle the original ticket
Never ask if it’s plugged in. Always ask them to unplug it and plug it in again. That way they don’t feel condescended to.
That’s a good tip!
If I am calling IT to fix anything, it’s because I’ve exhausted all the usual things to fix it (restart, clear cache, make sure everything is seated, googled the issue, etc). 9 times outta 10, they’re just as stumped as I am and the device simply gets replaced. That 10th time tho it’s something I’ve never encountered but they have.
That’s how one becomes IT
I support doing the troubleshooting yourself. Just be aware, if you call with one of those 9 out of 10 cases, we’re still going to have to do ALL of those steps again, so I can document that we tried them before sending any hardware. I’ve been burned one too many times by someone telling me they’ve already tried something.
I would call IT and give them error codes and attempted remedies. They would do house calls and leave with a few rip its. Everyone in my office usually had my call IT because they (my coworkers and the IT guys) knew I’d at least tried something. If someone else from the office called IT, they knew that I was out of the office or the user was lying about something.
As an IT person, hearing that someone has already restarted to try to fix it, gives me mixed feelings.
First, they might be lying. I’ve had it happen that people tell me they’ve done something when they have not. Restarting is usually an easy one to verify, just check the uptime of the system.
Second, maybe they did everything right, and actually restarted, that’s cool that they tried something before calling in. I appreciate that.
Third, if the second thing is true then, I’m now frustrated, because now I have to get dirty with whatever is happening since a reboot that should have fixed the problem, didn’t fix it. I know it’s not going to be an easy fix. Most of the time, I’m right, unfortunately.
I’m all for users trying stuff before calling in. But recognise that you don’t, and shouldn’t have access to some things. Sometimes that’s administrator rights, sometimes that’s a piece of software, sometimes it’s the ability to turn off the AV/firewall.
It can be a lot of things. If you’re not sure if what you’re trying won’t screw things up more than they already are, then don’t do it. If it’s something simple that you know how to do, go for it. If you happen to get it fixed, so much the better.
“Customer self resolved” is usually the fastest way to get a problem resolved. That’s good for you, for me, and good for everyone.
The real world experience
“Hi so to save us some time I’ve restarted the computer, went ahead and assigned a static IP to all devices and put them all on the same sub net. While in the router I noticed there was a firmware update so I managed to do that removing the ROM chip and wrote an open source os that uses half the resources of the factory one…”
“Ok sir could you restart your computer”
I spent months trying to tell my ISP that their side of a DHCP transaction wasn’t giving me my IPv6 address, being so specific as to send them the exact offending packets but it wasn’t until I took my entire network apart, unboxed their shitbox router and plugged that in that they would believe me.
I’ve worked IT man, I get it, but jesus christ!
One day my MIL’s Macintosh stopped being able to connect to the Internet over its internal ethernet, which was directly connected to the cable modem.
They called Comcast a bunch of times to no avail, so they sent someone out to check it. He had no idea what was wrong, so I said “Let’s connect your laptop to the Mac with an Ethernet cable just to make sure the Ethernet works.”
Dude looked at me like I had two heads. “It doesn’t work like that.”
I proceeded to grab a patch cable, hook them together, and mount the Mac’s public shares on the Windows machine, thus proving the Ethernet worked on both systems.
Turns out Comcast had changed the MTUs on the modems one night, which made the Mac not work for some reason. But getting a cheap router and putting it between solved the problem.
How is this the real world experience?
IT can have scripts and flowcharts they are required to follow, even if it is redundant to tech savvy people.
And as always, there’s an XKCD comic about it https://xkcd.com/806/
It helps too. I lost internet, did two full reboots of the modem and router. Nothing. Called support. He walked me through the process of rebooting the modem and router. It worked that time.
My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples’ Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.
The number of times I’ve had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I’m on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious…
They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn’t really save anything. I’ve had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.
Meanwhile I had an IT guy think I was just being an idiot. He was so confident I hadn’t checked something. Felt good when I showed him where it went wrong.
“Ok let me check on something”
Uptime: 156 hours
"let’s restart using what I like to call, ‘the right way’ "
“I restart every day before going home”
Uptime: 19:23:07:24
Yeah… Logging off isn’t restarting…
(Brought to you by my actual day today)
E: correct autocorrect
E2: of course that’s not why I told her. I explained how fastboot sometimes takes over and doesn’t actually restart the device, only “refreshes” the experience. I recommended she restart at least once a week. We’ll see what happens.
If you are internal IT you (or someone at least) should disable fastboot though GPOs
Idk how that person’s IT works, but in mine, that would probably warrant a lot of paperwork. The techs would have to pitch the change to client management, client management would have to pitch it to change management and provide test results to show it has no side effects, then deal with the techs complaining about the uptick in tickets about slow boot times or people justifying never shutting down or restarting with it taking so long to boot.
Not that they’re actually slow, our users are just super entitled. I got to observe the rollout of automatic screen lock for security reasons, and the ensuing pushback. The audacity of having to reenter your password if you’ve spent more than ten minutes doing nothing!
Security even managed to push for reducing it to five minutes after some unfortunate incident… but it got reverted for reasons you can probably guess. Hint: shit always flows downward.
I recommend looking into Windows hello for business to reduce the usage of passwords in the first place. It’s so much nicer to use your fingerprint, face, or even a PIN.
I would never consider fingerprints or face scans to be secure even for personal devices. I guess if theres literally nothing to protect, if thats possible.
Passwords can in most scenarios be considered to be even less secure.
Remember that you aren’t replacing 64 character passwords with fingerprints. You are replacing 8 character shit passwords with fingerprints.
Also pretty much everyone in IT security agrees that passwordless is the way to go.
Passwords REALLY fucking sucks for so many reasons.
I do understand the point that the biometrics are replacing very short pins usually, oftentimes 4 digits only but I dont quite see how that makes the passcodes worse than the biometrics.
I’d say even a 6 digit passcode with a randomized number pad, alongside an emergency wipe pin, would do better than biometrics, which also need to have a passcode setup as backup anyhow.
Maybe you could play out a few scenarios that illustrate your point?
windows doesnt actually shut down, its some kind of hybrid hibernation now. it only really reboots if you actually reboot. so they may actually be “shutting down” every day.
They have successfully circumvented the reboot. I just always turn that setting off. SSDs are ubiquitous, nobody needs a fake shutdown. It just causes more issues.
Show me how you reboot the PC.
*User turns off monitor
Honestly most unsavvy people don’t even realize they can turn their monitors off. Especially if the buttons are behind or under the screen, they wouldn’t even know the buttons were there.
There’s some older ones where there are actual buttons on the bottom of the screen. Beats me how the people who press them to turn it off manage to press the power button for the PC to turn it on.
I just had to search to find my work monitors’ controls yesterday! All the way on the back.
I get credit for knowing they were turnoffable though.
I remember some old movie that was on TV ~30 years ago. A terrorist group broke into some computer room to destroy the data. They shot the monitors to smithereens and ran away.
(AFAIR they weren’t Macs)
Considering our IT department replaces computers without moving over our files (like come on, just swap the drives!), I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they’d treat it.
