Today Is: Mostly Administrative  

Posted by James Wesson

Yes, most days are mostly administrative it is turning out. Although today when I walked in the door the email system was down so I took the opportunity to go with my direct IT supervisor to get coffee. Email was back up by the time we got back.


Emails of the morning: exceptions are made to the stated hardware requirements for the encryption of laptops despite the SOP documentation clearly stating the opposite (that's good for the unit I support); received new instructions on the procedure for adding email accounts to the large mail store (increase their storage on the regular mail store first then request the move to the mail store); three 'urgent' requests first thing from my support unit (can't access network drives [solved by a reboot - it's a laptop in a dock and likely asleep instead of off when being initially docked], miscellaneous unspecific 'freeze' and 'missing hard drive' (they were looking for the actual workstation and couldn't find it - someone had moved it, probably the housekeeping crew); email from an administrative employee asking about active-x notification in his email (unable to address it due to time constraints on his end - i.e. he's busy and solving the problem means looking at the messages which means him giving up his computer for a few minutes which he's not going to be able to do for the next month since he's under the wire for a number of time sensitive projects); client for my support unit stopped by my desk to ask about the Outlook outage (walked by to desk and ask client to login to Outlook - client had tried to check email earlier and it did not work but client had NOT checked it since before a meeting and did not know it was working - i.e. client stopped by my desk before going to their desk and trying email to see if it was working).

Up to this point this is the first 90 minutes of my day hereabouts. I have been fastidiously making tickets lately for even the most basic questions that my clients are asking since I am very interested in the exact number of items I am working on at any given moment. That is, in fact, what this journal is also about.

Around 10:35 AM the dead network adapter device from earlier in the week finally rears its ugly head again (as anticipated). At least I can call Dell now while it isn't working and ask for someone to come and replace the equipment. I have a hot swappable spare on hand, but it isn't full configured and I am working through that right now. As mentioned earlier in the week, I visit update.microsoft.com quite often and today is no exception. The hot swappable spare looks to be partially configured an I am running about 17 various updates. It makes me happy that I swapped out my old 10/100 Linksys switch the the new 10/100/1000 that my other location's NAS finally got wind of and killed off unceremoniously (which explains a lot about why I am spending more time in this location now - I need a lot of network ports and my other location has two ports and I have two workstations there already which makes for a problematic work environment). Hopefully in the next few minutes at least the Windows updates will be completed and I can cart this machine upstairs and get the client setup for minimum access for email and files. So, things turned technical around 10:35 AM it seems.

I took the spare upstairs with me along with a tool kit and the Dell contact information. I called Dell and they walked me through some steps. A step I did miss in my initial troubleshooting and updates was to update the BIOS. It actually might BE the BIOS simply because disabling and re-enabling the NIC in the BIOS reactivated it. Right now the device is working again and I have a Dell case number and email contact. If the network adapter dies again I can simply email the support technician and he will schedule equipment replacement.

With that I reach lunch time.
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After lunch the first thing I end up addressing is something I already have talked about earlier as well, which is a supposed virus going out via a listsrv from one of my support unit's computers. And again the level of misunderstanding is higher than the level of patience regarding the facts involved. Suffice to say that it is indeed a very technical issue, but only in the sense that it is a logical matter of explaining how things function as opposed to how the client thinks things function. A third part IT technician was pulled into the discussion and things get increasingly surreal from there, but suffice to say the third party IT technicians agrees with me. At this point I am not sure how to move this issue along any further since the feeling I get is that the client doesn't trust my judgement on it, so I may ask my supervisor for permission to have another technician in our own group to take a look at this just for confirmation.

Ultimately the client contacts me to explain her position, which I understand and we clear up the matter entirely. The misunderstanding led her to sending along an email that made it seem like a counter-argument to my own line of reasoning (i.e. it came across as "You're wrong." to me). Further discussion and being frank and honest about the situation clears up the matter entirely and ultimately we hear from our third party confirming that, in fact, my initial analyses of the matter are the most likely explanation of the matter. So there was a bad interpretation on my part as well in regarding the email she sent as simply saying "You're wrong." and a misunderstanding on her part from the voice mail. I am glad that it was resolved and that everything was clarified between us since I prefer for work relationships to be amiable.
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Today Is: Busy  

Posted by James Wesson

Many mornings are administrative, as it turns out. I have not yet launched email, however. Instead I am in our ticketing system looking at tickets to close out. The first task is to email the client with the network adapter issue mentioned earlier and ask if things are working ok (which looks to be the case since I can ping the device and VNC responds when trying to connect to it).


I am also trying to follow-up on an issue in which a workstation is blasting away request to the network print server. I have my suspicions about what is causing the problem, and it was another case of running many an update.

Another follow-up: client unable to login to the spam quarantine. Likely caused by the client attempting to login with their AD username and the spam quarantine server uses the first part of the email address as the login instead (verified by me since the spam filter server went online because my login name and the first part of my email address differ). Emailed client to find out if they tried that which I suggested in a previous email.

Some of today's incoming: client wants assistance in getting access to someone else's calendar (informed her the someone else has to be the one to grant the access but I am aware that the someone else is not technically savvy enough to do so and I schedule a time to meet with the someone else to do it for them); same client makes the same request of another someone else, but another someone else is easily technically savvy enough to process the instructions themselves and they will be sent along; answered some questions regarding Macintosh, OWA and Entourage and let the person know that Entourage is the preferred method for connecting to our Exchange email system and that using it allows them to also use Macintosh's Spotlight indexed searching on their email (since she was complaining that she could not search emails in OWA).

Just after the consultation with the person regarding OWA our entire network went down for about 30 minutes, just in time for lunch. Apparently there was a power failure on a core network appliance in our building, which does things like kill off a several thousand people's access to email (file servers were moved from this location recently) beyond just those of us in the building.

After having lunch I got wrapped up into an EndNote X3 and Windows Vista Small Business issue. The laptop recently was encrypted, but it looks like the encryption team missed removing the MS EFS encryption from the device before installing the CheckPoint full disk encryption. I am not certain if that is what delivered such a strange set of circumstances that rendered EndNote X3 non-functional, but looking at the random assortment of EFS encrypted files deep in the user folder it's hard to say what having EFS and FDE from a third party vendor turned on together might do. Ultimately I had to uninstall EndNote X3 via the local admin account and re-install it and tell Word 2007 to allow services from EndNote X3 to run. Unfortunately I started down a bit of a wrong path initially since it was so similar to another EndNote X3 problem I had experienced in the past.

I have had one phone call directly to my line that is not supposed to receive calls and the person was having issues with Outlook 2003 and multiple profiles prompting her for her to input her own login again instead of using the AD login for authentication. Outlook 2003 has always seemed to have this issue and sometimes it sorts itself out and other times it does not and the person is left to always input their own username and password when they log into their email via the profile. We covered how to do this and she was satisfied with the solution.

Many emails coming through requesting various things. One person followed up with me regarding the email quarantine login so that's a ticket to close. At the moment I am going through and creating Outlook profiles for various resource accounts used at the specific unit that I primarily support. The resource account method of doing this is an outdated method of doing this and many other things that once used resource accounts now have been moved to public folders, but these few things have not and I am left to be the gatekeeper for these specific accounts primarily due to the reality that people do not like being the designated gatekeepers for these accounts nor do they remember how to grant and pull access to calendars. I once made repeat efforts to have designated gatekeepers for these two particular accounts, but for whatever reason be it technical or logical people find the idea a very difficult one to comprehend and ultimately I have conceded for these specific accounts to be the person that grants access to the calendars. That fact that I have typed about it at such great length belies that I do the tasks involved begrudgingly since they are essentially administrative assistant tasks and not field technician tasks and it is being left to me largely due to the administrative assistants not wanting to learn the few steps.

For the same person I am granting that access for I have been asked to set up their old email address that they used when they were previously employed here as an alias address. Why? Because a single person has that old email address in their address book from well over a year ago. The thought process that leads to requesting the email account be modified to accommodate this is interesting because it seems significantly easier to simply ask the person with the wrong email address to change it in their address book. It does not matter to me, but it is a fine example of a complicated solution where a simple solution is easier.

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This Afternoon Is: Administrative  

Posted by James Wesson

Much in the way of answering emails and answering questions and prepping a laptop order to go out.


There is also a request for setting up someone to login to a workstation. Very rudimentary tasks this afternoon.

This morning's network adapter workstation was returned to its client's office, reconnected to the network port and seemed to be working. I checked in after a couple of hours and found that it was still online, so it may have simply been a one off corrupted driver issue. If it turns out to be a hardware issue at a later date then it can be reported and resolved at that time. In most places, ticketing systems would be tied to asset management and client relations software, but our current setup does not tie in asset management to service desk ticking or customer relations. This causes a bit of disconnect about what work was done on the hardware, unfortunately, since the only place the work is tracked is in the service desk ticket and it is not related to the device itself in any way. That is on track for being change in the near future, however, which is good news.

At least an hour of my day has been spent composing email replies to clients explaining that clients reporting a virus attached to their newsletter they email out may simply be reporting the results from antivirus software set to the highest level of scrutiny and that instead of a virus that what is being reported by the software is the potentialfor something malicious. The only information provided to me directly from antivirus software straight up indicates that to be the case:

"Trend Micro AntiVirus has detected an email that may contain malicious contents and attached it to this new mail as a text file. If you need to read the original mail message, we recommend you open it as a text file. To prevent infection, do not save the original mail as a mail file."

This is clear to me as a technician that the email is being filtered by TrendMicro based on its criteria for potential problems and not that the email actually contained a virus. The few sample communications I have received provide no specific information as to a specific virus. While it is best to be charitable about what people are reporting, it must be weighed against finding out exactly what is really going on. After more than ten years of supporting desktop support clients of varying levels of knowledge, it is important to take knowledge level into account when reviewing communications. Reports of viruses from recipients of an HTML newsletter unfortunately are going to face the highest level of scrutiny from me on the information they are reporting to me being accurate. The best I can do is methodically explain to the senders what the likely problems are on the recipients end that are causing the recipients to react with alarm and dismay. In most cases it is not anything genuinely threatening but their antivirus software simply letting them know that something has the potential to be a problem. But antivirus software suffers from the problem of reporting nearly all things in an identical manner so that potential problems of low risk are reported in a similarly alarming manner to genuine problems that are high risk. If you are the client and you see your antivirus software pop up something to you it is unlikely that you are going to read through the entire message. Instead you will notice the notification, scan it for keywords, pick out the ones that matter, and then you will focus on the most important ones: "malicious" and "virus" not "may" and "potentially".

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I Am Currently: Updating Windows  

Posted by James Wesson

A regular part of the job, despite the presence of a sever based update and patching system in place, is to install Windows updates on Windows XP based computers as they roll back and forth from the client that uses the computer to the technician that supports the computer. Ideally a client will not have local administrator privileges on the workstation and the desktop tech will be the one to perform software installs and run updates. Realistically, though, some people do end up being local admins on their workstations through various forms of neglect and/or necessity. (Some applications still have some rather old school architecture and require the client using the software to be able to write to the application's install directory in the Program Files folder, or worse, in any folder it creates for whatever purposes it needs, which kills the possibility of simply granting a single client local admin rights to only that particular folder.) The result of a regular non-technician client having local admin privileges is not that the person regular performs necessary software updates (although it does make things that auto-update work properly) as a matter of conscience choice. Instead the result is usually a negative one based on an ill-fated click in checking out results from an internet search. The negative result tending toward a virus at best and extortion-ware at worst (and I have seen three cases of the latter in the past month). So as machines come in for troubleshooting I run the updates and get them as up-to-date with operating system updates as possible. If other updates are available, such as Java or iTunes or Quicktime or Flash or Adobe, I try to push those into the mix as well. And that is what I am doing this morning as I sip coffee and visit the Microsoft update site a few times.


Those updates come after I have already reinstalled the network adapter driver for the Optiplex 755 network adapter. Windows Device Manager reports that it is a 2GB card but all of Dell's drivers and all of the indicators on their support site make no mention of any 2GB Intel on board network cards, but a driver is available for this specific machine and it is the same one already installed, and Dell's suggestion here is to reinstall the driver if the network adapter is experiencing issues such as the one this machine has been experiencing. If I call Dell and just go back and forth with them that it wasn't working but now it IS working then I end up doing these same steps anyway, so I am going through all of the possible iterations ahead of time to see if either (1) the problem is resolved or (2) the problem persist and I have just cause to justify to Dell that the motherboard needs replaced.

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Today Is: Mostly Administrative  

Posted by James Wesson

Very little on the technical side of work today. A few windows updates and troubleshooting for the server team of an out of control DCOM service on a workstation that was slamming the print server.


I disabled the DCOM service and I am running the standard cadre of Windows updates. The server tech thinks it might have to do with so locally install HP software on the workstation, and he is probably correct. I will be scheduling time to uninstall and re-install the updated versions of that software in the near future on that workstation.

Other than that, answering a lot of questions about an upcoming encryption project, setting up a loaner laptop for a VIP within the sub-unit and making sure it has the full disk encryption before it is picked up, processing a laptop order for the VIP (entirely a point-and-click set of administrative tasks).

I am also working on moving my email out of Outlook archives an just keeping the entirety of it stored as .msg files in a folder. I find that Outlook's archive files have been unreliable for me for some reason and I have routinely run into a problem with different archives where Outlook tells me that I have not configured it for that particular service and the only solution seems to be entirely delete my Outlook profile and create a new one. It has happened so often that I have decided to stop using Outlook archives. It is a viable solution in some ways, but given that I have been here seven year it is also a long road of moving many thousands of emails into the folder.

Later in the day there has been one technical problem that is of the sort that is most difficult to discern which is that of the intermittently function network port on a workstation. It was working fine, then not at all, then fine again in a different location. It easily could have been some issue with the network port in the faceplate as well despite a laptop working just fine (albeit slowly) through that port. So, tomorrow morning I will trek the device back to the original location, plug it back into the faceplate and see what happens. Incompatibility between the faceplate and the workstation seems unlikely without some sort of intervention from the network group deciding to make changes (which can happen if they believe something unusual is going on with a workstation on a particular port). With the computer and it's network connector functioning normally at my desk, though, I can't call Dell and say it doesn't work. At best I can boot to a CD and run the diagnostics and let it see what it can find. The port was acting strange when I first arrived on the scene and instead of the regular network LEDs being standard amber or green they were both solid yellow and then they were completely off. If it's an overheating issue, I'll find out tomorrow while I leave the computer sitting here all night.

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What did I do at work today?  

Posted by James Wesson

That's what this will be about.

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