IT professional

Vendor Knowledgebase’s

This is a mixed bag if I have ever seen one. Some vendor’s out there have knowledgebase’s so concise and breeming with information in a well indexed and easily searchable manner that it makes me want to compose a song in their honour. Some vendors however have knowledgebase’s so empty, or jammed with useless or antiquated information, or presented in a poor manner where your are never able to locate the article you need that you just want to go to their HQ and smack them.

I think this is pretty straightforward idea that when you produce a product you should want people to be able to fix the product as easily as possible. Obstacles and challenges in the movies are great but finding a bug fix on a vendor site should not warrant  difficulties worthy of the next Indiana Jones flick. I am going to quote a unnamed vendor rep who once told me in response to a question about getting better info about their product in their knowledgebase “It doesn’t look good for us if we post all of these issues”, to which I responded “I understand, however it looks even worse when we waste 10 hours trying to fix a problem only to call your tech support line and find out that it is a known issue with a easy work around”.

I would like a make a specific mention of Blackberry’s knowledgebase  http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/). I have used this knowledgebase on several occasions and found that it was excellent. This is the example by which all other vendor knowledebase’s should be judged.

Tough times ahead

I can remember clearly what the IT job market was like before 9/11. It was a glorious time when there were plenty of jobs for everyone. One could even get a job they weren’t quite qualified for since employers were so desperate for people. The market was great and employers had disposable income to burn, and then with one day the whole thing changed. Lay-off’s were common, including my own charming self, and budget’s were tight.

Fast forward to today and we are beginning to see the same thing all over again. Xerox announced today that they are cutting 3000 staff. Anyone with any level of foresight could tell you that HP is eyeing EDS like a fatty roast to trim.  This is just the beginning though, there is much more of this to com. From my experience when things get tight at a company this first thing that gets cut is IT.

Hopefully things get sorted out quickly because I for one have no desire to wax nostalgic in the unemployment line.

Unable to log into SQL

Here is the error

“An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server.  When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)”

The soltuon? SQLServeragent service wasn’t running. Not a difficult problem in the scheme of things but is it too much to ask of software vendors to program in error messages that actually point you in the right direction?

How hard would it be to provide an error message like “The SQLserver agent service currently is running. Please go into the services MMC in order to enable it”.  Would that make people’s lives to simple?

Print spooler issues

I have recently been fighting with a server with issues with the print spooler dying and needed to be restarted very often. I found this article which was really useful in fixing it.

 http://windowswideopen.com/blog/2007/08/…

Getting non-supported printers to work with Citrix Print Manager

As a general rule I quite like the Citrix Print manager, overall it does it’s job quite well and I think it supports a diverse group of printers. What I don’t like is when some people buy the crappiest, cheapest printers imaginable and then get angry at me when they don’t work with Citrix, particularly when they have had this issue before and I sent them the approved printers list and this printer isn’t on it. So for those times when “Buy a better printer” isn’t an appropriate response, here is the best solution I have.

Set the printer up as a network printer (buy the absolute cheapest usb print server if you have to), and then create a startup script to map LPT1 to the network share.

net use lpt1: \\servername\printername

Create a new printer using the HP LJ 1100 driver and assign it to print to LPT1. Rename the printer to something the user will associate with to his printer.

It’s quick and dirty but it works.

Broken hub causing Windows 2003 SBS server to freeze

So I am called in to fix a problem with a server being offline. I get onsite to find that the server is frozen and the last message was a delayed write failure. Give it a reboot and it blue screens. Boot into safe mode, works fine, I can get into windows, only suspicious event log errors are the delayed write failures. Boot into Safe Mode with Networking causes it to freeze again. Boot into normal mode with network cable unplugged and everything comes up ok. Plug in the network cable and try pinging, pings are intermitant, some work, some not, response is in the 1000’s of milliseconds. Try from another machine, same issue. Server freezes again. It’s about this time I realize the server is likely just a red herring (a crappy designed red herring) and start troubleshooting the network issue. Sometimes pings work fine, sometimes slow, sometimes not at all. Reboot all the main switches, same issue. So I start asking questions around. Turns out all the issues started around the time that someone dropped the small d-link hub by there desk. Bingo. Turn that off problems cease. Server comes back on, no more freezing. Now this was an interesting problem but it illustrates a rant. What the hell is wrong with server 2003? All the XP machines were fine, none of them froze up. I am not sure if it’s a server 2003 issue or an SBS issue (I wouldn’t be shocked, since SBS sucks) but regardless this is just bad.

“The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted” on a DC

I got this error today when trying to log into the only DC at one of our client sites. Needless to say this is a bad sign when a DC can’t see it’s own domain. After a few checks I quickly found that none of the machines could log into the domain at all. Didn’t take me long to figure out that DNS must be hooped. To get it working I logged in locally on another server, opened up services.msc, connected to the DC by IP address and stopped and started the DNS server service, and just like that everything came back. Now here is the rant, DNS is so tightly integrated with AD that you can get these catch-22 scenario’s where you can’t log into a server because DNS isn’t working but you need to log in to fix DNS. While one can easily restart a service from another machine, any other in depth troubleshooting is difficult especially since in this situation it would have been a 45 minute drive to get to the physical box.

Citrix Print Manager service hanging

I have been seeing this issue alot lately. Citrix Print manager service stops working properly so you go to restart the service and the service hangs. You end up having to kill the process CPSVC.EXE, then restart the spooler service and then start the Citrix Print Manager service. It’s really obnoxious but at least it’s a relatively quick fix to get it working. If this happens alot it can be resolved permanently by Citrix hot fix PSE400W2K3022.

Troubleshooting wireless networks

Wireless networks are getting more and more common and with good reason, they are damn useful, particularly when you get a lot of guests or vendors who visit your office. However they can be an absolute pain in the butt to troubleshoot. Part of this is because in a 9 times of 10 the person installing it buys the cheapest linksys or d-link wireless router they can find and installs it with the standard settings so you end up have 15 networks in proximity all with the same name and all on the same channel. It also  seems that some people  don’t see the correlation between the 2.4 ghz router they bought and all those cordless phones in their office that say 2.4 ghz on them. Plus why don’t some people realize that security could be important. To quote one of my co-workers “God bless the people who don’t realize they should put some form of security on their wireless networks because otherwise I would have to pay for internet at home”, great for your neighbours, bad for your network.

So there is a bunch of stuff that can go wrong but how do you make it right? Well I like to use a little tool called Net Stumbler. A great tool which shows you all the networks in proximity, their names, which channel they are on, their signal strength, whether or not they are secure and what type encryption they are using. Take it from me, it is a god send when troubleshooting wireless network issues.

 http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Too…

Dealing with Vendor tech support

I have the “joy” of dealing with vendor tech support on a semi-regular base and it’s just a constant pain. First you have to try to find their phone number. Most vendor’s seem to go out of their way to hide this to the best of their ability. It’s on their website somewhere but never in the most obvious places. After that you have to navigate through their IVR which is designed to be as tricky as possible so that you inevitably get to the wrong place so that they can forward you to another wrong place and so forth, waiting on hold for about 20 minutes in each group (if your lucky). Eventually you get to the group you need to speak to but the fun does not end there. It seems to me that the person I talk to always seems to know less about the product then I do. I will calmly explain who I am and all the troubleshooting steps I have done and instead of contributing something useful they will just ask me to do all the steps I have done all over again, and then when your finished they just tell you “Oh, I am not sure what the problem is, I will have to send you to my second level group” or whatever, well why couldn’t they have just done that in the first place. Eventually you do talk to someone who actually knows what they are talking about and get the problem fixed but by that point you have wasted like 3-4 hours out of your day. If that isn’t bad enough, the next day when you are trying to catch up on all the work you missed the day before because you wasted so much time dealing with this vendor, you then get a call back from the vendor wanting you to talk to them for 30 minutes and rate the service you received!

I firmly believe there are people who’s sole job is to design a system to make calling for support as painful a process as possible to discourage people from doing it. If these vendors spent half as much time into making their product work properly as they did trying to discourage people from seeking support then they wouldn’t have a problem at all.