A month or two ago, there was a retrenchment in a company where some friends work. And it got me wondering about its impact: of learning that you’re being retrenched, the uncertainty whether you will be retrenched, the doubts about the future of the company… too many morale busters. Then suddenly it happened to the company. Luckily, IT wasn’t affected… for now. But you can still see the detrimental effect on everyone. How should a company handle it? How do we handle it? The only answer I can think of is to go on and keep doing what we’re doing. After all, we’re not the only ones with that sword hanging over our heads.
dhcpd
Not a good day. And it didn’t even start good. I got a message from Erik that the Internet connection was down. I hurried over to check the pertinent server and found out that the disk was full. I noticed that the messages log was HUGE so I truncated it and restarted services. Presto! Problem solved. Or so I thought.
A few moments later, Erik told me that in addition to the Internet connection, DHCP clients were unable to acquire addresses. I checked the messages logs and a found repetitive stream of DHCPDISCOVERs, DHCPOFFERs, DHCPREQUESTs, and DHCPACKs: It was the reason why the messages log grew so big! DHCP clients were trying over and over to get an IP but couldn’t. I tried everything I (and Google) can think of and more.
All the while and even through working lunch, people were calling asking why there’s a problem and worse, telling me that it shouldn’t happen (duh!), and generally whining. I hate it when people do that. Can’t they see I was doing something?!? Can’t they just let the crisis pass then whine later?
Worse, by the end of the day, I wasn’t able to fix the problem. Instead we worked around it and just manually configured all the DHCP clients with IPs. What a pain!
Tech Support Blues
There’s this issue that had us stumped for quite some time. Our chairman had been complaining that he could never access his online bank account. He always gets an “under maintenance” notice. But whenever we go to his computer and access it, it was perfectly okay. Anyway, on the umpteenth time that he asked for help, I finally decided to watch how he accesses the site. It turns out that he use Google Mail as his home page and whenever he goes to any other site, he inputs the URL on the Google search field instead of the browser address bar. This does make sense from an ease-of-use point of view. But unfortunately, Google returns a link that turned out to be obsolete. When you click on it, you almost wouldn’t know it is obsolete because the page displays the exact same “under maintenance” notice as when it is really under maintenance. We really shouldn’t take for granted the actions users make.
Why I Hate Users
Since I’m in a “hateful” mood today. I might as well put one in on why I hate users. I hate it when they see a job that can easily be done, they immediately think that it’s easy for a computer program to do exactly the same. Even worse, they expect your programming to be done just as quickly as they can do the job. Come on users! Give yourselves some credit! Except for some, you are much more complex, much more intelligent than a computer program. It takes a lot of programming for a computer program to be able to do what would seem simple to you.
Why I Hate Windows No. 35706
I get to the office expecting to see the output of a program we left running on my laptop through the weekend only to find out that that Windows Automatic (but stupid) Update has initiated a reboot. Argh!