by CodeNinja | Oct 29, 2010 | Customers
This week at the Asylum has been a bit weird (And I mean weirder than normal) We’ve had two customers fighting to be crowned “The King of Idiots.” Now you would not think that was a title anyone would actively seek out, but I swear the two nominated contestants must have been. There is no other explanation for the level of stupidity involved.
Contestant 1: (We shall call them Santa & the Elves)
For several weeks now Santa has been emailing our Support department asking for some DNS changes to be made for their domain name. And every week they have been informed the changes were done weeks ago. This finally got escalated to me to look at, and I inform them that the changes have all be done.
I get an email from Santa saying that where www is working and pointing at the correct IP, the domain name by itself is not pointing at the right IP so could an A record be created. So I point out www is a CNAME that points at the domain. so whatever IP www goes to is the one the domain name by itself goes too. *Repeat four Times*. Since Santa is getting nowhere with emails, he decided to phone me up and explain again how www goes to the right place, and can we point the domain to the same place as www. This time as well as explaining it all to him, I logged onto our primary NameServer and emailed him the actual zonefile for his domain to show him where things went.
Santa then asked would I mind talking to his head IT elf, I agreed so the IT elf phoned and used the same words as Santa. I explained again, and the elf came up with this solution. “If we change the www from a cname to an a record it may work?” I had to check I had heard him right and that his plan was for me to change the one he claimed worked, and set it up exactly as the one he claimed did not work?
Santa then decided we need a conference call with all the elves, and some clever dwarfs who were walking past at the time. In this call they suggested that since www worked when it was just an alias for the domain, that couldn’t we leave it pointing to the domain, and change the domain to point to the www? I believe they could tell by the sound of *BANG* *BANG* as my head banged against my desk, that maybe that would not work.
It was during this conference call while their head IT Elf was muttering that the DNS was all wrong, and his load balancer was not working because of it, which in turn stopped their certificate from working. As soon as I heard cert, I stopped them to ask was this about a SSL cert? (Which it was). They had got one www.domain, only when they went to domain it was giving warnings. And they believed if they could just get the DNS & load balancer working right, this problem would be resolved.
I had to explain what DNS and URL’s were, to several people who were IT professionals, with claimed experience in hosting, networks, dns, etc..
Contestant 2: (We shall call the Seaman)
I was asked in my role of Linux Sys.Admin to help the Seaman with any problems he had moving the hosting of a website over too us. Now there should have been no problems really since the Seaman is a professional web developer.
Now, His entry was a late one, and only lasted one day, as opposed to Contestants 1’s weeks. Yet on that one day he managed to phone up for help over a dozen times, heres a few of the problems he had.
P: FTP will not let me connect to the server.
S: Spell FTP correctly, and it will work
P: It says it can not load the file, but the files there
S: You realise Linux is case sensitive right?
P: I can not write collected email addresses to a file
S: Make the file writable and not read only.
S2: Errr why are you using a flat file, you have a MySQL DB with that account?
I’ve not decided on the winner YET. I’m leaning towards Contestant 2. Mainly because “How do you spell FTP wrong?” come on, its three letters, and you say the three letters when saying the word F T P?
by GothNinja | Oct 25, 2010 | Games, RockTheLAN
You wake up in a doctors office with no memory of how you got there, the last thing you remember was getting a job to deliver a simple package to someone. After further investigation you discover you were waylaying on route, shot in the head and buried alive. Luckily this incident was spotted, and your body was dug up and taken to the nearest doctor. Now you must find out why you were shot, who shot you, and claim VENGEANCE!
No, this is not the plot of some Cheap Western (Or the Japanese original) but the rough starting plot of the new Role-Playing game in the Fallout series by Obsidian Entertainment. Yes “Fallout: New Vegas”.
The game is set about four years after the events of “Fallout 3″, and is located in the post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Nevada and the Mojave Desert known as the “Mojave Wasteland“. Yes, its a post-apocalyptic world with mutated creatures attacking travelers, legions of slavers, cannibals, criminals killing their way across the land, and Las Vegas is still doing trade as the gambling capital of the world. This is the world you are playing in.
The game play is similar to Fallout 3, well it is running the same game engine. Once again you can have companions, only this time they are more useful, and you can have one humanoid and one none humanoid companion. The greatest difference in my opinion is the addition of crafting. In the old game you had to scavenge for ammunition for your weapons or keep purchasing new ones, in this one you can use workbenches, or reloading stations to make your own ammunition using empty cases, powder and lead. Or you can make tools, equipment, repair items using the scrap you salvage as you travel. You can even use campfires to cook up things, I think this makes it a lot more realistic since most post-apocalyptic travelers would pick up a few real world survival skills.
Like any good RPG, you get to select your skill sets & bonuses as you advance in levels, pick what Armour & weapons you use (I am currently running around in a kilt with a machete thanks to pre-order DLC). You can even customise your ammunition (Armour Piercing, Overcharged Cells, Shrapnel in you dynamite) & add accessories to your firearms (Scopes, Silencers, Etc). You also get to pick which quests you will take, and if you will be nice or evil, which faction to side with, and how you will interact with the inhabitants. You can complete the game by just following you own quest for Vengeance, only you will miss out on so much more fun by doing that.
I would say this game is well worth getting (Hey, I lost the last weekend to this game), and any any fans of the series, or the RPG genre, or anything post-apocalyptic need this game in their collection.
by GothNinja | Oct 22, 2010 | LiveJournal, Family, Friends
Is it “National Nostalgia Week” or something?
Is there such an event?
If so, Why was I not informed?
If there is, how would the organisers control peoples memories?
If you have bad remembrances can you get a refund?
These and other pointless questions will not be answered in this post. It does make you think though, if today is INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY, and people celebrate the annoying use of shoutyness in correspondence, is “National Nostalgia Week” such a insane suggestion? But I digress, I know its an uncommon thing for me to go slightly off-topic but that’s what I seem to have done here.
The concept of “National Nostalgia Week” has come about because this week seems to be a collection of things reminding me of days gone by, basically a string of nostalgic memories for bygone days. Let me share a few here for you dear reader.
(more…)
by CodeNinja | Oct 20, 2010 | Work
I am sat here, feet on desk, phone resting on my shoulder trying to work out if I can slash my wrists with a business card. Why you ask? Well to fully explain I need to go back over a hour, so sit comfortably and get ready for story time.
The Governor of the Asylum signed up to attend a BT teleconference on their plans to move some of their systems to a newer environment. The only problem was, he decided to be visiting London Town for the scheduled appointment, So I was picked to fill in for him. On paper this sounds like a good thing, a couple of hour conference call where I could legitimately do no work.
I got my login details for the call and noticed the first problem. BT use Microsoft livemeeting for their conference calls, which is fine unless you run a Linux desktop. So for starters I would have to use the audio only phone part of the meeting, meaning I would not see the slides, the presentation or have access to the ongoing Q&A controls.
Feeling slightly annoyed to start off with, I follow the instructions and phone in five minutes before the conference is due to start. And get really annoying hold music which was on a two minute loop of the same tune. This very very annoying hold music continued for almost twenty minutes before the conference started.
Feeling very annoyed, I listen to the conference which seems to be almost fully talking about what we can see on the slides (What slides? audio only remember?). Another irritation was the fact there seemed to be several dozen people giving the talk. You would get one person introduce themselves, say a couple of sentences and then pass on to the next person who would do the same. This went on for over a hour, I lost count of the number of people we switched through.
Sometime in the last twenty minutes I really lost the will to live, since the constant droning in my ear from the voices in the phone are preventing me napping.
Oh, and the meeting, was a let you know whats going on before the full meeting in January next year? Like I will remember any of this junk by tomorrow, let alone next year.
by CodeNinja | Oct 15, 2010 | Work
Yesterday due to Health & Safety bureaucrats, the Inmates at the Insane Asylum all got a day pass out into the wild. Basically the overhead power cables in the Village where the Asylum is located were two inches lower than the regulations. I believe a circus stilt-walker standing on the back of an elephant could possibly electrocute themselves, so health & safety said the lines needed raising which meant a village wide power outage from 8am till 5pm.
Now the Asylum is an ISP & Telecommunications Provider & etc. So making allowances for the inmates to work from home should be no problem, especially as we had a weeks notice. The night before the planed outage we redirect our emails to a backup server, and take our phones home to connect to our Virtual PBX (which is a product we sell, so know works). So we should all have been sorted.
“The best laid plans of mice and IT professionals”
Now the Governor and our Phone Tec both have already got phones set up on the virtual PBX for testing purposes, so it was just the rest of the Inmates who needed to get online with it. Now Demonpengu tried setting his phone up the afternoon before the outage, and it took several hours to get it to actually connect. The rest of us waited until the day of the outage, where only I got my phone to connect. “Great so far right?”
After a hour or so a call locked up my phone, preventing incoming or outgoing calls. When the problem was spotted and fixed we discovered internal calls would result in only one phone being heard the other was just silence. And as for actual call quality, I could not hear the customer over hearing myself saying what I had just said. (And this is a product we sell)
For the last part of the day it was just me manning all the lines & support box, Pure madness & poor planning. I think next time I shall go the way of the others and just pretend my phone would not connect.
