by CodeNinja | Mar 31, 2011 | Work
Its been a while since I have vented my spleen on here about the things that go on at the Asylum. So I thought I would take some time out and have a little “Vent“.
I was originally hired at the Asylum as a Developer, and advanced my way up the ranks to Head of Development, then after an asylum wide reshuffle I relocated to the Systems Department as a Linux Sys.Admin.
Now I occasionally get thrown small development jobs are are complicated or in a rush, which is fine as we all like to help each other out. Only now its getting a bit silly.
I’m thrown Dev job after Dev job and told theres more coming in (am I a dev again?)
Then “Oh can you just make some android apps for layar?” (I know nothing about phone dev, and not done any programing in many many years)
Followed by “I’ve ordered a Mac Mini, so you can start on making some layar based iPhone apps now” (Ignoring the facts 1)I’ve never used a mac 2)I know nothing about using mac’s or mac software & 3) I know nothing about programing iPhones)
Now I’ve been asked to take part in a conference call to deal with a customer who’s website is bringing down the windows server its hosted on to discuss best ways of resolving these issues. (err I barley use Windows as a user unless I really have to, and that’s normal windows, I know nothing about Windows servers. I think our Windows Server guy would have been a better choice for this call)
And that’s just this week.
So here I am, your friendly neighbourhood Swiss-army CodeNinja
by CodeNinja | Jan 14, 2011 | Work
I know “Red Tape” is often required, and there are sometimes valid reasons for having it, but the people with the tape should have the sense to spot when they fall into a recursive loop and have the ability to produce “The Scissors of Doom” to sort things out. Let me give you an example, and its a real life example. I know because it happened to me, earlier this week.
Phone Conversation over BETA testing some new Busby servers/systems
Busby: “Can you confirm you can connect to the server fine?“
CN: “Yes, I confirm that, and i sent in signed form saying so.“
Busby: “Good. Can you confirm you downloaded our test file ok?“
CN: “What’s the file name, I’ll grab it now. I’ve been using your new systems for other departments, so the server area is full of files.“
Busby: “Our systems team say since you are already using the system there is no test file.“
CN: “ok“
Busby: “So can you confirm you downloaded our test file?“
CN: “But there is no test file?“
Busby: “You need to download our test file to show you can connect OK then we can move on.”
CN: “Talk to you main sys.admin. I tested connection to your server when you first set it up. I helped with the speed tests with the different secure connections, and port ranges. I was one of the first non Busby people using the system.“
Busby: “So can you confirm you downloaded our test file?“
CN: “ARGGHHHHHH!”
by GothNinja | Nov 23, 2010 | Comedy, Work
We at the Insane Asylum have been running some updates on our antiquated control systems, and during this update I had cause to check the Polychronicon that is the Asylums Wiki. While trying to find the list of perl modules we need to re-install after a major update to allow some of the older systems to continue working (Which I could not find) I came across an odd link to an article simply titled “Were Ninja” Intrigued I had a quick read, and memories of the old days came back, especially of the “Were Ninja” Himself. So I’m reprinting the article here.
Were Ninja
I have been researching a rumor I heard, about strange occurrences in some of the local woods. of a dark figure fleetingly seen from the corner of the eye, strange symbols, glyphs tracks. And most concernedly the noises and screams that echo out of the darkness.
I can now give a slight insight to these happenings..
It starts with a quick 10 minute job after hours, a job that ended up taking longer than was expected, It started with a man tired after hours of staring at a monitor, a man too tired to know what he was doing, It starts with an innocent chain-letter email, one that had to be sent out to a dozen people within thirty minutes or else.
It starts with someone we will call Mr X. He was a normal mild mannered I.T. professional, but one day while taking a break from his work he read his e-mail, the stuff he would normally just junk. It was while reading this e-mail he stumbled upon the book of e-vile! He innocently read out allowed the text from the satanic summoning kanji of death. And because the smtp server was down he could not fulfill the requirements of the chain-letter and the chain was broken, allowing him to be possessed by the spirit of a were-ninja from 14th century japan.
Now on nights where theres a moon he roams the welsh countryside. doing unspeakable things
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 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.
