(no subject)

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

I often lurk in the shadows here, but thought I would pop in and share a little incident one of my coworkers ran into today.

The players in this story are:
C1 - coworker 1
C2 - coworker 2
Luser

This morning C1 sends out his typical monthly message announcing that Microsoft patches were released and instructing the users how to install their patches. We don't turn on automatic updates because of how often people leave processes running overnight, particularly our developers. The instructions give not only textual instructions but a few screenshots to guide users to the right places.

C2 and I have been getting Remote Admin 3.0 installed on everyone's machine over the past couple weeks so that we can sit back and be a little lazy rather than constantly be away from our desks for little crap. C2 gets a call from Luser saying that Luser is having an issue installing the patches. Luser is clicking on the little yellow icon as instructed but nothing happens. C2 pulls up Remote Admin to see what's going on and finds out that Luser is clicking on the little yellow icon in the screenshot in the email that was sent this morning. This is despite the fact that the instructions say "on your computer".

I suppose you could technically argue that the email is in his inbox which is on his computer, but out of the 60+ employees in my office, all except Luser were intelligent enough to realize what "on your computer" and "you will see an icon such as: " meant.

The moment C2 told me this I laughed and was reminded that this is the same Luser who still doesn't understand the difference between the Citrix environment him and the rest of our accountants work in is different from his local machine even though we've slowly and simply explained this to him quite a few times. While it can be deceiving at first for a simple user (and most of these people are lucky they can figure out excel half the time), most users have figured out the difference after only a couple reminders. -_-

Comments

[moopet.livejournal.com]

Speaking of figuring out Excel, someone came in to see me today with an Excel problem. After firing up her laptop and opening Excel she said it... wait for it... is no longer receiving any email. She forgot the app she wanted was called Outlook.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

oof. *headdesk* It isn't too terribly often that our users make me want to bang my head against a wall which I'm ever so thankful for. But, every so often i think they unwittingly declare it stupid day. We just had a 2 hr email outage. I'd sent an email earlier in the day about doing some of those Remote Admin installs. A different subset of users from the original story. I got an email from one of them once email was back up saying "My emails are not getting sent to other people. The server was down, but I am Connected now. Any ideas why this is occurring?" Please tell me I'm not going crazy by thinking they just told themselves what was wrong in their own message. I sent him a reply saying "as you mentioned in your own message, the email server in $city was down until recently." if you can't send email and the rest of your team can't send email, yea... no shit it's down. i find myself clock-watching so i can run away from Stupid Day.

[ohmyhead.livejournal.com]

Luser is clicking on the little yellow icon in the screenshot in the email that was sent this morning.

I giggled quite heartily at this. Thanks!

[manuka.livejournal.com]

let me just say that where updates are concerned WSUS and Group Policy are your best friends. No chance for the lusers to muck it up, and you simply say that every week at X time, updates will install and potentially reboot.

[jecook]

Yep.

The network admins at work have been trying to get something along those lines working for over 6 months, but it's been back burnered a *lot*.

I'm half-tempted to ask them if I can manually update on of the test machines I have for such things and see if any of the new-ish updates breaks stuff, and ver them that way.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Word. It's not as if they're had to configure, and you know the systems are patched. I can't believe an enterprise that has permanent IT staff would leave it up to the lusers, personally.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

as mentioned elsewhere, it's really a business need at this point to give them a week to comply before we personally give them hell. we've never had a problem with compliance aside from a couple that were in the midst of something pressing (i.e. a release or quarter/month close). since our users are always good about it, we give a little leeway during those times due to the volume that goes through our office during certain times (centralized accounting, centralized HR, etc). hell, this user was being compliant and taking care of it right away but just being an idiot about reading the instructions.

this is why i love where i work. the users are rarely difficult, they comply 99% of the time and they're polite when they have problems. i have no problem treating them like adults as long as they do the above. i can see where having people who refuse to comply, are assholes to the IT staff, etc would warrant more stringent actions.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

we use WSUS already, but we don't employ the auto-reboot. we can't. not without disrupting business for about 95% of our users. we have too many developers that run their regression testing overnight because of how lengthy it can be and our accountants are often working until the wee hours of the morning every month for their financial closes which unfortunately seem to happen around patch time. =(

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

One advantage of using Lotus Notes way, way back when - we could rig the icon to actually do the deed. Or, alternatively, pop up a message saying "No, dipshit, not the one in your email, the one on your desktop, like the instruction SAID."

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

haha, yea. we actually just migrated off of lotus notes email last fall. our company was split part exchange and part lotus notes and stupidly we had a notes connector in place for normal every day use rather than the migration use it was meant for. this was bad news for email delays so the corporate group which handles the majority of the infrastructure decided everyone was going to be moving to exchange. if the business unit already was on exchange they could keep their server but if we were on notes we had to move to the corporate servers. =/

[tpajaz.livejournal.com]

Just worth noting that it was for exactly those reasons that we were not using automated Automatic Updates, but having actually looked into it, I discovered that with WSUS 3 and GPO (as mentioned above), you can not only mandate which updates will get installed, but you can also specify that NO automatic rebooting should take place and you can also change the "You need to reboot due to updates" message to only pop-up once an hour or so.

Definitely worth doing.. suddenly we are at 99% update complicity instead of the 40% odd we were at before, and I don't have to take sneaky opportunities to install updates on people's machines when I'm fixing other problems anymore.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

our users have always been pretty good about getting to it right away, but thanks for the suggestion. we may not be on WSUS 3 and we really don't do much with GPO at our level since the domain is controlled by the corporate group and we're only allowed certain things. i think we're stuck filling out some kind of form to request a GPO be put in place for our OU. it's really stupid if you ask me. i'd say 99% of our users take care of their updates in the week allotment we give them. we basically have a policy that if you don't install your updates within a week, we'll come do it for you and you have no choice but to stop what you're doing. that threat tends to keep folks in line. 1% that lags behind is usually in development. any time they have a release coming up they tend to get super sensitive and whiney. we'll still poke the flames once in a while because it's fun making them explode for all the whining we put up with. they really are a bunch of big babies sometimes.