Rather decent of them

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

see http://combat.uxn.com and http://combat.uxn.com/tracing.html and http://combat.uxn.com/complaining.html respectively

(no subject)

[methedras.livejournal.com]

Just found this on a fresh ticket from our customer service department :

Fault details : Comp recognises that the line connects but they have no homepage. she needs to have a homepage set-up as there is no homepage to connect to so it is trying to connect to the internet but there is receiving information.


Come again?

Edit : Turns out her LAN connection was disabled so it couldn't obtain an IP from her router. Not too difficult.

Google is your FWIEND !

[nexilen.livejournal.com]

BORING INTO TIME !

Hi there ... Great community. I've had a fun time reading you guys yesterday :D
I'm a 20 year-old LV1 doing corporate tech support for a company making semiconductors ...
Some of the things I've read here make me glad I'm not working for an ISP ...

---

So ...

Nothing pisses me off more than users who send me e-mails about "weird processes taking up all their CPU, is it a virus ?!!?!?!?! ARGH HELP !".

They're "computer-literate" (haha) enough to find out what's making their machine sluggish in the task manager, yet they're not smart enough to fucking look up the task name on Google before sending us an e-mail, and charging their company for the ticket the e-mail generates (the average cost of a ticket for ***** is around 16$).

Pathetic fucks.

---

Also, one of my coworkers should be fired. I'm sick and tired of getting calls on his tickets because "he needs more information on the problem" (which normally means he was having an attention-deficit-disorder-moment when he read the ticket).

Ticket Summary : Stuff is broken.
Actual problem (which he could not determine just by reading the user's e-mail, apparently) : Somebody can't transfer files over the company's FTP server.

STUFF IS FUCKING BROKEN.
I shit you not ...

I WANT ME TRANSFER FULL O' GOOOOLD!!

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Guy sitting next to me looks over and says, during a spot of avail time, "I've been getting a lot of wrong queue's, out of warranties, and transfers today."

I look back and say "there's leprachauns in the phone system. Today IS st patrick's day, after all."

Both of us, being of irish descent, look at each other, look at our phones, and are immediately stricken with the vision of 3inch tall Warwick Davis's jumping up and down on our phones and screaming for their pots of gold.

*shudder* as if things weren't bad enough to begin with..

(no subject)

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

We got two very incensed emails from an area manager just a few minutes ago, wanting people taken off the distribution lists and one distribution list deleted.

All fine and good, except the one he's particularly freaking out about right now is his PC Tech being on the distribution list since 'he doesn't even work for Division!' Clearly, this man thinks he's much more important than he is.

His latest email: Now Tech is included in Division Location Everyone. Please remove him. He doesn't work here or even work for DivisionName!!!!!!!!!!!

My response: Tech is your PC tech and is included on the distribution lists for all of his sites.

I mean, really. Does he actually not know who his tech is, when the man covers the whole state?

Amazing!

[naggy.livejournal.com]

2 calls from one of our frequent fliers...

Call 1: User wants to know how to make a printout of a search of our client database. For some reason, there is no way to print it out from the system, so the user has to do a screen print. Sooo...I show her how to hit Print Screen (4 minutes), Open MS Word, and Paste (5 minutes). She is happy.

15 minutes later...she calls back. Lucky me, I get her again.

Call 2: Now she's realized she typoed the SSN when doing the search, so she wants to fix the screen print. So she goes back into the program, redoes the search correctly, and then looks back at her screen print in Word, which, amazingly enough, did not update itself...

She's a really nice person, but man, she is not all there.

Spyware: now with 200% more suck.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Wow... I just cleaned up one tonight that had some sort of nasty shiite on it. The machine was getting t3h popups constantly, and everything had been cleaned expect for one little thing.

It showed up in hijackthis as "[etbrun] c:\windows\system32\elitepmm32.exe". If you removed that startup entry it would come right back. There was no running process by that name, and in fact no file by that name in that location... but something odd, if you went to a command prompt and tried "del c:\windows\system32\elitepmm32.exe" you would get something like "the environment variable is incorrect". WTF, whatever happened to "file not found?"

I fired up regmon and filemon. Sure enough, there IS an elitepmm32.exe replacing that [etbrun] entry every few seconds. But apparently that file doesn't exist and it's still not listed in processes.

I booted the machine from a BartPE and in c:\windows\system32 there's an elitepmm32.exe and about a dozen other identical files of the pattern elite???32.exe. Deleted them and the [etbrun] line, and it never came back. The popups stopped.

How nice. Spyware is now using rootkits. A rootkit injects itself into the kernel and can totally hide files and processes. System calls to list files and processes get intercepted by the rootkit and all references to the nasty stuff are removed. No application can see something that the kernel doesn't tell it about, so antispyware programs simply don't see it. There is no way to remove a rootkit without booting the machine from a clean OS. Now, in this case, you might be able to remove it from safe mode, because it installs via a usermode startup. If it has a boot-loading driver component, it's all over.

Try as you might, you just can't see the fnord.

(no subject)

[axessdenyd.livejournal.com]

First time poster here, I have some stories but this is not the time for telling.

I have a question regardingsupport jobs:

I currently work in a small computer store, tech work, sales, that sort of thing.

I'm considering moving to a job for an ISP working helpdesk.

Anyone made a change of this nature and care to comment on the differences in the two?  I take several support calls a day already whether they be from customers or random people who think that computer stores should just give out free tech advice to anyone (I bet lots of them are Best Buy, their tech department is utter crap).