1990 Called. They Want Their Server Back.

Funny thing happened yesterday. One of my teammates got a message from one of the IT guys. Apparently, our team was hogging a whole lot of space on the "shared documents" intranet site. Fully 12% of our site's allocation was devoted to our documents. Pretty impressive considering we have something like four people out of 100+.

Now, you're probably mighty impressed that four people could produce so many documents, presentations, charts, and random crap that the IT people are begging us to delete some of this stuff. You'll be less impressed to learn that we accounted for 1GB of space out of the 8GB our building was allocated.

We deleted a couple videos linked to an old presentation, freed up about 300 MB, and the IT guys were happy.

My coworker has more memory on his phone than our entire building has allocated for shared documents. Something is wrong with that. But what do I know? I don't have an MBA.

IT People Piss Me Off

So, my wife is trying to set up our computer so that she can work from home. With all the snow we've been getting, it's probably not a bad idea. Growing up in the frozen Northlands, I don't seem to have too much of a problem driving in the snow, but Hoosiers . . . they're a bit different.

Anyways, she was having some trouble accessing her work computer from our home computer. Not too weird, since most networks don't want to let just any computer log-on and hack into someone's files. Still, she needed to get onto her drives, and so called the (company name deleted) IT support folks.

She kept trying to log on, without success. After describing the issues she was seeing, they told her it sounded like she had a virus. And when the computer rebooted, there were pop-ups, which obviously shouldn't be there . . . . "Yep, sounds like you have a virus. You'll want to remove 'Superantispyware.' It's keeping you from being able to access your H drive."

Now, I don't fault my wife for not having computer skills. But the 'pop-up' that she saw was the splash screen telling the user that Superantispyware was firing up. That's all. It gets replaced by an announcement that there's an update for the program. Wow. No doubt that's a virus.

Dumb-asses.

When I rule the world, one of the laws I will implement is that tech support people must actually know what in the hell they are doing. And if you need to read from a script, you are not only fired, you're wrapped in chains and dropped in the deepest part of the ocean, so that as you sink to 36000 feet below the surface, all that pressure might force the two brain cells together and your last thought will be "Damn, I really shouldn't stuck to that job flipping burgers."

UPDATE 16FEB2010: Yeah, it was my firewall. I have the thing cranked down so tight that nothing is getting in or out without alarms going off. Unfortunately, that means that stuff has trouble, and the firewall says "nope, not gonna happen." Now I just gotta fiddle with the controls to say "Mrs. Workshop's work server is okay, Strange Russian Guy's server is bad." I so wanna call up Mrs. Workshop's tech support people and yell at them. Tell me my computer has a virus. I'll show you a virus . . . .

Adventures in IT Tech Support

So, Tuesday morning I was browsing through my daily webcomics, when I discovered that I couldn't get to QuestionableContent.net. Hmm, seems the internet connection was lost. Oh well, I'll just try to reload . . . to no avail.

Crap.

So, heading off to work, I imagined all the horrendous possibilities. Did I download a virus? Not that I've been to any sites that might expose me to such a thing, heavens forbid. Did my router die? Surely, I just needed to power everything down and reboot . . . .

Nope. Tuesday night was spent fiddling around to no avail. But, I figured I'd bring my work computer home Wednesday night and log on to the internet, just to check and see if the router worked. Yep, no problems there.

The router said it could see the computer, but the computer said it couldn't see the router. I ruled out a bad ethernet cord, and I ruled out the router. That meant either some weird frakking virus, or . . .? Can an ethernet port go bad?

Yes, it can. Specifically, the ethernet card can go bad. So, I wandered into our favorite big blue box store with the big yellow sign and looked for an ethernet card. $18.99 later I'm outta there. Thank you, Dynex.

Now, I'm not a computer person. I barely remember to clean the dust off the intake filter on my poor computer. The thought of performing surgery was a bit daunting. But, I took a stab at it.

Turns out, my ethernet port is mounted on the motherboard (I think). The PCI slot I popped the new network card into used to house the dial-up modem connection-thingy. Propably won't need that in the future . . . .

But, now I have a connection to the outside world! WooHoo! Mrs. Workshop is happy, too, since she can keep up on Facebook with all the people that she doesn't get a chance to see anymore since we moved out to the boonies.

Special thanks to Fred for the advice, and the offer to help should I get elbows-deep into the surgery only to discovery I don't have a clue what the hell I'm doing.

Whaddya know? I done learned something!