*computer fell, broken in pieces*

Me calling [Microsoft] tech support: hey can you check my warranty on this computer, I think I broke it?

Tech support: yes sir but we must first go through the troubleshooting steps,

Me: no, no I just-

Tech support: have you tried pressing F8 sir?

Me: umm… no, look I'm just -

Tech support: sir please press the F8 key sir

Me: okay… I pressed it, now can you just check my-

Tech support: sir please what happened when you pressed F8?

Me: it's broken, now if you could just check my warranty -

Tech support: sir I'm sorry sir I think you did it wrong. Please press F8

Me: no just check my-

Tech support: sir I think you do not understand, sir it is at the top-

Yup.

You suck!

Soo true!

if I got it right, this is how internet troubleshooting was programmed

HP Virtual Agent, you're about as useless as the fucking hardware that I'm troubleshooting. What part of fucking "Arch Linux" do you not understand?! Not everyone runs your fucking assumed OS choices - WanBLowS 7, 8 or 10. What's more, the hardware that I'm troubleshooting doesn't even support those bloody operating systems.

Long live HP and its random freezes due to poor thermal management. And long live Intel's fucking wireless drivers, that for no good reason disconnect after half an hour and require me to restart NetworkManager to (hopefully) get shit connected again. And long live those useless fucking "virtual assistants"!!!

I found a healthCheck function while troubleshooting an old application for a large auto manufacturer today. The healthCheck function was running several times a day on a timer. The function tries to insert a record into the database and returns whether or not it was successful. It was written in 1999 and has to date inserted over 2.5 million records into the database! 1/3rd of the data for this application was the same record.

How the hell did nobody notice this for 20 years!!!

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Sleep deprivation may have made this funnier than it actually is, but I can't NOT laugh when I see it

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (smbc)

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

So today I had a client come in and give me a free "broken" laptop that wouldnt turn on and was covered in grease and what appeared to be dog hair everywhere. So i go through my every day troubleshooting, found the problem and fixed it. Next i disassemble the entire laptop and just start air dusting and cleaning connections like crazy. Now I'm a proud owner of a really old school laptop that I can probably keep alive for another 10 years :) This will be a perfect machine to test arch linux on 😃

I have to share because I'm so confused at the moment. After troubleshooting for months trying to figure out why my laptop would randomly go into sleep mode, as I was typing. (Imagine my frustrations working on exam projects to have the screen just go black on me every 30 seconds.)

Today I found a post on the Dell forums by another person with the same problem. Apparently a magnetic closure on my bracelet triggered a sensor to think I had shut the lid on my laptop. What. The. Fuck. Guess that explains why it would only happen sometimes, as I don't wear this bracelet often 🙃🔫 definitely the funniest and weirdest problem I've ever had with a laptop.

coz we have a troubleshooting class this semester...

Me and co-worker troubleshooting why he can't run the docker container for database.

Me: Check if the port is busy.

Co-worker: To my knowledge, it isn't.

Me: Strange, it just works fine for me and everyone else.

Me: And you're sure you didn't already start it previously?

*We verify that it isn't running*

Me: I'm pretty sure the port is busy from that error message. Try another port.

Co-worker: Already did, it didn't work.

Me: And by any chance restarting your machine won't solve anything?

*It doesn't solve anything*

Me: Alright, I have some work to do, but I'll get back to this. Tell me if you find a solution.

Co-worker: Alright.

*** Time passes, when I get back he has switched to windows, dualboot, same machine ***

Me: I don't think you'll have a better time running the docker image on windows.

Co-worker: Oh, that's not what I'm looking for. You see, I had a database on my windows partition recently and I thought maybe thats why it won't start.

Me (screaming internally) : WTF ARE YOU STUPID, WINDOWS AND LINUX ISNT RUNNING AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.

Me (actually saying): I don't think computers work like that.

Co-worker: My computer is magical. It does strange things.

Me: That's a logical conclusion.

*** More time passes ***

Co-worker solves the problem. The port was busy because Ubuntu was already running PostgreSQL on that port.

Third co-worker shimes in: Oh yeah, I had the exact same problem and it took me a long time to solve it.

Everyone is sitting in arms reach of each other.

So not only was I right from the start. Someone else heard this whole conversation and didn't chime in with his solution. And the troubleshooting step of booting into windows and looking if a database is running there ???? Wtf

Why was I put on this Earth?

Accept it..

Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).

I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.

Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!

I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.

The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.

I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.

I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.

**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**

A client just asked me to fix his internet over the phone. After about 25 mins of remote troubleshooting, he tells me "Hey nevermind, it was just the monitor" *click*

...

And that my children, is the story about the time i lost faith in humanity.

VMware troubleshooting flowchart.

A rant from the old box, with some minor edits because I don't remember the exact wording anymore.

So last time I had this window cleaner visit me, and he'd do his job while I was troubleshooting a broken tablet that my past home supervisor donated to me. After he was done he came to me, very impressed.

He then said: "Wow, you are disassembling this.. you must be very technical."
Me (kinda tired): "Thanks. And yeah pretty much."
He: "Does this mean that you can fix anything?"
Me: "Kind of. It depends. But I can't fix printers."
He: "Why is that? Are they so complicated?"
(the tablet I had disassembled is orders of magnitude more difficult than a printer)
Me: "Not really. It's just that that's often what users ask next."
He: …

The guy immediately left 🤣

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

CI/CD Pipelines in real life

When ever someone asks me to fix their PC I ask them to sit down next to me so I can show them how I did it. First thing I do is open up Google search the problem then look them dead in the eye and smile 😂😂😂. I Then proceed to implement the fix from the first page of results. I don't get many repeat requests... I'm Such a passive cunt.😂😂😂

Currently troubleshooting a client PC's random restarts. Pretty sure it's gonna boil down to "client's chair keeps hitting the power button"

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Okay, so I was helping an elderly woman with her laptop + internet today (with payment). Problem: Laptop connects to WiFi, shows internet connection, but you couldn't even go to google.com.

The router wasn't the issue as my phone worked on the same WiFi. After a lot of troubleshooting steps, I noticed that Windows forced IPV6 for all WiFi connections for some reason. The router doesn't even support IPV6... So I disabled it and everything started working again.

WHY THE FUCK DID WINDOWS NOT TRY TO LOOKUP A IPV4 ADDRESS IF THE IPV6 FAILS? BOTH WERE ENABLED! WHO AT THE FUCKING WINDOWS 10 DEVELOPMENT TEAM THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA?

Windows troubleshooting:
- Works on my system, therefore it's not an issue.
- Must be a hardware error.
- Obviously it's just cheap hardware.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Here's some obscure error code that leads nowhere.
- Have you tried "sfc /scannow"?
AS IF SFC IS A FUCKING SILVER BULLET!!!
- Our Indian support chap from answers.microsoft.com will help you.

RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Solution: quietly weep and reinstall your system.

Linux troubleshooting:
- There are good quality log files.
- You can run the program from the command-line and read both stdout and stderr from it.
- You can usually run the program with high verbosity options to help you track down the error.
- Even daemons can have their commands spawned from a dedicated shell, to see why they failed.
- Usually it's a configuration error and you can easily edit the configuration file.
- More often than not, the program will tell you why it failed.

Solution: usually easy to find.

I fucking love Windows. Because you know, it's so easy to troubleshoot and the support is so great!!!

Yesterday I stayed at home sick. Had a bad case of the EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA FROM HELL. Was feeling ok but could not walk away from me throne.

Went in today cuz the lead was not gonna be there and shit always breaks on Freyja's day as we all know.

1 and a half hours before we clock out and go home someone calls saying that students are trying to drop from classes at the last minute and our app ain't doing it.

I "fixed" the app last week and ran a small login test. It work so I thought it was fine. Stupid me for making unprofessional and retarded assumptions.

Manager freaks out. The entire school freaks out. Coworker lols cuz he ain't got to work on it. I start mind debugging the entire bitcheridoo.

45 minutes later...and I was able to successfully go through almost 15k lines of code of php/html/js code and fucking FIXED it with tests and all for real.

Went at it hard. Babe ass manager was like 0.0 and then (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Called head office and told them everything was undr control.

Dropped the phone like a mic. Mic drop.

Then I looked at manager and coworker and said "ya I fucked up, but I am still the king"

Both nodded in agreement.

Everyone got wet with my sheer awesome troubleshooting php master skills.

Got home thinking about how boss I am.

Fucking Texas af b. Can't touch this heat. The rangers still suck and so do the cowboys. The astros and the texans don't exist because there is only room for one. Go spurs.

Still have diarrhea.

Fuck yeah.

I got transferred to a new city at the client location for few months.
I got the credentials for internet access, but I was not able to get internet. I contacted the admin and after troubleshooting it for few minutes, he asked where is Internet Explorer in this laptop?

I immediately understood, why they need me here. I was using a MacBook. 😐

PS: In the end, he gave me the full access without any credential requirements.

Not a rant.

Whoever came with the idea to implement an automatic restore point in Windows... BLESS YOU!!

Just had some problems and the PC won't boot. I entered the troubleshooting option and saw that there was an restore point from 22 this month. Just saved my ass.

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

So today I made my first basic program in C++ from scratch that worked! After some troubleshooting.. But I thought of ways I could edit it and make it better!

Me: *has problem, goes through hours worth of crazy complicated troubleshooting and tests to try and fix problem*

Literally anyone: have you tried the that super basic thing that you're supposed to do every time you start?

Me: oH GoDdAMMIT!!

Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.

If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.

Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.

Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.

I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.

But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.

This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.

I already talked about it in another rant but here it is !

This year, I got the chance to teach PHP to my fellow students in my uni.
PHP was the first programming language I ever learned (5 years ago) and this year I had a PHP class in my uni. I knew that I would not learn anything new (as I'm more competent than the teacher). So my teacher let me help the other students when I had finished the exercices. Then my teacher got sick and I, kinda officially, replaced him during 3 weeks.
I'm very thankful that he gave me that chance and thanks to him I discovered a new part of IT that I didn't knew. And even if I didn't learn anything new in PHP, I learned a lot by troubleshooting others projects and trying to understand how they reason. I really developed a new soft skill that I never knew I would have.

That also really helped me to trust myself and I got more confident about my programming skills.
This is one of the best experiences I got during my studies so far.

Greatest thing just happened.

Get a ticket about orders not being processed in our webshop. Angry customer. Critical!!!!

Starts troubleshooting. Nothing has changed in the code recently, was working just fine yesterday. Works locally and on test server. Hmmm...

Take a chance. Writes back to customer: “there! Try to place an order again” without changing anything.

5 minutes I get back “awesome! Everything works again and all previous orders have appeared. Good work!”.

Happy customer. Happy dev :)
Fin

"WTF? These records should have been inserted into the table!"
...Hours of checking code, trying to figure out how this is possible, can't find a way to have this scenario happen...
...Add additional debug and troubleshooting code, add more verbose logging, redeploy to all the containers, reset all the tables, many apologies to the boss for the delay....
...Co-worker comes in: "oh, hey, sorry, accidently deleted some stuff from the database last night before i left."

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

Anyone else having connection problems after the recent Windows 10 update? We've been slammed at work with them. If you do, here's an easy fix:
0. Go to Command Prompt (Run as Administrator)
1. First command:
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
(One of them will probably fail, that's fine.)
2. Second command:
netsh winsock reset
3. Restart the computer.

I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.

Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..

Golang installed and up and working fine.

Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!

Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.

hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.

> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.

No problem I just don't own this object!

> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.

At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.

Or install linux.

I bricked my Manjaro install by interrupting a kernel update like a fucking doofus.

After two hours of painstaking troubleshooting using a live image I finally resolved the issue. And man is that a good feeling. Solving complex problems (at least to me) on Linux is just such an amazing feeling ♥️

Just realized what was wrong when I was about to post on stackoverflow. I guess just writing it down helps sometimes...

Okay you bastards ya got me: I fucking enjoy using Linux as my dev environment.
There, I SAID IT -

BUT DON'T THINK FOR A SECOND IT MEANS THAT I STOPPED HATING IT

Oh the fucking love hate relationship to fucking Linux.

"Hey, ihatecomputers! How many hours per year did you spend fixing internet connectivity issues on Windows?" you ask. Well, close to fucking 0 you goddamned imbecile. But on Linux? I don't even want to talk about it.

And what about that time when I wanted to connect my bluetooth headphones so I could listen to music while studying? Well, by the time my headphones were connected to my machine (usually a one second operation) I had no time left for, you know, actual studying. Oh my god, it's the most trivial fucking thing.

Well, at least that particular issue got solved.

Unlike that fucking Ethernet connection which has been fucking out of commission since I started using fucking Linux. Wifi works just well enough to make it not worth pouring more time into troubleshooting that shit, but just barely though because my wifi IS FUCKING DOGSHIT ON LINUX

...

But fuck me if it isn't it the most lean thing ever! It's the goddamned opposite of bloated. So smooth and snappy. And free as in slurred speech, or whatever. It makes me happy. When I'm not seething with rage, that is.

Yeah I guess that's it, thanks for tuning in.

~ihatecomputers

Windows update fails with error 0x1235

Me in Technet: Hey, ms, i got this error. How do i fix it?
MS: Install the Troubleshooting for Windows Update and follow the instructions. Before that, create a system restore just in case. Also, if the problem persists, go to your boot menu -> troubleshooting options and follow the instructions.
Hope it helps.
Found it helpful? Yes No

Other random people: just rename $WINDOWS ~BT to anything or delete it. Then continue the process.

.
.

I followed the random people advice and worked.

Fuck MS.

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

If I do it in python : Finish in one day!
If I do it in C++ :
1 week for installation and configuration
3 days for coding
Another 1 day for troubleshooting...

But I will still prefer do it in C++.

Microsoft error messages have to be the worst I've ever seen. "Sorry, something went wrong." "Oops, something's not working". Thanks, do you care to elaborate? Would really help my troubleshooting...

"Get a job doing what you love, you'll never work a day in your life" they said

What they didn't tell us is that it would lead us to babysitting/troubleshooting continuous deployments at 3 am on a Sunday with a black Irish coffee and a manic look on our faces

troubleshooting: do not use IE.

Really good when you cant connect your pc with a 100€ os to the internet and you click on "show more solutions" and it only offers you online support and, even dumber, "ask a friend". Thanks, great work everybody, really good. Why don't you just write "sorry our os is too shity, but we don't want to care about it anymore, go fuck yourself in the corner over there"

Extended family weekend getaway turned into an IT repair and troubleshooting session

I really hate when I have to go to a colleuges desk to help when they need some troubleshooting . It is not because I don't want to help. It is just because of their light themed IDE.

After months of googling and troubleshooting my router settings trying to figure out why my port forwarding settings are not working only to realize that I'M BEING CGNATTED TO OBLIVION BY MY FUCKING ISP WITHOUT A FUCKING NOTICE!

y.

As if troubleshooting ever helped :D

Logged into a legacy box with an uptime longer than my age. That's how the troubleshooting went the rest of the day.

"What do you do when you're troubleshooting and you can't solve a problem?"

In a react-native code camp right now and troubleshooting participants install took 30% of the time 😂😂😂😂

Troubleshooting code...
Me: "ok cool did that fix it?"
Program: [same error]
Me: "alright, so can I break it harder?"
Program: [new error]
Me: "now we're getting somewhere!" 🎉

What did troubleshooting look like before stackoverflow?

One of my colleagues tried upgrading his Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10... he had multiple issues getting the installer to run but got past it after a couple of hours troubleshooting.

He left for lunch when it got to 81% installed, and got back an hour later to find "Something Happened" proudly displaying on-screen.

He clicked 'okay' and it just started rolling back to Windows 7 with no explanation as to what happened, or even any error codes!

Thanks Windows!
As helpful as always!

The debugging process is often complicated.

There are often many factors involved in troubleshooting an error, but usually I have a hunch.

Sometimes I'll ignore my hunch and try other, smaller fixes first. This will irritate me for a while until I actually go after my hunch, run the program, and INSTANTLY everything works again.

Found myself relating that to real life today when I had a slight belly ache and eventually decided to take a massive shit and INSTANTLY felt better. The relief was so quick that I actually looked up and paused in surprise.

I currently work with a guy that constantly blurts out, "It's awful quiet over there."

This is intended for me to reply to when I'm in the middle of troubleshooting some code. I put both headphones over my ears, crank up some metal, and continue being quiet. I don't reward stupid behavior with a response.

Working with a new team and I don't understand how this is normal or ok.

Me: Does anyone need help troubleshooting the broken build or can I revert this change that broke it so I can push my change out?

Dev: Stop build shaming me, I wouldn't leave the build in a failing state.

Me: Well, I wasn't sure how long to wait, before asking.... it's been broken for 4 hours.

Dev: It's the development environment, you should expect development to be going on.

Me: Yes and appears that this project architecture doesn't support any sort of isolation for development. So nobody can deploy anything except through the development branch.

Dev: That's what development is for IMO, so it doesn't bother me.

I fucking hate printers. And printers hate me too.

I've been working as a software engineer for almost seven years now, and not a single day as a printer technician, which does not stop my mother from calling me each time a printer breaks down, as she did today. I hop over to her place, the printer is connected via usb into the ethernet socket, but she swears it's been printing an hour ago, and she hasn't moved a thing. - "weird", I think, "it must be connected wirelessly". Suddenly my sister, who's an Arts major, comes over, saying her printer broke down too - "cool so they're both wifi printers". I reset the router and my sister's printer springs back to life.

But my mom's printer, which is old and in bad shape (the printer, not my mom! assholes...), doesn't. It keeps on displaying a weird error message, and fails to receive any print job, whether wired or wireless.

I spent 15 seconds resetting the router, and 15 minutes troubleshooting mom's printer. Nothing worked.
I finally give up and leave the house.

Not a minute goes by and I receive a "your sister fixed the printer" text from mom.

I fucking hate printers.

Long story short, my mama fixed the printer!

Well, more like she did troubleshoot.
Needed to print something and printer didn’t light up. Did some basic troubleshooting but didn’t work. So assumed it’s spoiled and thought would just use softcopy since document isn’t that important.

When papa told mama abt it, she went ahead and troubleshoot/setup for me to print. Even printed out a test doc, lol.

Then she remarked, “u’ve been doing software, that’s why not so good with hardware hah!”

Proud child is proud. 💪🏿

Division of my 8 hour work day:

30% Answering Emails
20% Attending Meetings
40% Troubleshooting Bugs
30% Support Calls
10% Project Management
90% Software Development

So I get home from work, sit down infront of my computer and start browsing a few sites.

The loading times was not as fast as they should so I checked out my network setup. I had been auto connected to my ISP provided modems WiFi, which happens every now and then, so I reconnect to my faster and better WiFi AP.

Invalid password. What? Ok.. Let me just type in the same password, slowly..
Invalid password. MF..... Same password, looking down at my keyboard.
Invalid password. GDMF...

Browse to my AP config site, type in username and password.
Invalid password. Oh no you fucking did not just deny me entry as well.
Ok. Something is up and I'm going to get to the bottom of this!

Boot up Kali, fires loads of crap at the WiFi and the site. Still no damn luck! WTH!
I go upstairs to my AP, turn it off and on again.

I can now login on both my AP WiFi and config page.
It had frozen.
Thats two hours of troubleshooting for a "have you tried turning it off and on again" solution.
I feel great about my competence after this.

My laptop has its own life...
I arrived at the lecture, start the laptop, black screen... Alrighty, might be the update from yesterday, I will just revert to the old version. Nothing... After multiple reboots and troubleshooting, I put my laptop down and go the old way of sitting down notes.

Then I come home after university and I'm set on fixing my laptop. I start it, it works perfectly fine...

I'm not even sure what fixed it..

Urgh. One key skill that wannabes seem to forget is patience. Patience, patience, patience. Don't panic, don't be lazy, be methodical. This is the way of the analytical computer scientist. Don't panic all over the place or make assumptions..

Some techs..

Don’t teach with LOGO, but instead start with Scratch, then something more advanced like Python and after that maybe C# or Java.
Teach different operating systems and software, not only Windows and Microsoft Office. There should be class with Linux (Mint for instance) with LibreOffice and another with macOS and iWork.
Teach basic troubleshooting steps.
Less theory, more practice.
STOP BEING SUCH MICROSOFT ORIENTED.
Ability to use own laptop (I would be really happy to use my own one).
Teach basic commands for Windows and Unix based systems.
Teach how to install Windows and Linux.

Spent hours troubleshooting an internal app that had zero logging today. It would just terminate, no exceptions, no feedback to the debugger, NOTHING.

Turned out to be the damn corporate virus scanner blocking "malicious" behaviour. Good thing my desk is so heavy or I woulda flipped it...

I just spent an hour troubleshooting an error message which I perceived to have some kind of abstract meaning.

Overthinking idiot, it couldn't have been more literal.

After the fix to one stupid line, I quietly watch that hour of my life sail away on a sad river of anguish, never to return again.

It works locally, it works in Dev, it works in Test, but fails to deploy in UAT. Is it a data issue? I don't know, I don't have permissions to see the UAT database. Literally all I know is that this API is returning 500 instead of what it's supposed to return, but only sometimes.

Guess I'll sit here all day and try to solve the problem telepathically as there is literally no way of troubleshooting other than scrolling through the code and hoping that a cartoon lightbulb appears above my head.

After the base installation of arch linux..I am trying to install the display server,Nvidia driver.and i3 wm...but getting errors..
Shall I install Display server xorg after or before the installation of Nvidia drivers??
What is the proper way to configure xorg and Nvidia?
When I give the startx command it is showing black screen....
@deadlyRants

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

Important rule of programming: don't swallow exception and provide details for troubleshooting.

Visual Studio: The project file contains a property value that is not valid.

Initial opinion: Visual Studio is the best IDE, hands down.
Tell friend to install it
"Runs like s**t"
Troubleshooting...
Final opinion: Visual Studio is the best IDE... If you have at least 8GB of RAM and an SSD.

So few of you will know that I was a bit wasted last night (Monday night). Few of you will also know I was having trouble with my new linux installation. (POP!_OS)

After troubleshooting this and that, I gave up. I believe my hardware just doesn't wanna pop. So I installed manjaro xfce.

This morning I woke up with my laptop beside me with a locked screen. I entered the password I remember I setup. Wrong. I entered all usual passwords I normally use. All wrong.

😖 😖 😖

Hello! My name is opalqnka and I am a Windows user.

I followed the 12-step program and now I am a step away to being certified LPIC Linux Engineer.

As step 12 preaches, here I humbly share the Program:

1. We admitted we were powerless over Windows - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Linus as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to Linus, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We’re entirely ready to have Linus remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through bash scripting and kernel troubleshooting to improve our conscious contact with Linus as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to Windows users and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

After spending my entire holiday vacation fucking around with the one language that really digs with my state of mind (Ruby) when developing and having to do some quick troubleshooting on 2 of our applications (Java and PHP respectively) I can honestly say: I legit don't want to go back to that ever again.

But money means more to me than my own personal biases. I have delved in some of the most HATED platforms that developers could normally ask for in terms of work. And have only done some very basic (fucking obnoxiously basic) consulting in terms of Rails, to the point that it might not be even worth putting on a cv. But fuck me man, if I could just fuck around building rails solutions for a living, from the frontend to the backend, I think I would for once be happy with the things that I work with with things more than monetary pleasure.

Y'all know your boy, I ain't no neckbeard, but I fuck with things that a lot of others don't, to me Lisp dialects and Smalltalk are gifts from dev heaven, and I have thrown out Clojure in production (my app is still chugging along just fine at work thank you very mucho) but in terms of pure web development, I have never been happier than when I generate a rails project and start tinkering around.

Sigh.......here is to hoping that maybe I will eventually open my own rails shop.

...when you are scared to run the code!

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

I will keep this short. I fucking hate Windows 11. There is nothing I like about it after over four weeks of having its fuckery drip down everything I do on my laptop like radioactive maple syrup. None of my apps from Windows 10 work. I google troubleshooting and I'm not going to go through 10 hacks to solve a problem created by Microsoft. The screen moves all over the place for no reason. I hate it. Not as much as I hated Mac, but I'm going to revert back to Windows 10 if I can. I don't wish to separate my laptop screen from my laptop keyboard again. The only person I know who can fix it tried to steal a hundred and twenty bucks from me. Thank you for reading this rant I'm living a charmed life otherwise, but snipping tool just fucked up and I'm fucking fed up. Peace out.

Ffs, HOW!?!? Fuck! I need to get this rotten bs out.

RDS at its max capabilities from the top shelf, works OK until you scale it down and back up again. Code is the same, data is the same, load is the same, even the kitchen sink is the same, ffs, EVERYTHING is the same! Except the aws-managed db is torn down and created anew. From the SAME snapshots! But the db decides to stop performing - io tpt is shit, concurrency goes through the roof.

Re-scale it a few more times and the performance gets back to normal.

And aws folks are no better. Girish comes - says we have to optimize our queries. Rajesh comes - we are hitting the iops limit. Ankur comes - you're out of cpu. Vinod thinks it's gotta be the application to blame.

Come on guys, you are a complete waste of time for a premium fucking support!

Not to mention that 2 enhanced monitoring graphs show anythung but the read throughput.

Ffs, Amazon, even my 12yo netbook is more predictable than your enterprise paas! And that support..... BS!

We're now down to troubleshooting aws perf issues rather than our client's....

Seriously though.

Why use Arch. It sounds like headaches.

What is the benefit. Like, I used to have fun with
tweaking systems and so forth, until it became
not so fun when I had to actually do it to make
money, like server admin on my websites.

From the sounds of it, setting it up takes hours, none of the packages are quite ready, it takes google research and troubleshooting for common tasks, etc.

Why not say, Ubuntu, kde? Or whatever.

I inherited some code today. I am in the process of reworking it to drop into my framework so I can use it with our product. I am seeing this throughout the code...

try:
\do something\
except:
pass

Ahem... HANDLE YOUR DAMN EXCEPTIONS!!! DON'T JUST PASS THEM INTO THE BLACK HOLE OF NOTHINGNESS! FFS!!! Using pass like this means "Fuck it. I don't care if this fails and I want NOTHING to tell management when it does. I want to blindly look into their frustrated eyes and say ..duhh, I don't know why it failed... Fuck troubleshooting. You know what, this job isn't meant for me anyways." My outer voice is politely saying "There is a better way to do this. Please allow me to show you." Meanwhile my inner voice is flipping tables and clubbing baby seals. /rant

"I don't know what I'm doing. Let's try stack overflow."
*check stack overflow*
"I know what someone else did. Let's try that."

I like talking to uber drivers with some limited tech experiences. My uber today was telling me about when he was helping his kid pick parts for their custom desktop as well as setting it up and the weird issues they ran into over time due to it being their first time installing windows from nothing and their troubleshooting process to solve things I might consider basic problems

Simple things yeah. But still interesting to listen about. Maybe I'm just simple and easily entertained

Started up KiTTY to connect to my virtual test server per usual when I couldn't establish a connection.

Nothing too unusual so I do the typical troubleshooting I make sure host, port and authentication is all correct and it is. So now I open the display for the virtual server and start looking at ip info, host info, checking ports and everything is completely fine.

Now I'm getting frustrated so I start running things like configtest in apache, using systemctl to check the services status, even restarting virtualbox in my windows 10 devpc. Still cannot connect!

I start feeling hopeless and just shut everything down, the whole operating system.

*takes breath*

Computer boots up and I start my usual thing of creating workspaces, opening editors, starting servers, etc.

I open KiTTY again and launch my virtual test server..

konicm8ker@VM-UBUNTUSERVER:~$ _

Somethings you just can't fix without a reboot.

I fucking HATE ORMs. Fuck this bullshit, they always have some use case that is stupidly difficult or obscure that no one knows how to deal with because the creators didn't think of the one thing I want to fucking do.

Screw this bullshit, homebrew SQL is ALWAYS the way to go; I've never encountered an ORM that didn't turn in to a troubleshooting, dialect-learning timesink.

Is it me or lately developers that call themselves senior doesn't even know how to use git properly, doesn't have proper troubleshooting techniques and have to be spoon fed several times?

It's crazy to me that they are still hired and working.

Errgh.. Why do people keep sending screenshots of errors and software versions they have on their dev environment.. C'mon it cant be that hard copy it and paste into the chat

Official documentation > StackOverflow.

StackOverflow sometimes has well-grounded and elaborate explanations on a question by well-meaning and knowledgeable developers, but oftentimes the answers also contain outdated or 'dirty' solutions and so it's always to be taken with a grain of salt.

However, in cases like the official Spring documentation, the IETF RFC's and the MDN, those provide a correct explanation to the problem, even if it requires some reading around. When it comes to serious and correct work, I favor these over the bro-zone that is StackOverflow.

Is it called school if the programming teacher is troubleshooting the other (incompetent) programming teachers program for at least 45 minutes? Happend to me today.

iPhone XSMax running iOS 14. Otherwise running normally.

DevRant app runs like old people fuck.

Is it just me?

Troubleshooting tips?

What’s this app written in? Is there a DevRant API? I’ll write my own DevRant app with blackjack and hookers.

I just spent 4 hours troubleshooting 2 pcs, neither of them working yet. I'm way too tired, and I'm not even sure what I'm saying is correct English but I don't care. Man, fuck my life. I just wanna go to bed, but my brain doesn't think that's a good idea

Just spent three and a half hours reconfiguring security cameras and troubleshooting over and over why the fuck internal and external weren’t reachable...

I failed to realize the DDNS was handing out the IP of 127.0.0.1 and 3.0.0.0 because nothing fucking stated that up until I found a small text link to the camera’s DDNS registration page... logged in with the customers info and low and behold the mother fucker was handing stupid shit out.

I hate that I overlook the simplest shit when I’m stressed and in a rush...

I need to learn to take deep breaths, but fuck that... I want to blow shit up.

Junior Software Developer Job( $37k-$42k USD)

-1 year experience
- J2EE, Javascript, HTML, XML, SQL
- object oriented design and implementation
- management of relational and non-relational such as Oracle, PostGreSQL and Cassandra
- Lifecycle and Agile methods
- Familiarity with the Eclipse development environment and with tools such as Hibernate, JMS, ,TomCat/Gemini/Jetty, OSGi.
• UNIX skills, including Bash or other scripting language
• Experience installing and configuring software packages
• ActiveMQ troubleshooting/knowledge
• Experience in scientific data processing and analytical science in general
• Automated testing tools and procedures, including JUnit testing, Selenium, etc.
• Experience in interfacing with scientific instrumentation, potentially over IP networks
• Familiarity with modern web development, user interface and other ever-evolving front-end
technologies, such as React, TypeScript, Material, Jest, etc.

I am betting they don't get many people applying.

Recruiters with no clue (a recurring theme it seems).

Got an e-mail this morning via LinkedIn proposing a position in Zurich (Switzerland) doing customization of an application according to business needs, configuration of interfaces, gathering of requirements, 2nd level support etc.

DID YOU READ ANYTHING MY LINKEDIN SAYS? I work in storage support (doing mostly troubleshooting of FC/iSCSI issues between storage and hosts), and live in Amsterdam, and while I would like to pivot to a SW dev job, this seems to be way over my grade of experience, plus I have no desire to go living in Switzerland.

Arsehole!

This is the reason I will never be with IT: I recently got hired as an IT assistant at my college. I was in charge of solving issues in an entire building actually. I was so excited to be able to go around to resolve and troubleshoot problems with people's computers. The responsibility and pay were good, but the fact that people had next to no problems, but I had to be in the same room with students during virtual tests and lessons just in case. I had to stand in the same spot for 2.5 hours watching people take a test. Whenever they DID have a problem, they just had to refresh the page! People gotta learn that I don't have to be in the room in order for people to decide basic troubleshooting. Extremely boring and tiring. No challenges and barely any problem-solving. This is why I'm on Devrant and not Fixrant.

Personal favorite quotes from my cubemate...
- JIRA, God of Blunder!!
- trickle-down badge-o-nomics: when I have to ask someone else to lend me their badge because someone else borrowed mine
- Haskell users can kick a motherfunctor right in the monads
- You can't put monads in Go because they try to prefix everything with go-
- Always use live rounds when troubleshooting -- never blanks
- Equifax's Apache wasn't patchy enough
- I saw the last episode of the first season of The Last Kingdom
- You gnow it's good cause it's GNU

I left for a week and someone deployed my code to production after being completely tested by qa on a Friday night. I get into the office after being gone for a week and am told that production has been down for many customers for several days. In a panic I start troubleshooting my code with the "What the fuck did I do wrong" face.

Development and qa were in a frenzy to figure out what happened, several developers were trying to figure out what went wrong by tracing through the source code for days, fucking days!

In that while time Noone thought to roll back the code. So, I was in a bind and thought "might as well get a box". Before that I looked at the deployment instructions: only the dll's were pushed, no db or resource file changes were pushed. In 20 minutes after I got back: no more problems for any customers and everything is working fine.

SMDH.

At least I found this picture of turtles wearing raspberries.

So I finally set up Team Viewer for the ole' Gramps for remote troubleshooting, and now he shares my fear of having your computer pwned.

Trying to play Warframe with my son. Why do I spend 3 hours updating Steam and/or Warframe and troubleshooting drivers and settings for every 1 hour of play?

I decided to format party my desktop since I'm working at home every day (got a 1TB ssd to replace 150gb OS drive).

First fresh Windows install in 4 years. I had forgotten how much fuckery windows puts you through to do some basic things. I can imagine being a newbie hobbiest programmer and having to go through this stuff?

So I just embarrassingly spent 15 minutes reading and troubleshooting why you can't run a python script inside of powershell. PS just blips for a moment leaving you wondering if the script executed. So I created a test script to use a logging file handler to see if it actually ran. No.

Turns out you have to register the .py extension by appending it to your PATHEXT environment variable. Before that I was going to add it to the PS profile, but realized it takes more than a quick moment to find out which scope of PS profile is appropriate to create, and on top of that, you have to enable script execution in PS (which I recall is easy, but didn't do yet).

Tangentially, I solved an ssh issue days ago. I would tell you what it was, but I seem to have mentally blocked it due to trauma.

For real Microsoft. Yes powershell has some great advancements--my friends say so.

But this needlessly nuanced bullshit needs a little attention from you guys to save the world a shitload of time. I can only imagine what it's like for non-tech savvy people trying to learn to program and having to face this stuff.

I still haven't solved the color scheme stupidity of powershell. This is 2020 ffs. Yet seems there's no clean or intuitive way to do it.

Other issues omitted for 'brevity'

Troubleshooting in Windows be like - " Well mate, you are fucked. Till the time we run a baseless scan.. relax ,take a deep breath ..Check your internet connection . .. for you are going to have to google the problem and fix it yourself...

When you spend hours troubleshooting an issue because you're too smart to turn it off and on again.

If my 'official' job title was programmer but I was also doing network troubleshooting and administration as well as server configuration cause we had no one experienced to do it should I include that on my resume or would it look fake?

Should I only include the programming stuff since that was my job title

Spent all week 40+ hours attempting to get my companies application up and running using the documentation written by one of the developers. Mind you, 20+ hours pulling and replacing files. Get to the end and nothing works, contact the developer that wrote the set up guide, and he has no idea how to fix and at some point admits her forgot some steps in the documentation and doesn't know what they are. Spent over 6 hours in troubleshooting meetings with that dev and another dev and made no progress. The documentation devs answer to try and fix it every five minutes, "do an iisreset". Fuck you and the camel you rode in on.

I told my new Director that I am not one for going with third party vendors. He claimed that I was biased. I am really.

But I told him that support and troubleshooting are the main reasons why I dislike third party vendors as well as the request for X software to do Y non supported thing, they always state during a sales call that they can accommodate, they never do.

As an example, I send them the logs of a support ticket for one particular piece of software that we have, for which I detailed the situation, only for them to NEVER respond and then after 5 days close the ticket stating that I never replied back to them, even when they never replied back.

A custom made in house solution will always be superior to your run of the mill all encompassing app. But try and make a non dev understand this. I wish my old director was back. I miss the fuck out of that dude. Loved working for him.

Looking to sharpen and pursue a SysAdmin/DevOps career, looking at online job offers to get the big picture of required skills and I say FUCK. It would take me a lifetime.
Azure, AWS, Google cloud platform.
CD tools: Ansible, Chef or Puppet
Scripting ninja with Python/Node and Shell/Power shell.
Linux & Windows administration
Mongo, MySQL and their relatives.
Networking, troubleshooting failure in disturbed systems
Familiarity with different stacks. Fuck. (Apache, nginx, etc..)
Monitoring infrastructure ( nagios, datadog .. )
CI tools: jenkins, maven, etc..
DB versioning: liquibase, flyway etc.
FUCK FUCK FUCK.
Are they looking for Voltron? FUCK YOU FROM THE DEEPEST LEVEL OF MY DEEP FUCK.

Heck yeah,
So an old Ionic 3 project wont work on the newest CLI.
I check around for the error, update some dependencies, sure enough it starts working again, all is great or so I thought.

Later something weird starts happening, upon pushing a new view on the navCtrl, the navParams are null on the next view.
I later find out that navCtrl is becoming navParams just on the first bit of the view loading, so I do a dirty fix just to keep working on the functionality from my browser, I know very well this will cause problems later on, this is just so I can keep working on functionality.

I finish all of the functionality and I'm ready to compile for android, I run my script, the dirty fix comes to bite my butt now.
I remove the dirty fix hoping for it to work just well on the apk.
Now gradle doesn't find ddmlib.jar, some 15 minutes of troubleshooting do nothing.

Fuck it, I'll just create a new project from the CLI and drag all the code there so that navParams work as expected.

Sorry Ionic, but the world is not our oyster when subtle changes in dependencies produce such unexpected behaviour, with some fucking view parameters!.

I'm looking forward to get done with all the current projects to jump back to native.

I'm noticing that installing a new distro and making it your main distro tends to be very stressful to me.

Here's a couple of reasons why:

There's this anxiety I get that is just crazy, like I need to set this thing up perfectly, meanwhile I have work to do.
And the thing you estimated to take 2 hours at most ends up being a full week.
Work starts to pile up but can't just shake the obsession with setting this thing up.

Another reason is that usually my main distro instance tends to be VERY customized.
So much that when you switch, you need to configure those things again, and troubleshoot a lot.

Troubleshooting isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that you're trying to troubleshoot with a machine that needs troubleshooting.

the shell, the editor, the terminal, the window manager, tmux, the notifications, the custom kb layout. it was all so neatly customized that fixing problems on the machine was manageable.

but without all that I feel like an idiot.

Even something as simple as keeping having youtube music to focus is now intermittent because you need to restart the X server.

Maybe my problem is that I don't do well for bootstrapping.

Anyhow, I'm really stressed right now, but I think it'll be worth it.

Why is it such a hassle to get Android Studio to work? Spending several hours filled with with installs, reinstalls, downloads, googling, troubleshooting, more failures, suicidal thoughts, env variable tinkering, crashes, total apathy - before I can finally start writing some fucking code is fucked up.

May IE burn in hell.

One time I was trying to get something positioned properly, and it worked on all browsers except IE. There was this little gap between two divs and I couldn't get rid of it. In desperation after hours of troubleshooting and lots of CSS attempts with no solution, I removed the whitespace from between the two divs in the HTML:

<div>...</div>
<div>...</div>

to:

<div>...</div><div>...</div>

And voila! No more gap when looking at the rendered page.

FML I hate you, IE.

That moment when full-stack web development suddenly includes troubleshooting the TCP connections on your new listener.

#rememberthatoneclassinundergrad

!rant
Just tried Vapor (server side Swift) for a web api project and expected to be troubleshooting a lot but it was super easy and worked out of the box. Even openapi/swagger generation.
Now I‘m exited to build a fullstack project with native and web clients, completely in Swift. 😁

everyone warned me, but did I listen!

I've done enough troubleshooting to last me a lifetime, I'm just gonna rollover and die

fuck you windows 10

Some people are good at troubleshooting, some people are just good in asking other people to troubleshoot it for them. Which one would you rather be?

Fighting a CDI dependency injection problem that makes no sense. The only thing that sucks about the magic of DI is troubleshooting it when it doesn't work.

So yesterday at a client location, our support guy called me and said this thing is trimming the characters whenever I save it. It was a ckeditor in our application, so basic troubleshooting was to check the system configuration for that page and the ckeditor configuration.
Checked the system configuration, ckeditor configuration, found nothing.
Out of curiosity, checked the schema for the table in which the data is stored, so one of the idiots took the backup of original table and appended it with the date time on which it was backed up. And created a new table with field data type of varchar with a 255 limit.
This was in UAT server as well as Production server. Changed the field type to text again in UAT. Asked to team to get the same thing done on Production server as well.

I just fucked up real bad:

My phone was giving some error about not being able to install an update. Fair enough, i think to myself, so i try rebooting. Still nothing...

I then remember that i at some point OEM unlocked it for some testing, so i start up adb and see if i can connect during the update process. I can't. This is bad: I can't get into my home environment, nor can i connect with adb

Then i try booting into recovery, but instead of booting to ACTUAL recovery, it boots to some custom made "E-Recovery" made by huawei (my phone is a huawei p9 lite), which only gives me the option to download the update, which crashes, and no way of resetting. However, from here, i am finally able to connect to my internal storage via hisuite to make a backup

Next up: Bootloader
So i next load up the unlocked bootloader to try and manually flash the update. That works great, but it still wont boot normally. So i figure: it must think my device is in fact a different device. At this point i'm pretty fucked: Even though i have my data backed up, i can't manually download the update from huawei's site because i don't have the right keys, and i can't download an OTA because their site sucks and half of the downloads don't work, including the one i need. So now i'm stuck here with a bricked phone because EMUI doesn't know how to install an update.

I then did the stupidest thing i have done to date: i wanted to flash a custom recovery image over the "E-Recovery" in order to do some troubleshooting, but instead of writing
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash recovery recovery.img"
I wrote
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash boot recovery.img"
Meaning i flashed my BOOT partition with a custom recovery image that turned out to not be able to run. Great! Now i've totally fucked my boot sequence

I can't call their support line either, because as soon as they realize i've tried to restore it myself, and therefor had my OEM unlocked, they basically just hang up.

Watched 2 different vendors struggle to get something going.

I stayed quiet during both meetings, the first, was a misconfiguration error on their project code. They were tailoring the product that they sold my institution, I could see the simple error: key-value settings on one of their json files (it is a dotneto app)
I don't get paid to troubleshoot the code for an external company, so I was silent, knowing full well this would take longer to get done, needless to say, I had originally advised against purchasing this product but was not listened to, very well then.

The other was a configuration issue on the side of a different Java based product, there were some strange XML configuration entries, some other project files that made little sense, but again: quiet.

Department head is concerned about the delays that this might cause and will still not ask if I am willing to help since he knows I A) was against this product purchase from the get go and B) knows DAMN well I will say that I don't get paid to troubleshoot the issues that third party vendors charging us over 100k of product "worth", they wanna spend the money on "enterprise" shit that does not work,they can deal with their own shit programs.

Morale of the story: money moves people. If there is no bling in my account: then I ain't doing it.

Now, I do get paid well for what I do, and for that I do bust my ass, for everything else: there is mastercard.

So, for my final year project I'm tasked with creating a mobile app for iOS and Android.

A YouTuber I watch avidly decides to go with Xamarin for his next app. Cool, I think: I'll go with Xamarin for my app too (I'd like to test run the app on PCs just for fun).

Looks for Xamarin tutorials, nice, found one! Goes into VS, creates a new project. I add "Hello World" to the centre of the screen.

*F5* Build started... 5 minutes later I come back and it failed. No reason why it failed, all parentheses closed, semicolon at the end of my only line of code.

Watches YouTuber's new video, he has the same problem ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ. He adds a button, builds, build fails. Tries a second time, build succeeds. And this goes on for a couple of minutes while he's troubleshooting the problem.

Oh well. Time for hell I guess.

Nothing makes me feel as incompetent as troubleshooting a database issue for two hours only to realize I'm using the wrong mirror that has botched permissions.

Spent three days banging my head against my desk trying to get an AWS Lambda function to work, only to finally discover that my code was perfectly functional and it was a security group problem. It was supposed to send a POST request to a load balancer's URL but couldn't resolve the hostname because the security group blocked a necessary outbound port for DNS requests.

That's what I get for not troubleshooting at the infrastructure level when experiencing connection issues. I did not spend two years doing tech support just to forget basic troubleshooting steps now that I'm in the DevOps field...

Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing

1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then

2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year

Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects

Coming down from a high of a Cavs championship tonight. Driving home from Cleveland with another dev, out of nowhere he says, "I know why the app still works"

// always troubleshooting

It's really fun to not have access to the CI backend and keep only troubleshooting build crashes through a CI that takes 15min to run until it crashes :)))

1 diagnostic command == 1 pipeline run
1 typo == another run :)

it's been 2 sprints now. Still no luck

While troubleshooting, and nothing works

You make edits to your code, then you deploy.
But the behavior remains the same.
You try to figure out why your new code doesn't get executed.
Try other cases.
Try changing this.
Try changing that.
Still no changes.

Then you realize you deployed to a minimized emulator* the whole time.

* replace emulator with device/server/whatevs

So yesterday I had to do some windows updates.
Today, I turn my laptop back on and notice I don't have sound.

Alright, I'll just see if I have some outdated drivers. Oh, I have 3, and one it's the sound driver! Cool, let me just update that. What do you mean I can't? Alright, let me try this app I have installed to see if it can update everything for me. It did, great!

Oh, but now the sound is coming from my earphones AND the speaker... Let me check the app again. Nothing. Let me check the drivers again. Detection verification is outdated. Alright, I'll just update that one, no big deal. Windows could not find drivers? Alright, let's see if windows update can find something! Nothing.

Okay, let's check sound definitions. What about troubleshooting? Still nothing?

Well, now I'm pissed. Let's see what the internet thinks I should do. Almost one hour later, I've tried everything I can think of and still can't fix this. Fml

Me: *spends 5 hours troubleshooting updates across 2 days*

Coworker: oh yeah, I submitted a ticket for that a couple weeks ago. Just run that specific part manually.

Thanks friend.

So I finally decided to take the plunge to dualboot my Windows 10, since I'm using Linux applications more and more than Windows applications.

I just had to choose Fedora out of all distros. It sort of worked. When I tried to install, it won't get pass the login screen (kept getting blanks). I rebooted several times and went with "Troubleshooting" and it got me passed the login screen and proceeded to install at the lowest graphical settings, i.e. 800x600

So far so good, I was able to operate stuff that I wanted but I just can't stand working in a really low resolution. My guess is probably incompatibility with nVidia driver. Tried everything, rpmfusion, the negativo17 repo, the current official fedora repo, the If-Not-True-Then-False guide, and bumblebee. None works.

Makes no sense at all. Luckily my Win10 still works. Now I'm stuck on whether to continue trying to get Fedora distro up or try a different distro and start back from square one...

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

I was just playing with Eventbridge for research for a potential project, and I wanted to test setting up a Cloudwatch Logs target. I go to set up my target, click save, and am presented with "Resource limit exceeded".

After some digging in my browser's network inspector, and some googling, I discover that the account has reached its quota of Cloudwatch Logs resource policies, which can't even be viewed in the console, only the API and CLI.

Is network debugging and StackOverflow really the intended method of troubleshooting this issue? What the hell was I supposed to do with "Resource limit exceeded" and no further info?

I’m one month into my first job as a C++ dev for a company with a MASSIVE code base and I still am struggling with having a consistent build environment, sometimes spending almost 3 hours a day troubleshooting because my environment is always inconsistent. I’ve barely gotten my hands into the code nor pushed anything because I’m stack tracing through thousands of compiled dlls through process of elimination to identify a bug in the software.

Is this normal? What am I doing wrong? I’m freaking out that I haven’t shown any productivity to this company.

I wish senior people would just admit if they don't know something or are unsure. I hate spending time implementing a feature and spending more time troubleshooting it only to ask for help and be questioned why I'm "doing it like that" in the first place...
YOU TOLD ME THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE!!!

Windows is stupid

My desktop is in my room, and consistently every night at around 11 to 12 it wakes up from sleep, consequently waking me up. I did some troubleshooting and apparently it's doing "automatic maintenance"? I couldn't find a way to turn it off.

If any other devs have had this problem, please help, I'm getting sick of this.

I need to write the maintenance document in case I die.

Any idea what to include?

I have written a lot of software which include family business and other business depend on by myself.

I have an idea of adding my git user name and password. Email and social media user name and password.Configuration file/Configuration property. Troubleshooting information.Program overview.

I swear to god that Docker is the worst thing in the world.

I'm trying to learn how to work with this f thing, and I've spent hours just troubleshooting, looking up on google how to do one simple task and I have yet to find a solution on this messed up, convoluted way of running a god damn project.

So I was able to learn something really neat about firefox. Apparently you can create a user.js file that will have all your about:config settings. I wanted to export my settings from my old profile, but could not. I exported all my bookmarks though. (Perhaps should have exported profile?)

If you go:
pancake -> Help -> More TroubleShooting Information -> Profile Folder: Open Folder you get a file manager pointing to your profile directory. Here you can create a user.js to house your settings. Such as:

user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.enabled", true);
user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style", 3);
user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override", 15);

This makes the scrollbar stay and I can control style and width.

TLDR: I wanted to change email to new one, but I could not remember which one I have
currently. I found out an API in DevRant JS files for email verification and used
it to find it out.

So, I am moving from Gmail to Protonmail Pro, absolutely love their service.
I wanted to do same on Devrant but I could not figure out my current mail for
"I lost my password" form. My Password Manager have only login saved, and profile does
not show email address.

I thought that this user information is stored on server so it have to be some way to retrieve it. I dug
in source code and I've found:

`<div class="signup-title">Verify Your Email</div>`

Which has event assigned to function which uses jQuery.ajax (love it btw :D) to call:

`url: "/api/users/me/resend-confirm",`

This seems like worth a shot. Few copy-pastes and one ajax call later:

*Ding*

From: support@devrant.io
To: dawid@dawidgoslawski.pl
"Welcome to Devrant"

Got it :) So I have already changed in march when DevRant on previous layout.

This is what I love in this profession - problem solving. AI will not replace human
in any way, we will just stop coding array iterations and data manipulation - we will focus
on real problem solving and human touch (like design, convincing management for changes).

In my previous position I did mostly networking and helped out where I could setting up servers and workspaces. About a month ago our systems admin left the company so I got to spend all day troubleshooting network issues and configuring the proper NAT statements to connect a new hire to our customers networks. I was supposed to be working on migrating our api from the Splunk search head to the indexer to keep it from absolutely tanking the performance of our database.

I am a php developer having total 3years of experience.More than coding I love to debugging and troubleshooting kind of works.So I am thinking of about Devops career.
Is it will be a good decision?
What do you think?

I have this habit of whenever I run up against an issue at work programming-wise (a step definition doesn’t behave the way I think it should, I have an error in the console when I attempt to do something and have to work out how to clear the error, etc.), I document the issue and the solution somewhere in the Slack.

This serves two purposes: discoverability for others who might run into that issue later and DISCOVERABILITY FOR MYSELF WHEN I INEVITABLY ENCOUNTER THE SAME ISSUE.

People in customer service:

1. Don't know shit about the product
2. Have 0 troubleshooting skills

Who asked for RedDatabase and RedXpert? You guessed it - nobody 😑 It's a buggy Firebird and DBeaver domestic knock-off!

My student was assigned with making Flask app by "simple" requirements. But guess what? We can't figure out hecking RedDatabase?! Figures out that they sent incompatible *.fdb database file, on which we wasted entire 3 hours troubleshooting obscure error, while clean database doesn't cause any trouble.

Last error that completely drained us is following:
"""
Reason: unsupported on-disk structure for file /var/rdb/test.fdb; found 12.3, support 12.2; IProvider::attachDatabase failed when loading mapping cache [SQLState:HY000, ISC error code:335544379]
"""

So now, he basically recreates database by scheme on image. What also shady seems to me is that application also has to deployed on virtual OS which he can bring on USB stick or by cloud later.

When project have errors related to libaraies that I don't fully understand what it does, what is the good habit for more efficient troubleshooting?

Should I read their GitHub documentation and understand the problem on my own first or simply find answer at SO?
And when should I just give up and post an issue?

SSL issues when behind a proxy.. i think.
Troubleshooting and solving issues are difficult when you just follow a guide about something you need :i

Recipes should have a troubleshooting section to see where you went wrong

- Every specialist is looking after his area of expertise

- Everyone is a specialist of everything and shall work on everything

- Every specialist is looking after his area of expertise, making improvements and automations in his area

- Everyone is a specialist of everything and is looking after everything, automating everything (devops)

- Everyone is a specialist of everything and is looking after everything, automating everything, in all the environments (SRE)

- ... I wonder what's next...

I miss the good old days when developers could be developers and rely on DBAs, sysadmins and networkists to do their job well. I miss the days when developers were developing applications, sytems, modules,.. Not troubleshooting ELBs, RDS latencies or building monitoring for servers.

About a month ago my grandfather gave me the okay to work on a pi-hole and attach it to the router

So I did that yesterday, and he yells at me for it (because having a civil conversation is impossible with him) and says that we don't need "extra stuff" and says that I'll break the router.

I tried to explain how the process works but I was just shut down and interrupted.

He could have at least told me he changed his mind so I wouldn't have wasted over two hours of my day building and troubleshooting the device.

Mind you, he literally worked in hardware for 50 years and has had ham radio as a hobby for over sixty.

Spending a whole day troubleshooting why an environment variable appends in IIS rather than being replaced and what out of all our heaps of shit on our internal server is resetting the original value which is then being appended to. Kicker is, already have a docker solution which handles this use case 100% of time but we're too cheap to upgrade our internal environments from motherfucking Windows server 2008 so we can't use it. Save money at all costs!

Programming at a job to me is no longer creating something fun and valuable; it's more like figuring out why shit doesn't work, con-stant-ly.

It' s like coming in to your desk every morning, dreading the day because there's yesterday's shit to fix. "Hmm, what shall today be like? Oh yes, troubleshooting why my database model doesn't work, redesign it completely and break my mind over db details. The next day? Having to redesign my classes to implement new patterns because apparently the current design isn't good enough." Even if you work on new deliverables, that's just new problems in disguise anyway.

Pleasant? Not really.
lol.

I'm all for diversity in Linux, I like that there's multiple organizations, flavors, etc., but geez, troubleshooting a huge CMake project that breaks on Fedora and not on Ubuntu because of the way Python2.7 is installed is a real pain. :(

This is interesting from a troubleshooting point of view. I have a decent laptop I use to play Fallout 4. It was running just fine until recently. The game will spike GPU activity and crash. I found if I reduced settings and lower resolution it happens less often.

I kept searching and finally found someone saying it could be GPU thermal compound has worn out. So I looked how to change that on a laptop. The video I found it looked fairly easy.

I get into my laptop and I find all the screws for the heatsink/head pipe assembly. However there is a ton of thermal tape used everywhere holding it all down. I think if I am not careful I will break the heat sink. I did pull on the main part and it just didn't want to give.

Feeling a bit defeated as I put everything back together. I had gotten some decent thermal compound for this. So I fire up the game and it runs fine at the low settings. Then I raise all the settings to max with max resolution. This was crashing the game the last few days. It just runs and runs fine on those settings. GPU temps look normal (they did before, but I wanted to see). So, all I can think the act of lifting the heat sink a small amount may have reseated the thermal compound a bit. I am still going to price out a professional doing this, but I can play on max settings again. Maybe messing with screws on GPU and slightly moving the heat sink actually did something.

This confirms to me that something needs done about the thermal compound. The company I bought the laptop from offered custom thermal compound at time of purchase. So I am thinking they can do this for me. It will be cheaper to pay a couple hundred bucks to have a pro do this rather than pay $1800 for a new computer. This is only 2 1/2 years old. It has been a top performer up til now.

Fuckin shit web hosts! I must have wasted three hours over the past three days on support emailing, troubleshooting and waiting for a webpage to load. Is a decent host at a decent cost too much to ask for?

Ok, we were troubleshooting a network connection problem. My boss told me: use fping, a small command line utility that gives you a timestamped ping. We can then check when did the connection go down. Ok. Since I've always advocated the importance of knowing advanced scripting tools, i tried to do it with powershell. I've been playing with Test-Connection for an hour to try to get not only the timestamp when the connection is ok, but the timestamp when the connection is down. Don't want to go into details. I've just a question. A solution that allows you to do such an easy task in say 20 lines of code is the proof that the system works or that it doesn't work? To make long story short, now i'm downloading fiping.

I was troubleshooting an asyncio websocket project for two hours that was working the previous day with minimal changes.

I am new to asyncio so I was getting very frustrated thinking I wasn't understanding something.

As it turns out, I had replaced a continue with a return, killing the broadcast function completely.

Please.....

Don't troubleshoot over my shoulder.
Don't point at the screen over my shoulder.
Don't suggest the troubleshooting step I'm currently on, while pointing at the screen and whispering over my shoulder.
Don't think out loud as you are troubleshooting over my shoulder.

Please....

I can only type passwords with my index fingers. Is this normal?

Brb posting to StackOverflow

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

Spending hours troubleshooting with a customer, nothing works, until eventually it comes out that the customer lied in response to one of my first questions.

Congratulations, asshat, you played yourself.

This happened across multiple companies, multiple classes of products, multiple classes of customers. It is how my “rule 1” came to be (see previous rant).