It's too early to be having heart attacks like this..
Posted by Cloudraa@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 62 comments
Got an alert about half an hour ago about a server on one of our remote sites being low on storage. Pulled up WinDirStat to poke around and see if there was anything I knew I could purge, click on a large folder to see the files inside, and my remote access locks up.
"Must be a lot of shit in that folder.." I'm thinking to myself, before I get completely disconnected. Minor warning bells start going off, but Connectwise Control isn't perfect software and I've seen this before, so I wait a second, and then..
Blip, blip, blip, other endpoints start going offline. "What the hell did I even do??" I start thinking to myself. Almost panicking at this point, I swap over to our network controllers access page and pop in on the site. They're completely offline. This actually calmed me down a bit as there was no way in hell WinDirStat was taking the entire network down, and checking in on another site in the same building confirmed it was a brief outage. By the time I was done in there all the endpoints were back up already..
Too early for that sort of panic lol. How's everyone else's day been?
lizzieismydog@reddit
It's like being a firefighter. Moments of terror alternating with long moments of boredom.
nymalous@reddit
I've seen that metaphor applied to Naval patrols: months of boredom punctuated by brief moments of stark, screaming terror.
Blue_Veritas731@reddit
And ATC's.
Ivebeenfurthereven@reddit
Submariners especially.
SeanBZA@reddit
For a submariner, that moment of stark terror is normally very brief, often shorter than the time it takes the signal to travel to the brain. See Oceangate......
RevKyriel@reddit
Just don't open the window for some fresh air.
thepfy1@reddit
Unless if you are permanently firefighting... I feel like Red Adair
Ich_mag_Kartoffeln@reddit
You use explosives to solve your IT problems?
joule_thief@reddit
I like the idea of flashbangs for sales weasels.
johndcochran@reddit
You seem to have misspelled "claymores".
joule_thief@reddit
I'm not opposed necessarily, but flashbangs allow for the possibility of reeducation. Claymores, on the other hand, just meant you need to buy a lot of booze for the janitorial staff.
johndcochran@reddit
True enough. But I'm of the belief that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so Claymores act as a deterrent when hiring replacement sales personnel. "The one who previously held your position did X and because of that was .... Please ignore the pockmarks on the walls."
MadRocketScientist74@reddit
You don't?
One of us is doing it wrong.
Ich_mag_Kartoffeln@reddit
No comment.
It depends who you ask.
technomancing_monkey@reddit
No... but after reading this I might start
technomancing_monkey@reddit
Worked someplace not long ago where they had 2 or 3 Sev1 outages a month. It was an absolute JOKE.
thepfy1@reddit
On one account I worked on, the customer regularly raised Sev 0 incidents. (Not my area, thankfully).
NoeticSkeptic@reddit
When I was a Private Investigator, I would say PI work was 95% boredom and 5% pure terror. But, boy, did I live for that 5%.
phazedout1971@reddit
In his book The Laet Hero the Late, Great Professor Sir Terry Pratchett (Blackboard Monitor) describes battle as "short periods of excitement followed by long periods of being dead"
technomancing_monkey@reddit
This i show I have had to explain what some teams in IT are like.
We are firefighters.
Management looks at us and thinks we are a waste of money. We dont "do" anything. Until there is something to do and then we are god damned life savers.
Noone likes spending money on things they arent using. But when there is a fire they want the best equipped, best trained, and most responsive fire department.
"Why do we pay for Sys Admins to sit around all night not doing anything? Fire them"
2 weeks later
"OH GOD! WE CAME IN THIS MORNING AND EVERYTHING IS OFFLINE, NOTHING WORKS, RANSOMWARE MESSAGES ON ALL THE DESKTOPS!"
bet they wish they kept those useless overnight sys admins who could have spotted the trouble as it started and immediately taken action to stem the tide of infection and begin remediation efforts...
MazeMouse@reddit
Good sysadmins are an insurance policy. You don't pay them because you need them. You pay them because you hope you don't need them.
Vidya_Vachaspati@reddit
This deserves more upvotes.
Geminii27@reddit
Boredom and maintenance and checking the alarms every so often.
No-Combination2020@reddit
Only the truly gifted Admins know these feelings.
straybrit@reddit
Only the truly gifted Admins ~~know~~ survive these feelings.
There. FTFY :-)
Wooden_Researcher_36@reddit
You haven't lived before you've run something like this on production:
> DELETE FROM users; WHERE ....
LordNelsonkm@reddit
Have a look at WizTree. Much faster than WinDirStat, has same features. There's a portable as well.
AllanIsKing@reddit
I use: Directory Report
Also much faster than WDS
No confusing treemaps
Cloudraa@reddit (OP)
just tried this out and its crazy fast! i know what ill be using next time
Shurgosa@reddit
It is such a hilariously captivating feature of the program. I use it allllll the time. I'm also a big fan of wizfile for blazing fast searches I haven't been caught up in the whole Everything fever yet
There is 2 other little programs made by the wiztree people but they are really niche...something about scrolling your screen under your mouse cursor...
SeanBZA@reddit
Used that for many years, confused the crap out of the support staff when I scrolled a non active window under the mouse pointer, while still typing into the active window.
stoopiit@reddit
Wait, that can't be done normally? I'm probably just misunderstanding here. Do you mean click into a window and type in it, then move over the cursor to another window and scroll with the scrollwheel without clicking and continuing to type on the original window
Shinhan@reddit
I checked their website because I was with you and it says "Windows 10 already has this functionality built in so WizMouse is most useful if you're using earlier versions of Windows (Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8)."
stoopiit@reddit
Ah ok. Thanks for checking, good to know.
Mr_ToDo@reddit
The only reason I still use Windirstat is I prefer the visual output it does. For me at least it helps with seeing patterns more than the other options seem to.
But if speed is an issue, ya, the other ones beat it every day even with the new update(which shocked the hell out of me, I thought it might be dead)
PeachyTinkerer@reddit
I second. I fucking love WizTree.
LanMarkx@reddit
I came here to recommend this one as well.
WinDirStat (which was awesome when it was released) is now old and slow.
daviox@reddit
It got updated recently:
https://blog.windirstat.net/20241016/windirstat-2-0-1-released/
chossenger@reddit
For those wondering how tis so much faster, it's because it's using Windows' file index and using the cached file sizes rather than individually checking each file.
This comes with the monkey paw that it reports virtual file sizes rather than physical file sizes, so if you have a terrabyte of SharePoint files synced, it will report the full directory, rather than only those physically present on your disk, like WinDirStat will.
Independent_Cell_498@reddit
I thought it was the middle-out algorithm.
LucasPisaCielo@reddit
Thank you for the recommendation!
I can't believe how much faster WizTree is compared to WinDirStat.
dRaidon@reddit
I once pressed enter to run a brand new powershell script and as I did, power went out.
archina42@reddit
Reminds me of the time I (on a Mac) was using WRD to connect to a client's server to do some FileMaker maintenance. It was late and I was probably a bit stoned. Went to shut down the WRD, but accidentally shut down their server! It controlled all their fuel pumps, shop tills - everything! Had to call the boss to come and and reboot the server, which was in a locked room.
incog473@reddit
Same happen to me yesterday. I was connected to the dc and TS, ran shutdown command in cmd on the TS. Next thing I know I lost access to the dc also. I was like wtf did I do. Did I shutdown the dc?! Only to check firewall immediately and realize I couldn't connect to it and found out there was and outage. Yep, too early in the morning for that type of bs
meitemark@reddit
Its a cosmic stress test of your cardiovascular system.
Traveling-Techie@reddit
I heard a story that in 1965 a kid in Jersey whacked a phone pole with a stick and at that moment the Northeast blacked out for the next 13 hours. He was very apologetic.
erikkonstas@reddit
LOL except that the whack might've been the direct cause, 60s and all...
Sunfried@reddit
"I'm sorry I found a single point of failure for all of New England's power grid with my stick."
Vicus_92@reddit
Been there before....
"I swear I just ran ipconfig, there's no way I caused this server to crash!!"
Was an ISP outage.
bmxtiger@reddit
Use wiztree. Windirstat is so slow.
SavvySillybug@reddit
WinDirStat is great, but I recommend WizTree. Basically the same thing except it gives near instant results instead of making you wait for the scan.
cactuarknight@reddit
How can i justify a sword fight break if i cant shout compiling?
deeseearr@reddit
Just add a speed-up loop to it and you'll be fine.
honeyfixit@reddit
Wayne's 80/20 rule sounds a lot like Scotty from Star Trek
xzer@reddit
The title I thought was really going a darker direction...
jamoche_2@reddit
Picturing every Hollywood version of computers dying where Our Hero sits in a room full of monitors that go black one by one, boom boom boom.
Cloudraa@reddit (OP)
lol it was exactly that, i was staring at a menu like this just watching them go tick, tick, tick..
scyllafren@reddit
I use TreeSize, it has a ton of functionality.
ArkofVengeance@reddit
I love TreeSize, sadly the new versions aren't free to use on windows server anymore, and we don't use it frequently enough on servers to justify the purchase.
(It's mainly the users using their client PC's as digital landfill where we need it the most)
Zakattack1125@reddit
TreeSize is great, can't speak for WizTree like the others are saying.
Mdayofearth@reddit
Also +1 for WizTree, but after over a decade of nothing, apparently WinDirStat 2.0 is a thing now.
SabaraOne@reddit
A couple of months ago I got around to replacing the U6+ AP I use in my apartment (The first one got fried in a surge and I spent several months using an old router in AP mode on a VLAN). Somehow I managed to lose the config backup so I had to recreate everything manually and I really couldn't be bothered to bring up the guest network at first.
A couple weeks after installing the AP, my brother/roommate invited a couple of friends over so I decided to actually bring up the guest network for them. Configure the VLAN in UniFi, create the WiFi profile, connect my iPad over to it... and nothing. Okay, poke around a bit in UniFi, still nothing. Switch my iPad back over to my network and suddenly now that's not working. The friends show up and I'm still bashing away trying to figure out how I screwed up the AP. Then just before they leave I figured out that the DHCP server on the OPNSnse spontaneously took a dump. Rebooted the router and it worked fine, but I never did figure out what happened there.