Sysadmin Myths
Posted by EntrepreneurNo2109@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 341 comments
So random Saturday thought after having beers with some friends last night. We somehow ended up on this topic about IT myths (not sure if Myth is the right word here, but come on the journey with me).
All those things some people swear by, but aren't necessarily true or has more to the story than meets the eye usually. Some are funny because surprising, while others are just pure nonsense, but people keep saying them anyway.
Here’s what I’m wondering: What 'myths' have you guys heard that turned out to be totally true? And what are some that are complete BS, even tho people still swear by them?
Examples that pop into my mind, while waiting for the bus:
True Myth - "Just turn it off and on again", super basic, but the reboot trick actually does work a lot of the time. Like, it legit clears up so many weird issues, especially when processes are hung up or memory needs a reset. The average person wouldn'y get it, but the sysadmin is running a process overview in his/her head.
False Myth - "Clearing cache = speed boost" – This one’s everywhere, but it's kinda a half-truth I guess (based on last night's discussions). Sure, clearing cache can help if it’s super clogged up or corrupt or whatever, but doing it too often actually slows stuff down sometimes cause your system has to re-download things over and over again. Double edged sword.
What other 'myths' or low-key funny things do you guys run into? I feel like there’s a ton of these floating around.
matt95110@reddit
Myth: It’s a network problem, or check the firewall.
Reality: The network and firewall works perfectly until it gets to your server and then your application doesn’t work.
East-Dig440@reddit
well, I had a 10 minutes discussion with a netadmin, just to try to make him understund that in an internal network was not the corporate hardware firewall the one that was filtering the access to a DB. Just te WINDOWS firewall...
Not only devs are short minded. MAny of the "specialists" are
jamesaepp@reddit
I had a problem kinda like this earlier this year. Application which is always having problems is acting up. Event logs make it appear that it's losing access to the Domain Controller, so Infrastructure gets blamed and saddled with the responsibility of troubleshooting.
We can't find anything - system just works. I pulled a hunch completely out of pocket and what I did was throw a script together that tracked the number of open TCP sockets on the server.
Result? Server was exhausting the number of ports available. Source? The problem application. Reason for the abrupt change in nature? Recent code change by the application team. Active Directory connection failures were just another symptom.
matt95110@reddit
I once had the server team and developers drag me into a call to troubleshoot some obscure network issue that their application was having. It was intermittent and they could only get it to break under certain circumstances. I ended up setting up a packet capture and let it run for 3 hours while I was on a call with them.
During that call they accused me of throttling connections, adding unnecessary complexity and a bunch of other crap.
Eventually the issue happened so I checked the capture and the firewall logs and it turns out they had left some hardcoded IP address and credentials in their application which no longer worked.
Didn’t even get a thank you for troubleshooting their garbage application.
pdp10@reddit
Amongst developers, netengs have reputation as a group, and as individuals.
A wise neteng may want to specifically build credibility as helpful, if a bit rivalrous, and not for being a blocker or antagonist.
Submitting one-line diffs as Merge Requests to the devs' code is often the highlight of my week.
bobdawonderweasel@reddit
Ah my friend in “guilty until you find our problem”. That’s the story of most of my 30 year network career. I feel your pain.
NV_Lady@reddit
Interesting how we have to prove it’s not the firewall or network all the time. 🤦♀️
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
I feel for you. We recently moved everything to Azure and a Zero Trust security model. Pretty much every application has been a network/firewall issue because suddenly the end user of the application is expected to know what servers their app communicates with and on what port.
We also have multiple layers of firewalls, NAT etc. The network team has no idea about the applications and the application team has no clue about networks.
I’ve had one issue that has been ongoing since May, which is when an issue with an sftp interface started happening intermittently. Something obviously changed to make it block the traffic, but the network team is stumped.
The issue is teams working in isolation and not considering that if they make even a subtle change, something can break in an unpredictable way. I can pinpoint exactly when it broke from the logs, but I don’t own the infrastructure or the network. I’m just the one that gets yelled at by the end users
jamesaepp@reddit
Same application I mentioned before - not Wireshark but Fiddler. Their application's HTTP library wasn't even configured to do compression. All application objects were being sent raw in the HTTP headers.
At times application responses would go into the hundreds of MBs. Fiddler's own nice features indicated the compression would make that laughably smaller. They showed no interest in implementing compression.
Cassie0peia@reddit
Nice job!
The_art_of_Xen@reddit
If I had a dollar for everytime a crappy vendor blames “network” or “firewall” issues for their app/service, and it is completely unrelated to the actual issue, I’d be retired in my mansion by now.
The_art_of_Xen@reddit
Bam - not even 24 hours after posting this just had a vendor blame the firewall for their issue….only for me to inform them this service isn’t behind a firewall on our LAN and will work if they followed our instructions (spoiler: they didn’t).
ninja-wharrier@reddit
I always used to enjoy being co-opted into a dev project to ease their rollout because they never tell us what ports are required and in which direction to/from which hosts.
The delight of implementation and discovering they haven't scoped out half the required connections. Then watch them get annoyed when you tell them all the ports they are trying to use that are being dropped at the fw because they don't really understand their app.
matt95110@reddit
I let them fail now. I have the change management people to support me.
Put in a ticket and I'll open whatever you need, once approved.
niomosy@reddit
For us, it's very often the firewall. Because they didn't put in a firewall request. Thus, firewall is working as intended.
WinElectrical9184@reddit
This happens so often it boggles my mind. It worked yesterday, now it's not...it must be the network.
Hans_Delbruck@reddit
"Server A can't talk to Server B. It must be the firewall and or the network "
"What are the IP addresses of the servers?"
"192.168.4.20 and 192.169.4.21"
"Ok, first, there is no firewall between those servers. Second, they are in the same server clan, so no routing. Third it looks like they are on the same VMWare host, so the traffic isn't even going out to the network so you probably want to ask the serv
"But it has
This_Bitch_Overhere@reddit
False myth: a user tells you they rebooted in the subject line of an email because one of the “sysadmins,” actually tells everyone to do that every time he gets their ticket.
The actual facts is that they have not and machine uptime is more than 2 weeks.
KingSlareXIV@reddit
Users lie to IT. A LOT.
Not even talking about misunderstanding how to actually shutdown or reboot a system.
I mean flat out intentional BS, because somehow they think it will make their problem seem more urgent/get more attention, or they just don't want to bother with the troubleshooting steps they know we'll ask them to do.
East-Dig440@reddit
well, some of my users do not lie (on pourpose), just turn off and on the monitor...
This_Bitch_Overhere@reddit
Oh absolutely! You’re asking about the person who emails “My headset is broken,” only to find it physically broken in 2 pieces? Or the guy who emails that they forgot their laptop, but when you get there, it turns out that they “forgot it in the rental car over the weekend in a city on the opposite coast, but they contacted the rental car company already.” Or the user who emails because their laptop is broken, but what they mean is it’s broken because they left it in the trunk of their car last night when the weather was 19° F and they don’t know that the “L,” in LCD stands for liquid. Is that the person you’re asking about? Oh that’s the same person by the way.
CptBronzeBalls@reddit
True myth: users fucking lie
Angelsomething@reddit
Even more annoying, the user actually shuts down their workstation and then powers it back on, and Because of Microsoft's enabled-by-default hibernate setting, the workstation doesn't actually reboot. Then you have to explain to hit the actual reboot button and look like an alien to them.
TotallyNotIT@reddit
If you aren't disabling that by policy, you're doing it wrong.
Brilliant-Advisor958@reddit
Or you are one of the the 10,000
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Angelsomething@reddit
Always and forever
Adoavocado@reddit
I got a phone call and asked user for a reeboot. I hear "Done" in 5 seconds. Oh really? I asked them and found out that they only turned off and on the monitor...
DeadbeatHoneyBadger@reddit
Sounds like the classic, “I shut the laptop and re-opened it” or cut the screen off and back on.
Also the same people that “didn’t click the link” in the phishing email but previewed it in outlook.
Standard-Side-5746@reddit
Here's a big myth that continues unabated: "If a user tells IT that their computer isn't working right, the IT folks will know exactly what that is."
idiBanashapan@reddit
True myth (from my experience) End user: “I swear it wasn’t working until you come over and watched me do it!” Me: “I actually believe you.”
BadSausageFactory@reddit
this effect is because when you are standing next to the user they slow down and work on a single task, instead of trying to blow through 20 things at once using muscle memory, this is my observation after three decades of walking across the office to see a menial task performed successfully.
idiBanashapan@reddit
Including typing a login password?
I get you point though
matt95110@reddit
I once had a crazy escalation come to me because a user was constantly getting locked out of their computer. It was happening multiple times a day and it was driving the helpdesk crazy. They replaced her keyboard twice and even her workstation. It got escalated multiple times.
I was at her office one day and I decided to take a crack at it. I watched the user fumble their way through working their keyboard and she was getting extremely flustered about it. She called her manager over and I decided to do a test. I wrote down a very simple password with one capital letter and a number, opened notepad and dragged it off screen. She couldn’t type it in correctly once after 10 attempts.
swtinc@reddit
Not a myth but I learned a long time ago to never underestimate the end users. I made the mistake of giving a lady my direct desk # and she called today to reset her password. No big deal. Knock it out and let her know that it will sync her 365 password to be the same in about 10 minutes then she will be able to login to her email too. She goes "Ten minutes?! Wow!". I let her know it typically doesn't take nearly that long but I say ten just to save a call back in 1 minute when their email password isn't updated... She calls me back 3 minutes later because she can't access the "blue page".... I remote in and she's trying to login to her outlook app. Literally after we just had a conversation about it to which she acknowledged it.
Windows95GOAT@reddit
Sameish case here but we found out the lady needed new glasses....
TheITCustodian@reddit
I don’t know if it’s my experience learning to type on an IBM Selectric vs a computer keyboard, but the number of users I encounter using the shift lock key instead of shift to get just one capital letter is pretty substantial.
This has translated to users locking themselves out because they don’t notice they are still shifted as they keep typing sometimes.
One user actually argued with me that there was absolutely no way this was the case, and I did the same thing: had her type her password while I covered notepad with my hand. Sure enough, everything after the first capital letter was shifted. She was astonished to learn you could just hold down shift and type a character and the let it go.
I also had one lady who could not understand that @ and & are not the same characters. I just walked away.
OptimalCynic@reddit
I disabled caps lock office-wide once as a test. About half of the staff complained on the first day.
Mackosaurus@reddit
Not a sys admin, but noticed a co-worker using caps lock for single capitals. I removed the caps lock key for a fortnight, so they had to learn to use shift.
I think their habit has been broken, but maybe I should follow up...
Comfortable_Seesaw30@reddit
I kinda found it was faster to hit the caps lock key twice than to reach for shift as a kid when i was like trying to be super fast typer guy and it was a hard habit to break.
Combo_salamander@reddit
I worked in a 1-1 laptop k-12 school and the majority of the kids do this as they learned to type on iPads and phones.
Theseguy0309@reddit
There is a user where I work that forgets his password every 4-6 months. When he forgets it, he insists that what he is trying to use is the one he always uses. If I am involved in the process whenever that ticket comes in, I just reset his password to the one he insists is the password he has always used.
Ziggy_the_third@reddit
So what you're actually saying here, is that this user has found a way to trick his support into letting him have the same password forever, he is completely playing you...
Theseguy0309@reddit
No, the one he gives us does not work. So he's unintentionally doing what every user does on a password change. We reset it to what he provides after making sure he's not fat fingering it.
Pharoiste@reddit
Still not good. It means there’s someone else who knows his password. It also means he thinks giving someone else his password isn’t a problem.
Theseguy0309@reddit
How do you think a tech gives someone a password when a reset happens.
Pharoiste@reddit
At minimum, they give a standard temporary password and check the box in Active Directory (or wherever) saying that the user has to change their password at their next login. Which won’t work with your person because not being able to handle his own passwords is his problem in the first place. At my own shop, we don’t give passwords to end users at all… rather, we direct them to the password reset portal (or use other technologies as appropriate).
There are two problems with doing it your way. The first thing, as I said, is that now the user’s password is known by someone else. Which, by the way, is a security risk not just for the user but also for the technician, as a bit of reflection should make clear.
The second problem is that the end user is conditioned into assuming that giving or receiving password information is some kind of standard practice in IT, which it isn’t. This is one of the reasons that (for example) whenever you start the very unpleasant process of opening a ticket with your ISP because you’re connection is out, you usually get a big reminder saying “a Verizon technician will NEVER ask you for your password”.
BlackV@reddit
And using the same simple password for ever ...
CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit
We had someone randomly insert a space when typing their password. They didn’t always; just some of the time. Since support was by phone, it took three months for someone to hear an extra “click” of a key in their process.
Then IT management reamed everyone out for not somehow figuring it out sooner.
neurosurge@reddit
I had a tech that was needing his password reset on a few systems at least once or twice a month. I watched him type it in one day and noticed he was adding a space at the end. Muscle memory and lack of attention was the issue the entire time.
supremeicecreme@reddit
i had someone doing this with a username. i had to watch what they were doing like a hawk because the logs couldn't show it
Loading_M_@reddit
This is why I always try to put user input in quotes when I log it - so that whitespace shows up.
supremeicecreme@reddit
I wish Fortinet would do that
KevinNoTail@reddit
Had a certified install guy add a space to the name of a server. Took us 2, 3 days to realize the error. Turns out space_server is not the same as server
I've used notepad to check ever since
Cassie0peia@reddit
How could they have figured that out? Magical ears?
CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit
Exactly. Somehow “someone”, some magical someone, should have figured it out (whereupon they’d have been blamed for spending too much time on the problem). That place was trash.
Reverse_Side_1@reddit
Classic responses so true, my weirdest was a piece of pastry under the letter (no word of a lie), the "P", key... Like some mystical irony ghost was having a laugh. "Whatever you're typing isn't being recognised by the system", is a great phrase I started to use in that call to this day 20yrs later if needed, no judgment or blame, just facts from the symptoms - took stress off them and encouraged me to find the reason. "Oh yeah, had lunch at my desk from going to the bakers". Like it was yesterday.
timbotheny26@reddit
Excuse me what the fuck.
matt95110@reddit
After that incident it stopped. Their manager was pretty pissed off once they realized that it was user error the entire time.
Superb_Raccoon@reddit
I bet.... "Hey everybody! I hired a complete moron!"
Chunkycarl@reddit
Had a user report a constant lockout of her account. After exhausting the usual methods, I went over and watched her as she logged on. When her laptop was asleep her method of waking it was slamming space multiple times (ergo prompting several incorrect logins and locking the account), That was a fun conversation :)
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
Hahaha, I love that your help desk replaced a users keyboard… TWICE.
I had a user that swore blind she would never receive the Authenticator prompt on her device, went through multiple support teams and cyber team. She escalated to the point the head of ops came to me (EUC + 365 Tech Lead) begging to take a look. Turns out nobody had thought to check user logs in Entra, she had installed Authenticator on her spare phone that her kid used to watch cartoons. The seven year old in a different room was hitting “it’s not me” 😂😂😂😂
matthewstinar@reddit
In fairness, the seven year old was answering correctly. They weren't trying to log in, Mom was.
Wonderful_Device312@reddit
Get those users a finger print scanner or similar device. Costs very little. Problem solved!
matt95110@reddit
That was suggested and my boss shot it down. Said if he bought one he would have to buy one for everyone.
nitroman89@reddit
So what was the fix? Get her a keyboard with bigger keys? Fire her?
SevaraB@reddit
As someone required by security policy to have crazy-long passwords (I’m not a total masochist- I do generate random passphrases with capital letters, special chars between words, and digits sprinkled at the end of words, I get this.
It frequently takes me 2 tries of rushing through muscle memory before I slow down and type it out carefully to avoid the lockout.
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
Same, and I can’t use a password manager on the windows login screen. So, following a tip I observed from one of our desktop support guys, I bought a small USB macro pad, and now my password is programmed into the keyboard as a single keypress.
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
Thank you for validating my Block USB access on intune devices 🙏
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
USB storage devices are blocked on our laptops, but since this is just a keyboard it’s fine. if they disabled the USB port then no worries, there’s Bluetooth ones as well. It’s also ironic that it was our Desktop Support admins that showed me this 😂
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
Can you run your own .exe? I made an app called nosleep for my production line computers to stop them locking (before all the cyber tsars kick off, these are running things for production line and there is a multitude of physical security mitigation to even get close to it)
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
I’ve not tried that. As long as the exe can be downloaded we are fine, and it doesn’t need admin rights to run.
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
NGL… I was really hoping you’d say no to that question, I’m amazed they block a password manager browser extension but let you download and run a random exe as long as it doesn’t need elevated perms… you’d hate one of my intune devices!
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
The password manager is not available on the windows login screen or windows Lock Screen.
We have both KeePass and 1password available, but you can’t access them until you log in, and it doesn’t work on the windows Lock Screen (I guess this is a windows feature)
andrewh2000@reddit
So anyone who steals your macro pad can log in as you? That doesn't sound very secure.
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
Yes, but the macropad stays with me, it’s not left attached the laptop in the office. I mostly work from home where it’s just me. The only reason the thing became necessary is our company laptops lock the screen after 1 min of no activity and need a password to unlock, but my password is very long. I got so sick of entering my password all the time. It was affecting productivity.
andrewh2000@reddit
Fair enough. What's secure at home is different to leaving things lying around in an office. I personally don't do it but writing your passwords down in an anonymous notebook on a shelf at home is probably way better than using short passwords for instance.
sorean_4@reddit
Windows hello for business and pin or bio would serve you better, better security.
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
Company laptops have no biometrics or Windows Hello functionality.
Wonderful_Device312@reddit
Password manager on your cellphone? Or a finger print scanner type device
Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit
I have a password manager on my phone that is also on the laptop, but that really doesn’t help when my password is just a random string of 64 characters (because our password policy won’t allow easy to remember pass phrases).
My company laptop has no biometric devices or Windows Hello. In theory I could get an external print scanner, but that wouldn’t work on the login screen unless the admins enabled it.
I can only work within the constraints I am given, so just having a device that just shows as a keyboard seemed the best idea. I was entering my password wrong so many times a day due to its complexity and locking my domain account 🤦♂️
SevaraB@reddit
Bitwarden’s password generator on my phone.
Silver-blondeDeadGuy@reddit
Ok I have my own crazy story about that. Years ago at Geek Squad, this old guy dropped off his Win 7 laptop and gave us the password "fishing1" (no quotes). As part of the process, I watched him log in and he was a keyboard pecker so it was easy to confirm that it was in fact "fishing1". Fuck me, I could not log in to that laptop no matter how many times I tried. Even gave up for the day and tried again the next. None of us could get in and I got blamed for not recording the right password. So I call him and get him down to clear this up.
I watch as he types "fishing1" and it signs in. Then he logs out and I try it and it works. Couldn't replicate the problem after that. And even though I had the correct password on the check-in paperwork, I still got blamed by my manager. The same manager who also tried "fishing1" to no avail.
Siphyre@reddit
He uses caps lock I bet.
Silver-blondeDeadGuy@reddit
I'm telling you it was "fishing1". No capitals, no symbols, no junk, no user error, no ambiguity.
Siphyre@reddit
Seriously? I've seen tons of weird things, but this is kinda out there. Sure it wasn't "fishin1" ?
Silver-blondeDeadGuy@reddit
100% I swear on my memories of my dogs.
Siphyre@reddit
Damn, I've got to add this one to the weird book of system mysteries then.
ChaoticCryptographer@reddit
Okay so my first thought was there had to be something stuck in his keyboard so it only works on that keyboard because it’s not actually fishing1 but something like fffishing1. Is that what ended up happening?
Silver-blondeDeadGuy@reddit
Nope. It was in fact "fishing1". No junk in it. Literally inexplicable and as this was over 10 years ago, I'll never get an answer.
stuckinPA@reddit
My guess is his num lock is on. The laptop has a larger keyboard and he's using the numeric keypad. Or some laptops have a num lock and a few keys that are normally letters become numbers.
Silver-blondeDeadGuy@reddit
OP here. Nope, it was a smaller laptop without a keypad. The cause is still a mystery to me more than 10 years later. So, when a user tells me that something weird that doesn't make sense is happening, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt until I prove them otherwise. So far nothing THAT strange has happened :/
AtarukA@reddit
In their defense, we figured out a user did not know their password at all, they only knew how to type it on the chair, at that precise height, on this desk, on this precise keyboard.
When we moved them of desk, they couldn't type it anymore.
THis is where I would say this user is me, but no it's not. Although yes, that also happens to me.
ChaoticCryptographer@reddit
Had this happen with a doctor. Swore his password only worked sometimes and I was like sir, that’s not how passwords work they can’t only work sometimes. Found that him calling helpdesk always slowed him down enough he’d sit down so he could type it correctly.
wrincewind@reddit
I remember a story on Tales From Tech Support where it turned out someone in a warehouse had swapped the M and N keys, and anyone that looked at the keyboard to type (i.e., was standing) would type the machine's password in wrong.
AtarukA@reddit
Hah, funny you say that.
My password for a while only worked sometimes. Turns out when you have hyper-v enabled, the source ports on your PC changes so it only worked if I somehow hit the right source ports. Otherwise it just said "incorrect password" haha.
dracotrapnet@reddit
This kind of happens to me when I switch to a laptop keyboard or worse iPhone or Android keyboard. Passwords are a set of keystrokes that I barely remember the password. When I have to use an unusual keyboard that hides certain punctuation behind a 3rd or 4th page I start to struggle.
Wonderful_Device312@reddit
Long long ago when I worked retail during highschool I had the POS system down to muscle memory. I could be talking to customers and doing the whole sales thing without looking at the screen and fully ring them through. It was an older system so fully keyboard and your key presses were buffered so you could go a lot faster then the screen could update anyways.
After a couple years of that they updated to a more 'modern' system with a fancy GUI and that's when I realized I had no clue what my password was. It was purely muscle memory at that point. I had to open up notepad and go through a mock sale in my head to capture it.
OGUnknownSoldier@reddit
Lol just on Thursday I was on a call getting a demo for some software, and the guy asked when our current solution expired. I was on the phone and on my laptop in the living room instead of my normal spot at the desk (it was Halloween, why not) and I could NOT get into my password manager. With the different seat, different keyboard, and the distraction of a live call, I literally couldn't think of my master password.
The second I hung up, bam I was in. One too many things going on lol.
Alaskan_geek907@reddit
My senior Admin could not tell you his AD password or anything that's not in the password manager. He creates his passwords by patterns because it's easier to remember patterns than a combo of letters, numbers and symbols.
Particular_Archer499@reddit
Legit happens to me all the time if I move a few centimeters in any direction before I catch myself.
RougeDane@reddit
They can be on the phone at the same time.
JustFrogot@reddit
I think it's mostly because there are a lot of intermittent issues and we are called when it's not working. The next state is working.
BadSausageFactory@reddit
Then you think like a user.
chakalakasp@reddit
No I’m pretty sure it’s becuase the server is scared now that the principal is in the classroom and knows better than to act up
awnawkareninah@reddit
You are basically a rubber duck for them to talk through troubleshooting with.
TommyVe@reddit
Plus sometimes they just put off that thing aside waiting for you and whatever problem caused might have already solved itself.
whosta-@reddit
The moment I realized this was a thing, I responded to a call about a projector not working while they were trying to do a presentation.
I headed over to the room and could see, through the doorway, the default blue projector screen when no input is detected. The very instant my body crossed through the threshold of the door, it instantly switched to projecting the desktop. Nobody was trying to fix it or near any of the connections/computer and it did not happen again.
I smirked, dusted off my hands, said "you're welcome" and went back to my business. The building was rumored to be haunted and that's about the only thing I can chalk it up to.
Disasstah@reddit
The PC fears the IT man. It knows it has no power over the admin in its presence.
viswarkarman@reddit
This. I call it the “proximity fix”. I tell my users you just have rub the device on the IT guy and it works … I’m like a magic eraser for tech issues.
jimmyjamming@reddit
I've not been able to unknow Quantum Support
BISOFH@reddit
Call it the principal effect. A class might be chaos for a teacher, but the second the principal shows up they are perfect angels. To computers the it guy is the principal.
Important-Product210@reddit
Been there done that on both sides. It's ought to be true.
fearless-fossa@reddit
I had that last year. Got a ticket something in one of our warehouses isn't working and it couldn't be fixed remotely. So I drove over (~ 2h), spent 15 minutes looking for someone that could tell me where the broken terminal was. "Oh it started working again 5 minutes ago"
Pirateboy85@reddit
The last time this happened with someone, I told them: “I totally believe you. The machines are gaslighting you because that is how they win. We must remain a united front in the battle with our computer overlords.” And I got a first bump out of that from the lady in accounting 🤣
chikadei@reddit
Funny! I often joke that tech gaslights us from time to time for entertainment.
CookieCrum83@reddit
There is even a word in German for it the "Vorfuhreffekt", whilst sounding very official, it's normally said with a laugh
Winter-Fondant7875@reddit
Is there a good word for a person for whom a certain technology hates and refuses to work? Out of all the things I work with, there's this one (ONE) android pad that hates me. Anthropomorphication, I know, but it's real.
CookieCrum83@reddit
Unfortunately not, though I often hear '"ich habe ein Händchen die Probleme zu finden".
CluelessPentester@reddit
"Schicht Acht Problem" would be the literal translation in German for that (/s)
liftoff_oversteer@reddit
You may have angered its machine spirit.
IntelligentTeam6290@reddit
This is a doubled edged sword as well. They would believe you need to be around all the time for the system to work perfect😂🤣🤣🤣
StaffOfDoom@reddit
This is called ‘tech syndrome’ and also applies to other fields of study/work like automotive…the car never makes that sound when it’s in the shop…ever.
DarkAlman@reddit
"Sometimes all I have to do is walk into the room"
In DnD terms it's a class ability. You have a percentage chance of making IT equipment start working by just walking into the room.
I once tested this, the guys were working on a server in the lab that wasn't working so I sent it my techs one at a time until sure enough one of the rolled high enough and it spontaneously started working.
CtheAutomata@reddit
I'm new to all the IT stuff, but I believe it already. Had to install some vm's, two of the same ubuntu server machines, i put the same settings into both but one complained, the other didn't. Or when it says it can't find the iso and you just reboot it and suddenly it works.
awnawkareninah@reddit
Repair by proximity to sysadmin is real. Like the opposite of an EMP.
ChaoticCryptographer@reddit
I’ve started just telling our employees I have magic powers. Easier than explaining that my presence just either reassured them or made them slow down enough for it to work.
Grimzkunk@reddit
We probably all say that end user sentence when we go to the garage..
landob@reddit
I call that my techno fear. Machines are afraid of me pulling them apart and tinkering with them so they behave when I come around.
autogyrophilia@reddit
The computer and me fear each other
H3rbert_K0rnfeld@reddit
This is not myth. It is truth and I hates it.
SvnRex@reddit
I love it. The calm you can bring to a tense situation because people are confident the systems will work now that your in the room.
cookerz30@reddit
IT Mojo is real.
enter360@reddit
I say “yep it’s the technomancer buff. All tech works better within 5 ft of me. Let me know if it starts acting up again.”
vitaroignolo@reddit
It's because how many times have we been fighting to death with something and then you just say "screw it, I'm changing nothing and trying it again" and it works for seemingly no reason?
fatbergsghost@reddit
Salespeople don't do anything
jokebreath@reddit
Myth: sysadmins personally read all your emails and will alert your manager if we find something inappropriate
I don't know how many times I have to tell my users, I read all their chat logs, not emails. And that's only on weekends and purely for personal entertainment, not work related at all.
Sheesh, why can't they understand that?
agentobtuse@reddit
Ever dig into reading teams messages? It's easy if we hijacked their account. If you want to be covert using graphapi it's doable but oh what a fantastic mess
CptBronzeBalls@reddit
Fact: I don’t even read my own emails
jaskij@reddit
We had a customer where their sysadmin did read the emails, and it was endorsed by the upper management. They had a massive intellectual property leak a few years earlier and management was shitting their pants.
Internet access in their HQ was so locked down, their reps used the not locked down mobile internet on their laptops to work even in the office because they couldn't do their jobs otherwise.
Cassie0peia@reddit
To be fair we can set up Microsoft to notify HR if any inappropriate words are being used in emails.
Mynameismikek@reddit
True story: I do know one sysadmin who installed keyloggers across his entire patch (\~1000 endpoints) and DID search for keywords looking for anything juicy. He and his protege didn't last long once that was discovered. Ironically, the site had the most stringent security accreditation.
jokebreath@reddit
Damn that's some scumbag level 1000 behavior
swisseagle71@reddit
Myth: the inodes can be ignored. There is plenty of space (multiple TB) so I can write 30 Million files of 1-5K each
Myth: personal computers (Notebooks) are unusable after 2-4 years and you need a new one. (Reality: there are users with 10 year old notebooks, also the 6 year old one and the newer 2 year old one).
Myth: we do POC (proof of concept) and then make a new install for production. Nope, POC is the production server even 10 years later.
Myth: I built the production system, please clone the VM to have a test system. It will totally not break when doing a release upgrdae of the OS 5 years later.
Myth: users will clean up the storage after the project has finished. LOL
Myth: 1TB of storage for users is enough (insert any number here). Nope, never.
Myth: users will use the company notebook only for work. LOL
Myth: let's just print this 5 minutes before the important meeting. Printer: I am out of magenta.
Myth: no user is such an idiot as to torrent on the company network.
Myth: the selected hardware provider has the best price, not the discounter next door. LOL
Myth: users will only use the OneDrive folder for important work. So all work is safe. LOL 2x
Myth: M$ software improves productivity of users. LOL
Waste_Monk@reddit
There is truly nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.
RetroButton@reddit
False myth: sfc /scannow does anything at all.
Practical-Alarm1763@reddit
sfc /scannow
BadSausageFactory@reddit
myth: IT understands every function of the software they support
reality: I barely understand the stuff I manage directly
Dragonfly-Adventurer@reddit
Yeah that's cause we support like 30-60 systems and we're only human.
Imagine our jobs if Google didn't exist.
Nightcinder@reddit
The worst part is that we seem to be the only people in the company with the ability to do any sort of critical thinking.
I've had to solve problems for so many people that if they sat there for 5 minutes and actually thought about the issue, or looked through menus they would have figured it out.
Users think you're a wizard cause you just went through settings and options and google
eairy@reddit
I've met plenty of sysadmins that lack critical thinking too. Some people just memorise steps and never really understand what they're doing.
ryoko227@reddit
I think the key factor is that while we may not KNOW all the answers, we do know HOW to find them. I've tried to show people how to answer their own questions, but they cannot be assed to do so. My solution was I made a catalog of unlisted YouTube videos that cover the common stuff, step by step, and shoot them a link. That's usually enough for most people.
timbotheny26@reddit
I've heard medicine is actually pretty similar in this regard. You can't expect a doctor to memorize every fucking thing that could be wrong with you, so they have to look stuff up too.
1cec0ld@reddit
We're basically computer doctors. Hell we even have to worry about viruses. Symptoms, follow up appointments to make sure a fix worked, 24/7 coverage at times... I need a raise.
Siphyre@reddit
We also have to worry about our user's viruses infecting our other systems. So we have to use ppe to protect them.
bemenaker@reddit
This has gotten worse over the 27+ years I have been in IT. So many more systems, and they are so much more complicated now.
dagamore12@reddit
And it has gotten worse over the past few years as all the forums have been replaced by reddit, but reddit does not have the history on some stuff that is needed.
is it not the worst replacement but on reddit there is so much more chaff to chew through vs the old dedicated forums that were better at self policing the groups.
Fred_Stone6@reddit
And don't forget the ones brought in by shadow IT, that you don't find out about till 3 weeks after they have been using it and they ask for it to be connected to the main erp so they can do their 'thing'. And if you could reset the password too.
Dragonfly-Adventurer@reddit
“You’re a sysadmin, I just assume you’re a (365/azure/intune/sql/iaas) expert” and that list grows and grows
TheOne_living@reddit
and software developer, yea thats right you make the software we use now too, get it done!!!!
Dragonfly-Adventurer@reddit
How do I sigh in Devops, and if I do, can I put it on my resume?
TheOne_living@reddit
in an interview the manager asked "what exactly are you, you've kind of done everything" i thought to say "im what the industry made me"
Nightcinder@reddit
'What platforms do you have experience in?' 'Yes'
Cassie0peia@reddit
I think of this often. It honestly wouldn’t be possible for us to keep up with the amount of changes they make to each system. I feel annoyed by the systems that don’t change at all but, honestly, legacy systems are the easiest to manage! (If we overlook the security aspect.)
HummingBridges@reddit
For one day, I would be able to overlook the user aspect and get some work done 😀
Dragonfly-Adventurer@reddit
At my last job I kept putting in the suggestion box. "User free Fridays." And then eventually expand it to the whole week.
mheyman0@reddit
Try “read-only” Friday. No system changes on a Friday.
Reverse_Side_1@reddit
I read that as overCLOCK the user, yes please, anything over 5MHz be great thanks 🙏
Plenty-Wonder6092@reddit
They can hire one generalist to run 30+ systems at 80% efficiency or 10+ specialists/contracting companies to run them at 99% for 10x+ the cost. It doesn't add up until the companies are huge.
spokale@reddit
Myth: IT understands how to configure Atlassian software
Reality: No one understands how to configure Atlassian software (or the config you're looking for doesn't exist except in a heavily-upvoted feature request from 10 years ago that was mysteriously marked as complete)
linoleumknife@reddit
Previous Jira admin here, you made me laugh because it's all so true. I feel sorry for whoever had to take over that role from me.
MasterIntegrator@reddit
True story. Pivot tables you are in IT you know pivot tables? Fuck no you are the accountant
punkwalrus@reddit
I was laid off from a job ages ago, and went through a "re-up your skills" training period. One of them was a fellow coworker and friend paid for a bunch of MCP certified boot camps with an exam at the end, but then got a new job, and couldn't attend them. So he gave the info to me, and they never checked ID, so I just took the classes and exam. This was a while ago (late 90s), so up to this point I knew how a word processor worked (I was a former DOS Wordperfect fanboy), and how a spreadsheet worked (Lotus 1-2-3), but never worked with actual Microsoft products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. So, every week, I took these boot camps, and then the exam of Friday. Now, I was theoretically MCP certified, but because I was taking someone else's class, the MCP certification was in his name, which was kind of annoying, but I wasn't paying for it, so that was the catch.
Excel, by far, was the best class I have ever taken. I was surprised how much I still use Excel, and how few sysadmins actually understand Excel beyond just typing in data. Like I did pivot tables, vlookups, auto-fills, you name it. In addition, I learned the VBA back end, so I could do amazing macros (that was, until they started locking that shit down due to security). But the teacher for that class was totally a sysadmin geek like myself. Most of the classes I took were people who were forced to take them, and I was surprised how many people had lack of basic computer skills. Most people dropped out halfway through, because they were still typing at less than 10 words per minute, had issues reading the screen because they were too proud to wear glasses, and some had poor communication skills and got easily frustrated. The teacher for the Excel class was so happy to have me and a few other students who understood concepts of data. One of the "tricks" of this teacher was that if he asked a question to the class and you got it right, or asked an intelligent question, he gave out these little rubber dinosaurs. Me and a few other guys got dozens of them stacked around out class monitors. It was a small gesture, and stupid, but I loved it.
Knowing Excel, even as a UNIX/Linux admin, was been one of the major tools of my career. It's amazing how often I use it. And, right after that, Powerpoint. Management likes pretty slide shows.
trisanachandler@reddit
I'm always amazed when people in IT insult excel skills. While it's true that we can't master many of the applications we support, if we can pick one user application, excel is the one to pick for sysadmins, powerpoint if you're a manager or higher.
one-man-circlejerk@reddit
🦕
That's for posting an interesting comment
commsbloke@reddit
Yep I use xargs and Excel in network admin in almost equal measure.
Aggravating_Refuse89@reddit
I want to retire and even die without ever knowing what a pivot table does. I am against ignorance and normally want to learn all I can but I want nothing to do with pivot tables or other Excel sorcery.
My_Big_Black_Hawk@reddit
I do! If you’re being serious, pivot tables aren’t that bad. Just select all —> make pivot table —> and now you can choose columns to display the data in different ways.
shoesli_@reddit
I asked the controller at a customer to help me with a pivot table the other day. I might know things about computers but my excel skills are garbage
Spagman_Aus@reddit
Throughout my 22 year IT career I have successfully avoided learning anything more than the basics of Excel and I impart this as a joke/serious comment whenever possible. It’s allowed me to push accountability back where it needs to be every single time.
warysysadmin@reddit
True myth way more often than anyone wants to admit.
CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit
Hell, they somehow think we’re all Excel geniuses when I never use it for more than non-mathematical tables.
Cassie0peia@reddit
This one baffles me! I have end users who use the spreadsheet for much more complicated stuff asking me how to do something. I’ve actually said, “dude, I should be coming to YOU for excel help.” But I guess I’m just better at googling things than they are.
Professional-Loan663@reddit
Googling well is definitely a sysadmin skill. We know which are the good sites and how to avoid the scam/spam sites. We also know how to read all the possible answers and which ones would work in this situation.
Nightcinder@reddit
don't worry soon we'll just be 'prompt engineers'
warysysadmin@reddit
I end up using Excel a little bit more, but there is a lot of it for that I need some assistance, like Google or Chat GPT. I any case, have a look at pivot tables. They are very handy.
CptBronzeBalls@reddit
I just poke through the menus and try shit that sounds promising.
Vesalii@reddit
I actually had to adjust to the idea of being fine with not knowing anything about the software our end users use. It's my first IT job, before I was a lab technician. In that job I was an expert at what I did but I also had good knowledge about processes throughout ever step in prod.
Vesalii@reddit
I actually had to adjust to the idea of being fine with not knowing anything about the software our end users use.
Iusethis1atwork@reddit
I have to tell people all day " I install the software I don't use it, ask your manager."
awnawkareninah@reddit
Yeah I feel like I look like a genius on calls ripping through some admin config in a SaaS app I've never used but really it's just guessing and trying stuff. People are very averse to just trying shit for whatever reason, trying shit and go ogling shit are the cornerstones of the profession. I guess asking Chat GPT too now though it hallucinates answers on occasion.
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
^THIS
Me and my colleague are the tech leads for a NYSE listed company with about 300 MSP provided resources across all the different tech stacks. We joke every day about the fact we just know how to use Google and Reddit but everyone thinks we actually have expertise in every little corner of their random solutions. Thank you community for every pay raise I’ve ever had 😂
ShettyGamerUK@reddit
Reality: end user was probably offered a free trial before I even knew Microsoft created a premium tier with a bunch of extra crap
DarkAlman@reddit
I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do and if you rely on us, everyone will die. - XKCD regarding IT
XTI_duck@reddit
I’m here to make sure that if the software breaks, I can fix it. No, I can’t use Visual Basic to build super macros on the fly. Sorry.
stuckinPA@reddit
I love it when users think I know how their special custom software works. I tell people I'm like a winning crew chief in the NASCAR Cup series. A winning crew chief can successfully lead a team to victory. But most aren't drivers. Most couldn't successfully race a car competitively for five laps let alone do it for 200 on a superspeedway. You guys, the people who use this software, are my drivers. You guys are the ones who tell me what the car is doing and how it's handling. I make the adjustments based on your feedback to increase the car's performance.
ChaoticCryptographer@reddit
I have learned to tell users I know nothing about Excel otherwise they want me to fix a formula that Brenda wrote before she left 5 years ago. Instead we try to pivot them to using automation that we do know and can actually support. Excel formulas will be the death of me
Reverse_Side_1@reddit
And like some drug crazed junkie they want their fix soooo bad
autogyrophilia@reddit
When I wrote this rest endpoint only I and God understood the code.
Now, God only knows
whatsforsupa@reddit
My boss says it best. We don’t always have the answers, but we are paid to find the answers!
RougeDane@reddit
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/627/
Cassie0peia@reddit
If most people weren’t so lazy, that flowchart would be the end of my job. 😂
chum-guzzling-shark@reddit
no. no i dont. Do you think I know how to do every person's job in the entire company?
A_Nerdy_Dad@reddit
Hmmm, next time someone asks me if I know how to do whatever for their job, I'm just going to say "No, because if I did, you wouldn't be employed here and I'd be a raging alcoholic."
Lopoetve@reddit
"Surely this vendor understands SSL and certificates?" - Narrator: They never, ever, do.
dasreboot@reddit
No one understands pki where I work. It's just magic. I could and have ranted all day about this
jaskij@reddit
I just run certbot and it does the magic
digitaltransmutation@reddit
dev: "Hey we can do TLS on this now"
me: "great ill put certbot on it"
dev: "no I made some horrible java applet thingy and you have to format the cert in this special way :) :) :) have fun doing this every year!"
jaskij@reddit
I'm a dev, of an appliance to boot. Made a thread in the sub some time ago asking how to be a good appliance on people's networks, and TLS management was one of the top responses. Shows how much a pain it is.
Also, a Java applet? Damn, been a while since I heard that.
As much as I'd want to just allow people to ssh into the appliance and do it themselves, the powers that be won't allow that.
As far as devops goes, I'm firmly of the opinion that backend teams should have at least a part time devops engineer embedded so someone closer to home can prepare the deployment.
Lopoetve@reddit
Give an interface to generate a CSR and take in reply a signed cert, with a separate entry for root or root chain.
That’s all it has to be. Just … standardize the format - document it - and follow it. I don’t care which format - just make it CLEAR.
jaskij@reddit
CSR? My experience with TLS extends to setting up an nginx reverse proxy, so I'll have some learning to do as well. Similarly, the appliance just doesn't make external requests, so I don't see a point in adding a root cert.
Re: format. The appliance would most likely run a reverse proxy internally, so I see absolutely no point to using anything but the format the proxy we'll select uses.
Lopoetve@reddit
So the question is - why do you need a signed cert?
Are you doing external access (the internet)? You can get away with let’s encrypt integration for home users, or cloudflare, but business or enterprise it needs to accept a der or p7b or pem or so on, since that’s what digicert/verisign/etc hand out. Everyone has those public roots trusted though; so no need for a root.
Doing internal access? Let’s encrypt might work again - but at corporate levels you have an internal signer, so you need the same as above, but also the root chain - since otherwise the appliance can’t trust itself, and if you’re doing it right, you have an offline root and online intermediate. Almost no one gets a signed offline or intermediate - too many rules.
Welcome to why vendors don’t get SSL. 😂
The CSR is the request file. Encodes what you need the cert to say. What it’s used for. Where it goes. Etc.
jaskij@reddit
Offline? Hah! We need to support airgapped deployments. Third party font? Gets deployed to the appliance since we can't grab it off of a CDN.
This discussion actually made me think - is there even a guide I can look up online to make sure I get this right? Everyone loves shitting on vendors - me included - but is there a resource to actually learn this stuff without getting bogged down in unnecessary details?
Lopoetve@reddit
Probably. I’ll do some looking - I learned it in 2011 when no one else at said major vendor wanted to, and it consumed about a year and a half of my life. The resulting document and guide was 194 pages, and was replaced twice by tools to automate it (including finally building in a new intermediate CA to the appliance and having it sign everything, because that was easier than navigating the possibilities).
Airgap is similar to offline internal root - you have to tote the root chain around and import it 😂.
But there are a dozen formats!
Seriously though - as you learn it, pick a format, document it, and stick with it. Formats can be converted with OpenSSL so that’s not an issue, just have to know what format to convert to (I have to do this with cloudflare origin certs for a few apps myself - it’s a single command). As long as it’s documented, and accurate, you’re golden. Someone will write a guide or have instructions for pulling it.
Lopoetve@reddit
I worked for a vendor. A major one. Think 90% of corporations using it, might rhyme with she-emware. I decided to solve the “why is SSL a pain in the ass?” Question.
Result:
I filed the bug on “our SSL implementation on product X literally violates the spec; all these support cases are because EVERY public signer will refuse to sign this, and it’s required that all these separate products all be signed by the same root CA. This will never, ever, work. Why are you stupid?”
We’d shipped that product for THREE years at that point.
trisanachandler@reddit
Citrix would like a word with you.
DarkAlman@reddit
They barely understand how DNS works, how are they going to understand SSL?
Dizzy_Bridge_794@reddit
Myth - yes I restarted my computer when asked.
gordonv@reddit
budtske@reddit
To be fair, it's crazy to me how much time it took for a lot of IT professionals to understand fastboot. So many People that either never explained to users the need to restart and not shutdown and start again, or didn't even get it themselves.
Heck it wouldn't surprise me if a thread pops up now where someone complains about a users uptime, specifically mentions they turned it off and on again instead of rebooting but how that's impossible because of the uptime 12 years after fastboot became a thing.
gordonv@reddit
Hmm... Maybe it's time to make a "meme" graphic to explain fast boot. It's really not that complicated.
Making it into a toxic joke would be annoying, but it would get the point across.
Cassie0peia@reddit
To be fair, sometimes they click “shut down” thinking it’s the same things as “restart”, even though we’ve told them it’s not the same thing. Maybe if we repeat this to them enough, they’ll remember to restart.
ryoko227@reddit
IT mana (also heard magic points and experience level):
Mostly true. The idea that we have some greater experience or power with tech; that PCs, servers, devices bow to our will and the problem will immediately resolve itself just by our presence or singular touch.
I don't know how many times I've watched someone do the right thing, not work, then I sit down and do the same thing, and the problem is resolved.
netechkyle@reddit
Ha, mad true, my wife has been in IT for 20 years, I have been in IT for 40. I can walk in and shit will just work and she gives me the look and says "Tech fears you".
444atlocalhost@reddit
I have a really good one or at least some of you could teach me something that would blow my mind cause i can’t figure the shit out of this :
NTFS / Password reset and AD account actions and info / GPOs DO NOT TRAVEL CORRECTLY over a RAVPN connection. Like, as long as you are not on the AD LAN some actions related to your account end up bricked and you have to use coping shenanigans like juggling with your new and old password.
I would assume it has to do with packet priorization or something similar that you can configure but i experienced it at my former job and someone recently told me she had a problem related to this as i see it.
quiet0n3@reddit
Myth: printers are horrible
Truth: printer drivers are horrible. The physical devices themselves are normally pretty sound. But printer drivers are some of the oldest least standardized code out there. It's wild the things they manage to make printers do.
Also printer ink is one of the most marked up things in the world.
budtske@reddit
I once got into an argument with someone (I think even on this subreddit) who was defending printer drivers of all things, saying how it's the OS's fault it all gets a bad rap.
I defended the vista driver model change, and after that the V4 print driver model, printer drivers being an ungodly kludge of security problems mixed in with instability, and that these companies needed to be forced to do better. and the guy got up voted instead of me.
God help the world.
maxlan@reddit
When you think about it, if you asked a person to feed individual pages of paper through a small slot, one at a time, 10 times a second. They'd fail badly.
If you asked them to write something on each page, it'd be a mess.
The tech in making a bit of paper go through the machine reliably and getting all the dots to line up and make a picture is pretty special.
If you go back 20-30 years and even high end dot matrix printers would have striping and alignment issues. And need fan fold paper.
But yes, ink is a racket. And notice how they've split the nozzles and ink now. And built the printer around them so you can't wipe them with alcohol. Because when an old inkjet dried up, you used to be able to clean it and carry on. Now, you buy a new printer.
Aggravating_Refuse89@reddit
Hard disagree. High end expensive printers are OK. Printers USED to be good. Most office printers are crap with crap drivers now
infered5@reddit
Myth: printers, printer drivers and printer firmware are horrible
Truth: They're all pretty easy, but I wont say so IRL because I fear I might accidentally get hired as a printer tech
jaskij@reddit
Then there's the firmware...
msalerno1965@reddit
Netware is (was) hard.
Ping is a valid diagnostic tool in and of itself.
"I already tried that" - luser
"It can't possibly take that long" - CIO being told a major Oracle product upgrade is going to take 3 days.
"What's the harm in changing this query in production without retesting it in QA, I just changed one of the tables in the join?" - moments before the process scheduler fills up for 96 hours because what used to take 5 seconds now takes weeks. Do not unbind subqueries in views is set, ya ninnies... THINK.
Linux is UNIX.
ok, I'll stop before I start getting snide ;)
ggcc1313@reddit
Netware 💜
skob17@reddit
the whole bunch of DISM commands never once fixed an issue on any of my win7 machines. I call it a myth, maybe others have better experiences
budtske@reddit
It actually can solve a lot of windows component store issues regarding updates among other things.
batboy132@reddit
Literally use it all the time in my org. Have watched laptops that were crawling whip right back up to speed.
Particular_Archer499@reddit
I've had it work a bunch of times, usually in company of sfc /scannow.
I don't know when it got fixed but the past few years they actually work a lot of time.
skob17@reddit
yeah, might be. it's some time I used it, when win7 was recent.
TryReboot1st@reddit
Myth busted: worked for me once….out of 100 or so attempts
skob17@reddit
👍
TryReboot1st@reddit
Maybe had sfc scannow work once too
Enxer@reddit
We enacted weekly reboots using the compliance component of our E3. Knocked 1/3 of our tickets off.
Phyxiis@reddit
True myth - someone in IT just has to look over someone’s shoulder to fix issues
Awlson@reddit
I call this "The tech aura". There is a certain radius around a tech that broken equipment just starts working in. The equipment knows that we know where the hammers are kept...
ChasingKayla@reddit
I can’t count how many times my mere presence has resolved user issues. 😂
Superb_Raccoon@reddit
No, you wont go blind.
desmond_koh@reddit
Myth: Windows is unstable
This comes from the days of Windows 3.1 and 9x which booted from DOS and allowed real mode drivers to be loaded. Modern Windows (those based on NT) are as stable – or more so – than anything else in the market. Windows Hyper-V supports:
And you think Windows isn’t up to the task of running your spreadsheet??!?!?!?!
maxlan@reddit
And yet it is still unstable. Just supporting big hardware doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally flawed.
My personal linux box, which I do all sorts of evil shit to only got rebooted after 3 years because I needed to move it.
Last time I had any windows servers at work, they'd need rebooting on a schedule to stop them rebooting unexpectedly during critical times.
desmond_koh@reddit
Except that as a mater of objective fact, it’s not.
I have a Windows 2000 server with 913 days uptime right now (just checked).
Calling Windows "fundamentally flawed" is laughable. Dave Cutler is a genius. We might not like the inclusion of OneDrive or the latest iteration of the Start Menu, but none of those things have anything to do with the operating system at the level we are discussing.
Then you have a problem that does not have anything to do with the operating system. These kinds of solutions (rebooting servers on a schedule) are only ever found in scenarios where the people managing the servers have a dim view of Windows to begin with. You should take the time to figure out what is going on. If Windows was really that unstable it would never have made it into production.
I run LMDE on my X1 Carbon and we manage lots of Linux servers (mostly Debian) hosting websites and mission critical web apps all the time. Most of them are running on our Hyper-V failover clusters.
the_bolshevik@reddit
Myth: No way, this can't be a DNS issue 🤡
Reality: It was DNS all along ☠️
nwhiker99@reddit
20 year sys admin here…
It’s always DNS 🤣
Particular_Archer499@reddit
Someone with too much access changed their network adapter to look for Google DNS instead of domain DNS.
I wonder sometimes what people think.
Electronic_Male@reddit
I’ve been to talks on this, I hear people say “our DNS sucks here,” and I’m just wondering what it really means?
At enterprise scale, are some things like this just not fixable?
I’d Google this but I’m trying to be sociable.
mexell@reddit
It’s surprising how often you find completely bonkers DNS setups in quite large organisations. Stuff where anything beyond A and PTR is completely shot. Zone layouts are shit, delegations are “we don’t do that here”, and so on.
FriendlyRussian666@reddit
Myth: "I restarted"
Truth: They didn't...
Ice-Cream-Poop@reddit
Ugh..... So true
Affectionate-Cat-975@reddit
True myth - Rebooting - had an x-ray tech suggest that we reboot/sleep every night.
True myth (old school) - scan disk/sector scan and defrag to speed up spindle disks
Ok-Double-7982@reddit
Huge myth: If you are in IT, you "should know" how to support and troubleshoot all things IT, including networking (wired and wireless) cabling, servers, vulnerability management, Active Directory, Exchange, DNS, endpoint configuration and management, SSO, cloud software, social media management and digitial media, backups and disaster recovery, NOC/SOC, and wrapping up with my top favorites: printers and A/V.
If I had a nickle for every time I heard, "You're in IT, why don't you know how to fix this?"
Bob_Spud@reddit
NOT A MYTH "Just turn it off and on again".
If you become responsible for a server that you have never administered before, the first thing to do before you touch anything is to reboot it and check its logs.
WHY: if you have a dead or an unstable box after your first change its becomes a real problem to figure out if was a pre-existing problem or one that you have introduced.
maxlan@reddit
Wrong. Get it rebooted BEFORE you take responsibility!
Get the service handed over in a shutdown state and the handover is only complete when it is running again without any interaction other than "switch on".
Otherwise you become that guy who'd only had the responsibility for 5 minutes and totally broke the service and couldn't recover it for 3 days.
Bob_Spud@reddit
A business server requires a valid reason to be rebooted. The first documented change you have to make on that server includes a reboot followed by server validation at the very beginning, plus an explanation why you are doing it should be recorded. By doing this you have identified and reported a potential risk, the responsibility of that risk has been shifted from the sysadmin to the business owner/management to proceed the service outage of a reboot.
SciFiGuy72@reddit
My last job had a clocking in webapp, ADP I think, that one user swore took 2 hours to reach each morning. I finally had him watch me from pressing the power switch with a stopwatch to prove it took average 2 minutes.
lawn-man-98@reddit
The user wasn't an idiot, at least not for that reason. The user was stealing time.
punkwalrus@reddit
Just turn it off and on again
As a Linux admin, the last one is maddening because not only are you forced to find out what the problem actually is, but so many people think it will fix the problem and put in "kludges" like cron jobs that reboot the system or service daily.
maxlan@reddit
The reboot cron is not to fix things. It's to expose people who start services manually and forget about them.
So that when it does get rebooted, things don't stop working.
jaskij@reddit
Why do people even use cron in 2024? Are they running non systemd distros on those servers?
punkwalrus@reddit
You'd be very surprised what I have seen "still running/being used in 2024."
jaskij@reddit
I work in industrial electronics, there's little that would elicit more than a sigh. It was more of an /s comment - personally I much prefer systemd timers, but understand a lot of people do still use cron.
As someone who's both writing and deploying software, I've been able to punt so much shit on systemd. Logs? Just spew out to stdout, that gets logged. Misbehaving 3rd party service? Limiting memory usage is a single line. Disable IP for the database service? Ditto.
It's not that I couldn't do most of that with other software, but that it's all in one place and simple to implement.
GeneMoody-Action1@reddit
The problem I see with a lot of these is ambiguity in the root of the declaration. "Clearing cache = speed boost" leaves out the one item that could in any way quantify if it is true or false, "What cache"
Myths of all natures get bigger as facts go down, and if they are just left out, there are no facts input to the equation to come out of the other end.
The foundation of all functional systems... GIGO
And the foundation of all lies is a truth.
Context is everything!
OddWriter7199@reddit
Would matter-of-factly tell them "because I'm magic"
-Akos-@reddit
Had a colleague say “reboot ist immer gut” (German for reboot is always good). So true. We’re not German btw..
Jolape@reddit
Vesalii@reddit
My colleague says that too! They're not wrong.
SaintEyegor@reddit
Power cycling can fix some problems ( like Linux processes stuck in “D” state (uninterruptible sleep)) but in general, it’s better to figure what the problem is and prevent a recurrence.
No_Resolution_9252@reddit
Disabling the firewall is a justifiable action
Disabling UAC is a justifiable action
The positive or negative result of a ping indicates something is accessible/inaccessible
vermyx@reddit
The clearing the cache isn't a myth but there is context. Previously browsers used an percentage of disk space for browser cache so what would happen is that these folders would have a ton of tiny files which would fragment the disk, the file table, and cause the browser grief because it had to go through those files. This is less of an issue with ssd's. The "fix" was to restrict the cache size to something like 100MB and you would never have to deal with this issue (I worked with medical software and we distributed workstations with local web based software on it. This was one of the first issues I had to investigate in 2005 with this model)
da4@reddit
Third-party security software makes a device more secure. Myth (mostly) - the attack surface increases and you have another opportunity for credentials being compromised etc.
Is there value in telemetry and capturing events on remote endpoints? Sure. Are you more or less at risk with additional 3rd-party software? Well..
Sea-Application-4873@reddit
Nice thanks for the advice. I hate trying to dissociate scammers and spammers from legitimate accounts
Vesalii@reddit
Myth: Windows built-in troubleshooting does nothing
Fact: it's helped me resolve audio issues twice. Last time was a few weeks back when somehow a mic was muted, even though this wasn't visible in any UI.
Sk1rm1sh@reddit
False:
Monster Cables for digital signals.
A guy I know spent an obscene amount on a gold plated, oxygen-free-copper, hand crafted by free-range cable artisans, individually numbered with a certificate of authenticity, HDMI cable.
Slight exaggeration yes, but he swore the guy at the store showed him how much better the colours were on the $600 cable he bought compared to the generic $5 cables.
arvidsem@reddit
IIRC Bestbuy used to have side by side Monster Cable demos set up with intentionally bad connections on the non-monster cable displays. So in store there was a real difference.
This would have been during the same time period that they had a separate version of their website that only loaded inside the stores so that they couldn't be made to price match their own stuff. Once smart phones became common, they got a ton of shit for it.
Vesalii@reddit
Boze used to do this too. Remember those demo pods with Bose speakers that sounded amazing? Ca 2000s? Those were connected to very expensive amps, way better than what came with the set. And nobody was allowed to touch those. Only Bose technicians.
geekworking@reddit
You don't need $500, but you should be weary of the $5 ones too. Any cable that truly meets the spec is fine, but a lot of the no-name China cables really don't meet the specs. They other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of "original" on Amazon is counterfeit, especially on items that have a somewhat generic appearance like cables.
Your best bet is the $15 cable from any brand that will actually pay for testing and certification from a store that cares enough about their reputation to not just resel the cheapest crap from Amazon or China.
Online outlets that sell cables who have been around a while are generally a good path.
narcissisadmin@reddit
Believing that the Monster cables will improve the digital signal is exactly the same as believing a more expensive USB cable to your external drive will spell check your Word documents.
jaskij@reddit
TVs in stores have the saturation changed depending on which model they want to sell.
InspectorGadget76@reddit
If you install the MS Authenticator app on your phone we can track everything. We can see:
. What websites you browse . How long you take for a shit on company time . Your GPS location at all times . Your wife is pregnant . . . to your neighbour * Your car is low on gas * You will win a small amount in the lottery next week.
_RexDart@reddit
System reports high RAM usage? SFC /scannow!
Nanis23@reddit
Myth- SIDs matter, always sysprep
Reality - no they don't. At least not in 2024
jamesaepp@reddit
I'm going to need a more distinct source on that.
Nanis23@reddit
Experience. When does it matter?
The only softwares that are bothered by duplicate UIDs are WSUS and SCCM. Each one of them is a UID of their own, not the SID that people warn about. (And both of them can easily be changed, no sysprep needed)
jamesaepp@reddit
We're talking about Myths and you're coming back with "Experience"? Bruh.
I did a quick google on the topic I think you raise and came across this - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/the-machine-sid-duplication-myth-and-why-sysprep-matters/ba-p/723859
I didn't read the whole thing but I did read the last sentence - "Note that Sysprep resets other machine-specific state that, if duplicated, can cause problems for certain applications like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), so Microsoft’s support policy will still require cloned systems to be made unique with Sysprep".
I get it - at the end of the day everything can be manually tweaked and adjusted, but MS literally gives us a tool that handles it all for us. You stating that "always sysprep" is a myth is lacking a lot of context me thinks.
Nanis23@reddit
No, sysprep has it's uses. But SIDs are not important.
If you don't use WSUS or SCCM you will not encounter a single problem with using a template without syspreping it
jamesaepp@reddit
Your original comment would be greatly improved if replaced with the following:
Nanis23@reddit
Thanks for the feedback, you are absolutely right
Mynameismikek@reddit
And that was only discovered once Mark R joined MS. It was just a big web of people pointing at each other saying "that guy told me we needed to reset SIDs".
Noodle_Nighs@reddit
I once demonstrated to a group of people, how easy it was to social engineer their passwords.
Two were strangers to me, never met them before but got their passwords and the phone PINs and wrote them down on a napkin and handed to them.
vacri@reddit
No, not a "true myth". It's a broken Windows style of troubleshooting. When I hopped the ditch from Windows support to Linux admin, the opinion was the opposite - rebooting was the last option. When you reboot, you lose the failure state the machine was in and troubleshooting gets harder. Actually fixing the problem so it doesn't happen again gets harder when you reboot.
Reboots are for getting your system working again asap with a minimum of effort. It breaks any other workflow going on with the machine, and does not help actually fixing the problem so it doesn't happen again.
TheJizzle@reddit
Myth: In-place upgrades on Windows Server are a TOTAL DISASTER!
Reality: They work just fine. Stop being scared.
Life_is_an_RPG@reddit
Jiggling a cable or flipping it around.
I worked as field services engineer for years and would often joke with customers to jiggle the cable or that the cable was 'upside down'. It worked way too many times.
DarkAlman@reddit
Myth: IT people are good at computers because we are smarter and better educated than the average user.
Truth: IT people are otherwise average people that are somehow immune to the Cantaloupe Effect.
Cantaloupe Effect: Take these otherwise highly intelligence and well educated people (like Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants) capable of great feats of deduction, memory, and complex thinking, but put them in front of a computer and they become no more intelligent than a Cantaloupe.
BadAsianDriver@reddit
It's always DNS
DarkAlman@reddit
https://www.cyberciti.biz/media/new/cms/2017/04/dns.jpg
ConfectionCommon3518@reddit
Clearing a cache can improve performance as the larger the cache the more effort is required to search it and thus return a result
DarkAlman@reddit
Used to be true in the Windows XP days regarding Internet Explorer.
The IE cache max size was set to a percentage of hdd space by default, so as hard drive got bigger the cache could grow to gigabytes in size.
Since the Windows Search function was so inefficient the more checks and lookups IE had to do in the cache, the slower it got.
Less-Procedure-4104@reddit
Cache is only useful if the data will be accessed again otherwise it is just an extra step Caches don't get searched they get indexed.
googleflont@reddit
Clearing a cache results in fixing many problems including speed, when the cache corrupts itself. The only way to determine if it will work is to clear it.
cknipe@reddit
The tradeoff is now everything is a cache miss and incurs the performance penalty of a request to whatever real backend you were catching for, until the cache builds back up.
Latter_Reflection_50@reddit
My apologies if this was already shared but ..
It's not DNS There's no way it's DNS It was DNS
stesha83@reddit
It wasn’t DNS
lost_signal@reddit
Myths: Snapshots are backups.
Truth: Snapshots YEETED somewhere else as a full copy are a backup.
GuyWhoSaysYouManiac@reddit
Maybe. If they are application consistent.
jamesaepp@reddit
Snapshots alone are never backups because they rely on the underlying system.
Software version control and snapshots are very similar.
Version control shares a common media - wherever the git repo (for example) lives. You can't take the objects representing a single git commit and reconstitute the entire repo.
Taking a snapshot of a VM or a logical unit on a SAN still relies on the underlying system.
I won't repeat myself further: https://forums.truenas.com/t/truenas-scale-as-a-virtualization-host-am-i-cooking-it-wrong/10503/15
lost_signal@reddit
True, but modern sql server is pretty good at crash recovery especially if it’s been backed up recently and the log isn’t a mile long.
DeadbeatHoneyBadger@reddit
In the early internet days, we were told you have to click the back button when you were done browsing all the way back to your home page.
wrootlt@reddit
My parents still browse like that no matter how many times i said you can just close the tab :)
PtansSquall@reddit
That's a diabolical rumor to start
a_bucket_full_of_goo@reddit
Oooh this one is painful
Sk1rm1sh@reddit
😭
invisibo@reddit
Truth: LTO auto loaders are angry VCRs that have been reanimated as a robot centipede
UMustBeNooHere@reddit
Myth: It's always DNS
Truth: It's always DNS
FoxNo1831@reddit
Myth: when you call the vendor support, they know more than you. I've known good ones and bad ones, surprising how many fall into the latter case.
jaskij@reddit
I actually had a VAR rep forward an issue in UEFI to the vendor. The vendor acknowledged, but said it's not big enough to warrant an update.
The issue? It was an AIO and disabling external USB ports also disabled the touch screen.
gordonv@reddit
Myth: Windows Shutdown
Truth: Sleep Mode, will not reset uptime counter
Solution: Disable Fast Startup, Sleep, and Hibernation
Alpha_Majoris@reddit
Shouid I run my Windows 1998 defragmentation tool (on my 2012 computer already upgraded with SSD)
PedanticDilettante@reddit
There are three orientations for plugging in a usb type A connector, and the third will only unlock after you try the other two.
mheyman0@reddit
Myth: call the vendor. They will fix it.
Truth: the vendor will do their absolute best to blame someone else for the problem.
Which leads to the more fun “vendor thunder dome .”
That’s when the vendor blames someone else, and you get the someone else on the phone as well. And suddenly the vendor actually starts troubleshooting.
thereisnouserprofile@reddit
"It's always DNS" no it isn't. If you understand the very basics of DNS, then you would very easilu be able to verify if it is DNS or not. Look up the DNS record, flush the DNS cache, try a different DNS server etc. It may be DNS, but it should be one of the first things you verify
IdidntrunIdidntrun@reddit
/u/the_bolshevik getting bodied
garcher00@reddit
My favorite is how the users think turning the monitor on and off is a reboot. Thought it was a myth until I witnessed it first hand by multiple different people.
astonishing1@reddit
That Sysadmin's have a magic knob in the server room that they can turn to increase the internet speed.
Jmkott@reddit
I can adjust the QOS settings from my desk. I don’t have to walk all the way to the server room.
ballzsweat@reddit
Sending instructions to users and thinking they will follow….
FoxNo1831@reddit
or even read them.
Mackswift@reddit
Something isn't working, acting like it should, lokks different, etc. etc. etc.
SysAdmin/Architect/Engineer - "What changed?"
Everyone else - "Nothing!"
bobs143@reddit
Myth- "The server doesn't work".
Fact- it's not the server. It's the crappy application your department insisted it needed. Even after IT told you the application was trash.
BTW- We set up the sert using the specifications your application vendor told us.
googleflont@reddit
Myth or gaslighting - even self-gaslighting …
“It was fine until you touched it.” I touched it because you called me and told me it wasn’t working.
Also
“Why did it break? It always worked before.” Yes, things generally work until they break.
True myth I rely on: Yes, a certain amount of the time, things start working when I show up.
a_bucket_full_of_goo@reddit
It guys have an aura that fix ~50% of issues when they enter the room, even if the device is turned off and unplugged
googleflont@reddit
Works for almost everything except things I purchased with my own money.
arvidsem@reddit
Because electronics can tell when you are the end user and not support.
ApathyMoose@reddit
Also with being on the clock vs not.
At work? I go all the way to the persons desk, works fine when I get there.
At home when I’m not getting paid? Hours on hours of things not working like they should
googleflont@reddit
That’s like exercise. Bust your ass at work? No benefit. You have to go to a gym or it doesn’t count.
H3rbert_K0rnfeld@reddit
My Downloads dir suddenly became inaccessible from command line on MacOS. Chmod and change permissions in GUI had no affect.
MacOs system update plus reboot fixed it.