What is a piece of software or hardware that still leaves you traumatized to this day?
Posted by 66659hi@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 1666 comments
The ones I can think of as being "infamous":
Citrix
Lotus Notes
Internet Explorer 6
What are some YOU had to deal with and hated?
Extreme_Original9832@reddit
I've been working with Lotus Notes (not the name anymore, it's HCL Notes, as it was purchased from IBM) since 1995 and I've not experienced any trauma nor did any of the many, many companies I consulted to.
Tell me, how did Notes hurt you to put it on par with Internet Exploder?
stoebich@reddit
SAS VA or SAS Viya. Fuck I've wasted hours, days trying to get two identical servers to perform the same. Ran on Windows Server with containers. Support was useless.
Oh - fuck windows server with (linux) containers in general
PulseDesk@reddit
PulseDesk.net — Service Intelligence, Evolved. "Try It and be mind blown"
RevealVast7178@reddit
having to set up parallels whilst I was 11 years old
starfish_2016@reddit
Anything quickbooks. Especially in a multi user environment.
Conscious-Comfort615@reddit
A lot of those horror stories with QB and SAP come from the same pattern. The system is both the database of record and the place where all operational activity happens. Every user, every transaction, every workflow hits the same core tables.
Eventually you get corruption or mystery behavior that no one can explain. It is not that the software is uniquely terrible. For ledgers like QB, it was simply never designed to handle this concurrent volume. For tools like SAP or Crystal Reports, the bottleneck is the massive amount of logic packed into one place. The way to avoid that now is by separating concerns. Let one system store finalized data and handle high volume processing somewhere else.
In finance stacks, that often means keeping the ledger simple and pushing complexity into a middle layer. Let the ledger store finalized transactions. Do processing, matching, and transformations somewhere else using middleware (MuleSoft, Workato) or a financial layer that normalizes transactions before posting like DualEntry (I work with them). Let's not force everything through one system and get a bottleneck.
Hebrewhammer8d8@reddit
Can Sage enter the chat or input any dental or small clinic management system?
psiphre@reddit
sage is the reason i still maintain an RDP server.
Makeshift27015@reddit
I worked for a company that exclusively supported and produced plugins for Sage. God that was awful, and I still get spammed on LinkedIn just for having the company in my experience despite no mention of Sage anywhere on my profile...
dgillz@reddit
Which of Sage's 2 dozen products are you referring to?
hasthisusernamegone@reddit
Sage and their unreasonably long license activation keys...
zombieroadrunner@reddit
Fuck you Carestream and SoE!
goingslowfast@reddit
What about Sage at an optometry clinic 🤢
rosseloh@reddit
Yep, there's mine.
SinisterCanuck@reddit
In my brief fleeting experience as a self employed MSP, I learned super excited quickly: FUCK INTUIT AND FUCK QUICKBOOKS. The only thing fucking quick about it is how fast your IT guy will lose their damned sanity.
UntouchedWagons@reddit
I use Quickbooks desktop in the family business and boy is it shit. Thankfully I installed it in a windows VM because I can no longer install it. I want to migrate to something self hosted but haven't found anything good enough.
cowprince@reddit
We have 6 subsidiaries that use QuickBooks TODAY. All multiuser files, often times remote. And QB Online doesn't do all the things we need it to do.
So we have an RDS farm and the files are hosted centrally. It always has issues. It's horrendous.
I think we're finally making strides to possibly kill it off for epicore. Which is what a different subsidiary uses today.
derpman86@reddit
I HATED the annual tax update for that shit. I am glad we no longer have the company that used it as a client any more.
AdolfKoopaTroopa@reddit
I currently support a multi user quickbooks environment and that shit is for the birds.
VexingRaven@reddit
Did they ever fix silent installs of Quickbooks or does that still trigger an automatic repair the first time a user launches it?
russellvt@reddit
Egads. I had willed that part of my career out of my brain... until now... thank you. LOL
Character_Deal9259@reddit
Multi-User through RDP with the Company File saved on a share located on an entirely different server.
starfish_2016@reddit
This is exactly how I ended up operating mine before I left the company. But I did remote app. Couldn't trust users with a full desktop 🤣
Character_Deal9259@reddit
Overall, it's not too terribly horrible, except when all the users are on Macs using WiFi. Then it becomes more difficult.
Natural-Nectarine-56@reddit
Ughhh
BoysenberryDue3637@reddit
Did you know there is an Australian specific version called Recon? Quickbooks with a different skin/support org. Same shitty product. My teeth chatter just thinking about that POS.
zealeus@reddit
Managed that back in the 2000s. Pain. Any time we upgraded was a gamble if it'd a) corrupt the database and b) finance would still be able to connect.
Djblinx89@reddit
You just gave me flashbacks of multi user, I thought I suppressed those memories lol
n3rv@reddit
The flat file is now 50GB. I need you to restore it.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Let’s get DNS and printers out of the way…
the_helpdesk@reddit
I had forgotten about Crystal Reports. Fuck you, I don't want those memories back!
North-Definition4430@reddit
I still have to use it from time to time.
Techops837@reddit
we're trying to get rid of it where I'm working.. it's a WIP
Willing_Comfort7817@reddit
Me too!
CyberInferno@reddit
This was my exact same reaction to it.
DaHick@reddit
Seconded.
Cooper101101@reddit
Crystal was OK once you learned what you needed to know to maintain/change the reports you were stuck with by your ERP system, but I did indeed hate it all the same. Now, layer on Business Objects and that abomination was hell. My boss forced us onto that against my protests. A week into beating my head on it, he stopped by and asked me how I liked it after working with it for a while. "I fucking hate it. Everything is harder, takes longer, and is harder to maintain." Shocked look. 2 weeks later, we threw away that $50,000 and went back to SSRS. In my next review, I was told I should "prevent him from making mistakes like that." So ready to retire and be done with this shit.
SeekingApprentice@reddit
I was just going to say print drivers
alphaxion@reddit
I'm convinced that people blame DNS when it's more likely to be people not understanding DNS. Frequently, they don't understand how search domains work, don't realise how to configure appropriate server addresses on their device, and still don't realise what an FQDN is.
DNS is such a simple system, if you bother to understand it.
The amount of people who will use a netbios name and bitch about DNS if it doesn't resolve because either the address isn't in the search domain, or the search domain isn't configured on the system.
"It's always DNS" is 9 times out of 10 "I don't understand what I'm doing".
Fun-Blackberry-1396@reddit
Sure, DNS is simple. Unless you've dealt with split-brain, multi-tenant Azure magic dns with Private Link, anycast, SRV records… but yeah, totally simple 🙄
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
Came here to say this also. Core DNS is easy -- but stir in split brain designs, CloudFlare, AWS Route 53, Azure DNS, and the troubleshooting starts drifting way far away from the RFCs. The more layers of stuff that makes DNS behave diferently you throw on, the more likely you'll get the wrong answer out of the magic query machine.
Just dealt with an issue a couple months ago with AWS Route 53's DNS firewall. The security team implemented it without telling us and we were left figuring out why some queries were getting blackholed only when sent to certain DNS addresses. Luckily we didn't waste too much time, but that's a really good example of a problem that could look like 1000 other things and ends up being a DNS issue.
rodder678@reddit
DNS is simple. IP networking is simple. You can make complex designs using either, but the protocols are simple. Most "DNS problems" are people not understanding the basic protocol.
Every time I see "may take 24-48 hours for your DNS change to take effect", I want to throat-punch the person who wrote it.
phealy@reddit
My favorite is people who don't understand that what order to use the DNS servers in is a client specified behavior and not a standard - and most importantly, it is not a failover list. I have had to troubleshoot some really weird issues where DNS would occasionally not work for internal addresses that came down to "we put our private DNS servers in slot one and two but then put the cloud provider's dns IP into slot 3 as a backup." This can neither cause intermittent failures when it round robins and sometimes gets an NXDOMAIN for an internal only host name, or intermittent complete outages when you have a client that does treat it as a failover list but doesn't switch back when the first two servers are back online.
alphaxion@reddit
Service records depends on what you're trying to do and are usually not something a person is trying to resolve to access a system rather than it being a way of authenticating that you are who your are; vast majority of people won't encounter most of this (of which, conditional forwarding and proxy DNS can make it transparent for them in a majority of instances).
Actually configuring DNS is a different beast to people using DNS as a client.
Fun-Blackberry-1396@reddit
Same outcome either way. A company without the right DNS records, or an internal cluster that fails to register one, both result in a DNS-caused outage, and it happens all the time. Calling DNS "simple" just isn't right.
Shiznoz222@reddit
Common these days for people who don't know as much as they think they do to call something simple.
Pazuuuzu@reddit
Then it gets real fucking complicated when you understand it...
The_Original_Conman@reddit
100% spot on. DNS is a simple system when you take the time to understand it.
_Borrish_@reddit
I have never joined a company where the DNS was setup properly. The closest I have seen was like 80% correct, but that was because they had Infoblox appliances that did most of it for you.
I have had someone complain at me for months about DNS issues when they had actually configured their server to use NetBIOS.
sadisticamichaels@reddit
Here's how this goes: my product needs dns. I dont know a damn thing about dns. I contact my administrator and ask for help for whatever this dns thing is. Im told to put in a ticket that I dont really understand how to fill out. I put in some settings I got from someone in IT and my product days DNS error. So, there is something wrong with dns. Because the screen said dns error.
rollingc@reddit
The last time a coworker had an issue with DNS, they didn't enter an A record for the system they were trying to resolve. Quick fix but WTF. That's not DNS, just dumb.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Precisely. Don’t say it too loud around here or the home lab subs. People get upset. It’s a hot item, like whether or not to host email internally.
ohyeahwell@reddit
Dude I love Crystal reports. I can bend it to my will and do all kinds of crazy things after working with it for 15 years. This is going to be my old man Fortran job.
jmbpiano@reddit
Fellow 15 year user and I can get it to do most everything I want it to do, too. I don't hate it anymore, but love it? No. No I do not.
I'll gladly let you have that old man job because it looks like our ERP is moving to a new reporting system that no longer relies on Crystal and I will not miss its idiosyncrasies one bit once that happens.
ohyeahwell@reddit
We’ve been hearing that from our ERP for years. I started migrating to powerbi but no real urgency.
mj3004@reddit
Same, I loved Crystal Reports! I was able to create so much off our ERP data.
lotekjunky@reddit
"hey clanker, make a report"
dgillz@reddit
We have a subreddit for it, /r/crystalreports
ohyeahwell@reddit
Wow, that sub is super dead
dgillz@reddit
Indeed it is. I am trying to revive it. I know crystal reports is not popular with a lot of people, but a lot of people and ERP systems still have it as their primary reporting system.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
The people that were into it were into it. I know a guy who’s supporting an application today that relies on crystal reports and is miserable, and another one who similar to you seems to have a real knack for It and doesn’t see the problem.
pg3crypto@reddit
You can have a knack for something and hate it. I was that guy with VBS automation back in the day...
ohyeahwell@reddit
I’ve seriously thought about just doing CR consulting. I’ve made hundreds of reports for our ERP (Vista) that would be useful for many people.
Honestly PowerBI feels less flexible to me, but it and dax are fun too.
pg3crypto@reddit
Tell me you're in a padded cell without telling me you're in a padded cell.
Shazam1269@reddit
I took over for a gal that was a wizz with CR, so I maintain reports she made, and even took a class on it several years ago. I still haven't really used it to create any reports, but I admit it is pretty freakin' robust and capable.
Kamina_Crayman@reddit
I didn't realise crystal reports was so hated! I've been using it for the last 12 years.
Now if you told me I had to use GUPTA report writer, I'd escort you out of my office with my foot
goingslowfast@reddit
When your option is raw print jobs or formatted crystal reports output that can actually work with modern printers, you soften on crystal reports.
InfiniteBlink@reddit
I worked for a SIEM company and our reporting engine was crystal reports, I fucking hated making custom reports for customer. Hot garage, thanks for reminding me asshole
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Hotboxing in the garage is a valid strategy to relax from this stress.
sysadmin420@reddit
I'm the guy that fully knows yet if someone asks I reply as if it were Klingon based language, fuck crystal man. I gave it up.
blk55@reddit
SAP is already a dirty whore, but the fact it's using crystal reports is...something else. Glad finance is working their way out of SAP this year.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
SAP acquired crystal reports several years ago. I could google it but I’m lazy so I’m gonna recall from memory that it was something like 2012. That doesn’t necessarily mean they use it.
incompetentjaun@reddit
I actually enjoy DNS.
Printers and crystal reports can die
DarraignTheSane@reddit
My last company used, still in 2014 -
Needless to say that Crystal Reports, as cludgy as it is, was the least of this org's concerns and was inevitably replaced by exporting the same data into a separate SQL database in order to run Power BI against it. The ERP itself wasn't replaced until just after I left in 2023.
LesbianDykeEtc@reddit
What the actual fuck
andecase@reddit
I need posts like this to remind me that for all the terrible things my company has could be worse.
DarraignTheSane@reddit
It made me the IT person I am today. You learn a lot from experiencing the way things should not be, too.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
Lotus Notes. Ugh. Say it isn't so.
DarraignTheSane@reddit
I did finally get them to move to Exchange Online later, but that was several years of being a Domino admin that I'd like back.
Phendranite@reddit
... what the Christ?
That might be worse than any of the crappy software I encountered in my sysadmin days. Wow.
DarraignTheSane@reddit
It was inexcusably poorly written software.
When we virtualized, we eventually ended having to dedicate something like 96 GB of RAM and some ungodly core count to that Windows VM running the ERP server because it needed those resources to run the "source" copies of every person's client.
Oh, and there were frequent program-halting errors on people's client app that we couldn't fix. The vendor had to remote in and clear the errors properly so it wouldn't corrupt the records it had been working on when it errored. Sometimes those errors would lock the whole system.
verbmegoinghere@reddit
I survived crystal reports because my laptop refused, for unexplainable reasons, to install it.
I obviously have local admin. Nothing I did would install it. My colleagues, IT, the other sys admin all tried.
Nothing worked and my work laptop stayed thankfully crystal free.
I've never been more relieved in my life that I didn't have to work on the most nightmare inducing piece of software ever created.
Flashy_Resolution500@reddit
Crystal Reports almost made me rage quit IT before I made it off the hell desk.
originaladam@reddit
Holy fuck. The unholy union of blackbaud fundraising software and crystal reports still gives me nightmares
Cauli_Power@reddit
Just remember it's gone to the cloud and can't hurt you any more.
Until you see the bill, that is.
FYI we're still using the classic RE over Citrix because the web version didn't port over all the features for Users Over 55 Years Of Age. Now when advancement calls for support when Citrix Citrixes we simply send them the RE dashboard URL and make sure they haven't lost the phone number for BB support.
Kmo78@reddit
Raisers Edge?
originaladam@reddit
Yes!
Jealous-Wall-9453@reddit
At this rate, I will be supporting Crystal Reports 2020 until 2040
elcheapodeluxe@reddit
Nothing has actually changed in the software since 2008. If you cover up the version number and let someone use the two side by side I challenge you to find the difference
Optimaximal@reddit
Look at you - I'm still stuck using Crystal 8.5!
RageBull@reddit
OMG… I had a book on crystal reports. I had managed to block that from my memory until just now. Thanks for that!
basheworking@reddit
I still have my crystal reports book. I can see it on my bookshelf from here.
Zero_cool6969@reddit
I feel like I will die in hell desk lol
czj420@reddit
Edi
Flashy_Resolution500@reddit
Eww, almost forgot about that one. I’ve mentally overwritten that acronym in my head with the airport code for my favorite place on earth.
WI762@reddit
I had forgotten about that hot mess! I may have nightmares again tonight.
Due_Address_5089@reddit
Sweet baby Jebus, I had blocked my memory of Crystal Reports until just now...
IndependentBat8365@reddit
Oh god.. crystal reports. I had forgotten about that.
Thanks for bring up such painful memories.
Baljet@reddit
Crystal Reports was my break into IT, company had paid some propeller heads to make all their SLA reports and no one else in customer support could understand them!
Of course nothing made sense in isolation so I took over their ticketing and equipment DB and then the phone system from the MSP
xdyzzex@reddit
Shhh ffs don't summon these demigorgon Crystal Reports
Lower_Bar5210@reddit
Crystal Reports is a name I have not heard in a while!
PandaAT@reddit
I have yet to come across another product which comes close to Crystal Report's capability to run a query against RDBMS and produce a dynamically generated document.
Granted you spent hundreds of hours to learn the Crystal Reports ofc.
dgillz@reddit
I wrote a ton of crystal reports back in the day, and I still write them. I'm actually the mod at /r/crystalreports. That being said, for every crystal report I create today, I create 10 excel power queries. There just isn't the demand for it today like there was in 2000.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
I’m not the business intelligence guy. I’m the Sys Admin who got roped in to figuring out why “the thing” broke.
osiris2k@reddit
I KNOW i'm in the minority but, I really liked Crystal Reports.
wintermute023@reddit
I’m swimming against the tide here, but I loved crystal reports. My first job after university was IT support in a large call centre, 9000 agents across three sites.
I could make Crystal generate meaningful reports on call handling across all sites, all teams, all agents. It was mind blowing how good it was. It was my first experience of being an expert in anything.
Of course this is viewed through 20/20 rose tinted hindsight, over a distance of 30 years.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
You’re not the only one. There are dozens, dozens, of crystal reports lovers.
gregsting@reddit
Well, yeah, it’s an SAP product of course
Uberutang@reddit
Jeez long forgotten ptsd triggered via crystal reports.
Starbreiz@reddit
I had black out those Crystal reports memories and they all came flooding back when I saw this comment thread
Maro1947@reddit
OMG! I'd wiped that from my mind!
Leven@reddit
Oh god, crystal reports have me PTSD flashbacks..
weekendclimber@reddit
Fuck you and fuck Crystal Reports!!
/s for you, but FUCK CRYSTAL REPORTS!!!
ButterscotchNo7292@reddit
I never used it,why it's so hated?
weekendclimber@reddit
It's like if Lotus123 and Excel both smoked crack, had a child, gave it up for adoption and it decided that it would make itself more complicated out of spite over the hate it had for both it's parents!!
19610taw3@reddit
I'm in an environment that has multiple products from the same software vendor, but is managed by different third party vendors.
None of them can use the same version of crystal reports. What a mess that turns into.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Hey I get it. I brought the evil by uttering its nameZ
weekendclimber@reddit
Damn it!! We said it 3 times in this thread, run!!!
Tasty-Education-1820@reddit
Crystal reports creating invoices for dot matrix printers. The sound of the printer was it laughing at my folly.
Danowolf@reddit
You bastard....
Wharhed@reddit
+100 for crystal reports.
DrebinofPoliceSquad@reddit
Crystal Reports is something I haven't heard of in forever. And Olap cubes.
EFT_Urbanfox@reddit
Bro you're triggering us all. Crystal Reports... My gosh.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Op wanted “infamous” trauma. They’re now hearing from a lot of people who have trauma-bonded over some specific software.
methane47@reddit
What's the problem with crystal reports?
networklabproducts@reddit
When that ticket came in a crystal reports isn’t loading in your billing system! Man, I don’t miss that and didn’t expect to see Crystal Reports when I clicked this post. Holy hell!!!
tuxedo_jack@reddit
Don't you put that evil on me.
At least it's not Quickbooks, though.
freakymrq@reddit
We still use crystal reports lmao
OppositeStudy2846@reddit
I came here to say the EXACT same thing.
Not only is it the highest voted comment, it has the most comments itself. Can’t believe how god awful that software was that we all thought of it within seconds of seeing the post, 40 minutes at the time I’m commenting.
Burn in hell!
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Indeed. There’s a couple other comments outside this comment thread that also mention crystal reports.
Capable-Ad-5344@reddit
We still have crystal reports 😓
-c3rberus-@reddit
We do as well, like CR 2007? I got some new updates but it’s like the same. Only the backbone of all of our ERP reporting. No big deal. LOL
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Unfortunately you’re not alone.
zealeus@reddit
I had to deal with Crystal Reports out of Blackbaud, our school's Student Information System. I was the only one who make any sense of it, even though I had zero actual education background.
Oh, and every thick client deployment (administration who needed db access at all) were required to be full Administrators on their devices.
madlyalive@reddit
Thaks for that flashback, Dick.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Yeah. Fair.
heeero__@reddit
I don't wanna google it and have it in my history... are they still in business? I hated them so much.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Acquired by SAP. So another love-to-hate system haha.
seamonkey420@reddit
omg.. crystal reports.. i had to use it to migrate a knowledge base back in the day.. and yea that sucked.. and took me so many hours/redoing the migration.
Inaspectuss@reddit
Motherfucker. Complete piece of shit.
icedtrip@reddit
Woh! Haven’t seen that name is a really long time hated Crystal Reports.
angrydeuce@reddit
Goddamn Crystal Reports.
CombatMedic77@reddit
Zebra printers.
SleepInfinite625@reddit
Came here to say this exact same thing
techslice87@reddit
Munbyn are significantly worse than zebra
Vesalii@reddit
We have zebra tablets at work. I staged them with StageNow. I constantly felt like a beta tester the first few months with home many bugs that software has and how utter shit and slow it is. I also accidentally bricked 4 tablets because I updated them without first doing a factory reset. For such a big company their software is utter shit. I'm working onnstsging the tablets with Intune. Can't wait to never use StageNow again.
ocdtrekkie@reddit
Just going to leave it out there, the Seagull Scientific drivers for Zebra printers pretty much ended them being a problem for me over five years ago. Just don't use Zebra's own software and you're all good.
ender-_@reddit
We always used NiceLabel's drivers, never had any problems either.
SlightAddress@reddit
I love zebra but I've worked with a lot of printers 😆 🤣 zpl for the win..
droppedpackets@reddit
I simply hear this all of the time and I don’t understand it. We have a fleet of 1000’s and simply zero issues. Yes of course maintenance needs to be done from my a physical standpoint but man they just print. Use the native zpl and all is good!
tuxsmouf@reddit
Oh yes.
xsam_nzx@reddit
The RJ4040 printers.I legit sent them videos of some of them only working if you pushed down on lid. They still denied it was the printers fault
derpman86@reddit
I would argue ALL label printers.. absolutely bastard machines that require needless wankery to get working.
DanAE112@reddit
Nah Zebras were the good ones, it was the el-cheapos who got the Zebra compatibles that were cursed.
Major_Disaster76@reddit
There are two types , ones that work solidly for 45 years in a warehouse with no issues and are abused daily , and ones so temperamental they have claimed the souls of the IT people sent to fix them or just get them to work . They are assholes .
theRealNilz02@reddit
Wait until you have to work with Carl Valentin Pica label printers. You're going to beg for your Zebras.
Really, for some reason these things sometimes switch their label orientation out of nowhere or forget their dimensions.
The ZD230s we replaced a lot of the Picas with are much more reliable and consistent.
Also direct thermal printing has less moving parts than transfer printing.
Whistlin_Bungholes@reddit
Most diabolical hardware/software combo to ever exist.
opotamus_zero@reddit
holy shit. With a transformer that's a higher voltage than all the other crappy devices, that would fail all the time, but uses the same barrel plug connector so users would plug a 12V one in and the higher amps would melt something in the printer before the fuse blew.
The ethernet being tacked on after the thing was designed so it wouldn't behave in the same way as any other dhcp device or lpd printer.
The shitty consumables ordering, and how they persisted for way too long in industries like medical because their apps had ZPL hard coded into them.
Oh one medical company I worked for later got data breached by storing their used Zebra thermal transfer ribbons for a while not knowing how to dispose of them, then throwing them all into general waste. They have the inverse impressions of whatever was on the stickers printed - in this case tens of thousands of patients contact details and test results. I kind of didn't feel sorry when I found out that they got trojan zebra'd
HTDutchy_NL@reddit
"Oh yeah we have these new labels we want to test but the size is different, can you configure them?"
I was such a naive junior sysadmin thinking that it would only take an hour. No it took DAYS.
And then on my next job I got suckered into making them work on linux printing pdf's generated by PHP. I hope I never see one again.
SweetsMurphy@reddit
Oh, I had forgotten about these. Not great.
Valleygurl99@reddit
Haha yeah I was IT for a spa factory with hundreds of zebra printers.
bruhgubgub@reddit
Had zebra tell me that the printer was a EU spec (we purchased from a Canadian distro) so they couldn't enable the web portal and dhcp. After fighting with them (the unit went to them with a dead motor and came back to us with no networking capabilities) they just said "ok it can now receive DHCP." So apparently in the EU zebra printers don't use any sort of networking. Bullshit. Other than that the rep I dealt with was great and decently knowledgeable it was just the supervisor that was being a smooth brain
GradeAccomplished322@reddit
Those blasted things. I could spend a whole day fiddling one into order just in time for the next one to break. It never ends.
DustinParkIT@reddit
Oracle
Copilot
Oracle
Outlook
Oracle
Teams
Oracle
Microsoft 365
Oracle
Crystal Reports
Oracle
ANY PRINTER
Oracle
WSUS
Oracle
ANYTHING OWNED BY BROADCOM
Oracle
HALF OF THE ENDPOINT SECURITY OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES
Oracle
Adimentus@reddit
I think this guys doesn't like Oracle.
audioeptesicus@reddit
AS400
Exchange
edbedford0@reddit
AS400 was a damn solid system. If IBM would have marketed it properly instead of trying to make it a cash cow, it'd have overtaken Windows Server. Also needed a better front end.
rollingc@reddit
Lots of AS400 in local government. Super expensive and hard to replace once it's up and going.
edbedford0@reddit
And Costco uses them.
Adimentus@reddit
Same with Kroger. At least Fred Meyer in the PNW. Front end was ugly to look at but it worked very well. Any issues that we had were usually user created.
ActionJ2614@reddit
I was a user of AS400 (green screen) back in the early to mid 2000's. At Travelers Life and Annuity (got bought by MetLife).
I have been in Enterprise SaaS sales for about 9 years. The funny part my 1st role selling. We exited and sold to HelpSystems (was a big AS400 automation software company Robot is there automation line). They are now Fortra and made a big pivot to security.
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
Is! No one new will ever touch it, but I've worked in a couple of AS400 and mainframe-adjacent jobs. That system was the essence of old-school IBM, where you paid through the nose but got a solid, well documented system that they'd bend over backwards to make sure operated well for you. Lots of plsces aren't moving off it because it's still so well supported. Same with mainframes...no one who doesn't need them has them anymore, but IBM definitely spends a lot of resources making sure they "just work" for the customers that do.
Even our IBM Intel servers were very well supported back in the day...IBM customer engineers were highly trained and the products were well thought out to be easily field-supportable even if it cost more to over-engineer them. It's funny because minis and mainframes under this model were the SaaS of their day - businesses who weren't tech companies just paid "the computer bill" every month and expected full white-glove service.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
We're still running an AS400. It is much more stable than our Windows servers will ever hope to be.
AggravatingLeg2782@reddit
I've worked with them on and off (and still do to some extent) since 1994
Number of times I have seen one crash? 4 in all that time.
There is absolutely no platform that I have worked on in all my IT career (and I have worked at a lot of places) that is so damn reliable.
Carphead@reddit
I was on a beta site for Exchange 4.0. We had around 100,000 users and were struggling with MS Mail. In our very first training session me and my buddy setup two exchanges servers and both created a rule that sent auto replies to email that got sent to the another mailbox, that mailbox then sent auto replies.
wintermute023@reddit
I with you on Exchange. Early 2000s exchange servers were such a bunch of shit. So many late nights trying to get them running before all hell broke loose again next morning. Every time I piss and moan about O365/MSOffice/CoPilot or whatever it’s called today I just think back to the dozen or so Exchange servers across three sites, and it doesn’t feel so bad.
BTW I loved our AS400s. Easy to manage and rock solid.
kennyj2011@reddit
Fuck Exchange
originaladam@reddit
All my homies hate exchange
ocdtrekkie@reddit
I'd so much rather Exchange SE than Exchange Online. EXO is "maybe mail, when Microsoft feels like it".
Viharabiliben@reddit
I made a good living supporting, upgrading and fixing on prem Exchange. Clustered back end mail databases, load balanced front end client access servers. I never took a single class, just OTJ training.
burghdude@reddit
Best kind.
mattelmore@reddit
Filemaker pro
Adimentus@reddit
Oh man, a couple of years ago I had to deal with an issue with FM not e-mailing correctly. Days of digging to find out that a Windows update broke the MAPI it uses to talk with Outlook. Trauma.
coyote_den@reddit
Let me tell you about a corrupted FM database. It lost the link between the records and the associated images, so I had to reattach them.
What were the images you ask?
Autopsy photos from a pathology department at a major hospital.
mattelmore@reddit
Literal nightmare material
deadzol@reddit
Thank goodness I was the only one.
CCCcrazyleftySD@reddit
Blackberry Enterprise Server!
averythrowawayaccidk@reddit
Limewire? Anyone remember that? It has given our laptop millions of viruses
Loose-Profile-3938@reddit
in india there was a tab launched reliance tab it still haunts me how i used to use it
DrGraffix@reddit
Veritas / Symantec Backup Exec
winky9827@reddit
Had this running on a dedicated server with a 24 channel card back in the day. No issues. Clunky, but it worked.
InsanePacoTaco@reddit
GFI FaxMaker has two states: "Everything is fine" and "something changed. now I'm mad"
Those fax cards were MASSIVE
OpenGrainAxehandle@reddit
Waitwaitwait... Veritas BackupExec v10d was great. It worked, and it's the last version that didn't suck. I had a copy running for many years without any incident whatsoever. Then Symantec bought it, and "Symantec'ed" it.
PrettyAdagio4210@reddit
Sage. Fuck Sage.
And their useless support team, if you could even call them that.
dgillz@reddit
Which of the 2 dozen sage products are you referring to?
Minimum_Associate971@reddit
sage 100 and sage paperless both suck!!!!!!!!!!!
dgillz@reddit
Sage paperless? Never heard of it.
systemhost@reddit
I just got to deal with Sage 50 Accounting for the first time yesterday, not a fan.
dgillz@reddit
If you need help holler at me or post in /r/Sage50. Note that the Canadian and UK versions of Sage 50 are different, as is Sage 50 Accounts.
TechnologyTurd@reddit
YES! FUCK SAGE!
I hate Sage so much. How could this piece of trash life past 2010 with a mandatory M$ Access 32bit?
boli99@reddit
Oh the joys of accounting packages that cannot run reports unless user is a local administrator.
AccPac must die
ick.
Angelworks42@reddit
Used to actually support accpac on msdos I’ve actually never run into another person who’s even heard of it.
boli99@reddit
it made it to windows. its awful.
Angelworks42@reddit
I don’t recall the dos version being horrible other that himem issues and btrieve - as I recall btrieve couldn’t be loaded high - also I don’t recall anyone being that mad about using it either. But that was so long ago.
FarToe1@reddit
Amen. Awful company, awful products.
Their support advised us it was fine to use two clients updating the same file simultaneously. This regularly led to it getting corruption, which required us to send it off to their support and pay extra for it to be un-corrupted. Several times our payroll was missed for this.
Eventually they admitted this was wrong but it was the only way to have multiple users (at the time). They then introduced proper multi-user support, but wanted a huge amount more to raise the level of contract to the next tier for it.
We got a new accountant who recommended we switch to Xero when that emerged, and magically all our finance software problems went away.
EntireFishing@reddit
Oh yes, I can remember when my managing director would said oh the customer must call sage support. And you think to yourself? Well that's pointless. So in I go I'm going to have to fix this one. I must have about 20 different sage hacks I've learnt over the last 30 years
CactusJ@reddit
Timberline
BruhAtTheDesk@reddit
So not just me who gets angry
NextSouceIT@reddit
FUCK SAGE!
mricci83@reddit
Citrix. Swing migrations from SBS 2008
ZeroUnityInfinity@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise server
johlae@reddit
PVCS
k6kaysix@reddit
What I find most annoying about Internet Explorer is how Microsoft 'kindly' provided IE Mode which has just meant the lazy suppliers don't actually update their applications to work in a modern web browser they just default to 'add us to your IE Mode list'!
audin_webman@reddit
SAP BTP
audin_webman@reddit
SAP
Ok_Story_2650@reddit
Microsoft ISA server
BendakLives@reddit
CiscoWorks, any and all of it. Also AppleTalk and PhoneNET.
Diskach@reddit
ODI....well almost everything Oracle...
narcissisadmin@reddit
Permanent nightmares of trying to keep our Exchange 2003 instance afloat while it was constantly knocking on 75GB's door.
skyliner143@reddit
Virtualbox Extension Pack aka Oracle’s trojan horse to launching an informal audit to justify an actual audit when they haven’t made enough money off you last quarter.
mcmatt93117@reddit
Oracle: Oh, and while we see you only downloaded it on machine machine and have verified it was only ever used on that one machine, THEORETICALLY it COULD have been used on the other 5,000 devices here so we'll be charging you for licenses for all 5,000.
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
Anyway, I don't know why people are still using VirtualBox for home virtual machines, Broadcom made VMware Workstation Pro, which was around 300 USD, free for personal use. I always found it superior to anything OracleBonks ever provided.
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/344595/downloading-and-installing-vmware-workst.html
narcissisadmin@reddit
Because Broadcom made it a huge dick in the ass to download it if you're not using a business email address, and because everything VMware can fuck itself.
Flameancer@reddit
Tbh I was quite surprised they did that from everything I heard from them. I actually bought workstation license since I use it for work and was perfectly fine paying the yearly re-up fee since I could just get it reimbursed for via work. I only used it for work due to space, before I got my current job I already had my workspace setup but with my new job I didn’t have enough space in my home office for an additional two monitors plus laptop; so since work is pretty lax only what devices can at least sign into account just setup a VM on my personal pc and entra joined the vm for my work domain. VMware also makes it extremely easy to 2auth where all I have to do is usb pass through my yubikey. Hyper-V doesn’t seem to work as well.
An-kun@reddit
Yeah. Usb pass though is much simpler with VMware. I have it working fine on hyper-v as well(for what I use it for).. but it's way more fiddling about than with vmware.
skyliner143@reddit
Can’t wait to see how Broadcom ruins that solution. They’re in full swing shaking down VMware customers.
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
I've just been archiving versions to be honest. If Broadcom does pull a fast one the old versions will work on a lot of operating systems for a very, very long time.
Flameancer@reddit
The 25H2 release fixed the updater.
itishowitisanditbad@reddit
"People shouldn't use Oracle, use Broadcom!"
i.e "Don't shit yourself, change pants first!"
Alarming-Estimate-19@reddit
Totalement 🤦
Franchement préférer un truc de chez Broadcom, par rapport à Oracle, c’est franchement dire je préfère la peste au choléra.
En plus, VirtualBox a au moins le mérite d’être open source.
Otto-Korrect@reddit
Microsoft did that to us. We had an SQL app that was only accessed by a few people. But because TECHNICALLY it could be hit from any computer (or any computer on the Internet could see data that resulted from the query), we had to buy core licensing, for each of 16 cores.
$$$$$$$
dracotrapnet@reddit
Downloaded it java 7.2 JRE 15 years ago which has since been eliminated completely yet they called every IT person, some who never even touched Java in their life.
doubled112@reddit
I'm glad the parking company doesn't use this model.
We know you only drove one car in, and parked in one parking spot, but theoretically you could have parked in all of them so you need to pay for all 150 parking spaces for today.
dracotrapnet@reddit
Hah I like that analogy. Add to it, the sign said free parking and now they are calling 15 years later.
stueh@reddit
I once parked in s high rise one in our nearby city and when I left my ticket wasn't working in the machine. I hit the help button and said what was up, and said i could hold it up to the camera or something. She said nope, gotta pay the lost ticket fee (which is like 3 x 24 hour fee). We argued for a bit while cars backed up behind me until I got out and lifted the boom then drove out while she shouted at me through the intercom.
It was really weird. Usually when there's a ticket issue they just let you out, or take your card number through the phone and trust you when you say what time you entered.
Angelworks42@reddit
Age old oracle comic about that very thing: https://houseofbrick.com/blog/the-oracle-parking-garage/
Icedman81@reddit
Schrödinger Parking. All about the probabilities, since they didn't collapse the superposition and see what you were actually doing. So you existed in all the spots for all of the time.
AggravatingLeg2782@reddit
Was a DC manager (well sort of still am) and was asked by my boss to pull a CPU out of a DL580.
Thought that was an odd request, so asked why.
Turns out it would save 1 million a year in Oracle licensing
AggravatingLeg2782@reddit
Also, we have Oracle at work to support Documentum.
We installed some IBM Power 10s running AIX as it's much more cost effective to run Oracle on those than other generic platforms.
Mind you, someone from Oracle will probably read this and change that policy
Don't ask me why its' cheaper though, I just rack em and stack em.
skyliner143@reddit
And you can only buy them in batches of 1,200 licenses so you’re gonna get shelfware….
cadre_78@reddit
Such bullshit. Blocked their “Texas” number and then they started calling from caller id blocked numbers.
loganbeaupre@reddit
My college CIS program got burnt that way, with the extension pack. In the middle of the semester we were suddenly all (CIS students) told that we would no longer be using ANY Virtualbox software. I think the legal team at my college was just that spooked. We finished out the semester with just textbooks for the most part.
I had a bad taste in my mouth then, as far as oracle goes. I’ve been in IT for going on 4 years now and still don’t like them
buzz-a@reddit
My 10k person org ripped out every last bit of oracle software over a decade ago and we haven't missed it.
They tried to blackmail us thinking we needed them, and we said bet.
JohnPaulDavyJones@reddit
God, that’s a hit to the veins to hear that someone successfully got off Oracle at scale. I’ve been at two firms in the last five years who have been on Oracle and hated it, but been unable to extricate themselves from the stack.
buzz-a@reddit
We were fortunate that only "real" app on Oracle was reporting and we already had started evaluating other options, and had a working POC.
theedan-clean@reddit
Problem is when you're a 100 person org and they come gunning for you after single fucking dev managed to install some bit of Oracle Java. That one dev who just needed admin on their local and managed to get that shit approved. It's like browsing to an Oracle site will get you dinged for unlimited monies.
Fuck Oracle and their Universal Subscription. Garbage founder. Garbage company. Any wonder everything they buy turn everything to shit. See: Java (licensing/JDK/JRE hellscape) and VirtualBox.
theedan-clean@reddit
Nobody likes them. Fuck Oracle. A law firm that sells software.
t0ny7@reddit
Even outside of software they are jerks. I went to an airshow with a friend who took their P-40. Before the airshow started we were getting ready and needed water for spray bar in the airplane. So I took a bucket and found some water. The plane was moved to right outside of Oracle's spot. So my choice was walk a long ways around with a heavy bucket of water or cut through their area. Which since it was hours before the start and their plane wasn't there yet I thought nothing of it. As I was going through someone came out and started yelling at me. Like angry yelling and saying this was their spot and I wasn't allowed to be there.
The worst I could have done was spill water on asphalt which would have dried in 5 minutes.
I've never had someone get so angry and aggressive over someone walking through empty asphalt before.
Friendly_Ad5044@reddit
At my former job we coined the acronym LENAY, for “Larry Ellison Needs Another Yacht” as shorthand for whenever Oracle tried to extort more money from us.
skyliner143@reddit
We always said “One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.”
ThisIsBrahma@reddit
Yeah. Look at the founder and long time CEO. Not hard to see how the company operates.
panopticon31@reddit
Oracles legal team makes Disney look like schmucks.
Evil-Bosse@reddit
I thought they don't sell software at all any more? Just lawyers suing you for potentially being able to use any software that oracle might sell
poke887@reddit
We were "fined" for not having a license which they knew we were about to use and did not let us know. As a result my department is on mission of separating from Oracle shady practices.
ReasonableBee3030@reddit
I've maintained for a while that Oracle are a litigation company with a small software development team attached.
sssRealm@reddit
We got threating emails from a Oracle rep over being unlicensed for Virtualbox Extension. Did an audit and only found 1 copy. Did some research and found out the rep was from another county. Ignored her and nothing happened. Unsure if the shake down was even sanctioned by Oracle. Email headers, etc verified as legit, at least I believe she was an Oracle employee.
russellvt@reddit
Was less horrific when Sun was still around and owned it. Sadly, I wrote far too much Python around their API... pretty much 65k lines that made it work like a highly customized VMWare.
Temporary-Article996@reddit
I worked for a global Aerospace company - My job was going to newly acquired businesses and taking away Exchange for Lotus notes - in 2015. We also took away corporate Wifi - the French didn't feel it was secure - only guest WIFI - to get to files in conference rooms you had to VPN into 1 of two entry points in the US and then access files in your building via a MPLS line which depending on the era through Orange could be as small as 10 MB.
I was NOT a popular person in the Americas - but my job was to be the solider....It sucked.
t1ndog@reddit
NT 4 Terminal Server when you try to put HP print drivers on it.
BrainBlight@reddit
Printers in general, but my first IT job was working for a medical practice. How are faxes HIPAA-compliant, and why were they so annoying to troubleshoot?
MisterTBD88@reddit
SCCM
Hangikjot@reddit
aw man, you weren't that guy that reimaged all desktops/servers with win 7 at that Australia bank where you? SCCM is probably the one product enjoyed even way back in the SMS days.
cwk9@reddit
If Microsoft doesn't care about SCCM any more, I don't see why I should.
FreeBirch@reddit
What part of SCCM did you dislike?
MisterTBD88@reddit
1) When you add drivers to boot media, you cannot expand the interface. If you search for a driver, check it, then search for another driver it unchecks it.
2) WQL is terrible.
3) WMI is depreciated and SCCM relies on a format of it.
4) SCCM baselines are great.
5) MDT integration was great until it was depreciated.
6) Application and package creation is great. Managing them over a CMG is terrible.
7) WSUS integration is great. Packages disappearing after a feature update has a newer build isn’t.
8) Going multiple layers deep into the UI is terrible. You can’t click behind some windows and other windows you can. You have to end up taking screenshots of the previous window or launch another console instance somewhere.
Wharhed@reddit
Bro came in with the receipts
Angelworks42@reddit
Honestly it’s my day job - for being as old as it is I think it’s mostly fine. I never thought it rose to the level of traumatizing.
Wharhed@reddit
Used to be my day job too - all valid points!
Socksalot58@reddit
I love SCCM and use it everyday. But yeah, gotta admit those are all valid complaints lol. Still, they'll pry it from my cold dead hands
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
I actually don't agree with that one. The problem is if you do zero work to make the product operate outside of installing it...there are so many other things that have to be solid first. But once set up properly, it's one of the only Microsoft products with a support team who actually documented the workflows and has logging that's understandable. Once you know how something is supposed to flow through that system, you can essily track down the problem.
Compare that with Intune which has improved significantly but is still mostly a black box eventual-consistency MDM.
MisterTBD88@reddit
Yes, you can set it and forget it. You absolutely shouldn’t have that mindset. Mind you, you do need to patch and upgrade the servers SCCM relies on. It’s a dinosaur and beginning to show its age. You’re right, the logging is robust and cmtrace is the bees knees.
My gripes are with the UI primarily. The UI was built by programmers and not end user experience developers. There’s a bug in which if you search for something and the tooltip window pops up, it’ll crash the entire console. You have to wait for the tooltip to close.
Also, PXE booting needs to die already.
The support team for SCCM has all moved over to InTune. Any time I open a case, the support is lackluster. Or it goes to a third party and you need to demand in-house Microsoft support.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Beef with configmgr? Did you mean SCOM?
crucialAmnesiac@reddit
Probably not related to much here but;
Autocad 2001. Mostly because I needed it for high school stuff and by the time we were using it (circa 2018) it was way outdated and most bussinesses didn't use it. Got so desperate to fix my grade (B+ student in everything else) I even spent cash on a tuition with an engineer and she was utterly confused. The teacher was an absolute hag so that didn't help.
Primary_Garbage6916@reddit
Epicor
SAP with no front-end customization
Working46168@reddit
You can customize the front end so users dont have to pick through a list of random options?
oxmix74@reddit
Nobody knows what the acronym SAP refers to, but the consensus is that the S stands for satanic.
techslice87@reddit
You mean it isn't Send Another Payment???
Calimhero@reddit
I am shocked SAP isn’t higher in the comments.
That shit is an endless pit of despair.
Top_Boysenberry_7784@reddit
We use an Epicor product for ERP and their hosted environment sucks. It just randomly runs like dogshit.
mynumberistwentynine@reddit
I was wondering if anyone else would mention Epicor. What a headache from basically every possible angle. I'd be lying if part of the reason why I left my last position wasn't because I'd never have to touch their stuff or talk to their support again.
Primary_Garbage6916@reddit
Epicor is so legendary, they were used multiple times as what not to do in one of my UI Design classes.
Otto-Korrect@reddit
I know I'm late to the party, but Okidata ML320 dot matrix tractor feed printers. It was all our system supported for decades, so we managed several dozen of them. They would last forever, but needed more and more frequent refreshes. The day we upgraded and were able to replace them all with thermal printers was a joyous day.
GeneMoody-Action1@reddit
Quickbooks, Sage X3 ERP, all things VFP, MSVB, oh the list could go on and on...
Rihx@reddit
a simple old pager... there is a ringtone that to this day, triggers a ptsd response if I hear it out in the wild.
AndreiWarg@reddit
DYMO is fkn atrocious to use due to the way their label sizes are locked out behind their printing software
Bryankkkkk@reddit
Oh and they removed the ability to print to dymos that are shared from a print server, the software just crashes and they told us they removed that feature and we shouldn't update past 1.4 or something, users hated the brother p touch software so idk what route to go haha
AndreiWarg@reddit
Go Zebra ZD421. There is more manual setup early, but we automate the driver deployment via Intune and then just physically plug the ZD in. Then I change the config of the printer and gg
Bryankkkkk@reddit
Thank you, looking at that option now!
AndreiWarg@reddit
Hope it works well for you. It is really solid if you just need 1 label size to run forever. If you need to swap sizes on the go it can be a bit of a pain.
Devar0@reddit
And their actual labels suck compared to Brother labels too.
simask234@reddit
Also a few years ago they launched new printers which would only work with their labels (which had an RFID chip in them for some reason)
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Thought about this after my original comment. Had to recall the rage. Glad you mentioned it.
AndreiWarg@reddit
Citizen gang here! E300 10/10 jiffy printers, Zebra ZD421 honourable second place.
I told my Ops DYMO is shite, they insisted, spent about 4 hours trying to make it work and failed lol
dire-wabbit@reddit
From my college days, one but of hardware that traumatized a lot of end users was DEC's dual 5.25" floppy drive they equipped on their PCs. Dang thing operated on one indexing motor by inverting the secondary floppy orientation. It would inevitably mis-index and corrupt the entire disk. It really sucked having to tell students they lost all their work. I usually worked the last shift, and would frequently stick around to extend the hours of the lab from 1am to 4am or later so the unlucky students could re-type their papers.
I swear the same engineer designed Zip disks and the click of death.
SwedeLostInCanada@reddit
Vista, but I feel like that’s too simple of an answer
Visual Studio (before VS Code) was utter garbage
HighRelevancy@reddit
Visual Studio has always been pretty good at the specific things it does. What's it done that upset you?
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
The problem with it was it's design.
It has a massive, cluttered installation, and then you have to spend tons of time getting your specific shit set up. If you have a managed environment, and especially if you have a VDI environment, the full Visual Studio is an impossible nightmare. We either had to spend a ton of time masking the app off the gold image, or we would make a separate image with Visual Studio 2022/whateverthefuck just for Devs, which is 2x the work to maintain. And putting it on an AppVolume/distributed contained app? Forget it. And the worst part? Most of the devs are just using a few parts for the things they are doing.
I was suspicious of Visual Studio Code when it came out, but now that I realize it meets the needs of 95 percent of our developers while being easier to deploy, I'm good.
HighRelevancy@reddit
That's like, the point. It's all batteries included. If you're gonna download an IDE and a compiler and a build system and a debugger and a full profiler suite and the OS SDK you're going to end up with a lot of stuff no matter which way you slice it. It's also completely configurable so like, skill issue? If you're using it for things that don't need all of that it might just not be the right tool.
Idk man you're complaining that the toolbox full of tools is heavy when all you needed was one decent hammer y'know what I mean.
SwedeLostInCanada@reddit
It would take minutes to start, eat up half your RAM and CPU.
The incredibly sensitive intellisense drove me nuts, you’d open a new statement, type 3 letters and Visual Studio would decide ”HOLY SHIT WE GOT ERRORS ON EVERY LINE. Syntax incorrect!!!” and fill out your error log. You finish your line of code and intellisense went ”oh… okay, you’re good”
segv@reddit
Which version was your first? I remember VS6 starting in near instant on the computers from the era
Makeshift27015@reddit
looks at vscode using 64GB of ram
In its defense, that's entirely my fault for having far too many plugins enabled
mkosmo@reddit
It was also one of the most powerful IDEs for a very long time.
HighRelevancy@reddit
Oh, yeah going off about in-progress stuff is valid. I don't actually remember when that improved but now that you've said so it's obvious.
It has always been a fat pig, that's true. But it's all batteries included, all possible bells and whistles, so that's not terribly surprising.
ub3rst4r@reddit
I hate how clunky VS is, but at the end of the day, it does it's job. I especially like the new "Debug mode" for CoPilot. All you have to do is feed it the error or problem your having and it will trace through all the code until it reproduces the problem and then try to fix it. It's especially helpful when you're dealing with a huge codebase and you don't want to go through all sorts of methods to find what LoC is causing the problem. It's specifically meant for .NET (C#/VB) development so it's not meant for other languages and it only supports Windows which sucks if you're a Mac user.
blu3tu3sday@reddit
What's great is that VS Code works on Mac. I don't like the clunky behemoth that is Visual Studio, been using VS Code since university across all OSes though
ender-_@reddit
Vista really wasn't bad when it had decent enough hardware to run on (which means at least 2 GB RAM and a graphic card with WDDM driver). Unfortunately OEMs managed to convince MS to certify machines with 512 MB RAM and integrated i915 graphics as Vista-ready, which did not help things (drivers were a problem in the beginning as well due to new graphic driver model, but things mostly stabilised by the time SP1 rolled out).
When I switched to Windows 7 on release, it really wasn't that different from Vista – the two visible differences were improved taskbar (7 added pinning support) and less UAC prompts (OS built-in stuff gained the ability to elevate without prompting).
WindowsVistaWzMyIdea@reddit
Vista was the best OS ever, you take that back!
sheravi@reddit
Vista? Pfft. How about Windows Me? I knew a guy that installed Windows Me on 20 different lab computers. Identical hardware on all 20. Identical master image for all 20. Failed to load on about half of them for no reason.
StiffAssedBrit@reddit
Oh! I'd wiped Windows Me from my memory. Thanks for bringing that back! 😄
Wharhed@reddit
Vista Enterprise SP1 was a solid platform, at least when managed by gpo’s and no users had admin.
Deathra9@reddit
Ironically, Vista in an enterprise network was actually not too bad. It was hot garbage for consumers, but it was mild improvement for admin tasks.
tri_it@reddit
WindowsME was way worse than Vista.
InsaneGuyReggie@reddit
I had a programming class where we made programs in VS. My programs were always the most screwed up things. (E.G. a program for computing square roots with “Squarey the Clown”.)
The guy to my right struggled mightily in that class and when we weren’t giggling at the mockery I was making I was trying to help the guy. I was saddened when he didn’t come back after Thanksgiving break.
66659hi@reddit (OP)
I’m surprised your company actually picked up Vista Enterprise. I never saw it, all I saw was XP until around 2010-2012 after 7 got established with SP1 and IE10.
SwedeLostInCanada@reddit
Well, there were a few of us unlucky trailblazers who had to take one for the team and warn the rest of yous
CasualEveryday@reddit
Now we all get to be trailblazers every other year.
Belem19@reddit
Not all heroes wear capes...
Raah1911@reddit
Flash, silverlight
66659hi@reddit (OP)
Forgot about silverlight. Never had to manage it or anything but I remember having to install it for Netflix
dracotrapnet@reddit
Had to install it for the presidential inauguration of Obama. Odd that they chose such an obscure video streaming service for a public stream.
Appropriate-Border-8@reddit
We still have that damned useless Silverlight included on all of our images. 🙄
mallet17@reddit
I read this as fleshlight
Appropriate-Border-8@reddit
🤣🤣🤣
ambi7ion@reddit
Silverlight was so bad...
Calm_Vehicle_3351@reddit
I used to support Yardi, which in and of itself is insanity. But it also had a check scanner element that required silver light, it was always a mess to configure and keep working. This was 2019.
thehuntzman@reddit
I didn't mind Flash back before Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone and it was rather fun to make crude Albinoblacksheep type animations but holy fucking silverlight batman - that shit refuses to die in the enterprise world. We were trying to move off of a medical application that REQUIRED silverlight to run in the browser and it took a special raindance and a blood sacrifice to get a machine configured right to open the application to export our data (we have another application for bloodbank that uses XBAP which requires IE mode and registry hacks to work - yes it is "up to date" according to the vendor). Don't get into medical IT if you value your sanity.
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
Ugh, silverlight. I had forgotten about that software.
PeeEssDoubleYou@reddit
Citrix and its "support" for printing. Absolutely fucking awful.
JerikkaDawn@reddit
Symantec Era Backup Exec. No contest.
one4spl@reddit
Backup software and printers suck because they interface with a lot of different hardware and software.
Having been in IT 35 years I've seen several generations of backup software rise and fall, and each one rises because it's got a limited scope (only doing vmware and only to disk, such as early Veeam) but by the time it's huge and they have added tape and Linux and Windows and bunches of other shit to it now the new thing is just as slow and unrelaibe as the thing it supersceded (like Backup Exec).
New_Alps9032@reddit
I'm a big fan of Datto if you haven't checked it out
Cauli_Power@reddit
Tape drives in general were always like using generic PCL drivers. It's nice that the hardware is dumb enough to have a limited set of commands that don't require custom drivers ... But shit, I'd have loved me some native Linux utilities for my TL4000.
netboygold@reddit
Fucking YES
Backwoods_tech@reddit
That was a gigantic racehorse, hogging piece of shit. Worst backup software I’ve ever used.
Jon72480@reddit
The original Ghost software for cloning PCs was the absolute magic pill!
Less_Woodpecker_1915@reddit
Oh my gosh, you just awakened PTSD
mattelmore@reddit
Oh god I forgot about that
JerikkaDawn@reddit
It was great when it was Seagate. It was even great the first time the company was "Veritas." It went to crap at version 9 after Symantec got a hold of it.
OppositeStudy2846@reddit
Veritas (now owned by Coheisty btw) Backup Exec was actually a very stable and feature rich piece of tape library software. I kinda miss it from time to time.
pg3crypto@reddit
You probably never had to perform a large multi tape full restore.
OppositeStudy2846@reddit
Bet! You just had to verify and index your headers frequently enough to not cause disaster, but not too frequently where you could easily cause a disaster.
True-Kangaroo532@reddit
veritas was great. Cohesty is a good product. It’s a rip off but works well in the msp world.
Procure@reddit
I used Veritas BE at a previous job for a long time. It was pretty good actually... just worked on old ass LTO's
CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit
It was fine as Seagate too, I used it at home when I had Seagate DDS3/DDS4 tape drives. But yeah, Symantec was where everything goes to die.
StiffAssedBrit@reddit
It was Ok until the V12 revamp, then it became totally unusable. Worst was you could run a backup job manually, it would work, but schedule the exact same job and it would invariably fail!
_Dreamer_Deceiver_@reddit
Started failing when hard drives got cheap enough to do backups to. Everything was a "tape file" and was still dealt with linearly.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
Up until a year ago, I was still using it to back data up ok to tapes!
winky9827@reddit
Apt name.
Mystre316@reddit
My former account manager called them 'Verishity'.
slimeycat2@reddit
They have killed it off btw.
jeversol@reddit
It’s not dead.
Cohesity did not include Backup Exec in their purchase of NetBackup. It remained with Arctera, which was the rest of Veritas: InfoScale, Enterprise Vault, and Backup Exec.
OppositeStudy2846@reddit
But it’s going end of life now Arctera announced.
ThisIsBrahma@reddit
I was at Veritas at the height of their glory. It was a very tech forward in a good way. We were encouraged to dismantle the tape drives and learn how the software and hardware worked together. It was one of the most intense paces to learn a whole lot about the ecosystem. I still vaguely remember the daemons and commands etc. I was surprised when they sold to Symantec, sounded like someone was cashing out.
PlayingDoomOnAGPS@reddit
Everything goes to crap after Symantec gets hold of it.
airled@reddit
This entire thread is triggering my PTSD. Like every time I hear the Nokia ringtone.
pg3crypto@reddit
Same man. I'm seeing names of tech I havent seen in over a decade...I have repressed memories I didnt know I had.
Natural-Nectarine-56@reddit
Those memories were better off repressed!
Dr-Cheese@reddit
ughhh.
I remember when we first went over to Veeam, I thought the lack of constant errors/failures meant that it wasn't configured right. I was so gaslit by Backup Exec failing in new and interesting ways CONSTANTLY that I just thought it was par for the course with backup software.
JerikkaDawn@reddit
No joke, seriously. Every day I would come into work and BE would have a brand new never before seen excuse as to why it couldn't do its job again.
LOLBaltSS@reddit
At least I could restore shit. Asigra on the other hand absolutely fought me for weeks trying to restore a client that had flooded during Harvey.
pg3crypto@reddit
Oh god. Asigra...thats a name I havent heard in a long time.
Cauli_Power@reddit
Godzilla vs Asigra wasn't even close to a fair fight.
conlmaggot@reddit
Lol, fuck Asigra.
bschmidt25@reddit
From tape? That was about a 40/60 proposition for us (more likely to fail than succeed). God help you if you tried to use their disk based backups with deduplication. That shit never worked. Uncompressed disk backups were about the only thing that worked somewhat OK.
JerikkaDawn@reddit
Ah yes, but the trick with Symantec era Backup Exec is getting a good backup to restore from! 🤣
pg3crypto@reddit
...and tape drives in general. Nobody swapped them, nobody checked them, restoring from them rarely worked. Absolute scam.
dww0311@reddit
You win this one. Hands down the most abysmal thing ever created in the course of human history
trynsik@reddit
You're so right. Here I was scrolling through looking for somebody who said BES to upvote, and then I saw Backup Exec and realized I had just tried to block that out of my memory.
TkachukMitts@reddit
LOL BES - “oh you’ve updated your phone software? Guess your email is broken now”
Joshposh70@reddit
vssadmin list writers will be written on my tombstone.
Devar0@reddit
Jesus fucking christ I'd thought I'd pushed having to manage that all the way down. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo---
ansibleloop@reddit
Backup report email says success for the last week
Look inside
"Job success: 0 items backed up"
Flaming pile of shit
hellcat_uk@reddit
Netbackup. No issue couldn't be overcome by simply reading the 5000 page instruction manual on great detail.
cwestwater@reddit
Came here to say the same. POS!!!!!
Grimzkunk@reddit
IIRC we missed it for tape backup when we went with veeam.
djhankb@reddit
…with a Travan drive.
DiscipleOfYeshua@reddit
Symantec and McAfee, any product past year 2000 or so, causes more problems than it solves; and is at times harder to remove than the viruses it’s supposed to prevent.
bschmidt25@reddit
Nightmare material
MaelstromFL@reddit
Legato! Fuck Legato, who changes compression routines 8n a minor upgrade, fucking Legato does!
Far-Bug8297@reddit
lotus notes is still running somewhere in ur company right now
Traditional-Tech23@reddit
An internal security reporting platform which I sadly can't name for NDA reasons, but it tracked that all security settings were as per base line and any mistake was amplified. It then calculated a score which was compared other sites worldwide.
theshapester1980@reddit
oh thats an easy one for me. SAP
kvorythix@reddit
usually the hardware that dies at 2am and takes half the stack with it
rileyg98@reddit
Best Practice and the Medicare submission module for it that required Java 6u86 from memory.
Antiwraith@reddit
Windows ME
Anything Windows + SCSI (especially SCSI scanners)
Needing to load drivers from floppy for windows to detect your hard drive so you then load Windows via 9,000 floppy disks
Making a dial up modem work with Linux “back in the day”
Making a working X Windows config for your video card and monitor
Moving CRT monitors
Damn I think I might be getting old
russellvt@reddit
Used to have all three, sitting kn the shelf...
...pretty much shows you what it is, right across the boxes (CE+ME+NT).
rot26encrypt@reddit
Many mentioning Windows ME as expected but surprisingly few mentioning IE6...
Also, Clippy
russellvt@reddit
At least it was reasonably better than IE4... AKA "Aiyee!"
cosmin_c@reddit
=))
Having used all of those (NT4 was not bad though), I am absolutely flabbergasted ME is praised by some retro gamers. I have nothing but BSOD memories from that OS, if you looked at it wrong it would just peace out.
InternationalMany6@reddit
TIL that I’m old enough to be retro lol
hellcat_uk@reddit
I'm one of them who didn't find it any worse than '98. I'm almost to the point when I truly believe there were two builds in the world just to fuck with people. Maybe Dave's Garage will drop this bombshell at some point.
OHten@reddit
Same here. Friends had issues but it worked beautifully on my Super Socket 7, I believe the name was.
Never understood the hate for ME. I Think it was an across the board driver issue. I happened to be lucky my setup worked great.
Mostly just played all Nova Logic Delta Force games back then. It even dual-booted with live versions of Linux very well. Think I used Knoppix back then. Been a while.
Thanks for the memories!
cosmin_c@reddit
I think it was drivers, honestly. I had a couple of rather exotic things in the HP Pavilion I owned back then, such as a sound card with an integrated modem; motherboard also had integrated Riva TNT graphics (which was almost unheard of). Later on got a GeForce 2 Pro GPU which seemed to eliminate a lot of issues, but then XP also landed so all issues really disappeared.
fuzzylogic_y2k@reddit
When I was young, I spent 3 weeks figuring out how to smooth out the registry and some dll files for win me. Once that was out of the way it was a pretty version of its 98se and it was just as stable. But it honestly didn't need to exist. What was more fun was hacking directx into NT.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
I saw that coming!
bschmidt25@reddit
How's your back doing? I remember lugging those 19 and 21 in behemoths around back in my 20s. Surprised I can still stand up straight.
DuckyofDeath123_XI@reddit
We organized LAN Parties in a number of nearby community centres. Unreal Tournament, GLQuake, C&C, that sort of thing.
There was some rich prick with a 27" Sony Heavyasconcreteandtwiceasnicetolift-tron. Didn't take two years of LAN parties for him to put his back out to the point he couldn't come anymore. His wife had to drive him and she flat-out refused to help him carry anything. Refused to give up on the giant screen, so he tried to host the LAN parties at his house. Also did not land well with the missus.
I hope he lived to see broadband, because man, I assume he put himself in a wheelchair and through divorce 30 years ago for what is now bog standard: playing on a 27" with your buddies.
xdyzzex@reddit
Not great, but could be worse. Lugging those resulted in needing slipped disk fixed
sovereignpancakes@reddit
My entry point into IT was taking a summer job in 2000 helping upgrade the College of Engineering's computing labs. At least 200 of the machines we deployed were Sun Ultra 10 with 21" FD Trinitron monitors. 86 lbs each if I remember correctly. I was 19 at the time and that was still taxing.
Vesalii@reddit
Ive always preferes ME over 2000.
sykojaz@reddit
Around 2006 I worked for a dial up ISP that primarily catered to elderly beach town residents, many still using Win 98.
Can confirm SCSI sucked.
mdmeow445@reddit
It's the year 2000, and my job was IT helpdesk at my high school. It was minimum wage, which back then was $6.25 an hour. One of the more fun tasks was swapping out 15-inch CRT monitors for 19-inch CRT beasts for the teachers. Not a bad deal, really, since those same teachers probably handed me just enough passing grades to not fail school. :)
We also had the joy of manually assigning static IP addresses to hundreds of workstations, because our IT director was too incompetent to grasp DHCP. Hundreds of computers. 192.168.… ugh.
Anyways, those CRT monitors are almost certainly the reason my lower back is staging a revolt at 42.
bilange@reddit
Those two combined when you try to install Windows from a ISO onto an OEM machine (Say, Dell or Lenovo). Sorry, but you need to install MY specific disk controller before continuing.
I mean, it's 2026, can't we run on a generic adapter driver with limited functionality/performance until we get online and apply Windows Updates?
InevitableOk5017@reddit
Besides windows ME all of the other stuff was fun.
GistfulThinking@reddit
Oh man, then they adopted the need to load AHCI drivers for SATA for some hardware during OS installs.. for a real server, sure. For a basic desktop PC? ugh.
per08@reddit
Dial up modems worked fine with Linux back in the day. It's just that for a time most "modems" were software defined sound cards with a line interface.
LameBMX@reddit
I was just gonna say.. ill see you linux modem.. and raise you a win modem under linux!
skydivinfoo@reddit
ah, the fond memory of my first time with X11R6 on FreeBSD, adjusting the settings out of range, because I had no clue what I was doing, and completely zapping my CRT. I loved that old Compaq monitor, had built in speakers and everything. RIP 🤣
homepup@reddit
I knew it would be here, but I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud. I yell at any coworker who dares utter that name...
Tx_Drewdad@reddit
Especially if you wanted it to work with a domain controller. System Policies. Oh. My. Fucking. God.
Tricky_Adeptness1643@reddit
Ceridian dayforce
Nearby-Pattern8644@reddit
Exchange 4
nyckidryan@reddit
qMail 😄
padde0711@reddit
Windows 11
GradeAccomplished322@reddit
Any multi-line fax system, all of them suck! The bigger they are, the more they suck!
Any spam filtering solution. Any sufficiently large solution will fail someone somehow. Nobody is ever perfectly happy with them.
Any email with more than five recipients!
Ok-Big2560@reddit
RightFax works fine for me.
ImmediateLobster1@reddit
We had a multiline fax that was great. Castille? maybe... bulletproof, never went down. pretty configurable.
ipzipzap@reddit
Tobit Faxware was great!
Ok-Big2560@reddit
I've supported 75% of the apps being listed here and its Java hands down.
New production app requires Sun JRE 5.0 but half the user need to use 3 other apps that won't work with anything higher than JRE 4.
Physical App servers hosting a single app because it would only work with one specific version of Java and t 6 exact Active X options that weren't compatible with any of the other 60 Java based apps running on 40.other physical servers.
Java 6 critical vulnerability come out and requires a patch that randomly crashes Kronos.
Lakers_0824@reddit
Printers….
timallen445@reddit
It's not the printers fault. MSP job where the mantra was never update. Turns out you need your print client and print server (also basically all clients and servers) to be on the same patch level.
Had a situation where a handful of specific yet not special characters would cause a single page in an 80+ page print job to be blank or have a generic character on it.
Same MSP had a prior employee make basic scripts that would print to specific trays. Software update reversed the tray order.
It was never the printers. they were why everyone was angry but it was never the printers
stgovern@reddit
Leader fixes for 6250 reel tapes on an AS/400.
orby@reddit
Visual source safe Salesforce Glassfish
stgovern@reddit
I almost forgot about using Source Safe with a huge VB6 project, and the constant corruption.
LesbianDykeEtc@reddit
Salesforce is only as good as your engineers make it. I used to work for a Fortune 500 that ran their entire KMS, CRM, and customer-facing dashboard on Salesforce. It handled everything impressively well and was easy to navigate.
If it's not built well though, it's awful.
orby@reddit
It is an interesting platform, but it isn't consistent and to your point, exceptionally dependent on your team. I've seen it at potentially it's worst. Your sales rep can be everything or nothing. You may end up building on sand without knowing it. Doing it the "right way" is going to change. APEX/SOQL aren't powerful enough. It gets super expensive per seat very quickly to solve things that should just really be included.
I'm not saying it's the worst CRM/ERP/etc. But for me? It caused me a specific amount of hell and regret.
disposablerubric@reddit
The data corruption of Visual Source Safe and having to restore from tape backups still gives me nightmares.
backdoorsmasher@reddit
Yes - I remember seeing it eat files very early in my career. Scary that it was the standard source control in use at Microsoft houses
Flannakis@reddit
Adobe products trying to manage in Intune
theedan-clean@reddit
Adobe products.
GistfulThinking@reddit
Not even their products.. just their PDFs.
I got sent a PDF telling me I had to use Adobe to even read it, because the person who created said PDF left the "sell our crap" box ticked in their $300 a year subscription they use to save files as PDFs.
Which could be done for $0.
Had to open it in firefox to scroll past the coverage and see the....EMAIL they could have forwarded me instead of turning it into a PDF.
ITAdministratorHB@reddit
Just face-palmed IRL reading that last bit
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
So we had the same issue with Adobe Creative Cloud products. My recommendation is, if on-prem, use a PowerShell script running on a server to call the Remote Update Manager with the --install switch. It will update ALL software in CC that needs it, silently. Your machines will need internet connection, and if they don't, you can stage the files on a server running AUSST.
But RUM solved the issue entirely. The trick was building a script that could run it on 50 machines at once. We just put a CSV file in with the hostnames, and it runs overnight.
I dunno if that helps, but maybe it does for some person out there.
theedan-clean@reddit
Have the joy of managing Creative Cloud on Macs.
Whatever you say about Mac management, Apple MDM and coming DMD has gotten 100x better than it was, while Adobe's self/admin managed packaging thing still makes no difference. Fucking nightmare to manage this bloat/spyware. Enough extra licensing and validation processes, and attempts to reinstall, to choke a PDF.
russellvt@reddit
Adobe Licensing Server... FML
BoltActionRifleman@reddit
Outlook
kennyj2011@reddit
Which one? Lol
theloop82@reddit
New Outlook (New) Copilot Edition
angrydeuce@reddit
I swear to fucking christ if they ever get rid of the normal Outlook and force us all to use Outlook For Dummies I am going to find and lock whoever made that decision in my basement and blast that Easy Street song over and over again like they did to Darryl in Walking Dead.
theloop82@reddit
Yeah it’s utterly shit. Not being able to right click or pick where you save an attachment is just criminally shit design.
ITAdministratorHB@reddit
My manager (head of IT) loves (NEW) Outlook for some unholy reason
phillymjs@reddit
With one “It’s Not Unusual” thrown in somewhere, to give them hope the torture is over.
Vesalii@reddit
Can i join you so i can beat the with a sock full of bolts?
blizardX@reddit
Name checks out.
DoctorOctagonapus@reddit
My work are threatening to do that. I told the head of security and compliance exactly what I think of such a decision and outright said I'd alter the registry to reverse it on my machine.
Destrae@reddit
Just this week my old Outlook decided it can't reply to encrypted emails. If I have to switch to new Outlook I'm cashing in all my PTO and reconsidering my career
katet_of_19@reddit
I have 2 Microsoft Outlooks and neither of them are working
thors_tenderiser@reddit
This person astronauts
jfoust2@reddit
This is Major Tom to tech support
I’m clicking on the tab
But it’s acting in a most peculiar way
And the menu ribbon looks quite different today
The background has gone blue
And there's nothing I can do
Tech Support to Major Tom
Thanks for your call, is your computer on?
Tech support to Major Tom
Your version's old, there's something wrong
Can you Teams me Major Tom
Can you Teams me Major Tom
Ground control to major tom
your outlooks dead
there’s something wrong
InternationalMany6@reddit
Need more upvotes!
ButterscotchNo7292@reddit
Are you still seeing the other side of the moon though?
gameoftomes@reddit
I am enjoying media with VLC, no problems.
T-J_H@reddit
Yes.
rapp38@reddit
All of them
The_Original_Conman@reddit
The newest one.
Brandhor@reddit
yes
Plantatious@reddit
Yes
TopDeliverability@reddit
Yes
LopsidedLegs@reddit
97 included with Office 97. It was so bad, that they release Outlook 98 completely free for everyone.
henry_potter@reddit
Outlook Classic (new) new copy 2
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
Oh, lord. Another MS travesty. Why in god's green earthy when I do a reply to a email I sent, it sends it to me?? Even Gmail is smart enough to know who I want to send it to.
And why on earth if you click just a hair right of the flag icon, it thinks you clicked the delete icon.
BoltActionRifleman@reddit
Yes! This happens to me all the time.
InternationalMany6@reddit
You mean CoPilot?
MS only has one product now
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
Feels like I've heard nothing but horror stories about Outlook, but never encountered anywhere near the issues people claim it is. Often the issue is exchange.
Ok-Tangerine-6705@reddit
Our company have made us move from old to new, but I have to keep the latest one closed to stop my machine grinding to a halt, so I have to remember to open it periodically so I can get work done..
cfmdobbie@reddit
"[Client] just called me and said they've received two hundred of the same email from me and they're still coming in!"
Oh good, another mailbox got slightly too large and Outlook decided to handle it in the WORST POSSIBLE WAY.
russellvt@reddit
Lookout ^+
r3almaplesyrup@reddit
At least your users are not in space..
simask234@reddit
Plot twist: they do actually work for NASA
MoonToast101@reddit
The one that keeps in giving.
Great-Pen1986@reddit
Schooldude
codeshane@reddit
Intersystems Ensemble
JustTheComputerGuy@reddit
Crestron. For the love of God, crestron
machacker89@reddit
One of the many applications Big Pharma uses. its a PITA
tangelo-a@reddit
esXpress
Visible-Ad8304@reddit
ACS
mm3873@reddit
Windows
Free_Styling23@reddit
SysAid for handling tickets. Its interface is clunky, unintuitive, and support for the software is largely nonexistent.
pg3crypto@reddit
Sounds like every help desk package. Heard of HEAT?
Free_Styling23@reddit
Yes, used it while working at a hospital. First job in IT nearly twenty years ago.
pg3crypto@reddit
Fuck hospitals man. I worked as a contractor for an MSP that had an NHS trust as a client. They had a massive internal IT department but none of them could do anything. All the hard stuff like SQL, exchange, backups etc was outsourced. They all just sat around playing Quake all day. All useless post grads.
Free_Styling23@reddit
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the IT field does seem to attract many people who are lazy and rely on talent alone instead of also doing the hard work involved that is necessary in order to learn new skills.
pg3crypto@reddit
Its not necessarily hard work if you do the job right. I woukd say public sector organisations lack talent because they hire exclusively through graduate schemes then forget to train them. Most folks that come through those schemes dont really have a passion or interest in tech...its just a career choice / job unfortunately.
For older folks in the industry, such as myself, there has always been a passion and interest. I became an engineer specifically because it meant I didnt have to get a "proper" job...I never really saw it as a job, just a way to avoid getting one...these days though, it is actually a job with managers, KPIs and all the other corporate bullshit that comes with it...fortunately I escaped before I had to suffer that and became freelance where it is still the wild west and still possible to be a rockstar!
Free_Styling23@reddit
Well, as for me, I'm 39 years old, soon to turn 40. Have the CompTIA trifecta or so it's called by fellow IT professionals, and a BS in Information Technology. Really wish I focused more on certifications about 10-15 years ago. It's a rough job market out there in the US economy and I'm currently unemployed. Want to study for the CCNA some more so that I can pass the exam but have to find a job first so that I'm financially stable.
pg3crypto@reddit
I'm around your age, I'm freelance. Go freelance man. No matter what you apply for, you're going to be at the older end of the candidate list, which makes things difficult no matter what certs you have...the thing with the IT industry is that the older you get the fewer people there are your age...especially in demanding roles like network engineering...I can't pull the same shit at 42 that I could pull off in my 20s...I used to do solid 72 hour runs and just sleep it off over half a day. That shit would kill me now...same with lifting heavy equipment...I'm pretty fit for my age, but its so much easier to pull a muscle and the recovery time is measured in weeks rather than days.
Its not uncommon now for businesses to have an internal team of juniors and hire a freelancer in to assist on more complicated stuff / train them up.
I quite like training young engineers, most of the time you're training boneheads, but once in a while you find an absolute gem...those are the guys you want to put the most effort into because they will move around lots of roles and remember you when they need help in the future.
Ive got about half a dozen such engineers out there and they all feed me work here and there when they need experience on hand, come across some dead tech or just want a second pair of hands on a project that they can rely on.
The tougher ones to train are the ones that come out of academia...but they are the easiest to bring onboard...after they've spent years in the slow trudge of academia and finally see the absolute pace of a genuine pro, their minds explode.
There was one guy who was absolutely mind blown when I tracked down a switching loop. He had been troubleshooting drop outs and slow DHCP for months, reeled off loads of diagnostic shit he'd done, talked about spanning tree packets, duplicate packets, said he had a load of PCAPs etc, but couldnt find the problem. His boss called me in, I wandered around the three rooms that had switches in, pointed at a switch...unplugged two cables and asked where they patched to...discovered one had a desktop switch plugged in with a loop in it. Unplugged the loop. Problem solved. Took about 30 minutes.
Dude was flabbergasted.
There was another time another young engineer called me, he was on shift at a customer of mine and he notices that a load of databases had failed. I was hiking up a mountain on a day off. So I said, I'd get back in touch shortly. I didnt have a laptop with me, just my phone (and it was a shit phone because hiking), it supported tethering so I walked to a nearby Tesco Supermarket and bought a tablet. A Tesco Hudl (they were only £89 at the time, so a cheap way to get SSH in a pinch). Tethered it to my phone and SSH'd to the datacentre to take a look. It was a multiple disk failure that took everything down. Luckily there were hotspare drives available and replica of the data existed, so I switched the databases over to the replicas and set the RAID rebuilding. Called the guy back and explained what I did, then he pointed out that I might need to check something else "some guy in Snowdonia in a tablet just accessed the network, I think we've been breached". I told him it was me and he couldnt wrap his head around the work I'd just done and the fact that I'd some it on a shitty supermarket tablet. This was over a decade ago now, but people still remember!
Both of these guys I ended up training and they're badass in their own right now. Probably exceed me in a lot of ways, but they carry my methodologyies and thought processes!
The best part is when my trainees parachute me in, they don't have to waste time explaining things. They know exactly what I need to know, so I get exactly what I need to solve problems which makes me even faster.
Free_Styling23@reddit
Cool story, bro. Spending time at University was probably the worst mistake I made for the purpose of getting a leg up in the field. Four-year degrees seem to barely matter anymore in the States. Employers (here) don't want to see titles; they expect competence and, pretty much, an immediate ROI from candidates they bring on board.
pg3crypto@reddit
Absolutely. Degrees aren't inherently bad, they just dont line up in terms of the time and resources required to learn technical skills.
A current day Comp Sci degree contains roughly the same knowledge as an MCSE used to contain...you could do an MCSE in a month. A degree takes 4 years.
So while you come out of a degree with decent knowledge, you're actually over 3 years behind in terms of experience. Thats where the problem is. If it was possible to Como Sci at a self study pace (I.e. be able to do it in half a year) and it was priced competitively with equivalent certs, it might be worth it.
If you compare two virtually identical engineers of the same age. One just finishing their degree and one who went straight into tech instead of college. The one that skipped the degree is going to be more competent and valuable...even though they may posses essentially the same knowledge...because the guy that went straight in has 3 years applying his knowledge while learning it. Whereas the degree guy has zero real world expert nice.
You can achieve the same level of knowledge as a bog standard tech graduate for free if you really want to.
Also being self taught doesnt hold the same stigma itnwoukd in other fields...because tech is a largely hands on practical field, its not that difficult to demonstrate competence. Whereas in other STEM fields it is quite difficult.
Also, in tech there is so much on top of the technical skill that is required. Interpersonal skills, managing expectations, handling pissed off people etc etc...you just dont get that from a degree. In the real world simple mistakes can cost millions of dollars, not just a few dropped marks that lower your grade.
Free_Styling23@reddit
Thanks for all of your insight, man. I really appreciate you. I may look into becoming a freelancer in IT somewhere down the line. Although I really need to bone up on Cisco and Microsoft technologies, as it pertains to computer networking and system administration respectively, before I attempt to do so. I have worked mostly help desk type of jobs in the past and currently have 5 solid years under my belt. I also realize that a lot has changed in our field in the past 22 years since I graduated from high school (secondary school), specifically with regard to where, how and by whom computer systems are presently maintained and administrated, i.e., many companies have moved their systems to cloud platforms, such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS, and as such typically do not maintain/administrate their servers from company premises anymore (if they own them at all), and the concurrent rise of Managed Service Providers.
pg3crypto@reddit
MSPs didnt really exist when I started out. There were 3 of 4 in London and I was the second or third hire where I worked...Ive seen how the industry has moved and progressed...and you know what, its the freelancers that provide the best service. MSPs don't really work because you have too many customers spread thinly over not enough engineers...slow escalation processes and weird billing structures.
As a freelancer I take the unusual step of not charging by the hour. I charge a flat monthly fee based on what In estimate will be the average workload. This works really well for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I can bill all year round, there is no "quiet" period for me and I dont have to constantly upsell, sell licenses and all tjenotjer crap that comes along with IT services. Secondly, I dont cap when or how often a customer can raise a ticket. They can raise a ticket whenever they like. The only conditions are that I will respond within an hour and begin work within 1 working day. Most of the time I resolve issues within a couple of hours. Because I have control over when I start work on a ticket, I can prioritise them. A lot of MSPs have tiered response times and rates which locks them in to having to respond urgently to something that isnt urgent or waiting weeks to get something fixed that needs urgent attention (because they dont want to pay the premium rates for a job they know will take a while). Its a nightmare.
I will simply visit the client, look at what they have, speak to some of their staff to get a feel for how demanding they might be and estimate a monthly bill. If they agree, they can log what they want when they want and if I get it right (I usually do), I'll never be out of pocket.
As for stuff you need to learn. Nobody in the industry knows everything. Not one person. The way you get around that is by building a network of other freelancers around you that you can support and that can support you.
Never worry about being able to support a customers setup in its entirety. There are very few people that are actually capable of that, and the ones that are usually suck in many other ways. The best freelancers know people and can find people that can help.
Worrying that you dont know enough is probably an indicator that you already know quite a lot...smart people know that they know nothing, dumb people think they know everything. Once you wrap your head around that, you'll be fine...also remember a key part of engineering is failing. You can know the correct way to do something until you've fucked it up a few times.
When you meet shit hot experienced engineers and you want to get to know them but you havent a clue how to break the ice...tell them about your biggest fuck up and ask them about theirs. Talking about projects that went well and wins is really boring...having the balls to speak about your fuck ups and own them isn't! Engineers will talk to you for hours about fuck ups and what they learnt, they'll give you 5 minutes if you talk to them about a "sick setup" and show them photos of a perfect rack wiring job you did...engineers all want to learn and you learn nothing from hearing about a project that went perfectly.
There's nothing wrong with screwing up as long as you know how to walk things backwards...eventually you'll understand that engineering isnt about being right the first time, its about failing as fast as possible until you find the right solution.
Free_Styling23@reddit
All the same, thanks for your perspective on the matter. 👍🏼
Ok_Strawberry6658@reddit
Netware 2.15 taking like 24 diskettes to gen the Operating system or the built in netware software level disk mirroring - hard to distinguish source and target when setting up mirrored pairs
Plenty-Hold4311@reddit
Hikvision plugins for logging into the camera’s web UI
Nongshim123@reddit
Borland paradox
siberian@reddit
Late 1990s Compaq DL360 power suppliers. They would brownout randomly so you just experienced life as a series of untraceable soft and hard failures. OS up, hard drive disappears. Reboot, its all back. System randomly reboots. Network drops out and comes back.
I had racks of these fuckers. Was so glad to get rid of them.
Smart_Entertainer740@reddit
Novell Netware 5.0. Nothing is worse than that in my career. Period. No wonder they have gone out of business.
spawnbong@reddit
Printers
siddhi_parakh07@reddit
Internet Explorer 6 still haunts me. I have spent a lot of time fixing CSS bugs, in Internet Explorer 6 of actually building things with Internet Explorer 6. This is really frustrating when I think about Internet Explorer 6.
se7enreddit@reddit
Windows 8, Windows Vista...
waterconnected@reddit
Easy one: Salesforce
Nexzus_@reddit
Great Plains
BoomSchtik@reddit
What do you mean? It was so easy to update. We totally didn’t have to pay a consultant to upgrade to the next version. /s
brejackal99@reddit
We still live with this evil!
PlsChgMe@reddit
Same
dravenscowboy@reddit
Same here. My brother in pain.
CleverCarrot999@reddit
THE HORRORS 😱
Antique_Gur_6340@reddit
Ooof I would get calls about that at like 2 am 😭
PalliativeOrgasm@reddit
Oh uck me, I’d blocked out supporting Dynamics on Netware with the Btree database.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
Did you remember to load IPXODI?
Zaphod1620@reddit
I remember calling MS Support for an issue and it became quickly obvious they had no idea how to make Great Plains work either.
Afraid_Baseball_3962@reddit
Pretty much everything about Dynamics breaks SQL Server best practices.
Afraid_Baseball_3962@reddit
Anything Dynamics (GP, AX, etc). They all suck.
Flaky-Gear-1370@reddit
At least Microsoft sunsetted it after acquisition
vermyx@reddit
But that is latest and greatest texh I have to support!/s
DrGraffix@reddit
Great Pains
Xe1ex@reddit
Oh god I had managed to block that out. The nightmares I'm going to have tonight...
BoomSchtik@reddit
Dell (Quest?) AppAssure.
Hands down the worst backup software I’ve ever used.
Lazy_Conclusion_673@reddit
Quickbooks
Maverick0@reddit
Why is it that I've touched so many of the mentioned softwares in here?.. the horror....
tonkats@reddit
I'm laughing because the job I quit was still using 70% of what's listed in here.
God I love my new job. Still using some legacy stuff, but there are active plans to modernize.
the_helpdesk@reddit
Encompass 360.
ActiveX and the maze of IE settings to make them work.
Everything Fiserv.
SharpDressedBeard@reddit
This is the first time I have ever seen someone else that had to deal with this. My first proper job was at a mortgage company in 2010, and I owned that system from day 1 with no idea what it even was.
We also ran an RDP gateway because the ceo didn't believe in VPN's and people would RDP into a live open to the fucking world server so they could run encompass remotely.
the_helpdesk@reddit
If memory serves, encompass ran like dog shit over the VPN. So we just served everything over Citrix published apps, or published desktops depending on the role.
SharpDressedBeard@reddit
This guy just didn't like em or whatever.
We had RDP open on all our production windows servers with public DNS entries. Utter madness.
kanid99@reddit
Yes. Yes. Oh and yes. Also most anything from Jack Henry.
the_helpdesk@reddit
I found Jack Henry to be better than Fiserv, but yeah, still trying to forget how to map a printer to a workstation. Or mass updating symitar.
buffalopancake@reddit
I thought I would like Jack Henry more than Fiserv but the way they 1:1 map IP addresses to consoles basically means my entire network is DHCP reserved. Almost feels pointless to have a DHCP server at this point.
the_helpdesk@reddit
When I joined the credit union where I was introduced to JH, everything was static. The only dhcp was done on the wireless networks. /16 flat networks at each branch. It was a mess. By the time I left 5 years later, we had converted everything to proper segments and dhcp reservations. It felt so damn good.
GiAx_898@reddit
I'm still dealing with Encompass 360. Support/KB articles are horrible still.
the_helpdesk@reddit
🫡 my condolences
WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit
And I mean EVERYTHING Fiserv.
rdo197@reddit
I've spent the past week battling with fiserv's change control board for Network changes. My liver is rapidly declined because of this
farva_06@reddit
Fiserv was literally the first thing I though of when I saw this post. Haven't dealt with it in over 10 years, but still remember it not fondly.
Was hoping someone else had mentioned it, and was not disappointed.
TheBestHawksFan@reddit
Fiserv can go to hell
kennyj2011@reddit
Fiserv is terrible
TheProle@reddit
Novell Netware environment running GroupWise email
I_Am_Become_Air@reddit
Western Digital drives. In laptops, PCs, and SANs. Soooo much replacement for failure.
darkhelmet46@reddit
I'm gonna go with TCP port 3389 exposed to the Internet
deathbyearthworm@reddit
Macola, unfortunately I still support it. I suppose I'm not waking from this nightmare.
coyote_den@reddit
This is going to be extremely niche but…
A CXFS SAN and those damn SGI Altix Itanic-based metadata servers.
Appropriate-Border-8@reddit
Windows Vista
My mom had Vista installed on one of her computers and one day, it started to blue screen on each boot. It would also blue screen when booted up on the Vista install DVD. I could boot from the install DVD if the HD was unplugged. Once I plugged the HD back in, while booted up on the install DVD, it would immediately blue screen. I cannot find an article about it now but, back then, I stumbled upon a Microsoft forum post that said that a certain obscure system file had become corrupt and deleting it would stop the blue screens from happening. Microsoft's recommendation was to wipe the drive and reinstall Vista from scratch (no way to backup existing documents). Instead, I booted the computer using SystemRescueCD, loaded the R/W NTFS driver in a terminal window, and then deleted the file. Problem solved and it never reoccurred again. Her documents were accessible and they were burned to a CD, just in case.
List of Vista issues
https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/s/umb2CvV3Qa
Traditional-Hall-591@reddit
Copilot. The trauma is ongoing.
GoodLyfe42@reddit
Which copilot….
Traditional-Hall-591@reddit
I’d have to ask but all the contributions are sloppy and not helpful.
whitemagemxp@reddit
Is it premium? That has multiple models, including Anthropic. The base, free models are terrible but the paid enterprise solutions are absolutely useful for conversational purposes
kojimoto@reddit
I didn't know about the Opus model from Claude, thanks
KageRaken@reddit
I use opus 3x cost for everything just to spite the folks paying for it. Burned through my token allotment for this month by the 10th.
I have also been telling people in my org about opus and our company not restricting our token usage at all ...
We'll see how long it takes before the finance guys start throwing a fit.
Traditional-Hall-591@reddit
Malicious compliance, I love it.
Traditional-Hall-591@reddit
I don’t use it. The problem is that others will run their problems through Copilot, send the output to me. They expect me to reply with a “good job!!” even though there was nothing useful in the output. It is fun debunking it when an exec is reading it, though.
techno-azure@reddit
Basically anything IBM
Exciting-498@reddit
Lotus notes and as400
Another_Random_Chap@reddit
Microsoft Project - ruining IT since 1984.
twolfhawk@reddit
Teams.
HotLoveLazyPoet@reddit
Sage 100
Amazing_Ad7386@reddit
InstallAnywhere installers and trying to get those silently installed on Windows.
rollingc@reddit
I don't like this thread. After almost 30 years in IT, it's just non stop PTSD.
DuckyofDeath123_XI@reddit
*Read thread*
*Go to bed*
*Wake up screaming*
Puzzleheaded_You2985@reddit
My eye is twitching
ebietoo@reddit
I had a massive stroke and had to retire. This thread reminds me why.
Thrizzlepizzle123123@reddit
I feel like I'm reading the names of the men who killed my wife and child.
I never got married and never had kids.
synthgab@reddit
An HASP security dongle (wikipedia link below) to plug on the parallel port between the motherboard and the printer.
Why not, except that this thing actually hijacked the bi-directional capabilities of the port, effectively preventing new printers to communicate back or even scanners to just do their job.
A headache at the time to explain the issue, cause and workaround (remove it for scanning, plug it back when using this software) to both my old dad and the Encyclopædia Universalis sales rep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle
Ill-Detective-7454@reddit
Avaya ip office
pg3crypto@reddit
Avaya IP Office. Christ.
Fuck this thread man. My PTSD is coming back.
I didnt mind using Avaya, it made sense...its just the PBX hardware would occasionally revert back to an old config for no reason at all.
Ill-Detective-7454@reddit
Yeah we dont even sell it anymore but we got like 30 customers that still use it with shitty sdcards that can die at any moment.
pg3crypto@reddit
I havent used Avaya in about 10 years now...but their older systems the hardware suuuuuucked. The phones were all digital as well so you needed twice as many patch panels.
Avaya is the reason loads of comms rooms had messy cabling. Because of moving phones around and double the patch leads.
YoNa82@reddit
Intune - it still hurts.
Beasty34@reddit
In one job I had briefly I was tasked with setting up a guest WiFi SSID with rotating login details that could be created/handed out by reception.
Problem was that this site was at the other end of the country with nobody technical on the ground there and the wifi system itself was a strange German vendor where you pushed the config to the AP’s from an app.
Needless to say I never properly achieved this before I left. I probably could have done better, especially these days with AI assistance but I believe I was set up to fail.
aisa10@reddit
HP Printers 100%
geegol@reddit
Crystal reports, Epicore. Quickbooks. ProCim.
Hated all of those so much. Still gives me PTSD to this day.
jason9045@reddit
10Base-2 networking. Just imagine, if you will, a networking standard that would take out the entire office if you bumped a cable wrong or accidentally loosened a connector anywhere on the network.
Angelworks42@reddit
Or how about arcnet - setting network addresses via dip switches is fun :)
airled@reddit
I was a student worker 30+ years ago and part of my job was crawling under desks to see if the coax was still connected and none of terminators fell off.
thx1138a@reddit
Oh my god me too. In my case it was very badly worsened by the company reusing old Wang drop cables. A year and an entire floor box rewire later we finally realised. I should really have said “those don’t look like twisted pair to me” on the day I joined.
thx1138a@reddit
10 base T in my case
The_Original_Conman@reddit
Yup. Been there. Done that. Learned some hard lessons.
PalliativeOrgasm@reddit
Same, maybe a bit longer. Mix of coax and garden hose with vampire taps between areas.
Rotten_Red@reddit
I still have T connectors and terminators somewhere
justcallmebitty@reddit
Getting the cable anywhere near a baseboard heater caused all kinds of intermittent fun.
geekworking@reddit
We would always put a few wraps of electric tape around the bnc ends so that nobody would casually disconnect them trying to "fix" or move something.
duckamuk@reddit
Going far enough back, in the Netware Dos days, after you moved the terminator to the next device you had to reboot the computer to see if that was the culprit.
IndependentBat8365@reddit
bWas a cable monkey for an IT shop, one of our clients was a big real estate firm with like 30 subcontracted realtors in a single office. Had an emergency call one Saturday to help them with their network as all of their MLS software and CRM was offline.
One realtor wanted to work from home that weekend, so unplugged their PC and took it home. Left the 10base2 connectors on the floor with the T-connector still in the back of their PC.
Puzzleheaded_You2985@reddit
AppleTalk enters the chat.
jmdinbtr@reddit
This reminder me; Token Ring.
Possumbox2000@reddit
Soldering on Twinax connectors for dumb terminals. DB 25’s were a piece of cake compared to Twinax
cptaxelb@reddit
That was the serial Christmas lights of the network generation
Accurate-Ad6361@reddit
Most of all and anything I hate is software that doesn’t Support let’s encrypt in 2026, looking at you, Microsoft.
I think Lotus is getting a bad rep for people not being able to use it. It’s a DB / client software that was very Advanced for it’s time. I am not saying domino (Lotus backend DB) is the cool kid on the Block, but it’s not half as bad as some people describe it. UPS Worldship and generally every Shipping API ever invented by a logistics company, it is till today not clear to me Why having First Name and Last Name in one field ever became a discussion.
Anything extending Browsers by Microsoft (Silver… and the other one i mentally supressed).
useredditto@reddit
Haha. Was about to post this
russellvt@reddit
AUI connectors! Woohoo!
xander255@reddit
Loose T connector or terminator. 🤣
wavemelon@reddit
Oh god I remember it well…
wavemelon@reddit
Anyone else end up with a co-ax sculpture on their desk after migrating away?
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
Oh, yeah, You end up with people who decided to use some ARCNet cable (RG-62) and/or use those "T" taps to fork the network. And then they wonder why it's unreliable.
Haunting-Prior-NaN@reddit
Well, you get what you pay for, and in this case the grand total value of your network was the cable.
brakertech@reddit
WebSphere and IBM HTTP Server. Even the creator regrets making it
r3dd1tr@reddit
CD Burners, Printers, Handheld Scanners, Windows Notebooks, Symbian Phones, Lotus Notes for sure, BNC Cable Networks, DOS PCs with too many cards…. I could do this for a while.
perk3131@reddit
Practically everything in this post along with multiplexers and printronix printers
CreepioAfricanus@reddit
Microsoft Outlook, MS Exchange, o365...
pmbaldwin@reddit
NIS+
oddchihuahua@reddit
NVIDIA switches
66659hi@reddit (OP)
I never even knew nVidia made switches or NICs. TIL. Only ever dealt with Cisco. I only knew of nvidia for video cards and chipsets.
oddchihuahua@reddit
They’re basically Linux machines with routing and switching software modules installed.
I have touched them twice. The first…the application allows you to make all the changes you need before actually saving them. The switch just stopped passing traffic before I saved anything.
The second time I simply logged into a pair of switches that were M-LAG’d together…and BGP completely dropped on one of the two switches.
I hate them now because it seems like every time I touch them shit breaks.
SuperWarning6038@reddit
Working wirh MS Exchange 4.0
GoodLyfe42@reddit
I’m surprised on prem exchange server is not higher
I_ride_ostriches@reddit
Java
dewman45@reddit
PC Mars.
BeyondRAM@reddit
Watchguard Firewalls
Business Central
HIK NVR
Orca Slicer
kalebludlow@reddit
Printers
DeerOnARoof@reddit
Any printer driver ever created
Ok-Condition6866@reddit
Polycom vbp. Or anything polycom related.
JasonDJ@reddit
The Lowes website.
Homedepot is a bit better (only in terms of website build-quality)...but not much.
Ace is alright but forget about finding a specific sized screw or something.
texcleveland@reddit
Working on it or using it? Frankly i’m pretty impressed with Home Depot’s system, knowing it’s a mainframe backend
JasonDJ@reddit
Using it. I had a terrible experience with them this week.
Idk why but...working in tech, I'm a much more critical user. Still, you would expect a modern big-box store to have a halfway decent web presence by now. Even Target re-did the atrocity that was MyRedCard Account Management (mrcam) a couple years ago. It still has its faults, but it's at least much more functional now.
Ended up cancelling most of my order after my brand new Lowes card...second transaction, on the day it was opened, was "flagged for identity verification"; the store modified the order (I think to change one or two things to be fulfilled from warehouse), which led to that item having to be refunded and then charged back.
As a result of this, they won't allow any more chats until I go to their website, record a 30 second video of my face, and upload a copy of my drivers license.
Fuck. All. Of. That.
Alternatively, I could wait for their letter to come in, and then mail them a photocopy of my license, a utility/bank/mortgage statement, etc...but I couldn't care less about having a "MyLowes" credit card. I've got outstanding credit and literally only signed up for $100 off the purchase.
But then...the second order also modified the order, and ran into the exact same problem. And this time, they wanted to charge me a $79 delivery fee, when originally it was free delivery.
Of course, you would think that when there are two orders placed the same day to the same address, and all of the pieces are in-stock at the same store, they'd just...deliver them on the same trip...or at the very least, source them from the same store...but no. Lowes Logistics are a dark art, understood by very few and mastered by none.
The really funny thing is...I had this same issue, almost exactly, with Home Depot, maybe 3 or 4 years ago.
roger_ramjett@reddit
Printers in general
CerebralAscension@reddit
As400, lotus notes, teams
FarkinDaffy@reddit
Citrix? I love it.
But so many people have no idea about how it actually works and just run it into the ground.
fentonjm@reddit
ITunes while updating and early iPhone.....
Quirky-Fun-9901@reddit
Lotus Notes.
HP HPVG FastEthernet cards - they conflicted with windows memory so you had to set the memory range in bios,
Cheyenne Arcserve
Fiserv
Early Active Directory
Suffnuts@reddit
Novell netware
Quirky-Fun-9901@reddit
Novell was a far superior network/identity server by every measure. If only the company understood marketing.
PalliativeOrgasm@reddit
Sometimes I miss it, even rebuilding the 2.x binaries from obj files to add drivers. Netware fucking worked. Even with NNS (the few who ever knew what NNS was will understand the pain.). It did a few things amazingly well, and NDS was miles ahead of NT 3.5 or earlier. I got out of it when I saw where 5.0 was headed and moved to Solaris and Linux.
Quirky-Fun-9901@reddit
This is so true. The java gui in 5.0 trying to be windows... that was awful.
Sad-Ship@reddit
Ok ok, hear me out. Groupwise told you when someone forwarded your email, so you had advance notice when you fucked up.
Gryphtkai@reddit
The problem with GroupWise was that it was a messaging database instead of a email client. Which ment it had issues when the database got to large. It wasn’t an issue of if the database would corrupt but when. Especially for those people who saved everything.
I tried to get people to start a new database every year to keep them from getting too large.
And God help you if someone wanted to restore an account or specific email.
Real nightmare was trying to move accounts from one post office to another because two state agencies had merged. Finally figured out how to start with a new account on post office being moved to, back up account on old post office and then force backup to change FID /account identifier to match the one on new account so old mail could be opened. The benefit of this was that it ended up also making backups easier to restore. And the damm config file I came up with to reduce packet fragmentation on the GroupWise servers to speed them up.
ender-_@reddit
Remember when Outlook would destroy its data file when it got up to 2 GB in size?
Microsoft's "fix" for this was to disallow the file from being extended once it reached 1860 MB, which very often resulted in the same message being sent over and over (user would write a new message, possibly add an attachment and click Send; Outlook would put the message in Outbox; saving the message to Outbox put the .pst file over the 1860 MB limit – this didn't stop Outlook from sending the message, but it did prevent it from copying the message to Sent [no idea why it used a copy operation instead of move], so the message stayed in Outbox, and was then sent again when the next scheduled mail check time arrived).
Gryphtkai@reddit
Sigh …we still have Crystal Reports in production
phillyfyre@reddit
You know , you never here about someone finding at MS NT 4.0 server running in the closet for decades with no issues. We found a netware 4 server two months ago under a desk that was running fine. Never let me down , huge file servers that also did printers , ran 24/7 for decades . Then they went Linux, took a bit but then OES was as solid as Netware. Both had high availability clustering. I still work on a Novell piece of software, now owned by OpenText, their Identity Management Suite is a thing of beauty.
Netware was better than anything MS had , and to this day. It's more secure and no one knows it.
Cauli_Power@reddit
I'm still running an OES Linux cluster for core services. We use eDirectory for all our LDAP and radius auth. Can't remember the last time the cluster was down. I'm fortunate in that my bosses saw uptime and security as more important than making everything MS.
ctwg@reddit
I was going to say Novell Client for Windows
Zaphod1620@reddit
I liked it. It never broke on me, ever. It just worked. Also, setting a ACL on an individual file would automatically assign the least privileges through the file hierarchy to access that one file.
EntireFishing@reddit
Agreed. Novell was superior in handling file permissions in a way that NT could only dream of.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
Yup.
phillyfyre@reddit
We had AD processing Novell login scripts thru OES to access our several tb cluster of assorted files in 2008 , they just shut off that cluster after a takeover, it had been running since I built it with only space and software patches
Mesmerise@reddit
I preferred it to Windows/AD.
With Groupwise and ZenWorks, you had user, email, printers, and workstation/apps/group policy management all in the one ConsoleOne admin app.
Directory OUs were security principles, so you could assign rights to them, meaning your directory structure reflected your organisation's structure. In AD, you have a flatter structure with thousands of groups.
You could also work rights backwards, so you could see where exactly rights were inherited from.
I could go on and on. There was a lot that Netware/eDirectory did that was better than Windows/AD.
Starbreiz@reddit
I had to scroll too far to find someone else traumatized by novHwll
bandor23@reddit
Novell Not-Working we called it
wavemelon@reddit
I was in our server room once, my boss had just refused me a days holiday so I was… annoyed. He was trying to remote into the netware server and I could see it, every time he tried to enter his password I pressed a key on the keyboard. Good times.
OpenGrainAxehandle@reddit
Netware wasn't really that bad once you got to v3.11 and above. Netware 2, however, when you had to play musical floppies to link a driver for whatever hardware you had... that sucked.
kojimoto@reddit
I miss it...
The file rights management was beautiful
phillyfyre@reddit
Transitive permissions, no need to map down thru all the folders, here it is , boom, done
Prestigious-Bell4299@reddit
Ducks, former CNE here. You are hurting my feelings lol.
jafo@reddit
Is it just me? I *LOATHE* Acronis.
jptechjunkie@reddit
UPS WorldShip
FourEyesAndThighs@reddit
Fun fact: All UPS software is developed in house, running on shoestring and fishing wire. Everything that runs in the hubs, all the user-facing apps, it’s all hot garbage developed by a bunch of rude assholes in Paramus, NJ.
I used to work the Worldship help desk in Las Vegas 20 years ago. At least I knew what I was doing unlike the boobs the temp agency would hire for just being able to use a mouse.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Cheers and small world. I’ve shared drinks with your coworkers venting this grief.
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
That's really interesting actually. I would've pegged UPS and other complex businesses as the first people to send that all off to a low budget Indian coder sweatshop, or at least send it down South to Atlanta at HQ. I've always been interested in IT for super-complex businesses like logistics or finance, and unfortunately they seem to be the most likely ones to have offshored their IT.
I haven't even looked at the Worldship software in ages, but last time I did gave me the impression of dev practices 10 years out of date from that time (VB 6 style interface, Access/Jet database engine, etc. in the late 2000s) Good reminder that if you start with a messy codebase and refuse to rewrite when needed, even in-house software dev can be bad.
InternationalMany6@reddit
Yeah it’s basically a rule in IT that the more important technology is to your business and the bigger you are, the harder you should try to fuck it up by treating it as a cost center.
It obviously works…look at all the huge successful companies following those principals!
Minimum-Machine-4581@reddit
As if I needed another reason to hate Jersey. It's the Carolinas of the Northeast, wedged between the more important states
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
That's really interesting actually. I would've pegged UPS and other complex businesses as the first people to send that all off to a low budget Indian coder sweatshop, or at least send it down South to Atlanta at HQ. I've always been interested in IT for super-complex businesses like logistics or finance, and unfortunately they seem to be the most likely ones to have offshored their IT.
I haven't even looked at the Worldship software in ages, but last time I did gave me the impression of dev practices 10 years out of date from that time (VB 6 style interface, Access/Jet database engine, etc. in the late 2000s) Good reminder that if you start with a messy codebase and refuse to rewrite when needed, even in-house software dev can be bad.
TechFTP@reddit
I was about to say this i had to migrate an old station to a new one it took me wayyyyy too long
Ambitious-Topic-1879@reddit
Just gave me flashbacks
Vzylexy@reddit
I've only ever had to handle the firewall exclusions for WorldShip and even that was enough for me to want to flip the table
ipreferanothername@reddit
I had forgotten. Oh God
mendozgi@reddit
I recently had to deal with this. Their tech support is the worst.
ACP_Paddy-@reddit
It's still shiiiiit. "Don't run on a server" But you need to run it from a network location... Which is a PC... Running the software, that is networked...
thepercussionistres@reddit
I have been running it on a windows server 2019 virtual server for a couple years now with minimal issues. The only issue I had in the early days was that if you have it scheduled to communicate to UPS nightly, and the nightly communication the text a software update available, it will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to install the updates. If you do nothing, and leave the dialog box open, the next scheduled job to attempt to communicate with UPS will fail. And then the end users complain that they can't process shipments because the server needs to communicate with UPS. So for several months after I moved it to the windows server, I was having to login every day to defer the updates.
I complained to the UPS help desk several times about it and now it works fine.
Still hate the software regardless.
panopticon31@reddit
I dreaded the yearly "updates".
Which was actually a full reinstall and data migration of your contacts.
Was always a fucking nightmare.
deucemcsizzles@reddit
This software was developed in the seventh layer of hell to bring pain and suffering to the human race.
PlsChgMe@reddit
AND it came with bi-monthly upgrades!
southsun@reddit
We have had 5 updates during the last 2 weeks, besides having to hardcode their servers into DNS since they couldn’t be bothered to fix the resolve. Bi-monthly is a bit of a stretch.
mayoforbutter@reddit
At first I didn't realize what you're talking about, then I noticed the typo at the end where you used a 'p' instead of a 't'
Farts-n-Letters@reddit
what a bloated pig
weinermanjenson@reddit
Windows 8
Wolklaw@reddit
BCRIS.
DaringRobin@reddit
UPS Worldship. Quickbooks, Sage, Prophet 21
Tx_Drewdad@reddit
Microsoft Access database using visual basic.
Vegetable-Ad-1817@reddit
'Shared' Microsoft Access database using visual basic..... shudder
releenc@reddit
With over 250 concurrent users on a Netware shared drive.
Tx_Drewdad@reddit
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention it was shared.
Hated that damned thing.
PlsChgMe@reddit
Yeah that's bad. A life lesson in the definition of concurrency problems.
shemp33@reddit
I had a customer ask for help migrating a company they acquired. Many things were overlapping. So basically build new server, install the software, copy the data, done. This puts them on new company’s security site, domain, etc. all in one fell swoop.
Then we got to some interesting cases. “We have about 95 Access Database-…” (my face dropped) then they continued “… based applications that do all kinds of things we don’t fully understand, and the guy retired last year.”
I was like… well, you’re going to bring them over as they are and bring in help on that. That’s out of our scope.
OgdruJahad@reddit
I had the lovely oppotrunity to work with a piece of software using access as its database and unfortunately it had a habit of filling up to its limit of 2GB and when I talked to support they said it was impossible even after I sent screenshots of the explorer window showing them the file size. I was able to compress the database for a while but it would always fill up again. Luckily we moved on to better software now.
admalledd@reddit
Did you know you can store word and excel files in ms access? It's so great we didn't use share point! 🫠
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
We had a client who wanted a custom browser-based BalancedScorecard software solution, but they wanted to be able to maintain it with in-house staff, so they dictated the tech stack and architecture.
That is reasonable, but in 1996 the tech stack was a VB "server" doing client/server communication with a Java Applet embedded in an IFrame, shoving data into other IFrames, to make a Single-Page Application. When a new browser rendered the IFrame containing the Java Applet, the Applet opened a socket connection to the VB "server" that opened a new MDI child window containing a TCP/IP widget to serve requests from the Java Applet.
Intelligent-Body-154@reddit
Everything versions of Microsoft Exchange for 10k + mailboxes 😒⚰️
bagelgoose14@reddit
Quickbooks, any version
Fucking eClinical works
sudobw@reddit
Ah, I almost forgot about ECW.
ChapterBooks@reddit
Modern Trauma is company made portals to connect to in order to view their CUI. They’re never optimized and I always have to jack with our firewall in order to push the connection.
sudobw@reddit
Netsmart Homecare.
OldObject4651@reddit
Netbackup, Commvault, Legato Networker, IBM Adsm/tsm
Basically any and all tape backup. Sybase Oracle
Pain too great, must stop
mostlylegalalien@reddit
As a baby sysadmin in the 1990s I used GHOST a lot to clone images onto freshly purchased machines.
It worked great until that one time I mixed up a clone and target drive...
My own fault, and it was a freshly created disk so I only really lost half a day of my own work, but I can still feel that heartbeat when I realized!
texcleveland@reddit
lol that’s not a software error, that’s PEBKAC!
mostlylegalalien@reddit
Oh yes the problem was definitely me!
Xelrash@reddit
Back in the '80s and '90s I was certified to repair Okidata printers.
svdorr@reddit
6 years IT at one of U.S. largest banks. The Okidata ML 590 on every banker's desk. I still hear the noise in my worst nightmares.
Xelrash@reddit
Real trauma my friend. 😂
timbotheny26@reddit
I wouldn't say traumatized, but there's no way you could get me to go back to Emsisoft. (Smaller AV/AM provider.) Only ever used it on personal devices and it worked, but looking back on it now I wish I had just never used it to begin with. A few problems in particular:
Hyper-sensitive behavioral detection that would freak the fuck out even with well-known and digitally signed Steam games. At one point I even remember it freaking out over Steam cloud saves.
Web-protection requires an extension that last I knew hasn't received an update in several years.
Absolutely garbage optimization despite not having a ton of features.
An inexcusable data breach after they did a silly with customer data on a testing machine.
They got rid of the forums on their website.
skotikus@reddit
Printers, and Sage accounting software upgrades
jorge882@reddit
Active directory in group policy 🤯😱🫣
squegg@reddit
My old boss came in one day and told me he got a good deal on some computers, and they were delivering 40 of them that day.
40 eMachines.
I had to go to therapy for years.
ambi7ion@reddit
Acronis was pretty bad.
macgruff@reddit
Novell IPX
SAP Printer queues
UKBARNEY73@reddit
I agree about visio but you have to admit ipx/spx seems like a great solution to creating a gap that malware might not be able to traverse.
macgruff@reddit
Meaning, a newer version of a transmission protocol? Could be. But…, the issue there is that there will always be bad actors with more time on their hands than those who try to build and defend.
dartdoug@reddit
IBM Maas360. Was recommended to us by a distributor as an easy to deploy, low cost MDM.
It was clear from early on that the product is a shitshow. Support was non-existent. After a month or so we wiped all devices that had the product installed and started over with another solution. Canceled the licenses and took it as a lesson learned.
That was about 3 years ago. This week I received an email from IBM thanking me for creating my Maas360 account. The email contained a link to activate and start deploying.
owzleee@reddit
Accenture’s timeroll system. Jesus fucking Christ.
Big-dawg9989@reddit
GFI Languard
AlmosNotquite@reddit
Sendmail.cf
iconicpatel@reddit
bit contradictory, magic mouse.
raven67@reddit
Novell 4.11.
firesyde424@reddit
Novell Netware....
Flameancer@reddit
Sage50
I loved my job at my former MSP…….I still sometimes have flashbacks troubleshooting sage50. Sage300 wasn’t bad but sage50…..never again.
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
Lotus Notes
Cherwell
Borland Compiler
ExitMusic_@reddit
ugh I've used Cherwell at my last two jobs and as many little tricks that I've learned with it, it's still absolute ass.
ITSM is currently in the middle of migrating to something new. Eagerly awaiting finding out what they picked.
slowhand53@reddit
Just started a new gig. Just now learning the pain of Cherwell
Small_Editor_3693@reddit
All the people here traumatized by what they are currently putting up with have no idea how bass lotus notes was
Alpha272@reddit
*is, not was......
oz_scott@reddit
Lotus notes in 2005 made a bunch of us Linux programmers excited to be moving to Outlook.
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
Tata Consultancy was still using it well into the pandemic. I believe they finally sunsetted it around 2023-2024.
Alpha272@reddit
I work for an MSP and we still Support Notes (its called HCL Notes today) and have it actively in use.
I am just tankful that
1: HCL Verse exists, which is a web based PWA E-Mail Client for the Notes Mail Portion, and Verse is actually quite good
2: HCL Nomad exist, which is a web based PWA Version of Notes which runs a bit better than normal Notes
3: We support more than just Notes and I am not one who regularly deals with Notes - besides of using HCL Verse for Mails and sometimes Nomad for a few speciality tools on Notes I need
innocent_bystander@reddit
Lotus FUCKING Notes, the worst application ever to be sold.
ars_inveniendi@reddit
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to see Lotus Notes, an application so truly awful there was a companion program called “kill notes”.
sammytheskyraffe@reddit
Brother printer. Auto adjust feature won't stay if enabled physically in the printer. Replaced rollers still had the same issue. Called tech support multiple times never helped. Finally after about 6 months I got to a level 5 technician. He explained auto adjust had to be enabled in the software that you use to access the printer. But not the one that ships with it (control center) because that has been out of support for ten years (not a joke or exaggeration) you need to get the new iPrint. Good news was that the fix actually worked. Never buy a brother.
texcleveland@reddit
i just got one at auction for $6 and it’s nice!
TheiMacNoob@reddit
My company still uses Lotus Notes! We are finally migrating off of it
texcleveland@reddit
hah I was thinking of Notes too but I was lucky to not have to deal with it too much
UKBARNEY73@reddit
In the scheme of things the answer is.... people.
Management = Feeding the bad ideas machine Users = Clueless , dangerous, alzheimer's bastards
Put them together and you have People
texcleveland@reddit
yes but that’s wetware
texcleveland@reddit
CA Unicenter
SCO Unix
techslice87@reddit
PBX system, I blocked out the name, that required Windows XP and a specific edition of Java in order to even open the Web page. I don't miss it
threadedBridge@reddit
Winmodems. Evil things, those. Glad we left that behind.
Cmjq77@reddit
Any raid with anything even remotely important running backup exec to ‘protect’ it. More stressful than a sick baby
ironman0000@reddit
Windows server core, running updates on the company’s bread and butter servers from home, waiting over 2hrs for it to come back up after rebooting, Not knowing if it was actually going to come back up or not.
sxspiria@reddit
OneDrive...
Anotheraccountig@reddit
My org is trying to cut costs and one of the measures is drastically reducing how much is backed up with our current backup vendor. Solution: Onedrive is now your only backup of desktop/documents/photos. The bean counters want to eventually make this the only backup solution for 100k+ employees. The migration to kfm has been.... Less than stellar
YellowAsterisk@reddit
Sounds like a hell of a 'name too long' time!
sxspiria@reddit
Godspeed, soldier. That sounds like a ticking time bomb
DijonAndPorridge@reddit
I use OneDrive for my large personal media collection of photos and videos.
They make me pay for a family plan to get 6TB, but I have to make accounts to spread data across in 1TB chunks.
As a content creator, its basically unusable. On both my i7-12700h and Ryzen 3950x machines, both with fast NVMEs and access to a verifiably-2gb fiber connection, it basically doesn't work. I'm about to beef up my Unraid server and ditch m365 altogether, then drop Windows and switch to an M4 MBP.
Apple Photos + iCloud is literally magic by comparison, can't wait to cease using Onedrive. Figure I can use Immich as well, I have an iPhone and a Galaxy, but I find the backup options on Android extremely lackluster.
I actually advise 99.9% of people to use iPhone/Apple because of how idiot-proof their backup solutions are.
The_Original_Conman@reddit
Hey now, I love my OneDrive.
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
Makes me nostalgic for local file servers.
You end up having to learn a lot more about syncing then you ever wanted to know.
jailasauraa@reddit
It's been a looooooong time since something has irritated as much as OneDrive. It's comical listening to me explain the benefits to customers when they run into an issue w/ it... because I genuinely HATE it.
sxspiria@reddit
30% of the time it works 70% of the time
Prestigious-Past6268@reddit
Go pavilion computers around 2000-2005. Least reliable PCs we’ve ever used.
….and all printers ever made.
iPlayKeys@reddit
AS/400 (they’re calling it IBMi this year) IBM Tivoli Informix Database Anything Java based FoxPro
b3542@reddit
ServiceNow
Vladamir_PoonTang@reddit
100% a skill issue. SN fucks if you know how to use it / have dedicated staffing for it
b3542@reddit
Oh we have (significant) dedicated staffing for it. I think that’s where the skill issue resides…
bluecollarbiker@reddit
I have worked with orgs that have had pretty slick deployments/instances. Have also worker in orgs that are awful. Thought it was a skill issue but given the split im not sure.
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
It 100% is a skill issue with companies. If you are using SNOW, you should be ready to invest in having one or two people who are skilled in it and work on maintaining it and making changes at a regular cadence. We are a company of 400 people, and we have two guys handling that monster, but it does work well, they know everything, and patch often. I mean shit, one of them told me how to work around a bug he's working on just from my braindead description of it 😂😂.
ipreferanothername@reddit
Skill issue.. Our instance at work is meh.. The admins were pretty fresh so we got a crappy build.
I worked in a workflow centric document management app and tried to get into the SNOW team here. I had really streamlined a lot of things and had good success in document management, but our snow team turned me down.
Worked out fine for me personally but I'm still at the org and service now here still suuuuucks
Thrizzlepizzle123123@reddit
100% a skill issue.
With dedicated devs it works beautifully. No organisation thinks it needs a dedicated dev, so it works like fucking garbage.
InnovativeBureaucrat@reddit
You can have both. Dedicated devs and a bloated system that everyone hates
Ok-Tangerine-6705@reddit
This, we have a 3rd party doing the dev for us, so we have someone in the company who looks after the pipeline with them. The problem is we still use a couple of other ITSM solutions which aren’t integrated, which was the problem we had before we moved to our current iteration of ServiceNow… and so the dance continues
Blueline42@reddit
This is too true and can be said about a lot of IT solutions. Just because you buy something you still need people to configure up front then develop and maintain. I have seen this first hand time and time again.
Procure@reddit
IF and only if there's a dedicated team supporting snow (not even anything else, just snow), it's actually pretty crazy what it can do
Deathra9@reddit
I’m convinced it’s a skill issue because when a previous org first started testing it, it actually worked pretty well and was decently intuitive. IT management was absolutely not having that. It took a few weeks, but it finally went into production with a completely broken workflow and UI. I’m still trying to figure out how that IT unit became so toxic.
Capt-geraldstclair@reddit
we have servicenow. ;(
UrWHThurtZ@reddit
This 100% … fairly certain my experience with it was just a bad implementation by our company, but I loathe logging into it.
b3542@reddit
I’ve used it at 4 different corporations. Each implementation has sucked in unique and creative ways. The current one is the worst iteration.
jollybot@reddit
Why do orgs still use this unintuitive monstrosity?
bforo@reddit
Unintuitive? skissue
phillyfyre@reddit
Because Remedy sucks worse now
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
Because it is better than many of the alternatives. Like Cherwell. Don't know what Cherwell is? Consider yourself lucky.
Admirable-Anybody360@reddit
Only started using it since last summer - stock management side of it is great. The helpdesk side is brutal
phillyfyre@reddit
The current cluster fuck Zurich is a bane of my existence
TexasVulvaAficionado@reddit
I hate that motherfucker.
whitemagemxp@reddit
Yet snow is one of the richest companies. Makes me so sad
Necessary_Emotion565@reddit
With the default cmdb that has like 2 million entries
Top_Boysenberry_7784@reddit
Access DB's using VB randomly created and relied on for business critical operations.
Blackberry Good MDM
LTO drives. The work required to fetch off-site tapes during restores sucked. I also had the fun experience a few times of servers randomly purple screening in the middle of the night during backups due to some SCSI/driver issue. This was after running small test backups created no issues.
Working on any computer system connected to a manufacturing machine.
Kamina_Crayman@reddit
Gupta report builder.
Our ERP software uses this to generate reports and every modification of any report is a lesson in patience and pain. In the earlier versions there was no easy way to undo an action, so every mistake has to be corrected manually. If anyone uses this software daily at all, you have my respect and condolences.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Fuck off lols hahaha no way is it called Gupta 🤣 😅 😂 🤪
I'm not even gonna stereotype that one.
Country of origin?
Kamina_Crayman@reddit
https://www.opentext.com/assets/documents/en-US/pdf/opentext-ds-gupta-report-builder-en.pdf
If I remember correctly the report builder is part of the "team developer" download package? At least that's what was bundled with our ERP. The ERP itself is VISUAL MANUFACTURING which is an Infor product so I assume it's US based but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Thankyou , the wiki was an educational journey I shall cherish.
YourTechSupport@reddit
Java.
Company had bespoke software that needed legacy builds the auto-updater kept removing. They couldn't just, say, update it.
BourbonWhisperer@reddit
CEOs.
We need (fill in the blank)... why? No good answer.
roosenwalkner2020@reddit
Old here, AIX to rdp, sysreport, and if anyone sneezed had to reboot and start all over again. AIX inventory had to be manually saved and printed because it could be corrupted if 2 people used the same item. Fun times in the late ‘80’s.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
McAfee E policy Orchestrator Or epo server as it was known, management being dicks expecting all data on all machines being up to date in a Large hospital environment.
Error yes boss , what about people being on annual leave or maternity leave?? Should I go and power them on for them??
DICKS with Pie Charts
Zazucki@reddit
Windows 11
Fit-Animal-9911@reddit
Double Space - it cleaned up files by just deleting everything of value.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Wait till the fool types defrag , do you wait and lose everything or reboot and lose everything
sovereign666@reddit
DFS.
Really cool stuff, falls apart like a jenga tower when you sneeze.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Dfs - shit we need peerlock because it was overlooked
ShitTricks- I had to keep metaframe 1.8 alive for too long lols
LightGuy48@reddit
Windows Millenium
alxmolin@reddit
PC LOAD LETTER
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Fuckin American install , lazy sysadim setup windows wrong lols
thomashouseman@reddit
Trumpet winsock
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Dialup on win 311 , man that takes me back further to
At&f0n0s37=0 Atdt0123xxxxxx
pg3crypto@reddit
Oh man. My original website from the 90s was pretty much based around this...and TweakDUN.
ARJeepGuy123@reddit
Finastra's on prem software is held together by folders upon folders of text files masquerading as a database, python, and duct tape
disabledusb@reddit
Microsoft NAV
Yamaphoba@reddit
arcserve.nlm
Amdaxiom@reddit
It's sad the only thing I haven't dealt with in this list of software everyone is posting is epicore and sap. I really am old.
rossrollin@reddit
Anything branded oracle
Zer0CoolXI@reddit
Fax machines > printers > certs in order of most to least trauma
Hammerfist1990@reddit
Old Exchange servers and transaction log issues with VSS failures, Backup Exec not clearing them down, space running out, no company email looming!
clawszilla@reddit
Voip Fax Adapters. Fuel system controllers from the 90s trying to run on modern computers.
ks724@reddit
Oracle eBusinessSuite but specifically jInitiator! The only way to launch the client. Browser update? Tuesday happens? Wind picks up outside? You took a late lunch? All reasons it would suddenly stop working.
thx1138a@reddit
A thing called Autodesk Vault. I still have to use it and it’s a living nightmare.
tardiswho@reddit
Service now
Vesalii@reddit
SAP and I only had to use it once.
mspstsmich@reddit
Blackberry Enterprise Server
ks724@reddit
Glad we missed out and ran a GoodLink server instead!
Hazelhurst@reddit
My first thought. I remember like a decade ago the president of the company wouldn’t switch over from his BlackBerry to iPhone and we had to keep supporting it. Most people had already switched over. It was such a pain to support.
SweetsMurphy@reddit
Feel you. We had one partner at my firm who dragged his feet for months so we kept a BES just for him. Eventually he buckled. Just hated change and didn't see the value of iOS.
TBH, I kind miss a physical keyboard. I got big mitts and tapping on glass is a drag sometimes.
jacnok@reddit
May I interest you in the Clicks keyboard: https://sudoscience.blog/2025/06/12/i-used-a-physical-keyboard-on-my-pixel-9-for-3-weeks-a-clicks-review/
russellvt@reddit
FWIW, RIM had a rather annoying little patent called "Keyboard for use with thumbs" that really plagues early device makers, including Palm and Motorolla and a few others.
TheJollyHermit@reddit
I had the reverse experience. Yes BES took some care but we had it mostly lined out. When the execs first wanted the shiny iPhones apple had no decent corporate support. In fact trying to manage and secure apple devices in the early days was the definition of after thought/half-assed/non-existent
danekan@reddit
I kinda loved it too... especially when they finally had activations that didn't require the local key pairing. and nobody else liked it so I became the BES admin for our whole enterprise
Actually that's not _completely_ true... I was paired with another admin and we were in charge of it together, until he didn't show up to work one day. 2 days later my boss went to check on him... he had had a brain aneurysm -- I think about that now and then still. I had talked to him the afternoon before he went home and died, he was really worked up about something in BES not working for him that I got working and I remember him being kind of upset that I had figured it out.
I think I didn't BES because I had the prior perspective of being a lotus domino/notes admin and that was way worse in every way
TheJollyHermit@reddit
Lol. I was thinking about replying to some of the Notes comments too. Worked for a company who just completed a fairly extensive Exchange upgrade/centralization process that made the whole environment much better when the unit I worked for was sold to a company running Lotus Notes and using it for EVERYTHING in their business.
They had no automated client installs. They were running an outdated version because upgrades were difficult. Each site was a separate database instance with its own key and migrating people between them require decrypting and reencrypting their store... It was such an enormous pain in the ass to administer and I had no experience with it and had to learn very quickly how to do so from their team.
I wrote some crude AutoIT scripts to do the install in the short time we had before cutover and it worked with about a 95% success rate for the client installs and basic account config and just that made the whole process so much easier... I can't believe they didn't have some scripted/packaged client install after decades of relying on Notes for everything.
They used it for everything. As much of a pain ass as it was to administer, especially they way they did it, I did quickly see how easy it was to implement data entry, workflow, and business logic. They had automated so much of their business in Notes and it was easy to add to and change that they were completely dependent on it and getting away from it would be a Herculean effort. So for at least a few years before I left I had to help deal with that massive pain in the ass.
danekan@reddit
Passing around keys is what I remember the most. But now I look back and wonder if with automation it could be even better than having to haggle user logins in outlook
russellvt@reddit
Technically, BES was never "secure" in those days... and didn't even support SSL/TLS - so lots of stuff was crossing international borders completely in the clear. FIPS compliance wasn't ever any sort of "concern" for the longest time.
TheJollyHermit@reddit
Hm. Been a loooong time but didn't they support their own AES256 encryption end to end?
danekan@reddit
I remember also Obama had to fight to get one but they did end up getting him one
CactusJ@reddit
IMAP !
farva_06@reddit
I had my Blackberry Enterprise Server Administrator cert. Insert "this is useless" meme.
scott0482@reddit
In my case it was usually running on “the server”. You know, the one with AD and Exchange running on it. “Yes it’s not technically supported, but the customer is small, so we gotta just make it work.”
TkachukMitts@reddit
Yup plenty of BES Express installs on SBS… ugh.
scott0482@reddit
It wasn’t even SBS. It was server 2003 or 2008 standard. So we had the option to add another DC or split things out later. Later usually never happened.
scratchfury@reddit
The insane number of services that had to start in the right order.
scott0482@reddit
I forgot about that. But I also got a script that did it for me from RIM support.
Disorderly_Chaos@reddit
Not again
russellvt@reddit
Still amazed that system ever "won out" over the much superior competitors ... that actually met and exceeded FIPS compliance.
Probably because of all those state-dot-gov assholes that refused to give up their Blackberries, contrary to their "corporate guidelines" ... there's at least one extremely famous "lost emails" case in US Government history surrounding that debacle. It was actually insane (IMHO), given details that weren't widely shared with the public.
whitemagemxp@reddit
This brings me to the trauma of Boeing technical support at the beginning of my IT career
DrGraffix@reddit
This is the answer right here
Neither_Meaning_8354@reddit
I`m definitly going with Lotus Notes and medical econet BM Monitors - i will literally CRY if i ever get one of these again in my fingers
MeggieHarvey@reddit
Just fucking printers man. They are out for me.
crow-party-13@reddit
OptiPlex GX 270. We had a stack of at least 100 of them all with burst capacitors just after warranty expiration.
doctorevil30564@reddit
Appassure and Symantic backup Exec.
Both sucked and weren't reliable for maintaining usable backups.
Muted_Elephant3997@reddit
IIS
vermyx@reddit
Shiznoz222@reddit
Fintech right?
vermyx@reddit
Medical
Shiznoz222@reddit
I'm so sorry, the only worse option
sleepmaster91@reddit
We had a customer with a watchguard firewall when they got rid of it nobody even wanted them even if they were free that's how much of a POS they are
castillar@reddit
The rack-mount models made pretty good Linux/BSD firewalls, but the little SOHO devices were so underpowered they weren’t good for much of anything.
russellvt@reddit
Slightly less horrific than 3.5 to 4.0 migration... though some troed to go Vista, instead.
EntireFishing@reddit
Ah that's the first 5 years of my career
touristh8r@reddit
Oh hey. That seems like a eerily familiar list
pepechang@reddit
QuickBooks
DarkSky-8675@reddit
Windows.
mxyzptlk73@reddit
Flash
Davidtgnome@reddit
EMC Networker, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, Oracle "unbreakable" linux.
RefrigeratorLive5920@reddit
Oracle "Already Broken" Linux, amirite?
Davidtgnome@reddit
Since we went to 8 we've been calling it "Oracle Undocumented Linux" trying to install RAC was a nitemare because all the documentation was written for 7.
One magical step involved, mid install, replacing the scp binary with a scp script that pointed to the binary with a different flag, because the flag called in the installer was depreciated for part of the install, but scp later had the new flag used correctly. You had to time it and the revert exactly right or the install would fail.
RefrigeratorLive5920@reddit
Dear Lord, and I thought Oracle on Windows (yes somehow I had to support that, like who in their right mind thinks that's a good idea?) was a nightmare.
BioHazard357@reddit
Networker was very special, I couldn't believe how little upkeep and micromanagement that Veeam needed when we migrated.
Davidtgnome@reddit
RIGHT?!?! that was my response to Veeam too. Embarrassing really. We called it "NotWorker"
Available-Serve6287@reddit
TMG
Call_Me_Papa_Bill@reddit
OS/2. Yes, I’m that old. When we switched from OS/2 to Netware it was the happiest day of my career. Probably helped that we replaced token ring with Ethernet at the same time. Fuck IBM!
wownz85@reddit
DPM and Arcserv
Rotten_Red@reddit
My arcserve memories are buried deep
HideyoshiJP@reddit
Oh god, I got this far down before being triggered. Fuck Arcserv!
dmoisan@reddit
Blackmagic Design. Broadcast drivers that can't be upgraded--or reverted! Sales rep tries an update despite my pleading not to. I have nightmares to this day.
ResponseContent8805@reddit
SAP
333Beekeeper@reddit
I actually liked Lotus Notes prior to its acquisition by IBM.
I don’t understand how Citrix still survives today.
My hated software was Netware. In late 90’s we had no Netware certified admins in our service company. My tech manager decided I was the one that needed to get certified on it. I refused saying it was an obsolete and dying OS. He insisted. I strung it along for four months before the client with Netware decided to convert.
pinetes@reddit
VCF
JohnL101669@reddit
ITunes! Shittiest piece of software ever!
iamcrohnos@reddit
Hardware - Snagless cat5 cables from monoprice. I reset a new branch’s main switch because of them combined with the location of ciscos mode button. Good times.
Miserygut@reddit
Basically every bit of Cisco software written in Java.
NullPointerException NullPointerException NullPointerException...
pg3crypto@reddit
I would upgrade that to "anything built with Java".
Nothing screams "I write enterprise garbage and I couldnt be fucked learning anything else after I finished Uni" more than Java.
Same applies to VBA.
hughk@reddit
One of the problems with Java was that at server level, there were so many special versions at one point addressing one bug or another.
pg3crypto@reddit
The problem m with Java is it was never intended to be used the way is it. It was designed as a portable SDK for mobile phones...but mutated into the bag of shit it is today.
hughk@reddit
It was the huge tower of subtly incompatible libraries and run time systems and this is before Oracle took them over. Afterwards, it just got worse.
Xerxero@reddit
Old SAP gui. Oracle form builder
MisterBazz@reddit
BackupEXEC
Zaphod1620@reddit
"Imaging" PCs was walking around with a cart, hard drives, and an unlicensed copy of Ghost.
satanclauz@reddit
Oracle
d3vourm3nt@reddit
Genesys Cloud is the bane of my existence.
MyOtherUserIsAThrow@reddit
Sybase SQL Server 10.0 When we ported our apps to it we had table lock escalations everywhere.
And that was just the beginning of our problems.
abelabelabel@reddit
Teams not staying uninstalled and using up resources on my thin clients.
MolimoTheGiant@reddit
Quickbooks.
Any product made by the company that makes Turbo Tax is on my shitlist.
CeBlu3@reddit
Late 90’s. A PictureTel system (proprietary video conferencing over ISDN lines) meant for a desktop computer that I had to install and get to work with an IBM ThinkPad & docking station for our executive. It had an ISA card (if I remember correctly) that actually fit into the docking station, but to get it to work with all his other stuff, and especially when he undocked and needed the PCMCIA cards (modems, …) to work while traveling … just thinking about it makes cold sweat run down my spine.
Designer_Airport8658@reddit
Games for Windows Live
davegcr420@reddit
HP 3000
Leading-As1283@reddit
Cherwell service management HP JetDirect boxes Netscape Navigator That stupid Internet Dialler thing I'm Windows 95.
thedudewhofixedit@reddit
BlackBerry enterprise server
kcornet@reddit
I was admin for BES and I don't remember it being particularly bad,
thedudewhofixedit@reddit
Well, I work for an MSP. Have I set it up or do you want me to elaborate?
thedudewhofixedit@reddit
I’ll just keep going . think about dozens of blackberry enterprise servers set up by jackemo hacks who had no business administering exchange let alone a blackberry enterprise server
bestintexas80@reddit
I hated SharePoint. Not using it... installing.and managing the back end because it used to be something that ran locally (for all the folks who are wondering why a SaaS is what I am traumatized by... it wasn't always SaaS and it was a monster terrible time to get and keep running)
Ban_Cheater_YO@reddit
Sharepoint..
Like. Take file explorer, and make it into internet explorer, with the ease of use of Microsoft Word. So. Yeah.
No.wonder middle managers or most C-suitr morons love Microsoft products. Makes then feel like their existence is worth something.
_Robert_Pulson@reddit
Scanner redirection across WAN
originaladam@reddit
As some one who worked in a media environment, what do you have against bnc? I found them to be among the most reliable media connectors
_Robert_Pulson@reddit
I associate them with 10base2 Ethernet networking. Like, no thank you. Keep your less than 10 Mbps and BNC T connectors away from me, haha.
originaladam@reddit
Makes sense. I appreciate them for their locking metal mechanical connection. Much preferable to hdmi for events
Different-Term-2250@reddit
It was great until some office bowerbird takes a liking to the shiny attenuator because [reasons]
burghdude@reddit
I am so stealing the term "office bowerbird".
Sieran@reddit
Jira
mobileaccountuser@reddit
epicor .... good grief
EjayLive@reddit
Microsoft Word
Writing it here causes me enormous frustration and despair. It’s the most awful thing ever to exist in the universe. I don’t even know the right words or language to describe my disgust for this “thing”, this hellscape, this monstrosity.
Yes, it’s THAT bad.
Mitsumasa@reddit
Right now it’s Copilot and OneDrive I absolutely cannot stand.
But of all time I hated working on Xerox copiers. There was also this school bell thing I had to program using a phone that operated all the bells in a school I worked at, and I still hear the tones being played in my head.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Mcafee Sercureboot
Not software or hardware but anything a "blue sky thinker" director wades in as a revelation and pushes while ignoring warnings and doesn't think roll back plans should ever exist 🤔
Ok_Green_7795@reddit
lol, first second i thought of lotus notes and citrix, so spot on!
unstopablex15@reddit
Trying to use a dial up modem in the middle of the night without waking up the whole family.
kruvii@reddit
Internet explorer and more recently, any time I hear the word "blockchain."
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Novell edirectory on windows server
Arcserve , good luck with that shit
Sentinel One - how to watch your workstations fall off the network
Nobs69784@reddit
My mechanic is still using a Intel 386 he bought in the mid 80’s and running quickbooks 2002 🤞
66659hi@reddit (OP)
Surprised it can run Quickbooks 2002. I would’ve thought it was stuck on Win3.1/DOS
unkilbeeg@reddit
Cadence (for EDA design)
Had an instructor buy licenses for chip design with his startup money. I got to install it. What a nightmare.
purawesome@reddit
SAP
jimmick20@reddit
Antiviruses. Back in the early 2000s everyone was using them and they killed the performance of computers so badly. Some more so than others of course. Finally Microsoft came out with their own and it worked great. It's now built into windows and free. Yet people like my 83 year old Aunt still insist on paying for a third party one instead of just relying on the one built into windows. I built her a new computer recently with Win11 and explained to her she didn't need her antivirus. She insisted anyways so whatever. At least today's PCs don't have a noticeable performance reduction from them running. I haven't used a third party anti virus since about the mid XP years. I'm also knowledgeable and know what NOT to do, but the paranoia that viruses have instilled into people is real.
I also use Linux now so I definitely don't bother. Again I know what not to do.
UKBARNEY73@reddit
Doublespace especially when some dickhead runs defrag
You gonna hate me for this but Linux and anything that runs in it, let's face it without an Internet and Google your all royaly fucked....
Benajim117@reddit
Microsoft Money! Never used it personally, but in my first IT job I had many an elderly customer that had been running their budgeting from it for years, some even for small businesses. Had to Frankenstein it onto Windows 8 and Windows 10 machines that didn’t want to take it at all!
That and trying to manage a HyperV server from a non domain joined machine
Proper_Dragonfly_300@reddit
Connectwise PSA. Terrifying.
fancycurtainsidsay@reddit
Webex. Everything about Webex.
Antique_Gur_6340@reddit
Honeywell thermal label printers
bukkithedd@reddit
I'm SO glad it's not just me! I have three of the fuckers, and I despise each and every one of them to the depth of my fucking soul!
Antique_Gur_6340@reddit
I had about 10 plants worth of shop floors that I kept getting calls on 😭. The worst was printing tiny labels and offset for no reason.
bukkithedd@reddit
You have absolutely ALL of my sympathy.
I swore an oath back in 2013 that I would NEVER touch another Intermec-product for as long as I lived, due to the absolute nightmare those printers were. Fast forward to 2023, where we went live with a new ERP-system and where I was stupid enough to not just go with Zebra (which, don't get me wrong, can be a massive PITA as well) but instead went with Honeywell...only to find out that the absolute bastards are Intermec-printers in disguise.
Aaaaand now we've got one PC45T and two PD45s. FML.
Then again, the PD45's are MOSTLY behaving. The PC45T just loooooves to forget its label-sizes completely, and nothing we do will make the settings survive a reboot. Have to manually set the labelsize on the printer itself, it doesn't give two shits about what the printserver tells it to do.
JamisonW@reddit
Everything I wrote in the 90s with PowerBuilder (which I think became Delphi)
seamonkey420@reddit
hey!! i was the citrix sysadmin... however if you built the environment from scratch and properly; it ran itself. we did xenapp, xenmobile and sharefile on prem w/a netscaler and hot-fail over to a secondary site.
however when i was in tech support/frontline, troubleshooting remote connections for citrix was not fun. especially w/a bunch of attorneys. and man.. those client updates... ooff. i made sure that when i became the admin for citrix that client deployments and versioning were priorities to keep consistent. i also was the app deployment guy so that helped a ton w/my users.
man.. been in it since the palm os days (goodlink) to bes / blackberry to then xenmobile/zenprise and mdms. what a ride baby!!
Minimum-Albatross906@reddit
Citrix was just gross for me in general. Maybe it has been improved, but VMware was the king for me. Better software and better support (eh?), better implementation IMO.
Procure@reddit
Same, been doing it for a long time. It's got some problems but actually pretty good if set up correctly and know what you're doing. Got full licensing so do PVS, App Layering, CC, everything else on lots of sites, lots of users.
Support can be hit or miss and we just did a renewal... Got Broadcom'd hard. (CEO of Broadcom became Citrix CEO in 2022)
$$$$$$$$$$
ErikTheEngineer@reddit
Citrix is an interesting beast because it requires so much outside of the immediate product to be set up correctly as well, and then it'll operate well. Adding Citrix Cloud on top makes it worse in a misconfigured environment. DNS has to be perfect, firewall rules right, certificates and revocation checking all need to be 100%, AD replication and queries via LDAP/LDAPS have to work, all that. Do a next next next install like a lot of places do, and it'll still likely barely limp along but people will hate using it because they'll wonder why it takes 2 minutes to launch their sessions.
I've been in EUC for a long time and it was kind of sad to see Citrix get private-equity'd...now no one new will ever use it and I'm sure all the healthcare companies locked into it are chewing on their restraints trying to leave.
Procure@reddit
This is all true. I honestly think it made me a better sysadmin because you really have to understand how all the parts work together or you’re going to have a tough time nailing down what your issue is. Hypervisor, storage, OS and optimization, networking, AD, GPOs, then all the way through the Citrix pieces. Also a LOT of custom scripting.
DivideByZero666@reddit
This week I've been transitioning a 2003 XenApp 4.5 farm to RDP as Citrix licensing changed to cloud only, which, shockingly doesn't work with 2003.
Amazed how much of 4.5 I remember. It was actually a pretty good product back in the day, at least compared to what RDP was.
thetoastmonster@reddit
Oh man I had a couple of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition servers with Citrix Metaframe 1.8 on them. I knew nothing about managing these servers so treated them more like I would a workstation. I certainly did not know the golden rule about never installing HP printer drivers. Guess what kinds of printers we used? BSOD was a regular occurrance, and it also coincided with the popularity boom of the internet and multimedia, which thin client was just not good at. Still, it kept our old PCs running a few more years with a new lease of life until we were able to replace them.
66659hi@reddit (OP)
I once ran into a guy wearing a Citrix shirt while out shopping. I asked him if people ever go up to him and complain about Citrix software. He told me that it happens actually quite a lot.
seamonkey420@reddit
😂 yea.. i'd never wear a citrix shirt in public, asking for trouble.. hehe..
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
Being on the receiving end of degradation, humiliation, and abuse is a niche kink, but not excessively rare.
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
One of the perversities of life is the time you most need experience with a package is when you're setting it up. But setup is most likely the time you just learned about it.
git_und_slotermeyer@reddit
I found the build tooling in the early days of Android horrible, before Android Studio. IIRC using Eclipse, which itself is decent, but the toolchain around Android building - what was it called, Gradle? - I hated it.
But nothing compares to modern M365
obmasztirf@reddit
I abhorred how long eclipse took to start when I had to use it on one of my earlier jobs.
git_und_slotermeyer@reddit
Reminds me of Apache Tomcat
pg3crypto@reddit
The build chain for Android is the same today. Its always been shit.
git_und_slotermeyer@reddit
Good to know - I realized Android dev is not my thing and thought it has maybe become better meanwhile
the_jalapeno@reddit
Windows
lokochileno@reddit
Quickbooks.
atomicwrites@reddit
Fucking QuickBooks updates are the bane of my existence, you can't automate them, you can't run them as non-admin, you can't get an alert that they are coming, they block the user from doing anything till you come and update as admin and then they start asking for admin permissions.
Tab819@reddit
I made a script that deletes the QBdownloads folder daily so I can run them on my own terms. For admin permissions, make sure all of the services run as local system and they're all set to restart themselves 3 times. Then run the qb database utility
atomicwrites@reddit
Oh deleting QBdownloads stops the update prompt? That's good to know, I'll look into it on Monday if I remember lol.
Tab819@reddit
Yes, it is in the program data folder
hewhotalksloud@reddit
I would like add another accounting software: Sage
BruhAtTheDesk@reddit
I truly wish harm on whoever was the original dumbfuck who thought sage was a good idea and product. Fuck the entire company, but fuck that guy in particular.
hulkwillsmashu@reddit
I replaced multiple PCs at a client site. Maybe almost 2 years ago. The version that they owned would not install. No longer supported by their support. Because w
kaiserh808@reddit
QuickBooks and MYOB are both a complete bag-o-balls.
DoorCalcium@reddit
Fuck QuickBooks. I've been struggling with that for the last couple weeks. They make it harder and harder to host and their support is regarded
Calm_Vehicle_3351@reddit
Yardi… enough said
C_isfor_Cookies@reddit
MSQL/Exchange
unclesleepover@reddit
Sage accounting software. Every single update broke the software.
BrutalHunny@reddit
Monkey B.
SOHC427@reddit
Lotus Notes & Domino
TeaPartyDem@reddit
A tape backup machine that spun for hours.
iareagenius@reddit
Lotus motherfucking notes, JFC, end of thread
JohnPaulDavyJones@reddit
What was so bad about it?
I have some much older coworkers (non-admins, just users) who talk about the old Lotus Notes era longingly.
iareagenius@reddit
I never administered it personally, but worked closely with the team that did. It was incredibly powerful, and incredibly complex to setup, and didn't work like Outlook, and users just wanted Outlook, and the geeks loved lotus and wanted all this fun capability, and it was a never-ending mess of bullshit and tickets and complaining.
derpman86@reddit
What even the fuck was that shit...
russellvt@reddit
Lettuce Nodes ^+
DoTheThingNow@reddit
Internet Explorer, specifically Quirks mode.
Zebra Label printers
Overprovisioned VM storage
JohnPaulDavyJones@reddit
Damn, I’m out here just thinking that I abhor supporting Access, and y’all make some of these old tools sound like hell on earth.
DigitalDefenestrator@reddit
CA Unicenter. Nothing like being paged at 3AM a couple times a week because the monitoring software is just trash.
It's not a coincidence that Broadcom pivoted from "boring chip designer" to beating out Oracle for evil not long after they acquired CA.
BelgianGeo@reddit
Windows Vista
glacierre2@reddit
SAP is like going back to the 90s or worse. That on this millennium you need to punch in alphanumerical codes to mean actions/people/materials is absolutely ridiculous.
The word report generator of Enterprise Architect is the jankiest piece of software I have ever seen first hand. On the training I was in tears laughing, how that state of usability was ever green-lit for release is beyond me.
hughk@reddit
SAP is pretty much inescapable in Germany, where I am. It is one of those things that was stretched into too many application areas. Reminds me a bit of Oracle.
Bongo_56@reddit
MWave modem/sound card combo in my IBM Aptiva...
jeffmoss262@reddit
An old CNC machine that had to be rebooted at least once a day. When it finally was replaced, it definitely got kicked a few times on the way to the loading dock!
c4ctus@reddit
Okidata printers.
SoulStripHer@reddit
DOORS.
Patchewski@reddit
Still have 2 buildings with Keri systems.
Baldemyr@reddit
Early PDFs and older versions of MS Word and it's word spacing.
samcuu@reddit
I'm still dealing with Citrix and Lotus Notes everyday.
hughk@reddit
Our Lotus Notes became IBM Notes and then HCL Notes. It thankfully was killed off at our place for Email but still survives for workflows.
ebsf@reddit
MS Word.
80% of the work is fixing what it's done, or hacking (poorly) what WordPerfect can do in a single command.
Ron-Swanson-Mustache@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise Server...
fragmonk3y@reddit
Printers. F! Printers with a hot poker!!!!
OinkyConfidence@reddit
Citrix
Lotus Notes
Old Meru wireless controller UI interface (literally just the worst, most awful thing I've used in 32 years in IT)
Pretty much everything else!
hughk@reddit
Citrix is very much still there to haunt us. LoNo has done a bit of an undead thing. It had been owned by IBM and now passed to HCL so is HCL Notes and is most definitely still alive for workflows. Unfortunately.
DenseDepartment8317@reddit
Consumer grade printers in my office. Then CEO brings in another consumer grade printers and wants to know why it's not working.
FloridaIsTooDamnHot@reddit
EMC disk arrays from the early 2000s. Fucking things left me high and dry in spite of “fully redundant configurations” and I spent many a sleepless night upgrading them along side EMC engineers hoping they came back.
Confident_Raccoon218@reddit
Windows. Haven't used it since 2007. Phew
the_good_hodgkins@reddit
hp laserjet 4
elglas@reddit
Life hack, run a piece of 8.5 x 11 sandpaper through one every other print job to keep the rollers gripping. Desperate times....
the_good_hodgkins@reddit
I can't tell you how many times I got called to replace those damn rollers.
groupwhere@reddit
Acronis VM Backup, or whatever it was called. Early days it was truly awful.
BenderMurray@reddit
Windows Mobile devices, AS400
juliejujube@reddit
Mcafee. I just hate it so much.
ppcpunk@reddit
anything microsoft makes specifically outlook though
young_wendell@reddit
XCP-NG
Kripthmaul@reddit
SAP Business One.
" The great thing about it is it's customability!!"
Proceed to break when you customize anything...
pm_me_bra_pix@reddit
Bonzi Buddy.
My admin told me one morning to install it because it told jokes and was funny. Slowed my 233 Mhz machine so badly I needed to reinstall 98.
Then to find out it was spyware the whole time. Ugh.
But I did hack his Start button to have his first name listed instead. So fair is fair.
onebit@reddit
websphere
isystems@reddit
citrix
brazzala@reddit
Symantec PGP
bmdvt90@reddit
Microsoft Project!!
tusharmeh33@reddit
definitely copilot. it feels like microsoft just shoved this intrusive ai everywhere without asking if i actually wanted it. it constantly eats up resources and tries to insert itself into my workflow when i just want to get things done. it was so frustrating that i just decided to upgrade to 10 from logkeys. com via instead. finally i can actually focus without a bot interrupting me.
ludlology@reddit
blackberry enterprise server, hp jetdirects, various dogshit industry-specific LOB apps (especially medical ones), pretty much all smartphones pre-iphone era, but especially things like blackberries, sony clie, and anything that used activesync.
Secret_Account07@reddit
So i wasn’t involved in the BES setup but i did like the concept of how blackberrys worked.
Man, i loved those devices. I remember when we decommissioned those servers and ppl were pissed. Our assistant director literally screamed and threw his phone. We replaced his blackberry with a MDM iPhone. He did not like the security requirements and using a touch screen lol
Chizep@reddit
Ahh yes, my peers affectionately called me ‘besadmin’ for a while. I was name after the service account it used. We were running it through a load balancer which it DOES NOT LIKE.
auntjemyma24@reddit
Anything owned by Sage is giving ptsd
Major_Disaster76@reddit
Blackberry storm where the screen was the click and it physically moved !
dphoenix1@reddit
My high school had a ton of those clamshell Dells. A very good proportion got hit by the great capacitor plague.
cioncaragodeo@reddit
I was hunting this thread for BES. We had some issue where the phones wouldn't connect to the exchange server, and the only fix was a wipe pushed from BES. I was on the helpdesk side for that, and man, resetting 100's of users phones was a nightmare.
66659hi@reddit (OP)
Did you ever have to manage the windows mobile/pocket PC devices? I never had to, luckily.
ludlology@reddit
a few yeah but almost everyone had blackberries for the workplace around then. every option was horrible and problematic and the people who used them were also the most annoying about it.
rire0001@reddit
I have a feeling I should be following AskOldPeople more, and these technical channels less, but I absolutely hated the Bosch/Rex-something automated mag tape library. Massive standalone cabinet with a number of cartridge tape drives and thousands of cartridges, all serviced by this ugly, jerky articulated arm. You could feel that thing operate thirty feet away through the floor - and remember, this was in an enterprise mainframe computing center with raised ceiling and drop floor and industrial air handlers positioned in the most annoying patterns across the floors... It was like a juke box for cartridges. God damn constant driver and SCSI signal issues, firmware hiccups, inventory desync - which REALLY pissed off our operators who instantly blamed me and the sysadm team. Cartridges would jam - and there was a whole process to power it down so you could enter the cabinet. And the lengthy robot re-homing process after each and every fault...
Murky-Throat-694@reddit
UNIX
tulottech@reddit
Dell OptiPlex GX270 "capacitor plague”. Was a K-12 Technology Director during this time. SMH
Daruvian@reddit
Any Sage software.
Mitel phones.
Some obscure Linux based proxy bullshit the guy before me installed. Never heard of it. Don't remember it's name. But that thing was the bane of my existence for a solid 2 weeks crashing literally every day before I convinced management to let me trash it and let the firewall do the job it was meant to do instead.
Secret_Account07@reddit
I forgot damn name but it was a piece of old and shitty software that was so shit it couldn’t run on modern (Windows 7 at the time) operating system so required an Oracle Virtual box to run within their desktop. It took hours and hours to setup.
They had constant issues and were constantly working on this custom VM. Took hours to setup as well. Our desktop team was constantly telling them - you need to work with vendor to figure out another solution. You got 6 months
It caused major issues between helpdesk and accounting/leadership. They would blame IT for xyz not getting done because their virtual software ruining on an ancient OS would stop working.
Our manager finally had our back so we came up with a solution. We created a custom image with Virtual Box installed and told them we no longer work on these VMs. They had to setup everything within the VM. They still constantly opened up tickets and we kept telling them that it was an unsupported software and we are not to touch it. Best we can do is give them local admin rights to VM and it’s all on them.
Magically when they had to do it themselves they found a solution through a vendor after a few months. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Arudinne@reddit
Anything from Mitel.
Financial-Peak47@reddit
The first desktop CPU at 1GHz. I scrimped and saved to get that AMD Athlon CPU and a decent motherboard. Turns out, AMD didn't include thermal protection and those things ran hot as hell. If your heatsink wasnt totally flat.....you cooked it.
Ignoble_Savage@reddit
Crystal Reports.
pg3crypto@reddit
That one old version stashed on a copied CD in the back of cupboard because its the exact version you need. Newer ones won't work, older ones won't work.
Fucking Crystal Reports.
Ignoble_Savage@reddit
Yes!!!
pg3crypto@reddit
Its ok man. You were never alone.
sloppy_cement_farts@reddit
FUCK lotus notes with the scorching passionate heat of a thousand suns, may it ever rot in hell. Thank you for the memory.
stickytack@reddit
A virtualized database server from 1985 (the year before I was born) running an on AS/400 from 1991 in a production environment at a warehouse keeping track of their entire inventory. This system was in place and in every day production until about 5 years ago when they moved to a completely customized Sage database. Glad we got rid of them as a client at my MSP. I didn’t even want to breathe too heavy around that AS/400 let alone touch it or work on it.
TarotCatDog@reddit
PEACH TREE
dgillz@reddit
Sage 50 now.
TarotCatDog@reddit
Hate Sage too
dominikwh94@reddit
OpenStack
ThisUserAgain@reddit
HP secure print
robbdire@reddit
Sage. Everything to do with it. FUCK SAGE.
dgillz@reddit
Which Sage product? They have a couple dozen.
robbdire@reddit
Everything to do with Sage.
pg3crypto@reddit
My old housemate and school friend is a software tester at Sage. If you knew what I knew, you'd hate them even more.
robbdire@reddit
Honestly I don't think it's possible. They are directly responsible for what likely adds up to days, if not weeks, or time trying to fix their shite.
I wish they'd go out of business.
pg3crypto@reddit
I'm not sure how it is today. But 10 years ago, they didnt have the budget to upgrade their test environment to the latest version of Windows / Windows server. They're always a generation behind. Which is probably why Sage is so shit.
They are chronically understaffed and they massively underspend on hardware.
Its highly likely that most of the time you are running on better hardware than they are.
They are extremely compartmentalised as well. Because their product suite is basically a bunch of bought in products, they have basically zero internal knowledge sharing. Someone working on Line 50 for example will have no idea what's happening in the CRM division. They're barely compatible with themselves let alone anything third party. Its insane.
They are massively behind the times on development processes too because most of their technical staff have been there over a decade and quite a lot of them have no experience outside of Sage. So they all live in a bubble. The tools and processes are massively out of date.
Its just a shitshow. Everything you suspect about Sage is probably true.
They dont even fund tea and coffee for staff. They all have to pay for it. Truly a fucking hell hole.
pg3crypto@reddit
Yeah those. They suck.
nosyeaj@reddit
win11?
Glassweaver@reddit
McAfee 5958 and Crowdstrike 2 years ago. But that's more PTSD around those events than anything else.
Salty_Paroxysm@reddit
Combination of Lotus Domino and BES server integration. Pretty much anything about Lotus Notes / Domino server tbh, made life so difficult.
thepfy1@reddit
Anything by Nortel
strydr@reddit
Nextel direct connect.
nikster77@reddit
Dell Tape Drive.
Knot_Click@reddit
Java Runtime client.
TheDarthSnarf@reddit
Anything written in Visual FoxPro.
TheButlr@reddit
Quickbooks
Sage
Anything Oracle
muskiier@reddit
Wordperfect for Windows. Used to crash for no apparent reason and corrupt its binary configuration files and the only way to fix it was to slowly reinstall from about a dozen 1.4K floppies.
If I had the time to upvote every post in this thread I would.
jmnugent@reddit
Maybe it's personal anecdotal historical bias or something ... but I feel like in decades past, (hardware especially) was a lot more fragile and crash-prone.
When you say the word "traumatized".. the things I think about are all the various hardware-failures I constantly had to deal with on the daily.
Things seem a lot more robust now (not that unexpected failures don't happen of course).. but when they do happen, it's easier now to just "replace the laptop" or whatever. Where in previous decades I've be required to spend hours or days troubleshooting individual components.
I'm personally very thankful that a lot of Lapotps etc are now all "1 mainboard" (everything soldered in). That pushes companies and individuals to either:
do everything in the cloud (so you dont have to worry about local data)
or have Backups (like Apple TImeMachine,etc)
There's still a lot of people out there who haven't learned this lesson.. but I feel like it's less than it used to be.
Phreakiture@reddit
RSA Keon!
So, I was tasked with doing a point upgrade of this POS. It went badly. Really badly. Like, I'm going to lose my job over this badly.
After about six weeks of hell, I ended up on one of those phone calls nobody wants. I'm on the call, with my boss, his boss, and his boss. On the other end of the line is our RSA account rep, who is desperately trying to sell us professional services for this task, because upselling is his job, so my management is blowing his suggestion off, he's on with a tier-3 support tech, and a couple of managers from RSA.
The thing that saved my job was when the account rep said this: "Oh yeah, even with professional services, we figure this job to take about eight weeks. No disrespect to your guy, I'm honestly amazed he made it this far."
My boss asked him to confirm about three times that we are talking about a point upgrade with that timeline, and it was confirmed repeately.
That off-the-cuff remark saved my job.
IWearAllTheHats@reddit
Oh man the repessed memories. Word Perfect. Specifically print driver processors that broken every few updates. Different processor for the same printer would mess up how it looked and the lawyers would loose it.
chicaneuk@reddit
HP MSA1000.
Hel_OWeen@reddit
Mimecast's admin interface.
Zachhandley@reddit
Docker swarm was aids. Same with Raft initially
xgiovio@reddit
Seagate 500gb hd drive from 2008/2009. A bug in the firmware simply didn’t allow the drive to be recognized after a stutdown. I lost 1 tb of data. It was patched after months
Antoine-UY@reddit
Most of what Apple produces and has produced. Anything produced by HP for their printers.
redwoodtree@reddit
SAP. What the hell. Even. Also web logic. Holy startup procedures. Triggered.
CornerProfessional34@reddit
Pathworks
sjmanikt@reddit
Oh God, Lotus Notes. I worked at the EPA, and I was tasked with migrating a huge website run off 50+ Lotus Notes databases into a single coherent look-and-feel with a modern CMS (back in 2004).
It went on for 2 years, mostly because meetings were crazy. Like you would see this shit on TV bad.
preyta-theyta@reddit
visual basic, taleo, workday, windows
kcornet@reddit
Fax modems.
As others have said, Citrix. Metaframe wasn't too bad since Citrix and Microsoft were in bed together at that point, but by the time XenApp came out, the divorce was complete and MS would go out of its way to break XenApp with every windows and office update.
As to the happiest events of my life, the day I got to walk away from XenApp ranks only below my marriage and kids being born.
QIC tape drives. Absolute garbage.
SAP. I have never seen a worse user interface and more arrogant support. SAP openly holds customers in utter contempt. Considering how obscenely expensive it is to license and maintain, I can't believe someone hasn't eaten their lunch years ago.
The little robotic 4mm tape drive that HP used to sell - the one with a cassette that held 8 tapes. Worked great for about 6 months, then would jam continuously.
EISA and microchannel. If you lost the config tool floppy (which was unique to each computer model), you couldn't configure IO cards.
Narrow_Victory1262@reddit
clearcase is a good start' virtualbox is another one. every debian based linux out there.
fuzzusmaximus@reddit
McAfee and Crowdstrike
ArchdukeTrout@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise Server. When people didn't understand that every gross naked photo they took on their company BlackBerry synced to the company servers and I had to remove them 🤮
osmedex@reddit
SAP Business One. Or as I liked to call it Shitty Accounting Program!
serialband@reddit
SGI Windows Desktop.
It had 6 proprietary RAM sticks per Bank, and every time you open, moved, or even touched the system we were sent, you had to open it up and reseat one of the 6 RAM chips. All 6 RAM sticks are needed for the RAM to work. Each time you reseat one another one needed reseating. Once you got it working you didn't want to turn it off. I don't know if it was the specific unit we got that was bad or if all of them were like that, but it took 2-4 hours to re-insert those RAM sticks to get it to work and we would avoid turning it off that day.
Outlook.
I never actually had to use it for many years, but eventually had to for a job from 2017-2022 that included supporting users. I had more issues with my own email than the entire previous 2 decades of email use. That doesn't even include all the users I had to support.
Television_Lake404@reddit
Worked on plenty of the 540 and 320. Those half width dimms were a pain. The only bonus was the faulty dimms were easy to find cause they were red hot compared to the good ones
wharblegarble@reddit
Rational ClearCase.
icedtrip@reddit
Flash, with the exception of Home Star Runner, Joe Cartoon, and JibJab.
Natural-Nectarine-56@reddit
Joe Cartoon was king!
Don’t forget foamy the squirrel
Midnight_Rain1213@reddit
Foamy still exists and has new videos on YouTube!
phillyfyre@reddit
Sharepoint....is behind everything I currently hate about MS. O365 is fing SharePoint with smtp
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
You mean Shitpoint?
blindbatg34@reddit
I’m really surprised I had to scroll this far down to find Sharepoint.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Deltek loves to find these niche products that are great, buy them, and just ruin them.
Fingolfin734@reddit
I miss the gold age of homestarrunner.com
master-shifu@reddit
Deltek and Unanet…
I’m right there with you.
bascule@reddit
sendmail and BIND. In the early ‘00s, ripping those out and replacing them with qmail and djbdns was so gratifying, especially when all the RCEs dropped
Television_Lake404@reddit
Sun fire v445. When engineering had release a doc on how to install the plastic cpu cage you know it’s bad. It’s 4 fucking screws that had to be done in order and how many turns each…
ph33rlus@reddit
Outlook retraumatises me every day
BuzzedDarkYear@reddit
And those dreaded PST files....... UGH! I rue the day I learned about them!
wrootlt@reddit
Cannot say traumatized, but disliking. Java stuff. Had to deal with lots of annoying Java stuff. Like trying to have multiple conflicting versions in non-persistent VDI environment, trying to use non Oracle versions and that failing with some apps. Sprawl of Java versions in vulnerabilities reports and having to deal with that.
Postman. I just hate this vendor for not making normal installers.
Currently i am going through ConnectWise Automate training and the more i learn the more i dislike it. So many questionable choices for design and even just naming things appropriately. And in general it looks so dated and clunky.
BuzzedDarkYear@reddit
I just got a new job with, hold your nose, an MSP after running my own shop for 20 years. Guess what they use? Fucking Connect wise....... UGH! It really makes no sense to me and the myriad of options is headache inducing. Screen Connect is solid but the rest of it just sucks Donkey Dick.
wrootlt@reddit
Well, they have acquired Screen Connect, so that explains it :) I have also started at an MSP 6 months ago and they use CW for customers and even now planning to use it internally (it is a huge company with MSP as a side branch). I am going through general training on their site and i have lots of questions :D Like having to double click a user in the list to remove it. Load instead of Browse. In one place you have to press "Add New" to actually save changes you did in that window. It is Save in all other places. Double clicking everywhere just irks me. Blacklist which is not actually blacklisting anything, but you can be alerted if app from blacklist is installed. Ok..? And then Service Blacklist is actually an Exception list to not get notified if a service in such list is stopped. WTF? It feels like they are piling lots of modules and menus together and naming it what first comes to mind. Or maybe now they are afraid to clean it up as many already used to how things work. My main problem with this system how counter intuitive everything feels. And i kind of am afraid to learn it and rewire my brain for it.
billyemoore@reddit
Service Now... or any cmdb,ticketing or change control... blah blah blah
xLith@reddit
CCH products.
Daneel_@reddit
Java and anything made by IBM.
SirKensingtonJr@reddit
Edge - just let me delete you! McAfee - more invasive than kudzu Jira - just f*ck right off ServiceNow - could you be any less intuitive? Teams - pick a lane New Outlook - how did you break something as simple as search?
pg3crypto@reddit
USB ADSL modems. Alcatel in particular. The fucking green sperm.
Weak_Wealth5399@reddit
Anything that starts with the word Norton...
ColonelCoon@reddit
bonzai buddy wormed its way through the school network im pretty sure
pg3crypto@reddit
Cain & Abel when I was at school.
WillieB52@reddit
Novell
pg3crypto@reddit
Depends on which side of the war you were on man. I used to abuse the shit out Novell print stuff when In was at school. You could use these services to hide copies of games in various places.
The printers would end up endlessly spewing shite out and causing distress with the network team...but I'd always have a copy of Doom 2 handy.
CammRobb@reddit
SolarWinds N-Central, and Nable Passportal.
N-Central was tough because it was relatively early in my Linux support days, but nowadays I'd probably be fine with it after 5 years of actual Linux sysadmining, but Passportal can fuck itself. Bloated, convoluted pile of shit.
3percentinvisible@reddit
Absolutely no problem with lotus notes.
Exchange from that era though....
Anyway, for me the Blackberry Storm. I can't go into all the reasons, I'll need to go back to therapy.
pg3crypto@reddit
Older versions of Exchange (2000/2003 era) were ok apart from the arbitrary information store limits.
I had a client (a well known semi celebrity figure) who was so fucking terrible at managing his inbox (he insisted on keeping every email he ever received, including the spam, forever), we had to set up an entire Exchange server just for his mailbox, it was that fucking big. Constantly had to run eseutil etc on it...at least twice a month.
ngorm@reddit
Microsoft Teams. I hate that thing. Oh and Mitel phone system. At my old job everything was super custom and it was a severe PITA - do not miss it one bit.
BuzzedDarkYear@reddit
Shoretel phone system now Mitel. Worst fucking thing ever except for AT&T who sold us that software horror. Never EVER get involved with AT&T for anything you've been warned!
ReviveTheProcess@reddit
Synology
shellmachine@reddit
Jira/Confluence
gregmark@reddit
Jira’s ok, but I was right-bummed out when I had to give up Dokuwiki for stupid Confluence and its goofy markup which… actually, you can’t even do that anymore. What a dumpster fire of a wiki.
pg3crypto@reddit
Wait til you're asked to customize it...then further down the line upgrade it or migrate it. Confluence is utter bollocks.
I rarely see upto date versions of it in the wild. Usually some old version from 15 years ago that cannot be upgraded.
pg3crypto@reddit
If I could upvote this a million times I would.
techierealtor@reddit
I really wish I remembered the name. It was a timeclock software I’ve never heard of one of my clients decided to use. Only seen it this one time.
So they handed the install files, I didn’t think twice about it. Installed and then when I launched it, it needed admin, huh. Whatever. Did it and left it alone. They reboot later in the week and I find out it needs admin to start again. Okay what is going on? Turns out the software installs an entire database and web server in their machine basically making it a server.
I call support because only one person needs it, no this is how it’s supposed to work. Their supported config is to install it on a workstation and then access the software via 127.0.01:whateverport. Their solution? Make the user an admin. Lol. So I tell the user “yeah this isn’t happening, is there really anything in here? No. Cool, I spin up a vm, install it there, set up a reverse proxy and throw DNS on it. User is happy, works, they don’t need anything else.
Company issues updates occasionally, normally all good. Run then package, reboot the server, all is good.
Except for one. Sever comes back up, everything is working for me, client says the timeclock is offline. Huh okay, I dig into it, I can see it. It’s up but the software can’t talk to it. Get it rebooted, same shit. I call support and they start looking into it. After like 3 minutes they figure out this is a VM. “I am sorry, our software is not supported on virtual machines, please move it to be directly installed on hardware and let us know if you still have issues”. Uhm what?
I spend the next 3 hours (I wasn’t as smart as I am now), and finally find that the app update enabled ipv6 communications and for some reason that is the default protocol on outbound. Disable it in windows, reboot and comes online instantly. Tell the client. Call support and basically say “hey, it wasn’t a VM issue, it was you enabling ipv6 in the software.”
“Agree to disagree”.
Note, sorry for formatting, on mobile and that turned out why longer than expected.
Disastrous_Meal_4982@reddit
Any software that you have to license with oracle, but fuck Java especially.
zewolf77@reddit
Shi…err, Citrix. The early days when I did most of my support of it was awful for any printer that wasn’t HP Laserjet 4 compatible.
theknyte@reddit
HPUX
WaizenErnter@reddit
Siemens Tia portal is pain in the ass to install. It still uses DVD installers in iso files 😭
And Siemens Teamcenter. Just pain in the ass to administrate
d5aqoep@reddit
SIS6326 GPU from 1997. Fuck that junk
Techguyincloud@reddit
Zebra printers
SolaceinSydney@reddit
Novell 3.11
pg3crypto@reddit
Novell was lit. My school used that back in the day and I drove the sysadmin almost literally insane. As a sysadmin myself now, Ive experienced similar pain so karma has been a bitch, but I feel his pain.
bionic80@reddit
AutoCAD was a terror of my early years in IT when they still used hardware dongles.
Shot_Fan_9258@reddit
Oh wow I forgot about that! 😂
bionic80@reddit
Much like any trauma, time dulls the edges of the pain until someone brings it up again.
j5kDM3akVnhv@reddit
Epicor POS. "POS" as an acronym has multiple meanings.
Mastodon_Opening@reddit
ZEBRA FUCKING PRINTERS!!!
And any software that was acquired by Computer Associates
JohnGillnitz@reddit
Many moons ago, when I was a pimply-faced-youth just starting out in IT, the organization I had just started working for decided it was going big time into the faxing business. We were going to have staff faxing thousands of people all day. So they had bought all these expensive fax servers, but found out the client that came with them made it complicated to turn into a work flow.
I opened my big mouth and say "Hey, maybe we can use WinFax." We could and did in a way far beyond what the product was ever designed to do. I manged that for over ten years. That's how I learned that once you solve a problem, that problem becomes yours forever.
RevLoveJoy@reddit
Long ago, 90s - 2010s, APC battery backup units standard data out was RS232 (serial). Or at least, it LOOKED like RS232. The pin out was not RS232. This is enterprise grade battery backup that you've got your core switches plugged into or your IDF with 300 wired clients plugged into.
If you plugged an actual RS232 pin out serial cable into the APC unit and then plugged the other end into a PC, the APC unit's default behavior was a hard power off.
That's right! From the school of "you had one fucking job!" - and serial cables were everywhere. Only the special APC pin out looks like a serial cable would both export data and not, ya know, hard power cycle your data center because you plugged in a data cable.
The really crazy part is that anyone who was decent at hardware knew this. We had ALL learned it the hard way either by being the guy who plugged in the standard RS232 cable and was met with The Horrifying Silence, or we were standing next to the poor SOB and we were both met with The Horrifying Silence. Anyone over about 45 who knows networking will VERY likely have a horror story about exactly this thing.
How APC are still in business is a testament to "well see engineers actually do not define what we spend the budget on."
kcornet@reddit
It wasn't rs-232. It used relays on what would normally be rs-232 control pins for controlling the UPS.
pg3crypto@reddit
Yeah thats pretty common. RS232 vs RS485.
Typically you will find RS485 on industrial kit. Its on most solar installations...so this shit will happen all over again.
As a general rule, if it involves power or machinery, its probably RS485.
Whether someone knows this depends on how they got into networking.
If you came in via Cisco (CCNA) you won't know anything about RS485 (or any standards they dont use or follow)...which is why I always suggest that people pursue vendor neutral certs and qualifications...that way you're training to be an engineer not a technical sales person.
Enochrewt@reddit
Hah you said it "Lotus Notes". It was actually Lotus Notes and installing into roaming profiles, and if I remember right the profiles were size limited because they were roaming.
Komputers_Are_Life@reddit
Quickbooks. It’s the slowest thing called quick I have ever seen.
BuzzedDarkYear@reddit
That's why it's called Slowbooks for real. Worst piece of software ever. And the company is in the top 3 of worst companies ever.
valsimots@reddit
ForstClass Communicator! Sudo email/storage/CMS ... I don't even know what its purpose was. We only ditched it 5yrs ago - and this was a municipality still using it! We joked and called it "Third class"
fieroloki@reddit
As400
Wodaz@reddit
Groupwise with the Netware login and Outlook. There was an early combo of this that was incredibly fragile. Running for a Hospital system.
ExitMusic_@reddit
BMC Remedy
kcornet@reddit
Oh, man, I have PTSD just from reading that. What a horrible product.
walledisney@reddit
Exit vim
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
You shut your whore mouth. vi is awesome!
/s (well, sorta. vi is awesome.)
chuckbag@reddit
Don’t worry. Ignore this person. They are probably a pico user.
walledisney@reddit
Can you exit it? Lol
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
ESCthen:qto exit, or:wqto write, then exit.walledisney@reddit
I see you code well. <3
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
I actually have it open right now. :D
I still do a lot of C coding in vi.
walledisney@reddit
walledisney@reddit
Wow I only edit text.
No c for me Only python
mic2machine@reddit
Why yes, I can. I have the reference mug. Don't you?
walledisney@reddit
Prove it.
walledisney@reddit
Can you exit it? Lol
Few-Office-1111@reddit
printers
pg3crypto@reddit
Backup Exec.
last__link@reddit
The MsTeams ringtone when getting a call.
kytosol@reddit
Oracle Weblogic. 😭
chuckbag@reddit
Ah yes. Web tragic!
tuxsmouf@reddit
A remember an application for ER based on SharePoint and ie6 (if I remember correctly). We had to store the admin password on ie for the application to work !
dickpower1@reddit
Notepad with copilot
F1ayer@reddit
Blackberry enterprise server...
Phendranite@reddit
A niche one from the UK education sector - SIMS.net. Apologies for the wall of text below but I suffered, and now y'all shall suffer.
SIMS stands for School Information Management System, which aptly explains what it does - manages student data, attendance collection, timetabling (I'll come back to that bit), logging sanctions and rewards, parent contact details, etc etc.
It does all those jobs pretty well, which is why at one point more than half the schools in the UK used it. The problem was installing & managing the thing.
Some context - this was back in the mid-2010s, SIMS is a desktop application (the ".net" bit actually does refer to the dot-NET framework here!), it talked to an MSSQL based application server, and got thrice-yearly updates. You'd think that deploying SIMS to a bunch of computers in a school would be straightforward - use Group Policy and install an MSI, or something like SCCM to push it out.
Nope. SIMS didn't come via MSIs, and the installer EXE was... just weird, and didn't behave sensibly if you passed "silent install" type flags - even the officially documented ones. You were supposed to first deploy an installer application called SOLUS (SIMS OnLine Update Service) which would install the SIMS client and keep it up to date.
Sounds reasonable enough? Yeeeeah except:
Being a bloody-minded fool, I refused to use the thing, and devised my own deployment script for SIMS using PowerShell. To be honest, all you really needed to do was copy the application files from the server, ensure the dot-NET client was installed, and maybe register a couple of DLLs. No need for anything fancy, it was basically just a (very complex and fancy!) database frontend.
The script worked wonderfully, and got shared with colleagues in other schools locally much to their joy. I checked with the vendor to ensure that doing this wouldn't cause any licensing or support problems, and the third-line rep I talked to basically said-without-saying "you're good, this is what we recommend people do if they complain about SOLUS".
Don't think you were safe from insanity once the thing was installed, as it had a habit of breaking in fun and interesting ways that of course weren't covered in the pitiful documentation. You could pay a handsome sum to the vendors for "priority support" ... or you could do what I did and use various Sysinternals tools like Process Monitor and dot-NET reflectors to figure out what the feck it was doing and getting wrong, and fix it - usually some missing dependency or a permissions issue.
Some other selected SIMS sins:
McDoodle209@reddit
Cold fusion
UrWHThurtZ@reddit
Crowdstrike!
pg3crypto@reddit
Sir, we call it Clownstrike round here.
gregmark@reddit
ACT, circa 1998. Contact management software. Still don’t understand why they made the Unix Admin manage it.
Groundwork circa 2009. GUI wrapper around Nagios. Inscrutable.
lpandcuandquotaon Linux/UNIX. Well… I guess the first two weren’t that bad, but the options were hard to keep track of. As forquota, I resented having to learn about it for all the garbage Solaris certs and RHCE but never used it for real, not once.djbdns. Oy.
pg3crypto@reddit
Omg fuck you man. I had forgotten Act existed. all the pain flooding back. Jesus.
kaiserh808@reddit
Yeah, Bloatus Goats definitely ranks up there in the all-time hall-of-shame.
Which is made all the more poignant as Domino was a really good platform.
As for DNS - I seem to have a way with it. I'm always fixing other people's DNS problems. Maybe that comes from originally learning to write zone files by hand in the late 1900s.
BioHazard357@reddit
"...late 1900s.." lol
What a century, started with the first powered flight and broadcast television, ended with RealPlayer, Silverlight and ME.
kaiserh808@reddit
You’re almost saying that like it’s progress
Obscure_Aussie_Music@reddit
Wow! Someone else also refers to it as bloated goats! I share your pain.
kaiserh808@reddit
Must be an Aussie thing!
PntClkRpt@reddit
Printers and fax machines. Over 30 years in enterprise IT and they are the bane of my existence.
brendanprice2003@reddit
setting up SCCM. I spent at least two weeks trying to get a working server image with SCCM setup and running, couldnt do it.
Settled for using other software.
ttyp00@reddit
Did anyone say cyberark yet? Bc cyberark is a bastard of cosmic proportions.
ShadowSt@reddit
Printers. I was a pretty good tech back when I was doing technical work, but I was cursed whenever I had to touch a printer, from drivers not installing correctly, or not being able to find them, to random acts of network connection issues, it's amazing I kept some of my jobs customers after being asked to deploy a printer.
CaptainZippi@reddit
…and why was it a printer?
nkitty@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)
Nothing has even come close to how bad this was for me. The solution to all of its problems seemed to be reinstalling it. I genuinely cried tears of happiness when we destroyed it
pg3crypto@reddit
There were loads of different ways to deploy it as well...depended on your phone provider. It fucking suuuuucked.
It essentially boiled down to single MAPI connection through Outlook to Exchange that had read permissions on every mailbox.
Soccerlous@reddit
Scanner plugged into a windows ME pc. Damn thing could only scan 4 pages before blue screening.
the901@reddit
Citrix being first on the list is a real truth.
WummageSail@reddit
Exchange Server
danekan@reddit
what was wrong w/ IE 6?? i loved it
IE5 must've been really bad
Jfragz40@reddit
The death of Star Wars Galaxies computer game
edorhas@reddit
Sendmail. Sendmail. I won't say it a third time.
voytas75@reddit
Mostly PKI
Realistic-Bad1174@reddit
Oh boy, here we go!
Zebra printers Oracle Beehive FormFlow (military) Installation of GreatPlains. I'm not sure why a doctor in engineering is needed to install this stupid piece of s***
Honerable mention for IBM i. It's solid, but I referred to it as the $2 bill of operating systems.
alxmolin@reddit
Damn you for creating this horror thread.
whoamdave@reddit
Xsan (especially after the death of the Xserves). Nothing like running a massive clustered filesystem that required two NICs on MacMinis.
IronLegs_217@reddit
Windows… I actually liked Lotus Notes
GenerallyVerklempt@reddit
Back in 1995-1998, we used to sell this router with a bulletin on-demand dial up modem with it called TEAMInternet. We sold the hell out of it to small businesses like law firms and insurance brokers. I had to support it, non-stop action.
oiler_head@reddit
SharePoint 2010 with is new fangled User profile beta service from MIM.
SharePoint 2003 was no peach either but that was my first foray into that space.
And lotus notes. That was no fun.
SolidStash@reddit
I was scrolling to see if anyone else experienced the particular hell of on-prem SharePoint admin, particularly user profile service administration during upgrades.
Failing upgrades through the UI so you have to start running individual powershell operations like a sequence of magic incantations. Cumulative updates you think are stuck but they really just take 4 hours... Nope it was actually stuck, maybe restarting web services at a particular time would help, try again.
The_NorthernLight@reddit
Blackberry enterprise server. Jebus i hated that software.
rootifera@reddit
JBoss 6 cluster setup. It was a nightmare.
Jacknotch@reddit
This mfer
musiquededemain@reddit
Microsoft Windows
Citrix
Threatlocker
SCOM
Ivanti
Cisco UCS blades
HP SIM
SupraCollider@reddit
Fax machines. Printers.
Windows McAfee and Symantec antivirus ~20 years ago. Wiping out windows system files, destroying fleets and putting AD domains into recovery scenarios.
Any bookkeeping/accounting/erp software I’ve ever touched.
dadburgers@reddit
Microsoft.
IWantsToBelieve@reddit
AusKey.
ImmediateLobster1@reddit
Ceridian (HR software).
A couple times per year I had to install updates. Updates had a packet of instructions, plus a neon yellow errata sheet that said "READ ME FIRST".
And a neon green sheet with the same banner, but additional changes.
...and an orange sheet.
Updates never went smoothly. That's stressful enough, but the issues meant you were holding up payroll.
Creative-Type9411@reddit
im still mad about accessdb
gregmark@reddit
I forgot all about that.
UrWHThurtZ@reddit
Not software, but a company, because of their software: Process Solutions
FreeQuQ@reddit
hpe IPMI, always bugging so e random shit and making impoaaible to fix or debug anything propperly. It's abusurd how much better dell idrac is
SinisterCanuck@reddit
Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. Fuck my fucking life
permanentnovice@reddit
Arcserve and ADIC tape libraries
skyhausmann@reddit
Any scanner and its associated software.
DerkvanL@reddit
Anything Packard Bell.
flaviodesousa@reddit
Great ad placement 😅
defrettyy@reddit
Symantec livestate
thedivinehairband@reddit
SIMS - all you UK school techs will know what I'm talking about
Norton Fecking Antivirus
Microsoft Teams, especially the early one with its stupid squirrel installer that needed to be assigned to users. I hated packaging that.
Extreme_Educator2461@reddit
HP Printers
Nevtir37219@reddit
IBM's Websphere
Heiminator@reddit
I once had to manage 30 Windows ME machines via sneaker net. If I ever become dictator then the guy who ordered us to use ME back then will be the very first person getting picked up by the secret police at night.
jdptechnc@reddit
I had a nonprofit that replaced about that many machines with Windows Me rigs that we built and sold to them. That was not fun.
InnovativeBureaucrat@reddit
I’m not really pro secret police, but this seems like an exception
Plastivore@reddit
That doesn’t deserve a secret police kidnapping, that deserves being made an example.
s_schadenfreude@reddit
Exchange 2000/IIS 5. Remember when you could run commands on an unpatched remote IIS5 server as SYSTEM via web browser? Oh the fun that was had. When I was bored or had downtime, I'd parse the logs on my bastion Linux host for hits from compromised IIS 5 servers (there were a LOT), then use the same exploit to log in, drop a notepad txt file on their server desktop called PATCH_YOUR_SERVER.txt. One time I noticed someone had already done the same thing! They beat me to it.
InnovativeBureaucrat@reddit
Zip drives were stressful. Failed at the worst times. Every time
Well-It-Depends420@reddit
SAP Powerdesigner. Had a particular rough experiment as I had to run it in a windows VM (no Linux support), but I absolutely hated everything about it. We had to use it for a course at university.
craigontour@reddit
Silverfort- arrrghh!
JerryRiceOfOhio2@reddit
wellfleet switches....you needed inband access to configure it via.... SNMP
PSYHOStalker@reddit
Please, no lotus notes or anything in this style from oracle
AidanAmerica@reddit
Back when the Windows BSOD and other crash dialogs said “your system has performed an illegal operation” I thought the police were gonna come
Sufficient_Duck_8051@reddit
Microsoft Windows
GeoSystemsDeveloper@reddit
IBM Lotus Notes
CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit
Anything Intuit (set up as client/server)
Also, a proprietary package from a previous place i was working at that served as a front end (they were/are a data processor for financial institutions), the back end being AS400.
mrkvd16@reddit
Printers, silverlight
krytenofsmeg@reddit
Anything by Pearson Education (UK). Most school sysadmins would be able to relate. Honourable mentions to Capita SIMS and Sibelius for it's wonderful bulk licensing system.
SausageWarrior96@reddit
Microsoft.
dayburner@reddit
Oracle backups, so many moving parts.
PrizeMedium2459@reddit
tivoli management framework, tivoli monitoring, lotus
fr6nco@reddit
Juju from Canonical
VLSHK@reddit
Bartender
MaziMuzi@reddit
Horribly outdated WordPress with a ton of plugins that I was supposed to bring up to date
tarvijron@reddit
I worked at Mindspring dialup support after they had absorbed tons of competitors like Netcom and Sprint and a little company called SpryNet. Spry had its own dialup networking client program called SpryDialer which we had almost no documentation about. Every SpryDialer user was 72 years old, hard of hearing, spoke in a variety of American English I’ll refer to as hillpeople speak. I was working through a SpryDialer call one day as the police were shouting commands through the door at the caller because of a stolen fishing boat investigation.
Admirable-Lock-2123@reddit
All of those are headaches, but come work in Academics and you will find personal hell known as lockdown browsers. Pearson which makes the Respondus LDB license it out to several vendors and they don't play nice with each other especially in a lab environment.
cowprince@reddit
QuickBooks
jamauai@reddit
ServiceNow, because how is it that I spend a stupid amount of time creating custom database views, patterns, classifications, researching hidden system properties for what many would consider very common scenarios.
alanslc@reddit
DB2
CoolNefariousness668@reddit
Having just finally shut down our Citrix environment, Citrix haha.
Inevitable_Ad_3855@reddit
Win 7 Horizon Desktops with Nvidia Grid K1 K2 cards
jackchrist@reddit
Any dental software really
molis83@reddit
Printers.
And Java
Ferreteria@reddit
Outlook, every day
coollll068@reddit
3CX
P_Villain@reddit
I think I've finally forgotten the very particular order to restart BES services on a Windows server when the CEO calls at 5AM because his email doesn't work. Only took a couple decades.
MagniNord@reddit
Shitbooks and that fucking H202 error and Rage accounting
Admirable-Zebra-4568@reddit
Netscape Directory Server. When log files are not log files.
hallowleg088@reddit
Printers
andyniemi@reddit
BMC Remedy
tomthecomputerguy@reddit
Excel and powerpoint ever since I started working IT for an overseas sales branch of a Japanese company.
They use Excel for everything.
I've seen them put some crazy things in Excel that do not belong there: Software documentation, even a vba script that manages external distribution lists for exchange online.
日本の会社 love excel...
KernelChaos@reddit
Microsoft Mail...the horror...the horror.
Ummgh23@reddit
Any printer
boxheadmoose@reddit
SharePoint
Trigrammatron@reddit
QuickBooks
There was one time I had to do breathing exercises because it was starting to make me cry.
Proud-Ad6709@reddit
Any of the original iPhone MDM solutions that replaced BES.
sedition666@reddit
Got to be oracle DBs for the winner. No other software has the ability to bankrupt your company if you install it wrong
CyborgPenguinNZ@reddit
Early Aldus PageMaker (ragemaker)
mustmax347@reddit
McAfee
Ok-Analysis5882@reddit
low cost Nvidia hardware in HP servers, night mare
Prophage7@reddit
Any email client running POP3
derpman86@reddit
Migrating to a new computer was always fun, copy the pst and nk2 files onto the new machine. I would actually import the emails from the old pst file as well into a new one so it would take longer to end up corrupt as they always would.
zupzupper@reddit
Hey now, I used to log into my campus email with Telnet to check my box, had all the pop3 commands memorized
PvtBaldrick@reddit
Interrupts having to be set manually by jumpers on interface cards and having to document them per PC....
imgroovy@reddit
Xerox
missed_sla@reddit
Sage. How do you make something so impossible to run reliably and charge six figures to run it. Jesus tittyfucking christ.
dgillz@reddit
Which Sage product are you referring to?
Icemagic@reddit
Pivot tables lol
But thermal printers are an PAIN IN MY ASS.
Spent over a day trying to get the dam labels aligned with EPIC. Works on one but not the other. Mirror settings? WRONG. Idk how the fixed it because I left right after their go live lol.
dgillz@reddit
Pivot Tables are very powerful and you need to revisit your use of them.
Dreilala@reddit
I still do not get why everyone hates Lotus Notes.
Microsoft spent the past 20 years copying it resulting in their O365 environment, which is still simply worse apart from Word and Excel.
ZathrasNotTheOne@reddit
windows ME
IAmTheRealTroy@reddit
Acer. They actually made server hardware.
Ch4rl13_P3pp3r@reddit
CC:Mail 🤬
Having to run a manual repair on the mail stores every evening.
Also had to make it talk to Novel Groupwise using an X.500 gateway.
The level of stress CC: Mail gave me… 🤬
Loved Groupwise itself once I understood how it worked being l behind the scenes.
Candid_Ad5642@reddit
Notwell NetWare
College used this, might have been misconfigured
The clients would check in with the servers regularly
When the network saw heavy use, the clients would loose check ins with the servers, and retry check in more often, effectively creating a DDoS on servers and the network, rendering the network kinda useless
somesketchykid@reddit
Network loop or broadcast storm imo
Candid_Ad5642@reddit
Not loop, just everything got very very slow
But the campus network and the clients were nice and fast outside "office hours"
HibsGeorge@reddit
DeskAlerts
michaeljefford96@reddit
Lotus Notes, 100%. When I started my current job about 5 years ago, I was taken aback that this was what they were using as an email client.
Just awful, clunky and slow, such a dated interface. Fortunately, I discovered a lot of employees also hated it, and took the route of utilising the Traveler plugin for Outlook in order to actually use something that was functional.
A year or 2 ago, they finally migrated fully over to 365.
yournicknamehere@reddit
TeamViewer especially versions 14 and below.
These versions had broken uninstallation script so if TeamViewer host randomly lost assignment (happened very fucking often) we had to re-install it.
But it was uninstalling enough to stop working but not enough to let me install new version.
So before I realized which registry entries must be removed manually during uninstallation, I had to manually search registry for everything with "TeamViewer" in name.
Then we started using Intune and I started deploying it as Win32 App with custom installation and uninstallation script.
AfternoonPenalty@reddit
Back in the 90s I used to be on a network team. For the life of me I cannot remember the network config platform we used, netmon or something, that only ran on OS/2.
Eeeeeeeugh, still gives me the shivers many years on!
bobbyuday@reddit
Optical drive disappearing from dell desktops all of a sudden and searching and deleting a reg key was the only way to fix it. Good old days without chatgpt or remote viewing applications 😂😂
No-Structure828@reddit
Shrewsoft VPN software
So_average@reddit
Seibel CRM. 400 column tables ...
Trooper_Ted@reddit
Dragon Naturally Speaking
That one Zebra printer we bought that I ended up flying a specialist over from the UK to fix and even they couldn't get it working properly
imtoowhiteandnerdy@reddit
BMC Remedy
mallet17@reddit
DFS-R on Windows 2008.
Asl687@reddit
All hp printer software!! All of it!
doubledown830@reddit
Trying to package and deploy Adobe products
FilmFanatic1066@reddit
Progress openedge database
winaje@reddit
Zebra label printers
AbbeLabben@reddit
Zebra Printers Lotus Notes
Alexandre_Man@reddit
Any accounting software. Those fuckers are so annoying to install and troobleshoot.
OrdyNZ@reddit
Windows 11. And a lot of the untested bloatware crap Microsoft makes now.
elwiseowl@reddit
Winmodems on Windows 98. The internal modem cards.
Detects the modem, lets you dial up. Then as soon as handshake finishes. Blue Screen of Death.
It's the wrong driver. Needs the exact right driver and driver version.
It pretends its happy with the driver, until it makes that final connection. Then crashes. Too many hours of my life wasted.
I just wanted to rip them all out and get an external serial port one. They were far more reliable back then.
pancakemonster02@reddit
Tivoli Storage Manager
Arseypoowank@reddit
Acronis cloud, dear god
Zenith2012@reddit
Net LM network
IE6
AlmoranasAngLubot69@reddit
Not traumatized but stressed the heck out of me. Crowdstrike, specifically the global outageway hack 2024. I'm the only IT working that day and need to troubleshoot 300+ computers on my own, eventually worked 24/7 that day.
osiris2k@reddit
Not sure if games count but Eco the Dolphin is messed up.
Gh0styD0g@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise Server
And
Cargowise
StiffAssedBrit@reddit
I've been in IT for many years, so my list is extensive, but here's the worst culprits from years ago.
CA Arcserve backup software. Massively over complex! Never got it to work!
Symantec Backup Exec V 12 onwards. I don't think that I ever got that to backup reliably. I had used Veritas Backup Exec for years but once Symantec took over, and revamped it, it became useless!
Novell Netware drivers. Oh the joy of getting Novell to communicate with the hardware. NIC drivers and Adaptec SCSI drivers were the worst.
CA network fax software. Another appearance for Computer Associates. I can't remember the exact name but it was supposed to allow multiple clients to send and receive faxes via a group of modems on a 'server'. The client software caused every single client PC to blue screen! Even a brand new PC build, with no other software installed, crashed as soon as I installed the CA client. After days on the phone with support I abandoned it and bought GFI Faxmaker. Had it up and running in three hours!
Now to today. The winner has to be the daily 'hunt the setting' game that we all play with the Microsoft O365 management portal!
ikothsowe@reddit
Lotus Notes - mediocre database mated with a mediocre email platform. I despised everything about it.
J_dizzle86@reddit
Autocad.
HowlinPsycho@reddit
Dell Optimizer. Breaks all kinds of network related stuff. Unable to smb, use intranet, rdp... All at random, and not always everyone, more when it felt like it.. we now order our dells with clean image, so this bloatware is no more, finally...
Ok_Size1748@reddit
Sendmail.cf . M4 is for cowards
pacopac25@reddit
HP JetDirect Crystal Reports VBA
ipzipzap@reddit
Patton VoIP gateways. Configuration was/is a nightmare.
Trabbi1999@reddit
Teams Rooms
fAAbulous@reddit
Software - McAfee isn‘t a Virus detection Software; it IS the Virus.
Hardware - Anyone mentioned Zebra label printers yet?
Competitive_Sun_7276@reddit
I worked for a software startup late 90's, we wrote a WMS suite & Zebra printers were the bane of my life 😂
roedie_nl@reddit
Printer
Chivako@reddit
Dot matrix printers old no nic, used to work in a warehouse and they had a lof of those for order picking and shipments.
Major_Disaster76@reddit
Any software about a year after Broadcom buy it
EffectiveEquivalent@reddit
TeamViewer. Utter garbage.
Identd@reddit
Anything by Novell
Major_Disaster76@reddit
As a former netware 3 and 4 ccna I both hate and appreciate this comment
Squeezer999@reddit
I used to work at an organization in the early 2000s that was running a netware migration utility that would migrate file shares to Windows server. I do not recall how many gigs of data had to be migrated, but the utility would take all weekend to run. If it ran successfully and at least 75% of the time it would randomly fail and you just have to restart it and pray.
EvandeReyer@reddit
Documentum. More specifically attempting to back up documentum. Very glad that system died a death. I will freely admit it could have been our implementation that was trash.
emag@reddit
BioPerl... IYKYK
benga_ch@reddit
Microsoft SCCM
IkarusCooper@reddit
SAP GUI Client Software.. I tried to pack it for in tune.. never had so many weird errors and if you went for the interactive instead of silent installation you did not face those errors.. absolute trash software
matthiastorm@reddit
The cisco serial terminal.
Late-Locksmith9706@reddit
Labview
Carl0s_H@reddit
Symantec Enterprise Vault
The number of database problems that POS had was unreal. Indexing getting stuck, message queues filling up and not moving, service failures.
So glad when we pulled the plug.
Major_Disaster76@reddit
Early Arcserve , bricks level backup and restores on exchange 5.5 took most of my life and will to live
doalwa@reddit
Microsoft ActiveSync. Not Exchange ActiveSync, talking about that POS software you had to install locally to sync files, contacts emails and the like to various PDAs. The main reason why blackberries and layer the iPhone cleaned HOUSE when they came out and did all that shit wirelessly.
ipzipzap@reddit
Arcserve aka Arghserve!
ashofsin@reddit
EGecko
blu3teeth@reddit
Workday. No matter how bad the experience is intended to be as an unconfigured product, everywhere I've worked has managed to make it worse.
old_wired@reddit
SE38
blu3teeth@reddit
I used to work at Citrix but only management called it that. Both developers and customers called it Shitrix.
Plantatious@reddit
Apple Configurator
faramirza77@reddit
SCOM
GreenWoodDragon@reddit
Appaling. I've only just encountered it in my current job and SCOM is all but useless.
ArshiyaXD@reddit
Citrix and Printers
Cuntonesian@reddit
Windows
ycnz@reddit
Carestream Radiology Information System. Fuck that shit.
squabbledMC@reddit
HP Printers. Every single damn one I've ever owned in my life or had to work with. I literally and physically had to fight one to get it to eject the ink cartridge once, I shit you not
oloryn@reddit
TCL (Terminal Control Language) for Verifone credit card terminals. Best I can describe it is assembler without symbolic addresses. If you have to make a branch, you pretty much have to count how many instructions back or forward you need to go.
Loupreme@reddit
On prem splunk … fuck that thing. Worst permission set up ive ever seen in my life
Jolape@reddit
LTM - Lenovo terminal manager
Worst thin client management software I've ever used.
MrVonBuren@reddit
Oh man.
So in the Army I was in a scout platoon with a radar that used cryptography in order to verify IFF (Identify Friend/Foe) transponders...but somehow the device that loaded the crypto was built for devices with a
Load Cryptobutton but the radar...didn't have one.So to make it work you had to go through this whole sequence to get to the laod point and then connect/disconnect the cable as quickly as you could to fake a button press. At the best of times, with practice you could achieve a ~40% success rate.
This had to be done daily.
That aside, I worked in the cable (television) industry for ~a decade so between that and the military I spent 15 years in jobs where none of the systems were connected to the internet. So I have all kinds of horror stories
gimpbully@reddit
stornext/xsan.
eufemiapiccio77@reddit
Lotus notes server
Any-Virus7755@reddit
Printers with fiery monitoring connected
freeformz@reddit
Windows For Workgroups 3.11
PandaAT@reddit
Oracle
virtualstaticvoid@reddit
Lol. Microslop Windose and Office 340 (it's down 25 days pa).
MadSkillz65@reddit
Bit niche but dotNetNuke IYKYK.
Also - can I add a supplier? Avanade. A Microsoft / Accenture joint venture that got the worst bits of both companies and added an additional layer of shit.
IreliaFtw@reddit
Radware alteon
DenverITGuy@reddit
Wsus
FarToe1@reddit
"What, you mean you didn't want the entire internet downloaded to your local drive for updates nothing will ever use?"
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Just throw it away and start over.
billrr02@reddit
After my 3rd or 4th WSUS rebuild, I wised up and got WSUS automated Maintenance. WAM
Once you WAM you never go back.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Unfortunately a lot of drama occurred there. Otherwise solid tool prior to that.
billrr02@reddit
At WAM?
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Yep. Making something freely available to a community and then deciding way later to delete every copy one could get their hands on and threaten legal action against anyone with a copy they didn’t have the ability to delete is a bit dramatic.
mistersd@reddit
HP ILO 2 and 3 with this Java remote console
FastHotEmu@reddit
Windows 11
heavyPacket@reddit
Many years ago I worked with two email software that were both absolute nightmares. The actual email software was called FirstClass. Truly a horrific piece of shit. Yet somehow, the email archiving software our director decided to purchase on a whim, was even worse. It was called MailArchiva. Just terribly written software with even worse technical support.
MadSkillz65@reddit
Nicknamed ‘SecondClass’ as I recall!
greenstarthree@reddit
BackupExec
UPS WorldShip
McAfee anything
WatchAltruistic5761@reddit
Dragon - Speech to Text software installs
TerrifiedRedneck@reddit
Winrar is STILL bugging me for a license.
Apprehensive-Pen7301@reddit
Microsoft Onedrive
McLovin-@reddit
Surprised to see Cognos absent here. Twenty minute restart times makes configuration and troubleshooting brutal. And IBM always has their own proprietary way of doing things
basec0m@reddit
Windows NT 4.51… just fucking awful
michaelwise@reddit
App Zapper… Volume set to high. 3AM… My soul left my body that night from an app being “zapped”.
daaaaave_k@reddit
Exchange 5.5 on NT4..
WretchedMisteak@reddit
Oracle DB servers on Windows Server 2003 clusters with EMC2 storage.
smikkelhut@reddit
Windows Vista.
SGL FlashNet: notorious in broadcast circles: a Windows cluster that crashed multiple times per day; a minimal UI that gave you no clue at all and sitting between Avid edit sets and a spectralogic tape robot.
At some point I was almost full time babysitting this nightmare
HeligKo@reddit
IBM HACMP with SSA disks.
Scereth@reddit
Installing Novell Netware from 100+ 720mb floppy discs!
kanid99@reddit
Coleco Adam. My friend had one growing up and that thing was a nightmare to use. . . If/when it even worked.
Rattlehead71@reddit
That loud daisy-wheel printer though!
XenonOfArcticus@reddit
MAPCON II
Rattlehead71@reddit
ESEUTIL.EXE /P
Haroombe@reddit
Teams call ringtone
XL426@reddit
Backup Exec! Thankfully haven't touched it for years now
theedan-clean@reddit
Salesforce.
stahlhammer@reddit
Docushare
russellvt@reddit
Docusave
LGrssBTeu@reddit
you awaken my Internet Explorer traumatism
bios64@reddit
Dynamics 365 Dynamics 2012 Crystal reports Docentric
Scary_Ad_3494@reddit
Paint.exe
Fritzo2162@reddit
UPS Worldship
Previously, if it was outdated, you had to upgrade it sequentially ( v9.1, 9.2, 9.3, etc). The software is huge and you’d have to download each version separately.
Here I am billable sitting in the middle of a shop floor at $150/hr downloading and installing this stuff over a 20/1 connection. It took days!
FleshSphereOfGoat@reddit
Printers SAP Every piece of software ever created by Oracle
spazzmonger@reddit
10 base 2 coax networks.
Impossible_IT@reddit
There was a museum collections/curator software in 2000 that was a PITA to work with and support. Thought I was going to get fired because their telephone support played musical chairs so to speak with their select this option, select that option going in circles and finally got a human being after about 20-30 minutes of that BS. I told the telephone support their software was a piece of shit. Tech said he would bring it up with the contracting officer of the org I worked for. My supervisor had my back though.
StrictNorth6671@reddit
Adlib?
mrender7@reddit
Remote Desktop Services (RDS)
NetBackup
Ivanti ITSM
somesketchykid@reddit
RDS aint so bad, cmoooooon
Totally agreed on the other two
mrender7@reddit
A nightmare of epic proportions for me, environment with c.1000 concurrent sessions. No one is ever happy with stability. I'm over it🤣
These-Baby6888@reddit
Not even software but Cisco Meraki licence. Basic setup for SME (8 switches/firewalls, 6AP’s) was ≈ €20k
russellvt@reddit
Lettuce Nodes (ie. Lotus Notes) running on top of Windows NT 3.5 ... and then migrating to NT 4.0. Ugh.
FinMaky@reddit
I got hit with vpn: Cisco anyconnect Direct access
Done IBM dos, os/2, IBM Tivoli, lotus notes, sccm, citrix, crystal reports, but one strong contender is Oracle dp connectors when they were version spesific and only one could be installed and ofcouse you need 2 or 3 different versions on same computer. Repackaging those to working package was "fun"
bukkithedd@reddit
Gods, where to start...
In no particular order:
SAP
PCMCIA Network-cards on Win95/98
Windows ME
Microsoft Bob
Honeywell (Intermec) thermal printers
Epson ribbon-based color-printers
Any product from Olivetti
3Com 3C905B
Cummins diagnostic tools
OS/2 Warp 4
Probably more that I've completely pushed out of my mind and blissfully forgotten.
Shiznoz222@reddit
Microsoft Teams. Every version to come out in the last year and a half.
Fuck you Microsoft.
Abnatural@reddit
NT 4.0 and IRQ’s
Starbreiz@reddit
Zip drives. Our entire college campus invested in them for the labs and everyone saved their papers to them, only for the click of death to become a thing.
Starbreiz@reddit
Novell netware
dangoldan@reddit
Microsoft Bob
Primer50@reddit
Java and boss controllers
Orionsbelt@reddit
Came way to far to find java, having to configure specific site exceptions for random one off apps sucked
planetawylie@reddit
OS/2 Warp
freethought-60@reddit
If anyone is old enough, the days of Novell Netware saw the introduction of iMangler (the infernal admin tool) and Crashcat, as some (rightly) named "iManager" and Novell's implementation of Tomcat. On OES it worked a little better (meaning it crashed a little less often, bugs aside)... so to speak.
blu3tu3sday@reddit
Printers. And Windows OS.
Vichingo455@reddit
Google Credential Provider for Windows. Garbage software.
The_NorthernLight@reddit
Printers….
paishocajun@reddit
I'll have to come back and edit later to tell the full story but I unofficially revoked all printer privileges from a building full of engineers except for getting their finished jobs off of the printer once
ImNotABotScoutsHonor@reddit
It's been two hours.
I crave the lore.
Give it to me.
paishocajun@reddit
Hey!
Ok so I was doing the normal IT shit, emails, etc when I got a call from one of the site office admins a couple of buildings over (very small site, a few petrochem units, an admin building where I was, a command and control building, a secondary admin/safety/etc building, and a trailer where safety/engineers had some offices).
"Hey R, what's up?"
"Cajun, one of our printers is blue."
"Uh, what? What do you mean blue?"
"Every page is coming out blue from Printer003"
All three of these printers have been royal pains in my ass, thank you Xerox, you're the one company that may be more useless than MSoft itself.
"Give me a sec and let me walk over, I'll meet you there in like 5"
Head over, meet R, she shows me a page she'd just printed. Sure as hell, the WHOLE page, not just inside the normal print margins, has a blue.... Dusting? of toner across it. I'm used to lines, smears, streaks, gaps, a mix of all of the above, but this is new. New with Xerox, especially these, means headache.
So I drop the front toner panel open and I swear to Gates, Jobs, and Torvalds that it looks like Gargamel has murdered the entire goddam Smurf village.
The actual fuck.
To save the boring parts, I go and get our special anti-static vac, clean everything I can, take all the parts and panels off that I can, clean THOSE sections out, pages are still coming out blue. Call Xerox to send a service tech out, he has to remove MORE stuff, and after about a total of 4 hours of work across 2 days, we've extricated all the Smurf guts. Turns out, when someone changed one of the cartridges, they'd been a little too enthusiastic. There's a tiny bit of plastic sponge with a hard plastic layer on top that presses up into the cartridge; this had gotten folded over so as best as we can figure, all the extra cyan had been just spilling into the guts of the machine for like a month.
Now again, this trailer is full of safety people and engineers, everyone has either 4+ year degrees and/or the equivalent field and continuing ed hours. I have an associates in business and a lifetime of being the neighborhood nerd, plus about a year of actual IT-IT time.
After doing the final checks and handshake with the Xerox guy (really liked him actually, just not the shitty printers), I walked out, looked at the about dozen people in the open cubicles, "I don't know who tried to help with the printer toner, but if any of y'all help again instead of putting in a ticket, I'm talking to the bosses. Get your print outs and leave the things alone please."
I'm generally nice to users because they're almost always the victims of updates or server changes, etc. Even when I'm aggravated, I try to play it off as general office banter by being overdramatic and hyperbolic. This, though, nah, please let me do my job so you can do yours.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
I had a call-out (ca 1997) to a client that was running a pair of Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations as print servers. Maybe they should be more appropriately be called Raster Image Processors, but they were taking Postscript jobs across the LAN from all of the user workstations that had only a generic Postscript printer driver and the print servers converted the print job for the specific printer it was bound for. It was kind of impressive, but wild. This was a professional service bureau doing high-end commercial print output.
Lonecoon@reddit
The highlight of my IT career was throwing a ColorQube printer off the roof of a building into a dumpster. It was like watching a clown's head explode.
wmposl70@reddit
Whatever the fuck ran the Kodak microfiche machines
Admirable-Anybody360@reddit
Norton Antivirus. A virus in itself pretending to be protection
randomman87@reddit
Any of the software vendors that market to enterprise and don't offer silent install switches
freakanso@reddit
Docker Desktop on Windows
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
Well you try making a Linux VM solution that users don't know is a VM, to run Docker containers! That it works at all is amazing!
PBandCheezWhiz@reddit
CAD or CAM software and their licensing.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
And the HASP hardware dongles plugged into the parallel port of every workstation!
zupzupper@reddit
HP ibrix, NIS, Ciscoworks on Solaris, sendmail and compiling macros…
Active Directory in the win2k/2k3 era, FirstClass
Any Java based ILO interface.
FluidGate9972@reddit
Vmware ESXw cluster running windows clusters with perennially reserved luns. This was esx 4 or 5, before vmotion was supported on those luns. Maintaining it was a nightmare.
Squeezer999@reddit
On-prem SharePoint
society_victim@reddit
BES server
DarknessBBBBB@reddit
SAP
bukkithedd@reddit
You HAD to go there. Straight for the goddamn dingdings....
I felt this in my goddamn soul.
rizlared@reddit
All-In-1, yes I'm very old
opmopadop@reddit
Netscape System Cleaner
GreatMyUsernamesFree@reddit
Lotus Notes /Domino R5
VeritablePornocopium@reddit
DeepFreeze
tdressel@reddit
Soundblaster sound cards on windows 95
n3fyi@reddit
Bluebeam
wavemelon@reddit
Printers. Always printers.
pee_shudder@reddit
Way back when: Having to learn DNS, DHCP, AD, and IIS on the fly, by myself, after talking my way into a job that I was in no world qualified for.
thehuntzman@reddit
Fake it til you make it brother! We all did. I went and taught myself these concepts when I was still in middle/high school (yeah I know I'm weird) and it still couldn't prepare me for the actual enterprise world. That was all trial by fire.
theRealNilz02@reddit
UPS Worldshit certainly is one of them.
Another one is dolphin Supernova, a screen magnification tool for an employee that's almost blind. Not only is that employee not very nice to IT, the software is also absolute shit.
doofusdog@reddit
MUSAC.
Any kiwi school IT people here?
MS Access based, basically the SMS for every New Zealand high school. Multi user thing..
Even well managed it would burn itself up once a month.
H0verb0vver@reddit
My Gravis Ultrasound Max that I lost
brvheart@reddit
ITunes.
ardentto@reddit
Lotus Notes and its adjacent Sametime.
Electronic_Tap_3625@reddit
Java on desktops. It gives me chills just talking about it today.
apple_tech_admin@reddit
Anything related to SAP. God I hated that job.
SRSchiavone@reddit
Citrix, fax, efax, and the flavor-of-the-day Outlook
Danowolf@reddit
Exchange Server I think 2008. I was a new it person tasked with maintaining the perverbial monkey throwing crap at me server. We had a complete asshole salesman (owners pet, back stabbing vindictive sob) and everytime he had a email problem he would page on overhead speaker "Bob, my emails broke "again"! Nice and loud making sure the company owner heard it. So we moved to a $600.00 a month solution so I didn't have to listen to him. After we moved to O365 I'd say I'll call MS not my problem. No doubt " it's Microsoft" has been used by many an it person to deflect criticism lol.
RefrigeratorLive5920@reddit
Lotus Notes
Symbian OS
Hitachi HDS
Windows NT 4.0
SQL Server 6.5
Pacemaker
Installing ANY sound card on old ass Linux
Oracle 8i
PostgreSQL 8.3
MongoDB 1.0 on Windows
Slow-laris
SNMP
Windows SCSI
Intel Optane
Hyper-V
Hortonworks & Cloudera
ext2fs
Samba
Cygwin
IBM AIX 5.3
OpenSUSE
El_Demente@reddit
QuickBooks on-prem
tech_is______@reddit
all of it is traumatizing
valryuu@reddit
Surface Pro 4s. Never again.
Safe_Routine_7453@reddit
Microsoft Front Page (web page design). Produced so much bloat someone wrote a tool to clean the output.
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
Windows is rapidly getting that way with me. I'd really like to meet a MS developer in a dark alley.
So many changes I don't think anyone asked for.
For example the search bar: "NO!! IF I WANTED TO SEARCH THE WEB, I'D OPEN A WEB BROWSER!!!!" (Yes, I know there's ways of turning that off, but it doesn't help when I have to work on other machines.)
"NO!!! I'M JUST DRAGGING THE WINDOW TO THE EDGE OF MY SCREEEN. I DIDN'T WANT TO GO FULL SCREEN!!!"
__Sariah__Vrc__@reddit
Whatever cursed checkin system my old hotel job used. Think it was AS/400 or something.
Worst thing I've ever used. Sorry, I'm probably not qualified to say this, but if the "go back" button is different across multiple menus for no readily apparent reason, you have shit UI. That software is so overcomplicated, difficult to use, and poorly designed that if often felt like it was deliberately made that way out of malice.
mghnyc@reddit
sendmail. Before they added macro support via m4.
m1k3e@reddit
Getting a USB printer to work correctly on Windows 98 first edition.
Atillion@reddit
SSRS Reporting
oh2four@reddit
CephFS. fuck you CephFS
vilnius_be@reddit
DirectX 3.11
Could not find direct3d.dll
watomtevat@reddit
Shitrix with wyse terminals and Blackberry enterprise server.
Dry_Negotiation_9696@reddit
I still can’t find anything in Windows File Explorer. After all these years
Gryphtkai@reddit
SAS. I made the mistake of becoming the one tech in the agency who understood how to get it up and running along with dealing with licensing
PS_TIM@reddit
Storage spaces direct
clubfungus@reddit
IntraNetware
ThreadParticipant@reddit
PC Load Letter
Wharhed@reddit
Anything Tyler Tech has produced or manages is always hot trash.
Shadetree_Sam@reddit
Custom label printing on Citrix.
mix51@reddit
Backup Exec
capta1namazing@reddit
Can I just say Printers?
Pr0fessionalAgitator@reddit
“I’m Cortana, and I’m here to help. A little sign-in here, a touch of Wi-Fi there…”
Primary-Sail6667@reddit
Netscape navigator
That damn purple monkey virus
When we were kids, my sisters had this My Little Pony game that was a corrupted mess and crashed the PC constantly. I'd remove it and they would throw a hissy like you wouldn't believe.
Windows ME
There are others but....Ive dated myself enough
Bio_Hazardous@reddit
I love getting reminders of all the garbage I've managed to touch in only 5 years.
Really upsets me after going down this career path after getting a software engineering degree that everything I learned in school was thrown out and everything is actually just the least viable trash that could get shoveled out the door. Even the DEMOS were getting from companies are making their own products looks bad, it's like they know they don't have to try.
zzzpoohzzz@reddit
an old employer trying to use quickbooks as a multiuser environment and an erp system that is based on using it as such.
Crafty_Ad4840@reddit
Printer ticket always terrifies me!
Willller@reddit
HPE 3PAR backup hw. What an expensive junk.
snookajab@reddit
Any printer 😩
DiscipleOfYeshua@reddit
Low-quality power outlets that become brittle and fall apart when I remove a plug are perhaps the scariest
Ejo415@reddit
Sonos...anything.
Fuck that software is horrific
soliwray@reddit
Outlook
Exchange On-prem
Sage
I know it's cliché, but I hate printers of any kind.
Original-Locksmith58@reddit
LogMeIn Hamachi
Cobyachi@reddit
I can go on and on about software but….
During Covid, our power users were given Dell Precision 5530 or 5540s, can’t remember which exactly… idk if it was because of our SCCM image package or if Dell just had a really bad batch, but we constantly had swelling batteries for about a year. There were probably a couple thousand people in our office that used em and I swear we had to have went through that many battery replacements.
phillyfyre@reddit
Tektronic Color Printers
Use a wax based ink, if you moved one before the wax cooled off. Big money service call because the wax would spill all over the interior
Hethoran@reddit
Honestly, anything with a word integration, like tss.
Shit broke constantly, and in the case of several dental offices, it required old as shit impossible to buy versions of office to do it.
opotamus_zero@reddit
Citrix
crystal reports
an even worse crystal reports called InfoMaker
every symantec product from the 2000s era
actually quite liked lotus notes. If it was integrated right its sync was legendary. Someone deep in the jungle doing smoke signals at 9600bps could get their mail and data while still using the ap.
I feel like as exchange became dominant, fewer and fewer techs understood notes and domino and would end up with epic but avoidable downtime cos of things like stopping it when it hadn't flushed to disk or under-resourcing it.
So despite having technically solved all those outlook frozen / pst / big mailbox/slow link problems before exchange had even started to have them, it still has a worse rep.
Mac_to_the_future@reddit
On-prem Exchange. If I walk into an environment that has that, I'm walking right back out.
ImightHaveMissed@reddit
AS/400
Avaya PBX (s8500)
Cisco anything
Palo Alto firewalls
Exchange 5.5
Creo prinergy
tipsle@reddit
As someone who worked at an ISP during dial up days: American Online Software. Yes, I can help you fix TCP/IP - but you're gonna need your windows disk and do exactly as I say.
revmachine21@reddit
MS Project. Whatever version was in use during 2000.
AndyceeIT@reddit
Remedy
P10_WRC@reddit
QWOP
WellFedHobo@reddit
Wow, I just physically twitched. I had blocked that from memory.
ronnie96_@reddit
Crystal reports .... citrix .... 😣
MustangDreams2015@reddit
Cisco UCS
Blue_Spider@reddit
Windows Me.
BruhAtTheDesk@reddit
Sage, anything made by that company. I hate them, i hate any CFO that forces their employees to use such a shit product.
TheDevauto@reddit
Windows NT 3.51, Lotus Notes, CA unicenter, Token Ring networks, IIS, Adobe products from pre-2005 or so, sharepoint. So this is where my mental trauma comes from. Huh.
rossumcapek@reddit
Peachtree and Quickbooks.
Youre-In-Trouble@reddit
RS-232 serial cabling. TXD, RXD, GRD, DTR, stop bit, baud rates, null modems, breakout boxes, parity bit, half duplex, full duplex, 9-pin, 25-pin, gender menders, tiny flat head screws, oh boy!
Character_Deal9259@reddit
Eaglesoft. Fuck Eaglesoft.
WellFedHobo@reddit
Amy Symantec product. They never cleanly.
Revolutionary_You_89@reddit
IPSwitch WS_FTP Sharepoint Exchange Backup Exec Zerto Crystal Reports Sage
and… god forbid…citrix. if it is working don’t fuckin touch it or it will break. please, please, please….I’m begging you do not touch it…. i have a family….
phillyfyre@reddit
Setting IRQ din switches
ontheroadtonull@reddit
I've got a Cisco Firepower firewall.
It takes longer to boot than a 2000's budget PC.
Reconfiguring an interface from the web UI takes about 10 minutes of "deploying the configuration", whatever that means.
If I try to turn an interface off while it has a DHCP lease, it gives an error that says I can't set it to DHCP because a static IP is set. I have to switch it to Static, erase what was formerly a DHCP address and now for some reason has become a static IP, set it back to DHCP and then disable the interface.
I fantasize about taking an ignition coil and hooking it up to the power input, the serial port, and every ethernet port on that firewall.
One. At. A. Time.
brycematheson@reddit
Hosted Exchange IBM Bigfix Flash
Trapics@reddit
Crowdstrike outage last year……….
Aemonculaba@reddit
Crystal Reports & label printers.
phillyfyre@reddit
Paradox, Corel's access replacement Window NT 3.51 Lotus Notes v5 Having to rip out a fully functional ZenWorks install and replace it with MS crap SMS 2.0 Windows fucking Print drivers Dot Matrix Printers Any HP printer made after the LJ4 Exchange 5 Groupwise on Netware MS AD 1.0 Excel Pivot Tables MS FrontPage
dubgeek@reddit
My first computer: a hand me down Trash 80 with 16k RAM, NO hard drive, NO floppy drive, just a cassette tape drive to save the programs And games I manually keyed in the code for.
FunKaleidoscope3055@reddit
BizNet
Sage
Iwatsu PBX (holy shit I want to die managing that thing)
TruthExposed@reddit
Reuters 3000 Xtra and Bloomberg
Michael2A@reddit
IBM Maximo Service Desk... *Twitching*
(Okay, it wasn't *that* bad. Doesn't mean I want to run back to it.) 😉
GearhedMG@reddit
Glad to see Lotus Notes from OP, I remember working at a place trying to replace it with other software and remove all of the tendrils that it had all over the place.
L3TH3RGY@reddit
KVM. Always pay attention to what you're doing.
thors_tenderiser@reddit
Early MS sharepoint. Poors bourbon on his cornflakes for breakfast.
Quantum_Tangled@reddit
Hand. Guided. Scanners.
godawgs1997@reddit
Manhattan WMS. IYKYN
DiligentCockroach700@reddit
My last company threw out our old, reliable, easy to maintain Meridian phone system and replaced it with an uber complex abomination from Cisco. I had to go on a 2 week training course and hardly scratched the surface. When it was switched on, all the fax machines stopped working and we discovered that if someone changed their name (e.g. a woman getting married) you had to change the name in something like 14 different places.
poul0004@reddit
NT4 & Win95 Embedded
bschmidt25@reddit
NT4 was great once you got it running. Shit was stable as hell. Just not a lot of driver support for it...
oxmix74@reddit
Service pack 6.....
slobis@reddit
Microsoft Bob
IYKYK
Gullible-Molasses151@reddit
Citrix. Ug. Never again.
Danny-117@reddit
Enterprise vault!
mic2machine@reddit
DesignerGoose5903@reddit
Alcatel PBX. Or any PBX system for that matter. Trying to find issues by live tracing calls, at least it made you feel like a Hollywood movie hacker seeing the console scrolling by.
bigbaltfun@reddit
Software Kaseya (the agent that won't die!) Any Norton bloatware (the percentage of my life I could have back that I spent Uninstaller and manually removing that crap) Lotus Notes 4.6!! (You had to been there to understand) CA ArcServe (What do you mean my backups are corrupted, I just tested them) And Novell WordPerfect (made Word the popular choice) rounds out my list.
Hardware Acer Screwless Desktop PCs (great concept dor opening up and adding components without having to use a toolkit until a bunch of them started not powering on whatsoever if the case was on because of a mysterious shorting of the motherboard) Apple Newton (my etch-a-sketch had better handwriting recognition)
SorryStandard8199@reddit
Qualix HA.
cyberman0@reddit
Let's see it's either re-installing win 95vA with someone who was in their 60s or when I had to re-install the OS's. Of blackberry units. Both were hell lol.
MechanicFun777@reddit
Lotus Notes is an unholy software!
Infinite-Tea-1800@reddit
It was a set we issued for all of our developers workstations. IBM Rational, Clearcase and Eclipse. I used to just restart the entire imaging process if the installs or prerequisites failed because it took so much effort to recover. I think we were on Windows 7 32 bit at the time.
Hentai-Overlord@reddit
Windows defender
AlissonHarlan@reddit
omg lotus notes, this thing was so heavy.
i think i have a stockholm sydrom to openldap...
Lopoetve@reddit
SSL. Especially enterprise vendors not knowing how it works.
ChatahoocheeRiverRat@reddit
IBM's 3270 emulation software running over their network hardware solution and IBM PC LAN Program.
First generation 3270 product had the 3270 gateway bombard the network with broadcast messages trying to handshake with the client PCs. At larger sites, the network would saturate at COB when folks shut their PCs down. We had to tell folks to leave their PCs powered up and the 3270 emulator running to prevent.
Second generation (PC/3270) v1.0 was a buggy mess, and it seemed that IBM didn't know how to configure or troubleshoot their own product. I had a multitude of Severity 2 problem reports, and the client ended up not implementing v1.0. v2.0 worked well enough to get implemented, though not all of the Sev 2 issues got resolved.
bschmidt25@reddit
Backup Exec
Inconsequentialish@reddit
SCSI
tchuster@reddit
Tyler ERP.
reinebiceps@reddit
Shibboleth
sonic10158@reddit
Kodak scanner licensing. One wrong move and you’ve cost your customer $3000
greenonetwo@reddit
10Base2. I fucking hated that shit.
kawajanagi@reddit
BMC Footprints, such a bad ticketing system, used pop ups, no UI for phones or tablets and expensive as well!
IceCubicle99@reddit
Novell
Lemonwater925@reddit
JIRA - completely useless. PIA to use. Everyone puts in whatever. Mgrs use the reports instead of managing. The number of times people have deleted or changed things to mess it up is on a daily basis.
Eug1@reddit
Exchange server on-premises
Any printer software
psycocarr0t@reddit
PowerSC
Veeam
Agent51729@reddit
Gotta add PowerVC to that too
Natural-Nectarine-56@reddit
UPS Worldship
ItsAManualReset@reddit
Windows 8
imposter_sys_admin@reddit
Any oracle product
mic2machine@reddit
Until this thread, I've forgotten how much trauma I'd buried.
Now I gotta go dig it up, shred it, burn it, and salt the earth where I scatter the ashes. Or, nuke the sit from orbit. Only way to be sure.
Snarky_Survivor@reddit
I didn't anyone say this yet. Here we go, Microsoft Teams.
itguy9013@reddit
I worked in Telephone Answering Services for about 4 years.
Everything is straight out of the 80's and it's all vertically integrated. You buy the software and hardware from the same vendors and are totally at their mercy.
Very glad I got out of that industry.
BeercatimusPrime@reddit
Hey I’m seeing a lot of Crystal Reports and our ERP is Sage 300 should I be scared? They haven’t asked me to do any modifications or changes yet.
Snarky_Survivor@reddit
Oh hell no.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
I dont know that there’s a good ERP. Sage in general will see a lot of loathe in this thread, as will SAP.
gpetrov@reddit
Lotus Notes
SweetsMurphy@reddit
Avaya one-X Attendant is far and away my worst.
I was the "phone guy" at my former job and suffered the absolute unrelenting pain of having to administer this total POS software. Avaya bought one-X Attendant from a German firm and just slapped the Avaya logo on it.
From our AI overlords:
"The one-X Attendant traces back to Tenovis (and through Tenovis, to the long German telecom heritage of Bosch Telecom/Telenorma). That's why the product always had a notably different feel from Avaya's homegrown U.S. products — it essentially was a German enterprise console that got rebranded into the one-X family after the 2004 acquisition."
But did Avaya bother since 2004 (!!!) to give one-X Attendant any UI improvements? Did it bother to fully translate the documentation from German to English for its US customers? Sure didn't seem like it.
Was Avaya support any help? Nope. The acted like they'd never heard of one-X Attendant, practically disavowing knowledge of its existence.
Honestly it looked like it came from behind the Iron Curtain coded by a sadistic high-schooler and was a DELIGHT to teach to our already frazzled reception desk.
So happy when Zoom Phone came along.
stableos@reddit
Damned crappy square assed token ring network connectors that would cause a network outage if you breathed on it wrong.
PlsChgMe@reddit
Type A we called them "claw" connectors.
Vegetable-Ad-1817@reddit
The SAP UI
Druber13@reddit
PlsChgMe@reddit
Installing Novell Netware 5.0 without a mouse
concretecrown85@reddit
Microsoft Exchange 5.5 - Information Store service will not start
Meterman@reddit
Source Safe
Parlett316@reddit
Fiery Controllers
MonsterTruckCarpool@reddit
SABRE ticketing software
kclarke6@reddit
For those of you who work for lawyers aderant. Aderant is awful
mic2machine@reddit
Made me remember WordStar. Dammit!
HuckleberryHolliday@reddit
AFS (Andrew File System)
discgman@reddit
Syncing a Palm pilot to Microsoft exchange using docking station.
hiphopscallion@reddit
Quickbooks
RagnarKon@reddit
Microsoft Office 2007.
It was the first major UI redesign of Office—the one that included the giant circular office button the top left corner.
I was working help desk at the time. That year I learned many people have absolutely zero capability to adapt to change.
QuantumDiogenes@reddit
I remember those days well. :(
Users. What bastards. Also Microsoft. What bastards.
mic2machine@reddit
You're in IT. BE the bastard.
ejk0005@reddit
Crowdstrike…I lived it
RandomContributions@reddit
lotus notes, crystal reports, os2 1.2
Johnny-Virgil@reddit
The unholy combination of Cisco Jabber and Actiance Vantage with a SQL backend. A fucking house of cards, every day.
FouLouGaroux@reddit
Avid. Pro Tools was such a pain to deal with. Hardware keys and required local admin to just open the software and use it. JFC
PalliativeOrgasm@reddit
Groupwise.
mic2machine@reddit
Autodesk anything. Special hate for pre Autocad 3.
Early Netware. (It got better...)
1A2 key phone systems (installation and maintenance)
Bulwark07@reddit
Carbon Black. Absolutely tanked performance across every system, broke things constantly, and made VDI management a nightmare. I'd take 10 Crowdstrike incidents over returning to Carbon Black. Especially now that it's owned by Broadcom... Fuck those guys.
redvelvetcake42@reddit
Lmao Lotus Notes. I mean fuck you for bringing them up. Goddamn Voldemort ass app.
Brand0_the_Mand0@reddit
Fuck media converters.
WashedPinkBourbon@reddit
An imaging software called Total Recall, and Quickbooks Desktop (multi-user environment).
NindieNation@reddit
Outlook. At least after all of these years, they fixed it.
surf243@reddit
Lotus Notes
DavidCP94@reddit
An Epicor Prophet 21 environment I took over from someone who lived on the line between genius and insanity. He retired and my team spent 6 months trying to keep the thing alive while the company attempted to migrate to Dynamics 365. The company went bankrupt before the migration finished.
Sebekiz@reddit
Timberline (now called Sage 300 Accounting)
Having to downgrade users to 32bit Microsoft Office before I can even begin to install this crapware is just one of the many stupid things about it. It is like the developers asked "How painful can we make a program?" and then went even further.
Dolapevich@reddit
Home Emulex and Sun HBAs were incredibly buggy.
Small_Editor_3693@reddit
Lotus Notes
Cruffe@reddit
The worst piece of hardware I ever owned was some Razer keyboard almost 20 years ago. Can't remember exactly which one.
Would work fine for a couple of hours, then some random keys would stop working and a few minutes after that Windows would crash completely with BSOD. Restart the PC and it would be fine for a couple hours more until it happened again.
After about a week of that bullshit with no solution in sight I returned it to the store, got a refund and picked out a Logitech G15 (the 2nd version) instead. I'm still using that keyboard to this day, still looking and working perfectly fine.
The Razer slogan is "For gamers. By gamers", I guess gamers absolutely suck at writing drivers that don't crash the entire fucking operating system... Never considered trying another one of their products after that experience.
phillymjs@reddit
I worked at an MSP in the 00s, and one of my clients was the Mac-using design group at Campbell Soup Company, who used Lotus Notes. If you thought Notes on Windows was a piece of shit, hoo boy...
The early versions for OS X put the user data in the application folder instead of the user's home folder, in a generically named folder.
It was the most half-assed port I've ever seen. The GUI was hideous, and if you looked in the application support folder there was nothing in there but 8.3 filenames with names that were just random jumbles of letters. You could not possibly even begin to guess the purpose of a given file by looking at its name.
The only solution for 99% of the problems with it was to reinstall and pray.
It would frequently "forget" where its spelling dictionary file was. If the user had "check spelling before sending" enabled and it forgot, you'd think it would ask the user to find the dictionary file and/or ask if it was ok to send anyway, right? Wrong. It would just refuse to send email at all until you disabled "check spelling before sending." And the only way to fix the "lost" dictionary? You guessed it, reinstall the whole fucking thing.
If the problem with a user's mail was clearly on the back end, I'd have to call Campbell IT. I learned very quickly to never mention to the support drone that the user was on a Mac, because if I did I could almost hear an audible click as their brain shut off and they would immediately try to punt the call to the designated Mac SME for Campbell's, i.e. they would tell me to call myself.
My next job after the MSP was an internal IT gig. A few months after I got there they outsourced their IT to one of the major Indian body shops and I ended up rebadged as one of said body shop's employees. Everything became a shitshow. I made this and put it up on my credenza to provide reassurance on particularly trying days.
msptmax@reddit
Norton antivirus, McAfee antivirus. Painful, bloated, slow and all around horrible.
ycayca@reddit
HP printers
lostdragon05@reddit
Fiserv Integrated Teller. Still get nightmares and flashbacks.
rallypat@reddit
Does Sonic.exe count?
galland101@reddit
Oracle VM. What a piece of shit virtualization software that Oracle forces you to use to get cheaper licensing on their database product.
Bill-T-O-Double-P@reddit
Microsoft Office
the_sysop@reddit
SGI hardware in general (damn those backplane compression connectors) and Irix. Sun 3/280 vme chassis. Netapp FC9 disk shelves. For something modern, openvswitch with dpdk.
Flaky-Gear-1370@reddit
Sitecore
Owhlala@reddit
Zendesk API... It would be easier to learn dark incantations
Flaky-Gear-1370@reddit
Really? I’ve never had an issue with it - including importing over a million tickets from a legacy system
drunkenwildmage@reddit
As a ISP tech in the early 2000s BonziBuddy. or as we called it 'Purple Monkey from Hell.'
Amy3See@reddit
Jira
Euphoric-Future-8769@reddit
SAP (various products of theirs, but especially ECC6)
Oracle 11g
Hitachi storage arrays
westex74@reddit
My company just switched from Oracle to SAP and, Jimmy Christmas, SAP seems 10x more complicated.
Microflunkie@reddit
As an IT guy I can say it is accounting software, all accounting software since the dawn of time has been awful to support. None of them are logical or consistent in how they function. They all seem like cobbled together unrelated software hacks and tricks poorly wrapped in a 1-ply interface labeled accounting software. They each have inexplicable idiosyncrasies that make no sense and defy explanation or reasoning. I think the old saying of “the greatest trick the devil ever accomplished was convincing the world he doesn’t exist” is clearly repeated by those who don’t support accounting software because he clearly exists and writes the code for accounting software.
joshtait@reddit
Lotus 🤣😥
chochy@reddit
Flash Player
westex74@reddit
Jeez Lotus Notes was a piece of sheet.
robbkenobi@reddit
The real answer is Autocad, but then its autodeploying the Borland Database Engine.
Edocsil@reddit
Paperport. Eeesh
WI762@reddit
I had a bank exec obsessed with the Cue Cat even after their data breach was made public. It eventually disappeared during a hardware refresh and I told him it wasn't compatible with new hardware.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Is this something other than the barcode scanner?
countryinfotech@reddit
Symantec Backup Exec
CaptainZhon@reddit
Palm Pilots, RIM syncing (cheap blackberry), cucimoc, Cisco cupc, Rally! (AS400 Displays/printers), Perl Controllers, any Dell hardware Palm Pilot like device from the 2000s. Dell MS Windows smartphones
Spagman_Aus@reddit
I was a citrix & emc storage admin for years and our setup was solid. the occasional issue, printer drivers, the usual stuff but nothing major that wasn’t sorted within a few hours. all the users were usually balanced well across the server farm and it hummed along.
i’ve moved on though, so feel for anyone still stuck with it.
others have mentioned blackbaud and crystal reports.
those in healthcare may be familiar with CarelinkPlus and TCM (The Care Manager) and have war stories.
label printer suck balls. especially in a warehouse.
i remember battles with the SAP login pad? the slightest update to IE would usually break it.
kaiser_detroit@reddit
JDE Edwards/Peoplesoft/Oracle Enterprise One. What a bloated clunky mess.
waflman7@reddit
IMC. It is software for police dispatching. It was crap but better than the only other option. Crashed frequently, installs were a pain, and the server made no sense. Multiple times a month it would crash in the middle of the night and I'd get woken up by a call from am angry dispatcher. Don't miss those days.
Billh491@reddit
anything from symantec, adobe or autodesk.
ThisIsTheeBurner@reddit
SBS
pepe74@reddit
Goldmine CRM. It was a batshit install and and even worse maintenance.
Kjotvi@reddit
The top 10 comments of this thread make me feel old … and in the distance sirens.
freakymrq@reddit
Mcafee Solidcore was miserable, could've just been how our security team managed it but God was it a nightmare to run and remove
saltyclam13345@reddit
Any kind of label/ticket/badge/card printer. My heart drops any time I see a ticket for one of them come into the queue
mapryan@reddit
Workday
Fingolfin734@reddit
I see your workday and raise you workday and costpoint
nice_69@reddit
Lacerte
Dell’s bloatware causing driver issues
QuickBooks desktop on an RDS
-c3rberus-@reddit
Microsoft DPM (Disaster Protection Manager is what I recall it stood for) was the worst backup software I ever encountered! Next to CA ArcServe, moving to Veeam was quality of live improvement.
rohepey@reddit
Lotus 1-2-3. Ouch, painful! Saving files on floppy disks, whey you had to remember to save all the linked files IIRC.
flsingleguy@reddit
BlackBerry Enterprise Server
Fingolfin734@reddit
The unholy abomination of configs to get a DCGS working is undead lich levels of spellcasting.
Iykyk.
jamesmaxx@reddit
Windows ME
honey_badger010@reddit
Duke Nukem Forever.
rs217000@reddit
Aces of the Pacific
First computer problem I ever had.
master_illusion@reddit
IBM Sametime instant messenger…. (Also Lotus Notes) Bonus points for the god awful process to migrate Lotus Notes to O365
pm_me_your_bbq_sauce@reddit
Appasure backup software.
the_helpdesk@reddit
Cisco CUCM 🤮🤮🤮
tenormore@reddit
Damn you just uncovered a repressed memory for me
whitemagemxp@reddit
Word Perfect
dh085@reddit
Eudira mail. Failed to realize a user was setup as POP 😔 instead of IMAP and forgot to back up there local inbox when I migrated them to a new computer! Rookoe mistake many many years ago. Fuck Print Shop too, straight garbage.
rs217000@reddit
I had a bad time working with McKesson
senpaikcarter@reddit
Weblogic on a workstation and log4j
SaintEyegor@reddit
For software, Microsoft Windows. I feel like I’m punished every time I have to use it.
For hardware, Cisco servers. Their network gear is good, but I frickin’ HATE their servers. They’re WAY too expensive, their support is terrible and CIMC/UCS manager blows in comparison with iLO. With HPE, I call the tech, they come in and fix stuff.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Just realized another one… Deltek. And opentext.
erirod@reddit
Tableau server upgrades. It's gotten better over the past few years.
shermunit@reddit
Wellfleet’s Site Manager. We called it Site Mangler. It was so bad we migrated to Cisco because of it.
LAMcNamara@reddit
Wireless Casting via Miracast.
0xDEADFA1@reddit
Lotus anything, lol
Rouxls__Kaard@reddit
Definitely Solidworks PDM. Fuuuuuuuuuck that shit.
ChromeShavings@reddit
HRMS by Sage Software. Nightmares.
bluecollarbiker@reddit
Not just HRMS…
jdsmith575@reddit
Questionmark. Version 3 to 4 upgrade required 72 hours of perfect connectivity between the server and DB or you had to start all over again.
BandDadicus@reddit
Simpact CNS 1000 serial terminal server running critical process control applications that used Bootp and Tftp to download it's software over the 56k bps WAN network, which was successful maybe 25% of the time. I get flash backs when I see a line periods slowly crawl across the screen. ....................................................................................................
zealeus@reddit
IPSwitch. On-prem e-mail server back in the 2000s. I learned a lot about spam filter, black lists, etc. Spent way too time pouring over those black lists as there were always false-positives. The day we switched to G Mail was legit one of the happiest days of my IT life.
zealeus@reddit
IPSwitch. On-prem e-mail server back in the 2000s. I learned a lot about spam filter, black lists, etc. Spent way too time pouring over those black lists as there were always false-positives. The day we switched to G Mail was legit one of the happiest days of my IT life.
zealeus@reddit
IPSwitch. On-prem e-mail server back in the 2000s. I learned a lot about spam filter, black lists, etc. Spent way too time pouring over those black lists as there were always false-positives. The day we switched to G Mail was legit one of the happiest days of my IT life.
zealeus@reddit
IPSwitch. On-prem e-mail server back in the 2000s. I learned a lot about spam filter, black lists, etc. Spent way too time pouring over those black lists as there were always false-positives. The day we switched to G Mail was legit one of the happiest days of my IT life.
Lobster_Bodyslam@reddit
IBM AS/400
replicant0wnz@reddit
sendmail
bind
Necessary_Emotion565@reddit
Commvault
fadinizjr@reddit
Zebra and Honeywell/Intermec printers.
IntelligentMoney2@reddit
Windows server 2012, Sonicwall and printers…
fromage9747@reddit
Synergy copy and paste
Miserable_Pear_6940@reddit
I’ll give you an answer to both: KACE.
KACE can bite my shiny metal ass. There is a secret special circle of hell reserved specifically for KACE.
Necessary_Emotion565@reddit
Fibre Tape library
mrsockburgler@reddit
Lotus Notes, NetWare 4.
fapestniegd@reddit
IBM WebSphere
VeryAngryGentleman@reddit
Ups Worldship also known at our place as UPS Worldshit
Pgowans25@reddit
Sabre
gbfm@reddit
Sophos RED60 VPN box. Upon launch, it has issues of randomly rebooting when connected to switches with energy efficient Ethernet. There was no way of disabling EEE on the switches too. Network equipment which worked perfectly on the predecessor RED50 are now unusable.
Subsequently left the employer, but heard from an ex Sophos staff that they managed to patch it.
the_helpdesk@reddit
Those RED devices were great. I never had problems with them. Saved me so much time standing up new sites or temporary stuff.
dignity_optional@reddit
Anthing SAP or IBM is straight trash and requires a rocket scientist from the 80’s when it was developed to properly support it.
davesmith87@reddit
Sage Abra
Fenrir51@reddit
Appassure and Shoretell or as I called them Crapassure and Shorefail
Sawyer-NL@reddit
Outlook classic
imawesometoo@reddit
Citrix is pretty bad… we still use it.
Crystal reports was horrible.
But to this day… the software that always made me cringe whenever it was mentioned… AccPac.
Sad-Ship@reddit
Temenos T24
the_helpdesk@reddit
I recognize the name. I remember hating it. I have no idea what it was or even where I used it. I must have repressed those memories straight to the bottom of the pit.
shimoheihei2@reddit
Writing screen scrapping scripts for the z/OS.
kytosol@reddit
Toad.
Toad is software to manage Oracle databases and write pl/SQL. The best feature they added was automating of any code you were working on when the software crashed. Which was a lot.
2_Spicy_2_Impeach@reddit
SQL Server both in licensing at an enterprise level and troubleshooting performance. On calls with Microsoft where two product teams are yelling at each other about who is at fault. The OS stack or the SQL engine itself.
Ontological_Gap@reddit
I'll just leave this here: celoxica "coded" fpgas
czj420@reddit
Oracle e-business suite
hondakillrsx@reddit
Not a lot of people will know this one, but NxTop Virtual Desktops. Yikes.
MegaTrippy@reddit
Honeywell WinPak
Change_HDMI_Input@reddit
Mcaffee SIEM
billrr02@reddit
Managing wireless access points prior to controllers / central management.
cornellartworks@reddit
Quickbooks.
SMUF0888@reddit
Iris
Public_Fucking_Media@reddit
ISDN long distance calls, when those were going away.
originaladam@reddit
Merlin phone system. It took magic to make it work.
nurax7@reddit
SAP NetWeaver and SAP GUI
ohyeahwell@reddit
OpenLDAP via slapd 20+ years ago. To this day the stupidest and most convoluted thing I’ve ever had to set up. Not sure if it was trying to integrate with samba, exim4, etc. but good lord, awful.
JimiJohhnySRV@reddit
HP 3000 minicomputer, Windows XP, Cisco FIREPOWER IDS
badaboom888@reddit
coraid
kennyj2011@reddit
Unitrends
binkleybloom@reddit
flash player
Serafnet@reddit
SAP.
tykulton@reddit
Jonas Club Management. It continues to traumatize me almost daily.
Miamichris127@reddit
Louts Notes
reddit-olson@reddit
Rebooting SBS2003 (or any 2003 flavor) on an HP server.
blyent@reddit
HPCA Radia
donnaber06@reddit
Windows
mistasnarlz@reddit
Zerto. Orbit Analytics.
BrokenPickle7@reddit
RGNets routers
automounter@reddit
BudTool
tacos_y_burritos@reddit
Rossware. The instructions and error pop ups make zero sense.