Common faults with your workplace computers

peterattheboro

peterattheboro

peterattheboro

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This ones for the techies here.

I'm building myself my own Emergency Procedure Plan incase all kinds of hell breaks loose within our workplace so wanting to know all kinds of problems which you have encountered.

Our normal ones are, because there are loads of printers on the network, one specific printer sometimes loses it's drivers so need to readd it. (Though we sorted this a few months ago and hasn't happened since)

Another is, a server kept restarting due to a problem with a UPS which has been changed.

We have some software problems aswell but I don't want to bore you with those :p
 
I take it my suggestion of "panic" won't really be what is required for an emergency action plan?

Most of the problems here that I'm aware of (I'm not a techie) seem to result from people moving computers and dislodging cables or are software related, neither of which are terribly useful in a disater recovery sense.
 
semi-pro waster said:
I take it my suggestion of "panic" won't really be what is required for an emergency action plan?

Most of the problems here that I'm aware of (I'm not a techie) seem to result from people moving computers and dislodging cables or are software related, neither of which are terribly useful in a disater recovery sense.
Click to expand...

I have #1 down as Panic :)

#2 is take deep breaths.

Does this make me look professional? :p
 
Emergency Procedure Plan?

do a DR exercise, take your tapes and try and make a working server you will probably find you are not able to do it... (especially on a email server or database server)

Now imagine you server jsut blew up and has been replaced...

Once you have made your servers work on other hardware with their current config document the process so if you have to do it for real you dont spend hours on the internet trying to work out what to do..
 
Need to know more about your current setup really.?
Windows domain.?
Email platform?
Desktop platform.?
F&P Servers?
DC's?
Backup methods (BUExec / Arcserve etc)

Before you can start working on a good DR plan you need to identify the companies key applications, i.e if theyre heavily dependant on email/F&P/telephony/DB etc etc.?

Once you've identified the key areas you can look at what you would need to get up and running first, get your priorites right and people (managers) will thank you for your effort.
 
Probably some common sense advice here but I'll say it anyways!!

The main thing with BCP/DR planning is building them up over iterations... Try as you might, you'll never account for everything, and even the stuff you account for will throw a spanner in the works...

The best thing is to baseline what you think is critical and build a plan around it, then test the plan. If it all works 100% perfectly first time you will be the first in the world!! Then figure out what went wrong and try it again.. Refine away!!

I remember being told a story once about some guys in a DC who claimed to have perfect BCP/DR, even ran a test to prove their warm site could be back up in under 2 hours, so test they did!!

The test controller came in and anounced a fire which had sperad into the DC, servers were melting!! OMG said the staff, lets get to the warm site and keep the business running, quick grab the backup tapes.... Ooops, the fire safe was in DC!! No backups!!

Just goes to show, without refinement and testing, you'll never work out all the niggles, and the worst time to have to work those out, is when there is a real emergency!!
 
in my last job, there were some weird problems with certain HP models

they would start to use 'system beep' instead of the windows noise for all 'ok' boxes etc

the only fix we could find was rip the speaker out, tried everything.
 
common occurance at my workplace

celeron processors + stupid users who think they are meant to go fast
 
I work in a school and the main issue we have is printers losing there IP settings. Usually a switch off and switch back on resolves but sometimes they have to be completely reconfigured :(
 
Well I walked into a heap of chaos this weekend at work. The main three phase electric supply cable had blown up. And I do mean blown up :eek:

I thought I had everything covered in case of emergency but here are a few of the many things I missed/got wrong.

The main server was in a room with "dongle" door access. Doors meant to unlock in case of power cut. Result: All electronic doors remained locked :eek: Rang installation company who came and rewired them so they open on power cut. Apparantly my MD had requested they wire them in this way for "security reasons". My original spec had stated open on powercut and nobody had ever told me that anything had changed.

The power cut resulted in the server and all the workstations shutting down when the ups ran out of juice.

Problem no 2: Server failed to shut down correctly and come this morning when we had power, it was doing all kind of weird things and it took me 3 hours to get it back up and running.

In the meantime I had 3 reports of work stations not working properly. 2 users reported printer wouldn't print.

I expected the worse - printers not on ups - but pleasantly surprised to find usb cables unplugged/half unplugged (don't ask me how this had happened just exactly at the same time as a power cut - the usb pixies must have done it) however, wasted lots of time expecting the worse and not looking at the obvious because of the power cut.

3rd workstation needed a windows disk repair to get it up and running again.

And lastly, of other major note, discovered that I have the server email me when there is an error connecting to the external email server. Discovered my workstation inbox wanting to download 4763 messages this morning :eek:

And my entire day was summed up by my non computer literate MD who asked me why I haven't put things in place to stop this problems happening after something like a power cut so I wouldn't waste a lot of my day "fixing" things.
 
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The main problem I had years ago when lumbered with doing the IT Support at work (and not getting paid any extra for it either!!!) was idiotic sales staff not reading my emails regarding viruses. Mind you, there's nothing like a couple of grand's worth of lost sales to get sales staff paying more attention in the future lol :D

I also had one bloke that claimed his Mac G4 wasn't working on his first day. I walked downstairs and asked him to show me what he was doing to start the thing up and he switched the monitor on. And that was it, he didn't realise that you had to turn the Mac on to make it work lolololol :D
 
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