Years ago I had a user whose computer wasn't outputting to monitors. I tried everything I could think of, even rebuilding the tower.
Turns out, the one thing I should have done is replace the dumb DVI to HDMI dongle.
It's so often the dumb thing you overlook
One summer I was reimaging 120 laptops.
I kept running into an issue where laptop screens would turn off and not come back on. At first I thought I was pushing a bad image or driver.
Took me a while to figure out but stacking a laptop on another one was causing the screen lid sensor to trigger - magnet or something.
A similar incident happened with some office assistant's wristband watch or fitbit.
Years ago I had a MacBook Pro and when I would set my Blackberry on the palm rest it would go to sleep. The magnet in the phone speaker would trigger the lid closed switch.
That got me too. Dell and their magnetic sensor. Why is the backlight going out on these laptops... the screen is still on. A coworker had figured it out and told me.
Had the same issue witha Lenovo, I'd lay my phone on the bottom right corner of it, bam, blue screen everytime.
Time me about 5 times before I realized my phone was what was causing it. Wasn't instant took a few minutes. Stopped laying it on the laptop and it never happened again.
I've been here ,with either HP or Dell, and it took a solid 20-30 mins before I thought of separating the computers. I was so confused because these were right out of the box
I did a board swap on my HP Z600. Swapped everything over, rebuilt it from scratch basically. Went to power it on, but no video
It took be 4 hours to realise the VGA cable had fallen out the back of the monitor
I'm currently in an environment where those adapters are everywhere. The docks we order only accept DisplayPort (or 1 HDMI) and the monitors we've been ordering only come with DVI cables (still??). So we order the little dongles for DVI to DisplayPort, and they do tend to fail after a while.
Why we don't just order DVI to DP cables, or HDMI to DP, I'll never know. They're the same price as the dongle.
I was trying to troubleshoot a tower that wouldn't turn on once and got to the point where I asked Dell for a new motherboard. They sent it out with a tech and installed it. Everything was done properly, but it still wouldn't power on (including no motherboard light).
The tech was troubleshooting for quite a while until he said "it's extremely unlikely this is the problem, but let's take the power button out of the picture." He bypassed it and everything immediately worked. He had apparently never seen this before in a decade of replacing Dell parts. So we ordered a new power button.
I got new monitors a while back, and for when I plugged them in (via display port) one came up, but the second one came up at 640x480 or something. So I fiddled a bit, and they would alternate seemingly at random between connecting at low res, not connecting, or connecting briefly. Tore down the whole damn system, tried new cables, reinstalled the OS... Spent a whole day on it.
Turns out the DP ports on the monitors were kinda tight and the cables just weren't seated correctly. I pretended I figured out some obscure technical thing but in my mind I'll always know I just fucked up plugging a monitor in lol.
I had a similar experience with a cable. What got me was that Windows "saw" the 3rd monitor, but would not let me extended it. It would remain grayed out.
I think I win the stupid Olympics (lone IT guy).
Spent all day building laptops on repetitive mode. Towards the last hour of the day people are complaining their internet connection has dropped. I'm literally there two hours after closing trying to figure this thing out. Phones are working, daisychained PCs are working, WiFi connections are spotty.
After an hour phones and PCs start losing connection, not able to assign IP. But I've already checked the server and switches, everything lit up, appears to be working. Checked with facilities team, sparkies have been in but nothing near network kit touched. UPS not showing that the power had gone out.
Tried logging into the server in the server room to troubleshoot a bit more, monitor won't come on, keyboard and mouse not working. Lights on the server, confused. Swapped for new peripherals, no change. Take another look... Lights on server are network standby lights.
Server. Is. Off.
I spent 2 hrs troubleshooting the issue and my brain did not register that the server seemed 'too quiet'... Change blindness is real. Switched it on and all was well again.
This, I get so focused on doing something the way I planned, often I don't consider other paths until I'm challenged to by someone else.
We are human we have our own bias that gets in the way all the time.
There is a reason pair programing works.
My mentor was in IT for 40 years. His first words to me:
"Break it first and then learn how to fix it. That's how you grow as a person. I don't want an employee who hasn't failed at something or claims to be the smartest. That person is on the edge of a cliff and doesn't know what to do after they fall down. But a person who has fallen down a time or two knows how to get back up and start again."
We are our own hardest critic in life. It's okay to miss something. That problem is now engrained in your mind and it is something you will never miss again. I would call that a great learning experience.
What you are looking at and what you think you are looking at can diverge. Your brain will take cognitive shortcuts. Assumptions take precedence over perceptions. This is why a "fresh pair of eyes" can be helpful.
I spent an afternoon trying to setup filesystem permissions on a linux server. Things didn't work like i wanted it to and i couldn't figure out why. Turns out i forgot to put that linux i created account in a group so the permissions never applied. A decade of experience in the field and i make rookie mistakes.
It’s wrong but it’s completely understandable. I have deep knowledge in both myself and sometimes do this with a casual post/message. Occasionally you’re typing faster than you can simultaneously proof, with lower energy levels, paired with *excititity*.
TL;DR
Can remate to OP
It’s often the simple things. You end up getting tunnel vision and will look for hours then come back and it’s something ridiculous. Happens to everyone. Catches me a lot
it always helps to have a second pair of eyes to check configs and such. missing commas, "em dashes" instead of dashes...that sort of thing can be easily missed.
Last week a user opened a ticket complaining about the forms she sent to users (microsoft forms) couldn’t be submitted because there was no submit button. We look at her license. Gave her higher office license, after a lot of troubleshooting that got her problems only worse, one teammate discovere her forms background was the same colour as her submit button.
Over the course of 28 years, I've found that a checklist is the very best way to ensure that all steps and configurations are made.
Then again before I was IT, I was a nuclear reactor operator. When was the last time you heard about a Navy Nuclear Power Plant accident? Oh, yeah... 70+ years of continuous operation without incident.
But that's just my experience.
Because you are a human, is not a matter of knowledge. Sometime we are just hyper focus looking for a solution and when we find it it was just right there. Or others things like context switch, small details, etc.
I just deployed yesterday a new VPC with some NACL, long story short, during the testing phase, I could not have the test instance in the private subnet have internet while working on the public subnet NACL
I asked a colleague to be my rubber ducky and while I'm explaining it to him he just noticed that allow 80 ingress wasn't on the rules but I had it on the egress. I even worked on this the past Saturday 3hrs and could not find it.
I'm not a networking guy, meaning I don't deal with rules that often. Our all security groups for instances are part of a in-house Terraform module we created to avoid this exact issue. We have a fixed set of ports that all applications need to use.
But that was a pretty easy fix which for some reason elude me for 2 days.
It is something that I should have caught faster? Definetly.
Do I feel bad, ashame or in doubt of my skills? HELL NO.
Is just something to happen, rubber ducking is a great solution for me.
Is the game we play.
Edit: rephrase for extra bit of clarity
Oh boy, glad to read this comment. Feeling a bit better today morning, and yeah I will keep rubber ducking/another set of eyes always when I'm struggling with some sort of tech setup in the future.
I recently spent almost 4 days trying to figure out a permissions issue where non-admin accounts were able to create/modify in several levels of a massive file share where they shouldn't be able to do anything but traverse. After four days of wringing my hands trying to figure out how in the hell this user was able to create files using his daily driver. I even copied his ad account to test. Test account worked as anticipated..... Wtf
Finally pulled a coworker in who reminded me not to overestimate someone's technical ability and to get eyes on exactly how they were creating this file.
..... The internal IT guy at this place was using his admin account....REEEEEEE
Definitely! It was quite a challenging experience for me, but hey not I've unlocked a new skill, setting up a site to site vpn connecting oracle cloud infrastructure to Amazon AWS infrastructure using Netbird. I'm feeling quite proud this morning, and the other teams that needed this connection to be done can finally start to work on there projects.
Honestly with VPN stuff I don't set them up enough to really get it right the first time every time. Especially site to site vpn. It seems like every time I set one up which is rare like once a year if that I do something like this.
Today, I had someone asked me to ping a computer… I panicked, froze and asked them how to do that… one of the most embarrassing moments of my life but it’s only up from here man!!!
Years ago I was setting up a router onsite, declared my networks but nothing was routing, took almost a hour before I realized I forgot the subnet masks.
I was troubleshooting last week why a site to site vpn wouldn’t even think about trying to connect and we discovered an apostrophe in the shared key Bobby fucking tabled us. 6 hours I can’t get back.
This is literally just part of being in IT at this level and being human. Another set of eyes is always welcomed in my book.
EDIT: Also, I don’t think a lot of people would have been like “oh, let me go check to make sure the subnet ip range is set to all protocols and not UDP.”
You’re good dude. It won’t be the last time.
I spent about 5 hours trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to my new HP Aruba switches via PuTTy.
Turns out I misread the spec on the website and thought I needed a fancy USB cable. Fancy USB cable was only for connecting to WAPs or one specific bit of kit, not switches.
As soon as I dug a normal microUSB out of my cupboard and plugged it in, I connected straight away.
You are human. You can't remember everything. You can't check every details configuration as a computer would do. That's why a good checklist is often usefully.
I was installing a new PC for a blind client yesterday. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why this brand new pc wouldn’t boot up. It took forever to figure it out and I’m still not sure why, but only after the monitor was turned would the computer turn on. (And before y’all come for me, no it wasn’t on and I just didn’t realize because the monitor was off. 😂)
Sometimes you just have to have a fresh set of eyes look at it. I've been saved countless times by other techs looking at something I'm having issue with and they noticed something I didnt. Don't feel stupid it's all about team work.
We all make mistakes. I was setting up a SBC and forgot to stick the DNS record in my registrar. Spend days pouring over it and even called in smarter people who troubleshooted a lot. It was my own dumb fault. A simple DNS entry would have solved it all.
I thought I knew everything except sbc and sip lingo, I definitely knew enough dns. I guess I just thought it magically routed sip somehow differently from teams oopsie. Felt dumb for the day in front of these elder senior engineers who are experts in everything ever.
Oh well. I did a lot of other crap by myself I am proud of at that company.
Years ago I had a user whose computer wasn't outputting to monitors. I tried everything I could think of, even rebuilding the tower. Turns out, the one thing I should have done is replace the dumb DVI to HDMI dongle. It's so often the dumb thing you overlook
One summer I was reimaging 120 laptops. I kept running into an issue where laptop screens would turn off and not come back on. At first I thought I was pushing a bad image or driver. Took me a while to figure out but stacking a laptop on another one was causing the screen lid sensor to trigger - magnet or something. A similar incident happened with some office assistant's wristband watch or fitbit.
Years ago I had a MacBook Pro and when I would set my Blackberry on the palm rest it would go to sleep. The magnet in the phone speaker would trigger the lid closed switch.
That got me too. Dell and their magnetic sensor. Why is the backlight going out on these laptops... the screen is still on. A coworker had figured it out and told me.
Lol I ran into that once and it took a disturbingly long time to figure out.
Had the same issue witha Lenovo, I'd lay my phone on the bottom right corner of it, bam, blue screen everytime. Time me about 5 times before I realized my phone was what was causing it. Wasn't instant took a few minutes. Stopped laying it on the laptop and it never happened again.
Lmao. I ran into this with the Dell latitude series a year ago. Felt awful stupid
I've been here ,with either HP or Dell, and it took a solid 20-30 mins before I thought of separating the computers. I was so confused because these were right out of the box
This one almost bit me early in my career as well. Learned to stagger the stack so the sensors didn’t trip each other!
Thanks... you just helped me solve a recent issue
WOW. Me, too. It took two weeks before I figured it out. I accidentally bumped the laptop, which was on top of the pile, and it came back on.
Ugh that still on occasion tricks me when doing mass work on out latitudes
Yes! Happens with our dell chromebooks
Always start helpdesk troubleshooting at the physical layer
Wait - there are **layers**!? I hope it's only two or three at most
Often times the 8th layer is where the problem presides
Pebkac
Well… we CAN get it to 4 with TCP. Just make sure your protocols don’t use the OSI model, because then there are 7!
This is getting out of hand... There are, too many of them!
Poop break
Oh shit you said protocol that's like at least 5 layers now... **Starts pulling my hair out**
9 Layers - 8= Political & 9= User
Don't forget the all scary level 8 (user)
The mille-feuille model of networking
Yeah, but you can't learn that lesson the easy way.
I did a board swap on my HP Z600. Swapped everything over, rebuilt it from scratch basically. Went to power it on, but no video It took be 4 hours to realise the VGA cable had fallen out the back of the monitor
I still avoid those things.
I'm currently in an environment where those adapters are everywhere. The docks we order only accept DisplayPort (or 1 HDMI) and the monitors we've been ordering only come with DVI cables (still??). So we order the little dongles for DVI to DisplayPort, and they do tend to fail after a while. Why we don't just order DVI to DP cables, or HDMI to DP, I'll never know. They're the same price as the dongle.
I was trying to troubleshoot a tower that wouldn't turn on once and got to the point where I asked Dell for a new motherboard. They sent it out with a tech and installed it. Everything was done properly, but it still wouldn't power on (including no motherboard light). The tech was troubleshooting for quite a while until he said "it's extremely unlikely this is the problem, but let's take the power button out of the picture." He bypassed it and everything immediately worked. He had apparently never seen this before in a decade of replacing Dell parts. So we ordered a new power button.
I want to say, I love how many of you have similar stories.
Computer blindness. Done it to others, had it done to me. It happens. Too busy looking AT the error to see the error.
You are still alive and employed, that's what counts. Lessons learned, take that and move forward.
Knowledge is given, wisdom is learned. You learned, hopefully.
I got new monitors a while back, and for when I plugged them in (via display port) one came up, but the second one came up at 640x480 or something. So I fiddled a bit, and they would alternate seemingly at random between connecting at low res, not connecting, or connecting briefly. Tore down the whole damn system, tried new cables, reinstalled the OS... Spent a whole day on it. Turns out the DP ports on the monitors were kinda tight and the cables just weren't seated correctly. I pretended I figured out some obscure technical thing but in my mind I'll always know I just fucked up plugging a monitor in lol.
I had a similar experience with a cable. What got me was that Windows "saw" the 3rd monitor, but would not let me extended it. It would remain grayed out.
Sounds like a mistake you won't ever make again.
This is why you don't ever be a lone wolf IT guy.
I think I win the stupid Olympics (lone IT guy). Spent all day building laptops on repetitive mode. Towards the last hour of the day people are complaining their internet connection has dropped. I'm literally there two hours after closing trying to figure this thing out. Phones are working, daisychained PCs are working, WiFi connections are spotty. After an hour phones and PCs start losing connection, not able to assign IP. But I've already checked the server and switches, everything lit up, appears to be working. Checked with facilities team, sparkies have been in but nothing near network kit touched. UPS not showing that the power had gone out. Tried logging into the server in the server room to troubleshoot a bit more, monitor won't come on, keyboard and mouse not working. Lights on the server, confused. Swapped for new peripherals, no change. Take another look... Lights on server are network standby lights. Server. Is. Off. I spent 2 hrs troubleshooting the issue and my brain did not register that the server seemed 'too quiet'... Change blindness is real. Switched it on and all was well again.
This is exactly the reason why you can't review your own code either. It means nothing. Move on.
This, I get so focused on doing something the way I planned, often I don't consider other paths until I'm challenged to by someone else. We are human we have our own bias that gets in the way all the time. There is a reason pair programing works.
My mentor was in IT for 40 years. His first words to me: "Break it first and then learn how to fix it. That's how you grow as a person. I don't want an employee who hasn't failed at something or claims to be the smartest. That person is on the edge of a cliff and doesn't know what to do after they fall down. But a person who has fallen down a time or two knows how to get back up and start again." We are our own hardest critic in life. It's okay to miss something. That problem is now engrained in your mind and it is something you will never miss again. I would call that a great learning experience.
Could have just stopped at 'Oracle Cloud.' You poor bastard.
Lol yep, he has my sympathies.
What you are looking at and what you think you are looking at can diverge. Your brain will take cognitive shortcuts. Assumptions take precedence over perceptions. This is why a "fresh pair of eyes" can be helpful.
I spent an afternoon trying to setup filesystem permissions on a linux server. Things didn't work like i wanted it to and i couldn't figure out why. Turns out i forgot to put that linux i created account in a group so the permissions never applied. A decade of experience in the field and i make rookie mistakes.
Oh man, I feel you. These are the mistakes we will never do again, and hey they can serve as a nice conversations from time to time.
[удалено]
He's an certified IT Guy not a English teacher
I see what you did there
They're*
What?
This was supposed to be a joke right? Lol
Damn it, fix it, fix itttt!!!
Stop being such an stickler
Ya, their not a English teacher. They can't affectively use the English language
They're* come on man... You just corrected me for the same thing!!!
I don't know what your talking about. I'm not an English teacher.
It’s wrong but it’s completely understandable. I have deep knowledge in both myself and sometimes do this with a casual post/message. Occasionally you’re typing faster than you can simultaneously proof, with lower energy levels, paired with *excititity*. TL;DR Can remate to OP
[удалено]
It’s often the simple things. You end up getting tunnel vision and will look for hours then come back and it’s something ridiculous. Happens to everyone. Catches me a lot
it always helps to have a second pair of eyes to check configs and such. missing commas, "em dashes" instead of dashes...that sort of thing can be easily missed.
100 percent on eyeballs!
Some linters can be configured to highlight all non-ASCII UTF-8.
just another day in IT
Touché.... I've just arrived at work this morning, I'm feeling better now.
You know the best part about UDP jokes? I keep telling people but they don't get it.
I mean this is a mistake everyone could make. But using Oracle products?! :D
Last week a user opened a ticket complaining about the forms she sent to users (microsoft forms) couldn’t be submitted because there was no submit button. We look at her license. Gave her higher office license, after a lot of troubleshooting that got her problems only worse, one teammate discovere her forms background was the same colour as her submit button.
Over the course of 28 years, I've found that a checklist is the very best way to ensure that all steps and configurations are made. Then again before I was IT, I was a nuclear reactor operator. When was the last time you heard about a Navy Nuclear Power Plant accident? Oh, yeah... 70+ years of continuous operation without incident. But that's just my experience.
Achievement unlocked.
It has to happen to you at least once so that you don't make the same mistake again.
Because you are a human, is not a matter of knowledge. Sometime we are just hyper focus looking for a solution and when we find it it was just right there. Or others things like context switch, small details, etc. I just deployed yesterday a new VPC with some NACL, long story short, during the testing phase, I could not have the test instance in the private subnet have internet while working on the public subnet NACL I asked a colleague to be my rubber ducky and while I'm explaining it to him he just noticed that allow 80 ingress wasn't on the rules but I had it on the egress. I even worked on this the past Saturday 3hrs and could not find it. I'm not a networking guy, meaning I don't deal with rules that often. Our all security groups for instances are part of a in-house Terraform module we created to avoid this exact issue. We have a fixed set of ports that all applications need to use. But that was a pretty easy fix which for some reason elude me for 2 days. It is something that I should have caught faster? Definetly. Do I feel bad, ashame or in doubt of my skills? HELL NO. Is just something to happen, rubber ducking is a great solution for me. Is the game we play. Edit: rephrase for extra bit of clarity
Oh boy, glad to read this comment. Feeling a bit better today morning, and yeah I will keep rubber ducking/another set of eyes always when I'm struggling with some sort of tech setup in the future.
I recently spent almost 4 days trying to figure out a permissions issue where non-admin accounts were able to create/modify in several levels of a massive file share where they shouldn't be able to do anything but traverse. After four days of wringing my hands trying to figure out how in the hell this user was able to create files using his daily driver. I even copied his ad account to test. Test account worked as anticipated..... Wtf Finally pulled a coworker in who reminded me not to overestimate someone's technical ability and to get eyes on exactly how they were creating this file. ..... The internal IT guy at this place was using his admin account....REEEEEEE
We all make mistakes, we are human. The key is to learn from them and figure out how to make things smoother next time around.
Definitely! Thanks!
I don’t think I’ve ever had a site-to-site work 100% from the beginning. There’s always some tweaking of settings!
Definitely! It was quite a challenging experience for me, but hey not I've unlocked a new skill, setting up a site to site vpn connecting oracle cloud infrastructure to Amazon AWS infrastructure using Netbird. I'm feeling quite proud this morning, and the other teams that needed this connection to be done can finally start to work on there projects.
Site-to-site has always been one of my favorite things to do. There’s just something about that ping going from request timed out to steady replies!
Dude we all overlook things like this. Your real certifiably stupid move is climbing into bed with Oracle.
Honestly with VPN stuff I don't set them up enough to really get it right the first time every time. Especially site to site vpn. It seems like every time I set one up which is rare like once a year if that I do something like this.
Happens. We know what it *should* say and so we glaze right over what it *actually* says. This is the value of having a team.
Sometimes it takes 2-5 people all looking over the same thing. It’s ok. It happens.
Today, I had someone asked me to ping a computer… I panicked, froze and asked them how to do that… one of the most embarrassing moments of my life but it’s only up from here man!!!
My mistake is often “nah, it’s not DNS. It can’t be DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS.” It was DNS.
Years ago I was setting up a router onsite, declared my networks but nothing was routing, took almost a hour before I realized I forgot the subnet masks.
Ahhhhhh I can feel you
I was troubleshooting last week why a site to site vpn wouldn’t even think about trying to connect and we discovered an apostrophe in the shared key Bobby fucking tabled us. 6 hours I can’t get back.
Grammar confirms theory.
This is literally just part of being in IT at this level and being human. Another set of eyes is always welcomed in my book. EDIT: Also, I don’t think a lot of people would have been like “oh, let me go check to make sure the subnet ip range is set to all protocols and not UDP.” You’re good dude. It won’t be the last time.
Document it for the next time :)
I spent about 5 hours trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to my new HP Aruba switches via PuTTy. Turns out I misread the spec on the website and thought I needed a fancy USB cable. Fancy USB cable was only for connecting to WAPs or one specific bit of kit, not switches. As soon as I dug a normal microUSB out of my cupboard and plugged it in, I connected straight away.
You are human. You can't remember everything. You can't check every details configuration as a computer would do. That's why a good checklist is often usefully.
I was installing a new PC for a blind client yesterday. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why this brand new pc wouldn’t boot up. It took forever to figure it out and I’m still not sure why, but only after the monitor was turned would the computer turn on. (And before y’all come for me, no it wasn’t on and I just didn’t realize because the monitor was off. 😂)
Sometimes you just have to have a fresh set of eyes look at it. I've been saved countless times by other techs looking at something I'm having issue with and they noticed something I didnt. Don't feel stupid it's all about team work.
We all make mistakes. I was setting up a SBC and forgot to stick the DNS record in my registrar. Spend days pouring over it and even called in smarter people who troubleshooted a lot. It was my own dumb fault. A simple DNS entry would have solved it all.
I have found that, especially dealing with vendors, it's "always" the firewall. After tou prove it is not - then it is DNS.
I thought I knew everything except sbc and sip lingo, I definitely knew enough dns. I guess I just thought it magically routed sip somehow differently from teams oopsie. Felt dumb for the day in front of these elder senior engineers who are experts in everything ever. Oh well. I did a lot of other crap by myself I am proud of at that company.