Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks
- Reference: 1678437135
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/03/10/on_call/
- Source link:
This story came from a reader we'll Regomize as "Charlie" because it comes from his time working for a chocolate company.
"I'd become the go-to person for anything that was not strictly operations or programming," Charlie told The Register . That meant anything from hardware issues to cabling to OS patching landed on his to-do list.
[1]
Charlie's chores often saw him work with a colleague he suggested we call "Stan" whose sole responsibility was hardware.
[2]
[3]
Charlie and Stan did not get on.
"He had a standard response of 'that must be a software issue' when his attempted fixes failed," Charlie told On-Call.
[4]
That pat response emerged on such occasions as when a printer attached to a terminal in a newly refurbished warehouse refused to work.
Stan glanced at the printer and, without evidence, diagnosed a software issue.
Charlie asked to swap out some components just to make sure the hardware was not at fault, and as he did so felt "a bit of a tingle of the stray voltage variety."
[5]
Stan dismissed that as a phantom shock caused by stray shielding that felt prickly to the touch, and the pair continued to work.
Then came a proper jolt. Charlie reckons his tingling was about 20V. Stan copped 100V or more – and still insisted it was a software problem because an app hadn't recognized the hardware and therefore somehow failed to regulate current. Or some such malarkey.
[6]Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it
[7]PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis
[8]What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage
[9]If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now
Charlie and Stan survived that incident and were still working together a couple of years after. Extra responsibilities had come Charlie's way in the interim such that he was in charge of a team installing a colossal disk array attached to a mainframe.
Sadly, that job went badly: the system could not see its newly attached storage.
Stan became involved, and naturally suggested it was a software problem.
A wager was then proposed. The 100-volt jolt meant Charlie had won the last round of the bug identification battle. This time around the two resolved that the source of the correct diagnosis would acquire a case of something tasty for the loser.
Debugging progressed to the "pulling off the cover and looking around inside" stage.
At which point a ribbon cable fell to the floor.
Someone had forgotten to plug it in. Surely that made the storage problems incontrovertibly a hardware fault?
No. Stan stuck to his diagnosis of a software problem: the array worked fine, it was just that software couldn't configure it!
Charlie ended his mail to On-Call with a question about how to calculate interest on the case of beer he feels he's been owed for 40 years.
Would it be rude of us to suggest there's software to figure that out?
Has a colleague who denies reality made it hard to do your job? Or are you still waiting for a workplace wager to settled? Share either sort of story in [10]an email to On-Call and we may use it to energize readers on a future Friday. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/03/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/10/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/17/on_call/
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What a shocking story!
Charlie ended his mail to On-Call with a question about how to calculate interest on the case of beer he feels he's been owed for 40 years.
Do you think the debt get paid into his current account?
Surely it should be put on a charge card…..
Visa Electron
It will pylon interest
Re: Visa Electron
It would certainly have the potential.
(It must be Friday!)
Re: Visa Electron
Will you lot of jokers just go Ohm?
Re: Visa Electron
Watt? I R ohm!
Re: Visa Electron
There appears to be some resistance to that.
Re: Visa Electron
You wanna coulomb da bandwagon with us Will, anode at.
Could be an offshore account, perhaps paid in pesoelectrical crypto.
It should to be a big VAT amount of liquid assets.
Been There
He had a standard response of 'that must be a software issue' when his attempted fixes failed
I'm surprised he attempted fixes before his declaration.
In the early 90s I was working with a national hardware maintenance company. I was writing the in-house database systems and supporting the network etc. We had a large number of dental practices on our books, supporting their hardware. This was thanks to an up stream supplier, that brought the dentists onboard, providing hardware and software, which was supported by a third company. We had a very good relationship with the supplier. The software providers were always saying "it's a hardware thing". In the early days we'd have an engineer on site, unable to fix - coz not hardware, right? The engineers would call me to check any software likelihoods: bingo! So, reading the signs on future calls, the software mob would get really narked as the supplier allowed me to speak to them directly and explain how to fix their software issue, with a barely hidden implication of "stop trying to pull this shit off!". They did rein in their shoddiness quite a bit, but we eventually handled the software support too.
Re: Been There
"the supplier allowed me to speak to them directly "
What was the drill for this?
Re: Been There
The tooth always hertz
Obvious reply ...
"He had a standard response of 'that must be a software issue' when his attempted fixes failed"
There is no such thing as "software". So-called software is merely the current state of the hardware.
Re: Obvious reply ...
I'm honestly not quite sure whether you're continuing the electrical puns seen earlier.
Reminds me...
Reminded of our networks team who, on being advised of a network failure, would inevitably respond with "Replace your NIC". I think that worked once, although it might have been zero times. We wound up simply going into the DC and switching cables around; once it was confirmed the fault followed the cable, we gave them the incident back. Still took them months to acknowledge that one of the RIB connections to our HP server wasn't working after we'd had to swap cables around a few times to get console connections working.
Storage team would typically also have a similar response to slow responses on the EMCs. "health checks are fine on our end", until a few days of badgering later alongside IO stats from the OS, they'd respond "we found a hot spot on some disks and we've rebalanced things" and disk responses would go back to better levels.
well...
It is probably software, because it borked the hardware... Bad firmware update anyone? LOL
Sometimes the software will tell me its hardware
During my 20's I was a software diagnostician for a Mainframe manufacturer. I'd often get roped in when a new installation had a 'software problem' I had numerous fall outs with engineers who would swear on their mothers lives that the hardware was good, unfortunately I'd seen most of the common problems, If I could talk to all the discs in a cabinet up to to the controller you just installed, its not going to be a dead controller it's going to be the fibre optic cable you strained as you joined the 2 cabinets together. Passing on this news to an engineer with 30 years experience who really, really didn't want to take the cabinet apart to plug in a fibre connector was always going to be painful. Likewise trying to convince an engineer that the poor system performance was caused by a too cold CPU (really) because I could get the real CPU temperature from the Node Support Computer he didn't have access to, or even that I could go 3 levels deeper in the diagnostic process and prove that a front end processor failure in the engineering logs was cause by read errors on a disk volume timing out causing the OS to time out which resulted in the front end app thinking there was a comms fault. On the bright side IO could give him a disk volume name so he could perform hardware diagnostic tests on the disk
It Works both Ways
He had a standard response of 'that must be a software issue' when his attempted fixes failed
How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None - it's a hardware problem!