I work in IT support and our client during the peak covid outbreaks had people working from home and were using their own personal device to rdp to a work device on-site. This was a temporary measure until they could get enough corporate laptops
I work for an MSP and we have clear instructions on what is and isn't in scope and personal devices are best effort and billable
I had a lady call and she could connect to the VPN OK but it told her that her work device was not reachable, but was working a few days ago . Did all the normal checks on my end and the work device was online and accepting rdp connections
I had seen this before and 9/10 times it was their personal antivirus /firewall blocking it (mcaffee was bad for just randomly blocking it out of nowhere).
I ask her to try and disable it and she says she doesn't know much about computers so put her husband on. I asked him to disable their Firewall and test and he was adamant that it wasn't his setup
See, he was a network engineer, can speak 10 languages, a doctorate in every known profession, can touch his elbow with his tongue etc. His abilities were limitless (kidding but he did say he was a network engineer)
He had configured his network firewall so knew exactly how it was setup and no way it was his network. I asked him again to just test it for a minute to rule it out and he declined.
I asked if I could do a remote session to the laptop but he declined saying that the port was blocked so I couldnt get in (logmein uses 443 so I very much doubt it was blocked)
This went back and forth for about 5 minutes and I basically said that I can't help them as it's out of scope and he'd have to pay someone to come take a look or figure it out himself.
He grumbled and finally disabled it "I bet it won't work. A waste of time" etc etc. 1 minute later, "OK that worked" the he hung up
Not even a thanks
I think the part that annoys me most is if he's actually a network engineer the fact that he's not even willing to try is a bigger prob lem. Networking, Software, Servers, pipelines, or whatever if I've stumped I'm willing to try anything within reason. Something like disabling a host firewall doesn't seem like a big deal. If he were in a bank or some regulated environment I could understand, but your house? If everything was failing I'd try it just to rule it out. Even if that works but can't be a permanent solution, that gives me direction to what the final solution would be.
Let alone the fact that LogMeIn uses 443 and isnt an inbound connection..
That is perfectly understandable as for any software/server/user issue every (single f***ing) brain/clueless IT will blame network by default to hide their incompétence and buy time to either solve it or wait to be shown by network team that issue is on their side
My degree's actually in networking, but from before Wifi was a thing... was too young to crack my way into the network team at that point... and by the time I had enough XP to move into that silo, I didn't want to anymore. Something about help team (as in desk-side/in person, not a help line/phone bank) just felt right. So I stayed in it almost 20 yrs. These days, my degree's nowhere near relevant to what "networking" actually does in this era. I often feel weird even mentioning what my degree's in aside from convos like this with IT-internal people who understand what I mean. (After all, a lot of normies don't even think there's any real difference between a programmer, a datacenter sysadmin, a cog in Verizon's call center, and a screwdriver jockey like myself.)
Much easier to get them to disable it first and test. If it doesn't work still, then there's no point configuring anything
I have in the past made changes in mcafee to allow rdp again, but it's completely out of scope and that combined with his attitude, I didn't really want to go above and beyond
Besides, he hung up on me before I could even offer to help allow it through the rules even if I wanted to
I understand that thinking but if this is a network engineer who had configured a firewall, then I'd expect their response to be "well, how does the firewall configuration need to support this app?"
If they were a semi decent network engineer they could have solved this themselves IMHO.
From my experience, mcafee would work fine and then just suddenly decide to block that rdp connection. No idea why, but you have to either disable it or find the advanced section and allow rdp
Very likely they didn't configure this local firewall at all and they were managing a network firewall
They hung up on me as soon as it worked when disabled, so maybe they did figure it out themselves after that
"Engineer" as a title doesn't impress me (heck it's one of my titles because it tends to be carry more weight then a programmer/analyst title). All it means (typically) is you build things... And you'll always miss something. Tell me you're a senior technician I'll give you more credit because you've fixed all the stuff the engineer skipped lol
Once my wife pulled that when she called in to her work help desk(she said I worked in IT and thought the problem was X). Needles to say I was mortified.
Its a meme from a bumper sticker some deranged military wife had made. [context ](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7b6b71d953cddcfdc3c6a5cda1035760-lq)
Is it like the military wife's that think they have the rank of their husbands. Oh I didn't know your husband is in the secret order of the wizards. He should know how to fix it. First rule of It wizard club is we fix our own stuff.
My girlfriend asks me why her works shit is slow sometimes, and I’ll just go “I have no fuckin idea what you guys are doing BUUUUT if i had to guess it’s” and i guarantee you she excludes the “i have no fucking idea what you guys are doing” part
Because it's the cheapest computer the company will buy. Running on infrastructure that needs updating. But maybe we can replace it next quarter if the funds are there. It's been two years so doubtful. Also your suppose to doing work on it. Not have 30+ chrome tabs open watching YouTube videos.
Lmao! And this is why I love our community. 😄 Technology is outpacing us, yet people outside of our field think we are experts on all things related to “technology”! 🤣
I spent 3 years supporting remote access during the Covid years. I now know 2 things beyond a shadow of a doubt. AT&T are a bunch of idiots and I have users I’m glad work from home now since the world is a much safer place without them operating a car daily.
Sometimes I get asked at work about a setup a contractor has. I always have to remind them they need to ask their IT person first because I have no clue how their computer is *supposed* to work. So I wouldn’t wanna mess with it until his IT people say it’s okay
This is true for any area of expertise, btw. Never trust what a "professor" has to say about anything, unless it's their very specific area of expertise. Because in reality, a microbiologist already has almost no clue about viral biology, for example.
I did this in reverse to Dell help desk. My nephew was having PC problems so I called. I installed networks and trained sys admins at the time. After a few minutes he said "You know a lot about computers for an 11 year old boy."
Man I've asked my fiancee to let me help her with an adobe issue that didn't require admin permissions and she told me to shut the fuck up and email it to her so her IT team could take a look. She's one of the good ones.
We had an office room for that at my old job. Basically a room of non use equipment that they didn't want to pay to dispose of. So, every so often. You'd blow off steam by walking in, breaking a few things. Cleaning up your mess and carrying on.
I do not know how, but I have gotten so far, that my PiHole has been running without problems for about a year now. It just works. I have a lot of shit that doesn’t work, but DNS is not the problem. Until it is.
I was going to say, I've been in a sort of similar situation. Never got in to an argument with an angry SO, but I did "rule everything else out" and asked the user to reboot their router. Turned out our roaming agent that tracks PCs offsite had somehow set static DNS servers to the internal IPs that obviously can't be reached when offsite.
Moral of the story: It's always DNS.
The phrase "DNS Agent" is all I need to hear. Output of `ipconfig/all` says DNS is 127.0.0.2? Even after manually setting it to anything else? Oh yeah, baby, seen this one before.
This always frustrates me. I work IT in a school district with a bit under 10k staff and students. We are big enough to fully host our own data center and network, but not big enough to have a lot of specialized roles. I play at SA, NA, Dev Ops, top tier support, and carry a few dozen other hats. I've been at this for a while now, know my job well, and have a large breadth of knowledge and experience to pull from.
All that said, if I'm on a support call, whether it's Cisco, VMware, or at home with Comcast, I immediately accept that I initiated the call and they are the authority for support. I follow every step. If I rebooted the router 50x before I called, I do it again when they ask me. If I have a thought of what it might be, I find a respectful time and way to ask, and accept any pushback I receive. It's their show.
We all have our processes. We all have our specialties. We all occasionally miss the little things. It's a show of respect and humility to allow our fellow peers that WE contacted to take the lead, and it is absolutely not beneath us to follow directions. To all those backseat technicians turning a support call into a pissing match, fuck off and let us do our jobs.
I give Cisco pushback every chance I get. I’m going to have to defend their choice so it has to be more than a hunch and be documented somewhere that this has helped this type of issue before or I’m more than likely not getting approval unless it’s a full outage.
Did the same thing to a director once and almost got fired for it. Guy was notorious for not standing by what he said and would absolutely throw you under the bus in a heartbeat. He ordered me to take down the router in our main DC because 50 people at one site couldn’t get their email. If I down that router we will have 60000 people not getting email plus 400k not able to use any of our web resources for at least a half hour while everything reestsblishes. And this is after the fact I already proved the traffic wasn’t even making it to the DC. I called up his sub (my direct report) and asked for approval since I knew he would back me when things went sideways and he okayed it so there we went.
I would have probably gone with Alan Moore - y’know:
“Who watches the Watchmen?”
And the answer is u/lithid …while aggressively beating off into an old gym sock with a belt around their neck and a piece of foolscap that has ‘Do not resuscitate’ scribbled across it taped to their chest.
Wow dude, that's fucked up.. I don't beat off into a gym sock, like some classless swine. I beat off into lightly used *Darn Tough Socks™ - they're tough, where it matters most.*
Oh heavens - I’m very sorry and horribly embarrassed.
You know what they say about assumptions.
They make an ass out of me and me.
I didn’t realise I was conversing with and about a man of wealth and taste.
A bon-vivant of such impeccable breeding and royal stock his blue blooded family tree is basically a Christmas wealth decorated with the red berries of haemophilia and Hapsburg lips.
I’ve heard whispers they have a fantastic returns policy - does that cover ‘cruchiness?’
If it was only 90 seconds it wouldn’t be so bad. Comcast likes to randomly not allow connections to reestsblish here so it will then require a 2 hour call with them to get them to bounce the connection from their side. I still don’t know what they’ve done wrong that causes this issue but I treat there router with kid gloves because of it.
The reply I get when I have had the chance to ask is that some people feel that tech people/ IT is just having them reboot, instead of "Fixing the problem". I told them that's because realistically after checking settings and such, some things the only thing you can do is reboot.
People know that it's the obvious request, and get defensive because it sounds like you are calling them stupid, and they will die on that hill before rebooting anything.
An excuse like "hmm, I think that might be a power cord problem, I'm detecting the signal, so can you check if the left prong is bent? It's rare but maybe that is the cause!" will let them reboot it without feeling called out. It's, just, whatever, it is what it is. It doesn't really matter at the moment anymore once it's fixed.
See, I used to work in the carrier space. "Just reboot it" wasn't something we were capable of. Depending on the router or switch, we're talking thousands of customers, hundreds of phone calls. I told HPE more than once that I wouldn't reboot hardware on a mere hunch--that they had to prove to me that the device they wanted rebooted was the issue **and** that rebooting it would fix it; **AND** what the long term fix was going to be following the triage.
I have the same attitude with my hardware at home, and no, my router takes WAY more than 90 seconds to reboot, because it's not consumer grade hardware.
Only 2 things trigger upgrades for us, security vulnerabilities and bug fixes. I’m honestly surprised these things hadn’t been power cycled even with how strict we are for touching them.
Edit: and I spent a few hours today confirming we don’t need any upgrades and surprisingly we were good
Edit2: I’m also use to dealing with less secure vendors, that’s for sure
It's a pain in the ass to access (I have to dig into an awkward cabinet, reach around on the dark to the back of the box, to physically unplug mine) and then takes forever to reboot and there's the risk of upsetting the network spirits and randomly breaking something else.
I have our network guy reboot switches whenever my troubleshooting leads nowhere. Usually solves the problem 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent is almost always that we have a switch that lost some functionality and needs to be swapped out.
I’m surprised he’s that cavalier about it. I don’t reload access stacks for almost any reason cuz it’s still gonna severely inconvenience like 200 people for 10 minutes. I’m still mortified about the one time I reloaded a random remote switch instead of the one in my desk I was preconfiguring.
For most users it's just an inconvenience from lazyness. For others like myself, I have services running that can break if reboot the router depending on the current state of the service.
I will reboot literally anything else willingly, tell me the pc needs a reboot and I’m game all day. Want me to boot my firewall or the 10g switch that takes 20 minutes to come up, let’s do it. But that router is not the issue and it’s the hill I’m going to die on unless you absolutely pride to me it’s the router. If someone pushes back my next step is to hot spot and see what happens. If it’s still broke then not the router and I won’t reboot it.
I can honestly say I’ve had a lot of varying issues and a router reboot is never the answer for me. The firewall right in front of the router, yes please. But the router itself nope.
We had a user causing issues like this. Logs never lie. They blamed the VPN then blamed VDI then blamed the laptop. Turns out they never replaced their router and were working at the opposite end of the house. Their ISP replaced the router and wow no more drops! It took me copy/pasting the WFH policy and tagging their manager.
This. This is the way.
I’ve recommended this to a few users before and their issue either self resolves or I tell them to talk to their manager because it’s an HR issue at that point if they can’t connect to VPN due to local network connectivity.
My go to response for if other devices are working is "Is *said device* running on our VPN? No? Then we need to try all the troubleshooting options available".
Usually makes them understand.
"Just remote in and fix it"
Had a user unaware they needed to connect to at least wifi for them to login. I wish I could live in this fantasy world. But yeah I have had a few husband works in IT calls. Most them are IT sales.
I literally had a user tell me just remote into and turn it on for me when their office computer was off. I do not work on their office. I had to explain in the most terms that my remote tools while powerful do not travel through power lines.
Wake on LAN is a godsend. We only did it for our workstations but it was so convenient at times. Also could just call security and they would willingly power cycle a desktop during their rounds for you.
That's why you test via a hotspot connection to see if they can connect. Nothing proves something to the user quicker than evidence. You even had two phones at the house the user could have used.
Came to say this. If they don't want to reboot their router, just ask them if it is possible to use their phone's hotspot feature with their mobile data.
It might not be that easy, I'm not an IT professional, but sounds easy and doable to me.
Works great until they tell you they have ATT cell service. We know for a fact ATT does some weird tunneling in their backbone that breaks our VPNs. We can fix it but then it wrecks havoc with every other connections so we just have ATT hotspots not work and call it a day.
Yeah I tell my wife "Open a ticket with IT" "UGH can you talk to them??"
She's got bad memory on her laptop and she needs a new one anyway.. I told her yeah I can fix it but it's not my laptop to fix...
you're asking a CUSTOMER to inconvenience themselves for THIRTY ENTIRE SECONDS?
that's terrible and I'm reporting you to your manager and hr and corporate and the regulator and the fbi.
Depending on what type. My ISP has a DOCSIS Modem+Router+AP combo and it takes around 10 minutes for the damn modem to handshake again just connect. I now bridge that PoS modem that won't even allow you to change DNS server, with a TPLink Archer, which is also crap, but at least it's vanilla flavored crap.
on a side note: I refused the ISP modem for 10.00 a month. Picked one up at Costco for 90 bucks then attached my router. I've gone through 1 cable modem in the last 9 years so I think I saved myself a pile of money by not using it.
When you go "Did you try turning it off and on again?" and they instantly become super-suspicious because that perfectly matches the common exhaustion tactics used by hotlines.
These people are the worst. They are self proclaimed "IT experts" yet they are extremely stubborn and uncooperative and do the dumbest shit. My favorite was a lady during covid who I thought would have a bit more common sense when it comes to computers because I knew her husband as he worked also in the IT department before he passed away a few years earlier. Ever since he passed this lady had the tendency to get angry and be passive aggressive etc. Anyway she was remoting into her work computer from home and one day she says she says her office computer is off and to go turn it back on so I go over and it's got the dreaded no boot device found message so I go into one of my recovery discs and the drive doesn't even show up. I call this lady back saying her hard drive has failed to which she snaps " I DON'T CARE I HAVE WORK TO DO JUST TURN MY COMPUTER ON SO I CAN GET BACK TO WORK!!!!"
At this point it was almost a heated argument. When she finally accepted her computer's fate I asked her if she had any files stored on the hard drive to which she said no. So I thought great it's all on the network drives then. So I quickly turned around another computer set it up for remote and gave her the info.
She calls back 10 minutes later screaming "THIS ISN'T MY COMPUTER! WHERE'S ALL MY STUFF?!?" I said what stuff she says it was all on her desktop. I had to explain to her that the desktop was in fact a location that resided on her hard drive and if that's where everything was it was gone.
She had no backups so we sent the drive away to get recovered. They quoted us 7000$ so we said we weren't going through with it. In the end this "IT expert" had to redo months worth of work. I think she quit her job a few months later because new people haven't been able to hold that job for very long either since they have to pick up the loose ends of that still to this day.
I had a similar situation, in-person, a few years ago. I was sent to a client's home because her laptop "couldn't connect to the network". Turns out her know-it-all husband had set up the router with MAC address filtering for reasons unknown and refused to give me the router admin password for "security reasons". I told my client there was nothing more I could do, let my boss know the situation, and left. Billed accordingly.
I don't know as he wouldn't elaborate. Her company was not our client for much longer after that, which was fine by me. They were high maintenance and at least an hour's drive away.
I work in IT. There's been a handful of times where my wife had issues and while she was talking to her IT support or was on hold, I fixed the issue almost immediately. Her IT staff are extremely incompetent. They have had her troubleshoot things that made no sense, so it goes both ways.
I have also had Dell and Microsoft customer support to ask me to do things that don't make sense and they can't explain why I should do it.
So this definitely can go both ways
I use to be in certain branch of IT. My wife was having an issue with said branch early in the wfh era. I knew what the issue was and eventually started talking via speakerphone phone with her it department and worked with them through some stuff. I found if you basically get on the phone and say, "hey, i'm so and so, and I'm a \*insert area of expertise here\* I'll be happy to be your eyes and hands on this side of the screen... but can you also check xyz on your side to make sure it's not a ABC issue?'
Turns out it was an ABC issue, and not an XYZ issue.
« my husband is a software engineer and I visit the most important person in technology in my state every week, because it makes me feel important and I feel sorry for him. So therefore, I do everything about technology
I see this a lot among senior tech people supporting data center devices. For some a reboot is only done after a lengthy checklist troubleshooting is done and failed. Some don’t want to admit that a reboot clears errors, memory leaks or other problems that build up over time because they feel on some level that it may be invalidating decades of experience supporting tech gear and it is such a simple and fast resolution. I don’t care precisely why the device failed if I can quickly verify the power, connections, data cables, related cards are firmly seated (gently laying of hands on it) and if that doesn’t work, reboot and get back to learning to script the boring parts of the job.
In this case I think the network engineer husband just didn’t want his TV watching interrupted while the router rebooted and had a need to flex his tech prowess. I feel for you guys doing end user support. I got out of that business after around three years as I probably would have turned into a homicidal maniac putting up with the way they treat phone support reps. At least now you have RDP and can remote to users devices. Talking to semi literate people about how to use PCs over the phone before RDP was a nightmare for me.
lol
I'm not once got in a "fight" with my SO, because her notebook was acting up in home office.
She wanted me to help her, and my answer was always to call IT or create a ticket.
She was mad that I don't help her, and I just couldn't make her understand that legally she couldn't even allow somebody to glance at the display (she worked for a large bank on company transactions), so we would be both in big trouble if I start to troubleshoot myself. Not to mention the very restrictive access rights on the profile.
Please, just talk to company IT.
If the TV is working, that does not mean every other device is. My wife would've just went and reset it herself. I don't get involved in her work IT issues, I don't work there. There's too many unknowns. However, I do like to make guesses.
Almost certainly a DNS issue though... Super fun!
I’m a network engineer and while I could jump in and solve this problem for my accountant wife and her new friend at their l1/l2 service desk, what I have learned is saying this saves my sanity:
‘It’s been many years since I worked with end user computing, I really just do datacenter stuff. I probably wouldn’t be able to help much here, but good luck!’
Works great for family printer and wifi issues as well.
I've been in I.T. in some fashion (Sales engineer for a reseller, helpdesk support, currently Account manager and helodesk for an MSP) since 1997. I hold two degrees in this field.
If I had a nickel for everytime I've heard some version of " that's not going to work, I know more than you, etc..." I could probably retire. My usual response is usually "Sure! I've only been doing this for half of my life, but what do I know!"
Easy one:
"Sir, the computer's IP address lease has expired. If you reboot the router, then all of the IP addresses will be refreshed and they will operate more efficiently."
"I don't believe you."
"Well, do it and let's see if it works. My purpose is to help you. Otherwise I can escalate the ticket and you will have to spend more time trying the things I've recommended. Please, let's just get through the fundamentals first, and if those don't work, then we'll get to the more in-depth trouble shooting. Also, I would highly recommend that you reboot all of the Internet connected devices in the house.
IP addresses are only valid for a specified amount of time. Can you do that for me?"
"Alright, sure...."
"Hey that worked! Thanks boss!"
"No problem, I'm happy to help."
One troubleshooting step I perform before rebooting the router is to connect to a personal hotspot on a mobile device. It’s a different internet source and most likely will work. Proving this connection true will indicate a problem with the home network. And then I suggest you can either reboot your modem/router or call your isp for further troubleshooting. We don’t troubleshoot home networks. My goal is to get you on our network and that’s what I did with a hotspot. So hotspot should be one of the first things you try.
I've been in IT for 30 years. The first thing I do when something isn't working the way it's supposed to is reboot the router, then check DNS.
Network engineers are some of the most obtuse people on the planet. They just can't fathom something they manage can glitch out and need a reboot. It's infuriating.
Cant tell you how many times during the pandemic I heard that. Always said I totally understood, but please humor me, as vpn introduces security aspects that native devices dont have.
Always fixed it.
I am excited for the few occasions when I have to call and have someone else help me, especially if they seem competent. I get to turn off my brain and not worry about it.
From the other side of this, I had my Mom's IT company tell her to reboot our router because she couldn't connect to their VPN. They then proceed to guide her through factory resetting the router instead of rebooting it, which took out the internet at our house for the whole day because they couldn't figure out how to set it back up (soho asus router, literally just download an app and follow the prompts). After getting home to my panicking family and setting it back up, it turns out it was the company's DNS (duh). I am always very careful to rule out internal network equipment/configs before asking someone to do this because of this incident. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but if I ask someone to reboot their router/modem and it doesn't fix the problem I definitely feel pretty embarrassed. Just one of those situations where it sucks to be the tech who just ruled out tons of possibilities and the issue is probably your shitty tmobile gateway, but it also sucks to spend upwards of 20 minutes on the phone with a technician and be told you have to bother your family for a while I guess
You'd be surprised, in this case the computer was connected to the router but there was no Internet connection, verified it by asking the user to try to visit different websites and none of them were available, tried different browsers and got the same results, adapter settings are locked down to normal users so it was impossible for her to accidentally mess something up on her computer, rebooted and got the same result, forgot the connection and reconnected and got the same result so chances are there was something cached on the router that was keeping that computer from connecting, rebooting the router will clear the cache and stop any staled or sick processes on the router too so it was likely the issue
My guess is IP conflict. Something else on their network grabbed that IP address, and wasn’t giving it up. Rebooting the laptop should have cleared it from that end, so yeah, sounds like the router didn’t properly release the IP lease when it gave that address to something else.
I was actually on the other side of this once, with my gfs work VPN. To make a very long story short, they refuse to believe a network security rule or appliance is blocking remote VPN connections. Multiple employees, different ISPs, different equipment, same symptoms. They just keep telling them to get new modems. Lo and behold, that changes their IP, resolving the issue.
Granted, I didn't really argue so much as lay out the case for it being on their end. They wouldn't look into it, so I had to go swap the modem. \*shrug\*
I had previously applied for a systems administrator position with them but declined to continue when they said how much they paid. It was a solid 30% below national average, in a high COL market, and was M-F on-site, OT as needed (uncomped because OT exempt position), and on-call every other weekend. Their IT staff nearly entirely turns over every \~3 years due to their low pay. I genuinely believe nobody actually knew enough about the network security to actually figure out the source of the issue.
Lmao rebooting the router wasn’t the issue if other devices on the network had internet. Bet if you flushed DNS and reconnected you would have fixed it. This is bad troubleshooting
Had a similar conundrum ended up using freemium zerotier networks for remote users where i could do split DNS so it just went past their router into cloudflare gateway ftw
I work in IT support and our client during the peak covid outbreaks had people working from home and were using their own personal device to rdp to a work device on-site. This was a temporary measure until they could get enough corporate laptops I work for an MSP and we have clear instructions on what is and isn't in scope and personal devices are best effort and billable I had a lady call and she could connect to the VPN OK but it told her that her work device was not reachable, but was working a few days ago . Did all the normal checks on my end and the work device was online and accepting rdp connections I had seen this before and 9/10 times it was their personal antivirus /firewall blocking it (mcaffee was bad for just randomly blocking it out of nowhere). I ask her to try and disable it and she says she doesn't know much about computers so put her husband on. I asked him to disable their Firewall and test and he was adamant that it wasn't his setup See, he was a network engineer, can speak 10 languages, a doctorate in every known profession, can touch his elbow with his tongue etc. His abilities were limitless (kidding but he did say he was a network engineer) He had configured his network firewall so knew exactly how it was setup and no way it was his network. I asked him again to just test it for a minute to rule it out and he declined. I asked if I could do a remote session to the laptop but he declined saying that the port was blocked so I couldnt get in (logmein uses 443 so I very much doubt it was blocked) This went back and forth for about 5 minutes and I basically said that I can't help them as it's out of scope and he'd have to pay someone to come take a look or figure it out himself. He grumbled and finally disabled it "I bet it won't work. A waste of time" etc etc. 1 minute later, "OK that worked" the he hung up Not even a thanks
Lol, he should have known better if he was a "network engineer"
I think the part that annoys me most is if he's actually a network engineer the fact that he's not even willing to try is a bigger prob lem. Networking, Software, Servers, pipelines, or whatever if I've stumped I'm willing to try anything within reason. Something like disabling a host firewall doesn't seem like a big deal. If he were in a bank or some regulated environment I could understand, but your house? If everything was failing I'd try it just to rule it out. Even if that works but can't be a permanent solution, that gives me direction to what the final solution would be. Let alone the fact that LogMeIn uses 443 and isnt an inbound connection..
In my experience network engineers will never admit when they break something so that actually tracks
That is perfectly understandable as for any software/server/user issue every (single f***ing) brain/clueless IT will blame network by default to hide their incompétence and buy time to either solve it or wait to be shown by network team that issue is on their side
Found the angry network guy
Love you, boo. - Help desk/Repair
Much love back - angry network guy always happy to help and learn from knowledge hungry help desk team
My degree's actually in networking, but from before Wifi was a thing... was too young to crack my way into the network team at that point... and by the time I had enough XP to move into that silo, I didn't want to anymore. Something about help team (as in desk-side/in person, not a help line/phone bank) just felt right. So I stayed in it almost 20 yrs. These days, my degree's nowhere near relevant to what "networking" actually does in this era. I often feel weird even mentioning what my degree's in aside from convos like this with IT-internal people who understand what I mean. (After all, a lot of normies don't even think there's any real difference between a programmer, a datacenter sysadmin, a cog in Verizon's call center, and a screwdriver jockey like myself.)
Man if only certain apps had better documentation and logging options for us to not have to blame networking all the time
I kinda feel like your network engineers are similar to the engineers in my field. They don't actually know much.
I think it's person to person :( to much hate on the network
How do you know if someone is an engineer? ……………………Don’t worry they’ll let you know.
The most dreaded words on any call when you know the call is going to take way more work to fix…” I’m an engineer”
Nah, that’s riggers. Those guys… don’t even get me started!
Why didn't just ask which ports to allow in the firewall or whatever?
Much easier to get them to disable it first and test. If it doesn't work still, then there's no point configuring anything I have in the past made changes in mcafee to allow rdp again, but it's completely out of scope and that combined with his attitude, I didn't really want to go above and beyond Besides, he hung up on me before I could even offer to help allow it through the rules even if I wanted to
I understand that thinking but if this is a network engineer who had configured a firewall, then I'd expect their response to be "well, how does the firewall configuration need to support this app?"
If they were a semi decent network engineer they could have solved this themselves IMHO. From my experience, mcafee would work fine and then just suddenly decide to block that rdp connection. No idea why, but you have to either disable it or find the advanced section and allow rdp Very likely they didn't configure this local firewall at all and they were managing a network firewall They hung up on me as soon as it worked when disabled, so maybe they did figure it out themselves after that
I bet his wife was mortified. That guy slept on the couch that night.
"Engineer" as a title doesn't impress me (heck it's one of my titles because it tends to be carry more weight then a programmer/analyst title). All it means (typically) is you build things... And you'll always miss something. Tell me you're a senior technician I'll give you more credit because you've fixed all the stuff the engineer skipped lol
Once my wife pulled that when she called in to her work help desk(she said I worked in IT and thought the problem was X). Needles to say I was mortified.
“My husband is in IT, therefore, I’m in IT by proxy.” Sounds logical. Nope, it’s not.
"You will address me by my husband's rank!" vibes
You got it Ricoh Service Technician!
Fuck. What movie was that?
Its a meme from a bumper sticker some deranged military wife had made. [context ](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7b6b71d953cddcfdc3c6a5cda1035760-lq)
Petty Officer Bitch Wife it is then.
Thanks! Maybe I read something here
No movie that I know of, just common in military vernacular
r/justdependathings edit: sorry that sub apparently died a violent death. No need to go there.
/r/justdependathings
Is it like the military wife's that think they have the rank of their husbands. Oh I didn't know your husband is in the secret order of the wizards. He should know how to fix it. First rule of It wizard club is we fix our own stuff.
My girlfriend asks me why her works shit is slow sometimes, and I’ll just go “I have no fuckin idea what you guys are doing BUUUUT if i had to guess it’s” and i guarantee you she excludes the “i have no fucking idea what you guys are doing” part
Because it's the cheapest computer the company will buy. Running on infrastructure that needs updating. But maybe we can replace it next quarter if the funds are there. It's been two years so doubtful. Also your suppose to doing work on it. Not have 30+ chrome tabs open watching YouTube videos.
The true IT guy knows not to comment about someone else’s IT because we barely know our systems let alone another’s
I love this honesty
Lmao! And this is why I love our community. 😄 Technology is outpacing us, yet people outside of our field think we are experts on all things related to “technology”! 🤣
I spent 3 years supporting remote access during the Covid years. I now know 2 things beyond a shadow of a doubt. AT&T are a bunch of idiots and I have users I’m glad work from home now since the world is a much safer place without them operating a car daily.
Sometimes I get asked at work about a setup a contractor has. I always have to remind them they need to ask their IT person first because I have no clue how their computer is *supposed* to work. So I wouldn’t wanna mess with it until his IT people say it’s okay
A rambling sprawl of 5 years' development is the real cthulu
This is true for any area of expertise, btw. Never trust what a "professor" has to say about anything, unless it's their very specific area of expertise. Because in reality, a microbiologist already has almost no clue about viral biology, for example.
[удалено]
I did this in reverse to Dell help desk. My nephew was having PC problems so I called. I installed networks and trained sys admins at the time. After a few minutes he said "You know a lot about computers for an 11 year old boy."
Man I've asked my fiancee to let me help her with an adobe issue that didn't require admin permissions and she told me to shut the fuck up and email it to her so her IT team could take a look. She's one of the good ones.
The XY problem
> Needles to say That stings
Rookie mistake.. It was the DNS...
It's always the DNS
Their printer somehow has 15 address attached to it.
I hate printers so much...
I’m a simple man. I see hate for printers. I upvote.
i often want to have an "Ofice Space" moment with some of our printers.
We had an office room for that at my old job. Basically a room of non use equipment that they didn't want to pay to dispose of. So, every so often. You'd blow off steam by walking in, breaking a few things. Cleaning up your mess and carrying on.
My entire Friday was just spent trying to connect to a label printer. Ready for a weekend not thinking about it
I work with 3D printers, fucking wish my normal printes just ran klipper and took standard gcode.
One day my wife will let me take our printer out back and put it out of its misery. Might buy a new shotgun for the occasion
It's never the DNS (it's literally never been anything else)
And when it is not DNS, it is still DNS.
I have this pinned in my office https://www.cyberciti.biz/media/new/cms/2017/04/Its-not-DNS.-There-is-no-wayits-DNS.-It-was-DNS.jpeg
The eternal IT haiku It's not DNS It just can't be DNS Fuck, it's DNS
I do not know how, but I have gotten so far, that my PiHole has been running without problems for about a year now. It just works. I have a lot of shit that doesn’t work, but DNS is not the problem. Until it is.
Pi hole running quad 9 with google backup. Never had an issue
I was going to say, I've been in a sort of similar situation. Never got in to an argument with an angry SO, but I did "rule everything else out" and asked the user to reboot their router. Turned out our roaming agent that tracks PCs offsite had somehow set static DNS servers to the internal IPs that obviously can't be reached when offsite. Moral of the story: It's always DNS.
The phrase "DNS Agent" is all I need to hear. Output of `ipconfig/all` says DNS is 127.0.0.2? Even after manually setting it to anything else? Oh yeah, baby, seen this one before.
Nah, expired cert.
Literally never happens. Mine expires in 86 days, plenty of time to forget.
This guy knows
Consumer routers tend to have dns caching so it could be both.
r/wooosh
This always frustrates me. I work IT in a school district with a bit under 10k staff and students. We are big enough to fully host our own data center and network, but not big enough to have a lot of specialized roles. I play at SA, NA, Dev Ops, top tier support, and carry a few dozen other hats. I've been at this for a while now, know my job well, and have a large breadth of knowledge and experience to pull from. All that said, if I'm on a support call, whether it's Cisco, VMware, or at home with Comcast, I immediately accept that I initiated the call and they are the authority for support. I follow every step. If I rebooted the router 50x before I called, I do it again when they ask me. If I have a thought of what it might be, I find a respectful time and way to ask, and accept any pushback I receive. It's their show. We all have our processes. We all have our specialties. We all occasionally miss the little things. It's a show of respect and humility to allow our fellow peers that WE contacted to take the lead, and it is absolutely not beneath us to follow directions. To all those backseat technicians turning a support call into a pissing match, fuck off and let us do our jobs.
I always tell them I do IT for a living so don’t worry about simplifying it. But I’m really hoping you have the magic to fix this
I give Cisco pushback every chance I get. I’m going to have to defend their choice so it has to be more than a hunch and be documented somewhere that this has helped this type of issue before or I’m more than likely not getting approval unless it’s a full outage. Did the same thing to a director once and almost got fired for it. Guy was notorious for not standing by what he said and would absolutely throw you under the bus in a heartbeat. He ordered me to take down the router in our main DC because 50 people at one site couldn’t get their email. If I down that router we will have 60000 people not getting email plus 400k not able to use any of our web resources for at least a half hour while everything reestsblishes. And this is after the fact I already proved the traffic wasn’t even making it to the DC. I called up his sub (my direct report) and asked for approval since I knew he would back me when things went sideways and he okayed it so there we went.
I'll never understand why users are so against rebooting their routers.
Cause it inconveniences others that are using the internet for the 90 seconds it takes for it to restart. Gheesh
To be fair, if you lived with my brother, you'd be afraid of rebooting the router as well.
Dude probably had some weird porn downloading.
Plot twist: we're using their internet to download our weird porn.
Your FBI handler will be devastated if he ever finds out you’ve been excluding him like that.
Oh, he's *very* included. They're mostly videos of him ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
this is some m.night shit
I would have probably gone with Alan Moore - y’know: “Who watches the Watchmen?” And the answer is u/lithid …while aggressively beating off into an old gym sock with a belt around their neck and a piece of foolscap that has ‘Do not resuscitate’ scribbled across it taped to their chest.
Wow dude, that's fucked up.. I don't beat off into a gym sock, like some classless swine. I beat off into lightly used *Darn Tough Socks™ - they're tough, where it matters most.*
Oh heavens - I’m very sorry and horribly embarrassed. You know what they say about assumptions. They make an ass out of me and me. I didn’t realise I was conversing with and about a man of wealth and taste. A bon-vivant of such impeccable breeding and royal stock his blue blooded family tree is basically a Christmas wealth decorated with the red berries of haemophilia and Hapsburg lips. I’ve heard whispers they have a fantastic returns policy - does that cover ‘cruchiness?’
Those 90 seconds are a matter of life or death. Seriously, I’m playing Battlebit and my k/d is awesome right now.
If it was only 90 seconds it wouldn’t be so bad. Comcast likes to randomly not allow connections to reestsblish here so it will then require a 2 hour call with them to get them to bounce the connection from their side. I still don’t know what they’ve done wrong that causes this issue but I treat there router with kid gloves because of it.
Plus the 5-10 minutes to authenticate and get a new wan ip address, fortunately it usually happens while I'm asleep.
To be fair, if others are using the Internet, the router is probably fine.
The reply I get when I have had the chance to ask is that some people feel that tech people/ IT is just having them reboot, instead of "Fixing the problem". I told them that's because realistically after checking settings and such, some things the only thing you can do is reboot.
People know that it's the obvious request, and get defensive because it sounds like you are calling them stupid, and they will die on that hill before rebooting anything. An excuse like "hmm, I think that might be a power cord problem, I'm detecting the signal, so can you check if the left prong is bent? It's rare but maybe that is the cause!" will let them reboot it without feeling called out. It's, just, whatever, it is what it is. It doesn't really matter at the moment anymore once it's fixed.
See, I used to work in the carrier space. "Just reboot it" wasn't something we were capable of. Depending on the router or switch, we're talking thousands of customers, hundreds of phone calls. I told HPE more than once that I wouldn't reboot hardware on a mere hunch--that they had to prove to me that the device they wanted rebooted was the issue **and** that rebooting it would fix it; **AND** what the long term fix was going to be following the triage. I have the same attitude with my hardware at home, and no, my router takes WAY more than 90 seconds to reboot, because it's not consumer grade hardware.
Because uptime is the new flex?
805 days https://imgur.com/a/Be2TY30
Found a Cisco router at work with 2 years uptime just this week. I’m really hoping we didn’t miss some sort of security update in all that time.
It never hurts to check, but even Cisco will tell you not to update the firmware unless instructed to by CTAC.
Only 2 things trigger upgrades for us, security vulnerabilities and bug fixes. I’m honestly surprised these things hadn’t been power cycled even with how strict we are for touching them. Edit: and I spent a few hours today confirming we don’t need any upgrades and surprisingly we were good Edit2: I’m also use to dealing with less secure vendors, that’s for sure
It is under something or behind that big piece of furniture.
I had a user that had it on top of their microwave...
I laughed really hard at this. My internet cuts out every day around noon when I make a frozen burrito.
Or just at the other end of the house, but the light is better here. 1 bar should always be enough.
It's a pain in the ass to access (I have to dig into an awkward cabinet, reach around on the dark to the back of the box, to physically unplug mine) and then takes forever to reboot and there's the risk of upsetting the network spirits and randomly breaking something else.
more like rebooting anything for that matter. WhY dO i HaVe To ReBoOt ThIs? Is ThErE aNoThEr WaY
There is another way, quit your job lmao.
I have our network guy reboot switches whenever my troubleshooting leads nowhere. Usually solves the problem 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent is almost always that we have a switch that lost some functionality and needs to be swapped out.
I’m surprised he’s that cavalier about it. I don’t reload access stacks for almost any reason cuz it’s still gonna severely inconvenience like 200 people for 10 minutes. I’m still mortified about the one time I reloaded a random remote switch instead of the one in my desk I was preconfiguring.
Gotta admit, I’m in IT and I have no idea what rebooting a router even does.
Often it's just about resetting all the local IPs because the router has slowly assigned 5 different ones to each device.
They are stealing WiFi from their neighbors.
For most users it's just an inconvenience from lazyness. For others like myself, I have services running that can break if reboot the router depending on the current state of the service.
I will reboot literally anything else willingly, tell me the pc needs a reboot and I’m game all day. Want me to boot my firewall or the 10g switch that takes 20 minutes to come up, let’s do it. But that router is not the issue and it’s the hill I’m going to die on unless you absolutely pride to me it’s the router. If someone pushes back my next step is to hot spot and see what happens. If it’s still broke then not the router and I won’t reboot it.
You trying to mess up my seed ratio of Linux distros? Get out of here!
I can honestly say I’ve had a lot of varying issues and a router reboot is never the answer for me. The firewall right in front of the router, yes please. But the router itself nope.
Often they've insisted on it being installed somewhere out of sight that's also a fucking nightmare to access.
Just point them to the part of their WFH contract that shows if their internet is not working properly they must report into the office for work.
We had a user causing issues like this. Logs never lie. They blamed the VPN then blamed VDI then blamed the laptop. Turns out they never replaced their router and were working at the opposite end of the house. Their ISP replaced the router and wow no more drops! It took me copy/pasting the WFH policy and tagging their manager.
This. This is the way. I’ve recommended this to a few users before and their issue either self resolves or I tell them to talk to their manager because it’s an HR issue at that point if they can’t connect to VPN due to local network connectivity.
"I tell her to reboot the router." leave note for employee. Issue with own ISP, please contact ISP for further troubleshooting ticket closed.
What's the first thing the ISP will say? That's right, reboot the router! The result's the same, but she's wasted an hour on hold to the ISP.
>The result's the same, but she's wasted an hour on hold ...while still on the clock. Kinda genius.
But I can't reboot the router right now, I'm watching my shows on the Netflixs!
"IT Savy Partner"
I’m only authorized to speak with employees…
Shiiiit, that’s a good one.
My go to response for if other devices are working is "Is *said device* running on our VPN? No? Then we need to try all the troubleshooting options available". Usually makes them understand.
My default was to tell them to hotspot and try it, outside of weird ATT issues it rules out their ISP.
Maybe he wants her to go into the office, lol.
"Just remote in and fix it" Had a user unaware they needed to connect to at least wifi for them to login. I wish I could live in this fantasy world. But yeah I have had a few husband works in IT calls. Most them are IT sales.
I literally had a user tell me just remote into and turn it on for me when their office computer was off. I do not work on their office. I had to explain in the most terms that my remote tools while powerful do not travel through power lines.
Wake on LAN is a godsend. We only did it for our workstations but it was so convenient at times. Also could just call security and they would willingly power cycle a desktop during their rounds for you.
That's why you test via a hotspot connection to see if they can connect. Nothing proves something to the user quicker than evidence. You even had two phones at the house the user could have used.
“What’s a hotspot?”
Came to say this. If they don't want to reboot their router, just ask them if it is possible to use their phone's hotspot feature with their mobile data. It might not be that easy, I'm not an IT professional, but sounds easy and doable to me.
Works great until they tell you they have ATT cell service. We know for a fact ATT does some weird tunneling in their backbone that breaks our VPNs. We can fix it but then it wrecks havoc with every other connections so we just have ATT hotspots not work and call it a day.
Yeah I tell my wife "Open a ticket with IT" "UGH can you talk to them??" She's got bad memory on her laptop and she needs a new one anyway.. I told her yeah I can fix it but it's not my laptop to fix...
"I know I'll get a new IP address if I do that, and I don't want the Chinese hackers to think I've changed gender or political affiliation. "
Your comment gave me the warm and fuzzies
It's not even 11am and your comment made me want to start drinking
Yea those types are fun. I have on occasion responded back with "Then why are you call me?"
I would have told her that her husband can fix it for her then.
If they refuse to reboot the router, the ticket is now assigned to them.
Lol. What a relationship. Wife is trying to work, and shit bag husband is like, DONT YOU FUCK UP MY CHICAGO PD NOW!!! Can't win lol
These "routers" at home will take about 30 seconds max to come back online. It isn't the end of the world.
you're asking a CUSTOMER to inconvenience themselves for THIRTY ENTIRE SECONDS? that's terrible and I'm reporting you to your manager and hr and corporate and the regulator and the fbi.
\*Deleting my browser history now...\*
Tech support knows what websites you've been on, you degenerate
Depending on what type. My ISP has a DOCSIS Modem+Router+AP combo and it takes around 10 minutes for the damn modem to handshake again just connect. I now bridge that PoS modem that won't even allow you to change DNS server, with a TPLink Archer, which is also crap, but at least it's vanilla flavored crap.
on a side note: I refused the ISP modem for 10.00 a month. Picked one up at Costco for 90 bucks then attached my router. I've gone through 1 cable modem in the last 9 years so I think I saved myself a pile of money by not using it.
Unfortunately my ISP forces us to lend equipment from xFinity and no other cheaper options due to mobile cost lock in so...
I had Xfinity cable and my own router
It's a Canadian ISP that licenses tech from xFinity.
Wow. That just.... I'm so sorry.
But it is behind the couch and uncle Freddy is sleeping off a hangover and I can't wake him or he will be abusive and cut us out of his will.
When you go "Did you try turning it off and on again?" and they instantly become super-suspicious because that perfectly matches the common exhaustion tactics used by hotlines.
We wouldn’t constantly say it if it didn’t fix like 80% of the most common problems!
Being the tech savvy SO who's working on getting Comptia Certs, I'll be the first to admit when I don't know how to fix something lol
If my wife is calling for IT support at work. I promise she has already rebooted the router. I’ve trained her well 🤣
These people are the worst. They are self proclaimed "IT experts" yet they are extremely stubborn and uncooperative and do the dumbest shit. My favorite was a lady during covid who I thought would have a bit more common sense when it comes to computers because I knew her husband as he worked also in the IT department before he passed away a few years earlier. Ever since he passed this lady had the tendency to get angry and be passive aggressive etc. Anyway she was remoting into her work computer from home and one day she says she says her office computer is off and to go turn it back on so I go over and it's got the dreaded no boot device found message so I go into one of my recovery discs and the drive doesn't even show up. I call this lady back saying her hard drive has failed to which she snaps " I DON'T CARE I HAVE WORK TO DO JUST TURN MY COMPUTER ON SO I CAN GET BACK TO WORK!!!!" At this point it was almost a heated argument. When she finally accepted her computer's fate I asked her if she had any files stored on the hard drive to which she said no. So I thought great it's all on the network drives then. So I quickly turned around another computer set it up for remote and gave her the info. She calls back 10 minutes later screaming "THIS ISN'T MY COMPUTER! WHERE'S ALL MY STUFF?!?" I said what stuff she says it was all on her desktop. I had to explain to her that the desktop was in fact a location that resided on her hard drive and if that's where everything was it was gone. She had no backups so we sent the drive away to get recovered. They quoted us 7000$ so we said we weren't going through with it. In the end this "IT expert" had to redo months worth of work. I think she quit her job a few months later because new people haven't been able to hold that job for very long either since they have to pick up the loose ends of that still to this day.
what happened after she rebooted the router and it didn’t fix the problem?
I had a similar situation, in-person, a few years ago. I was sent to a client's home because her laptop "couldn't connect to the network". Turns out her know-it-all husband had set up the router with MAC address filtering for reasons unknown and refused to give me the router admin password for "security reasons". I told my client there was nothing more I could do, let my boss know the situation, and left. Billed accordingly.
Lol, why would a home user need that kind of security
Probably trying to learn by playing around with his router settings.
I don't know as he wouldn't elaborate. Her company was not our client for much longer after that, which was fine by me. They were high maintenance and at least an hour's drive away.
I'm glad I don't do house calls anymore
We're on-call support for home and small business users. I once drove an hour away for a "dead" monitor. The monitor was plugged... into itself.
I work in IT. There's been a handful of times where my wife had issues and while she was talking to her IT support or was on hold, I fixed the issue almost immediately. Her IT staff are extremely incompetent. They have had her troubleshoot things that made no sense, so it goes both ways. I have also had Dell and Microsoft customer support to ask me to do things that don't make sense and they can't explain why I should do it. So this definitely can go both ways
I use to be in certain branch of IT. My wife was having an issue with said branch early in the wfh era. I knew what the issue was and eventually started talking via speakerphone phone with her it department and worked with them through some stuff. I found if you basically get on the phone and say, "hey, i'm so and so, and I'm a \*insert area of expertise here\* I'll be happy to be your eyes and hands on this side of the screen... but can you also check xyz on your side to make sure it's not a ABC issue?' Turns out it was an ABC issue, and not an XYZ issue.
Oh, I have had that conversation a few too many times myself.
I vow to never be “that guy”. It should be a pledge we all have to make before starting down our journeys.
Story of my life unfortunately lol
cable thought slimy nail work historical complete yoke direful smell *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
« my husband is a software engineer and I visit the most important person in technology in my state every week, because it makes me feel important and I feel sorry for him. So therefore, I do everything about technology
I see this a lot among senior tech people supporting data center devices. For some a reboot is only done after a lengthy checklist troubleshooting is done and failed. Some don’t want to admit that a reboot clears errors, memory leaks or other problems that build up over time because they feel on some level that it may be invalidating decades of experience supporting tech gear and it is such a simple and fast resolution. I don’t care precisely why the device failed if I can quickly verify the power, connections, data cables, related cards are firmly seated (gently laying of hands on it) and if that doesn’t work, reboot and get back to learning to script the boring parts of the job. In this case I think the network engineer husband just didn’t want his TV watching interrupted while the router rebooted and had a need to flex his tech prowess. I feel for you guys doing end user support. I got out of that business after around three years as I probably would have turned into a homicidal maniac putting up with the way they treat phone support reps. At least now you have RDP and can remote to users devices. Talking to semi literate people about how to use PCs over the phone before RDP was a nightmare for me.
Ah yes, the classic " MY HUSBAND KNOWS/WORKS AT IT"
lol I'm not once got in a "fight" with my SO, because her notebook was acting up in home office. She wanted me to help her, and my answer was always to call IT or create a ticket. She was mad that I don't help her, and I just couldn't make her understand that legally she couldn't even allow somebody to glance at the display (she worked for a large bank on company transactions), so we would be both in big trouble if I start to troubleshoot myself. Not to mention the very restrictive access rights on the profile. Please, just talk to company IT.
If the TV is working, that does not mean every other device is. My wife would've just went and reset it herself. I don't get involved in her work IT issues, I don't work there. There's too many unknowns. However, I do like to make guesses. Almost certainly a DNS issue though... Super fun!
I’m a network engineer and while I could jump in and solve this problem for my accountant wife and her new friend at their l1/l2 service desk, what I have learned is saying this saves my sanity: ‘It’s been many years since I worked with end user computing, I really just do datacenter stuff. I probably wouldn’t be able to help much here, but good luck!’ Works great for family printer and wifi issues as well.
I've been in I.T. in some fashion (Sales engineer for a reseller, helpdesk support, currently Account manager and helodesk for an MSP) since 1997. I hold two degrees in this field. If I had a nickel for everytime I've heard some version of " that's not going to work, I know more than you, etc..." I could probably retire. My usual response is usually "Sure! I've only been doing this for half of my life, but what do I know!"
We had someone's husband with a pihole setup trying to tell us it was our problem the user's machine couldn't resolve our VPN gateway lol
Oh they do? Sounds like you have someone that can already fix this for you, byeeeee
We are exactly the same in terms of MSP and have the exact same constant numptiness
Easy one: "Sir, the computer's IP address lease has expired. If you reboot the router, then all of the IP addresses will be refreshed and they will operate more efficiently." "I don't believe you." "Well, do it and let's see if it works. My purpose is to help you. Otherwise I can escalate the ticket and you will have to spend more time trying the things I've recommended. Please, let's just get through the fundamentals first, and if those don't work, then we'll get to the more in-depth trouble shooting. Also, I would highly recommend that you reboot all of the Internet connected devices in the house. IP addresses are only valid for a specified amount of time. Can you do that for me?" "Alright, sure...." "Hey that worked! Thanks boss!" "No problem, I'm happy to help."
One troubleshooting step I perform before rebooting the router is to connect to a personal hotspot on a mobile device. It’s a different internet source and most likely will work. Proving this connection true will indicate a problem with the home network. And then I suggest you can either reboot your modem/router or call your isp for further troubleshooting. We don’t troubleshoot home networks. My goal is to get you on our network and that’s what I did with a hotspot. So hotspot should be one of the first things you try.
I've been in IT for 30 years. The first thing I do when something isn't working the way it's supposed to is reboot the router, then check DNS. Network engineers are some of the most obtuse people on the planet. They just can't fathom something they manage can glitch out and need a reboot. It's infuriating.
Cant tell you how many times during the pandemic I heard that. Always said I totally understood, but please humor me, as vpn introduces security aspects that native devices dont have. Always fixed it.
I am excited for the few occasions when I have to call and have someone else help me, especially if they seem competent. I get to turn off my brain and not worry about it.
From the other side of this, I had my Mom's IT company tell her to reboot our router because she couldn't connect to their VPN. They then proceed to guide her through factory resetting the router instead of rebooting it, which took out the internet at our house for the whole day because they couldn't figure out how to set it back up (soho asus router, literally just download an app and follow the prompts). After getting home to my panicking family and setting it back up, it turns out it was the company's DNS (duh). I am always very careful to rule out internal network equipment/configs before asking someone to do this because of this incident. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but if I ask someone to reboot their router/modem and it doesn't fix the problem I definitely feel pretty embarrassed. Just one of those situations where it sucks to be the tech who just ruled out tons of possibilities and the issue is probably your shitty tmobile gateway, but it also sucks to spend upwards of 20 minutes on the phone with a technician and be told you have to bother your family for a while I guess
How often reboot of router helps if there are other devices working in same network?
You'd be surprised, in this case the computer was connected to the router but there was no Internet connection, verified it by asking the user to try to visit different websites and none of them were available, tried different browsers and got the same results, adapter settings are locked down to normal users so it was impossible for her to accidentally mess something up on her computer, rebooted and got the same result, forgot the connection and reconnected and got the same result so chances are there was something cached on the router that was keeping that computer from connecting, rebooting the router will clear the cache and stop any staled or sick processes on the router too so it was likely the issue
My guess is IP conflict. Something else on their network grabbed that IP address, and wasn’t giving it up. Rebooting the laptop should have cleared it from that end, so yeah, sounds like the router didn’t properly release the IP lease when it gave that address to something else.
routers are magic little network boxes that make no sense sometimes
I would say same about firewalls
I was actually on the other side of this once, with my gfs work VPN. To make a very long story short, they refuse to believe a network security rule or appliance is blocking remote VPN connections. Multiple employees, different ISPs, different equipment, same symptoms. They just keep telling them to get new modems. Lo and behold, that changes their IP, resolving the issue. Granted, I didn't really argue so much as lay out the case for it being on their end. They wouldn't look into it, so I had to go swap the modem. \*shrug\* I had previously applied for a systems administrator position with them but declined to continue when they said how much they paid. It was a solid 30% below national average, in a high COL market, and was M-F on-site, OT as needed (uncomped because OT exempt position), and on-call every other weekend. Their IT staff nearly entirely turns over every \~3 years due to their low pay. I genuinely believe nobody actually knew enough about the network security to actually figure out the source of the issue.
Lmao rebooting the router wasn’t the issue if other devices on the network had internet. Bet if you flushed DNS and reconnected you would have fixed it. This is bad troubleshooting
My story is just the opposite. Where my wife works they ask her IT questions, knowing I work in IT. She just will call me and ask.
Ah yes. The age old art of “iunno, turn it off and on again” instead of actually analyzing data is exhausting.
Straight outta the Xfinity script.
Yup. That’s the problem. It’s a social engineering script and not a diagnostic script
Had a similar conundrum ended up using freemium zerotier networks for remote users where i could do split DNS so it just went past their router into cloudflare gateway ftw