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I've been doing IT for quite a while now. About 25ish years ago a bloke called Ben Greer sent me some patches to get 802.1Q VLANs running on Linux which sorted

I've been doing IT for quite a while now. About 25ish years ago a bloke called Ben Greer sent me some patches to get 802.1Q VLANs running on Linux which sorted a snag for me on a rather large network with no Windows domain and a lot of workgroups. I whipped up a lot of Samba daemons - one per network per workgroup and combined their browse lists. There was something like 100 of them running on an old Compaq cream coloured tower thing. A few weeks ago I filed a couple of bugs a few days before buggering off on hols. Both were fixed within a couple of days. One was for a pretty esoteric snag on Arch Linux relating to Python, Kerberos and WinRM. Ansible now works again. I can't remember what the other one was but it was to do with Graylog - again fixed with alacrity. I've done time on the Gentoo and Arch and many other forums and sometimes actually fixed stuff 8) and of course had stuff fixed for me. I have also been called a wanker and may have had some fairly heated discussions - that is the way of the internet. I have also apologised for being a knobend a few times and that gets a good response. My experience with Windows is not the same as my Linux experience and I started off with Windows 2. OK I actually started off with a ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and I still have a C-64 (with USB nowadays). When you search for a Linux snag these days you get an awful lot of blogs that are at least nicely formatted copies of canonical sources. I use uBlacklist to get rid of the worst. Search for a Windows snag and you generally fall into a whole world of hurt. sfc /scannow or reinstall your OS is a common answer. I'll drop here that sfc has never fixed a snag for me (I worry about roughly thousands of Windows boxes) but someone a third my age will still insist it is the dog's nadgers. Windows isn't malware, it's just lost the plot. There is a lot to love still in there somewhere but the copy n paste icons are an absolute aberration and W11 is just plain odd in places. You cannot use telemetry to work out what is going on in someone's mind. My wife uses Arch Linux with KDE as a WM and has no idea what that even means. I divorced her from Windows at Win7 and never looked back.

dizhn 4y ago
Great comment. Between sfc /scannow and a format you can also try to revert to an earlier snapshot. Don't forget the ever so optimistic Windows Troubleshooter. I think I've seen it fix a network issue once by restarting the interface. :)
- gerdesj 4y ago
  I've just finished updating my work Windows boxes to Server 2019. We are a small firm with three DCs, a FS/PS, ePO (Mcafee/Trellix), RDS/RDG. The ePO at least was 2008 R2 originally. I always do inplace upgrades these days. If you do a search you will probably find that I am apparently so wrong that I need to report into Room 101. I think that what goes wrong is an inability to look at logs - laziness. Windows has rather a lot of logging. It took Linux years to catch up with journald (Events) plus various random text logs in /var/log. No matter how much logging you have, getting technicians to actually look at the bloody things is a really hard problem. The little darlings think they are omnipotent and can deploy a cure based on what I call wankery. It might work but probably doesn't. Medics are way ahead of us here - I've never heard the term contra-indication in IT. Perhaps we should learn from experts in dealing with weird symptoms and very, very complicated diagnosis.
garganzol 4y ago
> sfc /scannow or reinstall your OS is a common answer Microsoft outsourced the support to some chinese guys who are the masters of /dev/null'ing any support request they have. It's always to reboot your machine and sfc /scannow, but of course, it never works. The classiest part of the act is that the same support guys mark their own "answers" with big green check marks to signify their "importance". I think this helps them to meet the corporate metrics. The whole Windows support thing is a total joke since 2008.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  It's not just China. I generally find that responses come from the Indian subcontinent. I could participate myself but MS insist on using users as unpaid "volunteers" to work for them and that's not my bag. If they'd like my experience then they might feel free to pay for it and I am very cheap compared to the usual 'softies. In some countries, time spent on MS Social is a requirement or sufficient for a job.
rstupek 4y ago
It was likely a Compaq SystemPro if it was a server.

dizhn 4y ago

Great comment. Between sfc /scannow and a format you can also try to revert to an earlier snapshot. Don't forget the ever so optimistic Windows Troubleshooter. I think I've seen it fix a network issue once by restarting the interface. :)

gerdesj 4y ago
I've just finished updating my work Windows boxes to Server 2019. We are a small firm with three DCs, a FS/PS, ePO (Mcafee/Trellix), RDS/RDG. The ePO at least was 2008 R2 originally. I always do inplace upgrades these days. If you do a search you will probably find that I am apparently so wrong that I need to report into Room 101. I think that what goes wrong is an inability to look at logs - laziness. Windows has rather a lot of logging. It took Linux years to catch up with journald (Events) plus various random text logs in /var/log. No matter how much logging you have, getting technicians to actually look at the bloody things is a really hard problem. The little darlings think they are omnipotent and can deploy a cure based on what I call wankery. It might work but probably doesn't. Medics are way ahead of us here - I've never heard the term contra-indication in IT. Perhaps we should learn from experts in dealing with weird symptoms and very, very complicated diagnosis.

garganzol 4y ago

> sfc /scannow or reinstall your OS is a common answer Microsoft outsourced the support to some chinese guys who are the masters of /dev/null'ing any support request they have. It's always to reboot your machine and sfc /scannow, but of course, it never works. The classiest part of the act is that the same support guys mark their own "answers" with big green check marks to signify their "importance". I think this helps them to meet the corporate metrics. The whole Windows support thing is a total joke since 2008.

gerdesj 4y ago
It's not just China. I generally find that responses come from the Indian subcontinent. I could participate myself but MS insist on using users as unpaid "volunteers" to work for them and that's not my bag. If they'd like my experience then they might feel free to pay for it and I am very cheap compared to the usual 'softies. In some countries, time spent on MS Social is a requirement or sufficient for a job.

rstupek 4y ago

It was likely a Compaq SystemPro if it was a server.