Wednesday, January 09, 2008

2008 Continues To Go Down The Drain

Warning. the following post contains large amounts of stuff about computers, messing around with computers or dealing with people involved with the technical support or sales aspects of the computer industry. Expect tedium.

It has been a week of intense annoyance and zero moving forward at work.

Today I am supposed to be watching a streaming slide show from Brocade under pain of a visit from Le Boss.

This was a tortuous process involving a voyage of website discovery. Brocade's educational website has a generic sign-up page where you can set up an account with them, which is required to see their training. It turned out that the courses I was being asked to look at had a slightly different sign up process, using what was in hindsight obviously a second database of information, forming a de-facto second account for me. It took me a remarkably long time to figure that out and get registered for the courses.

Then came reconfiguring my computer from a boring Cobol-programming workstation to a state of the art telelearning center. The required browser applet installed seemingly perfectly last night, but this morning everyone else in the department is avidly watching a gripping tale of optical fabric switching in a World Gone Mad and I'm getting the audio only, and that is echoing like allgitout.

I've tried following along using a pdf of the slideshow but have finally quit in disgust on the grounds it says nowhere in my employment contract that I have to work in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

Yesterday the Sunsolve website1 kept refusing to recognise my account password. I would ask it to send me a new one it would recognise, then alter the ransom note gibberish password2 it sent back to a more friendly one, which it would then promptly forget again. At one point it refused to recognise a password it had just emailed me not two minutes before. Sun's "solution"? Open a ticket on my sunsolve account.

Which I only need to chase an open ticket on a bloody server.

With which they didn't send the "tools" CD containing the software they insist will "fix" the outstanding raid array issue and must therefore download for the sunsolve site.

Which won't respond, forcing plan "B" - intel's version of the tool (also Sun recommended).

Which downloads fine but the package it comes in won't go through the package installation utility without wittering about magic numbers and problems with them.

I tried to go with plan "C" which involves tossing the bleeding computer out of the window and calling it a day, but said computer weighs more than tha Stevieling does and the windows in the computer center do not open, probably because Sun were consulted on the design and had a desire to reduce the incidence of gravity-induced server failure.

It's all very discouraging.

  1. Sun's version of MSDN - a techie forum for clever people to tell each other about boring and confusing computer stuff
  2. e.g. BhGF8J7ms5To

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