Recently in Support Category

"I can't connect to the server - no login servers available on the network"
Laughing I said "That'll be the dodgy software you installed on your laptop"
"No - I've not installed anything......but whilst in america I had to do that ipconfee thingy"

And I wonder why he has limited network connectivity......

MCP magazine has an article, Nothing Up My Sleeves which lists utilities that techies submitted which they use to do their job. Although I'd heard of (and used) most of them, there were a few more utilities worth checking out.
Essential reading if you do support or network administration.

Chris posted about PSEXEC, a utility that I had installed on my pc but never actually used. When I read his post and then tried it on a customers box, I knew this was going to be great for remote troubleshooting. Thanks Chris and Mark for writing about it.

I had the unfortunate need to ring IBM for support yesterday - one for a UPS which has a faulty usb monitoring connection and the other for a DDS4 tape drive that won't read dds4 tapes. After logging the call for the dds4 and explaining that it fails on the dds4 tapes but is ok on dds1 tapes, I was told that the warrenty was void as this tape drive didn't support this type of media. Now i know that some dds tape drives will not read older tapes, but I'd never have expected to have the warrenty voided because the wrong tape was put in it! However, appendix 2 page 3 of the manual says that ALL DDS tapes are compatible. Ringing back to explain this information I got cut off - twice. Now they are asking for the firmware to be upgraded - not an easy task as the obvious page only shows a 220MB+ download (for firmware????) which contains all the firmware ever made. So far the only help from support has been to get the relevant firmware sent in an email (at 1MB) but that got lost in the customers spam filter.
As to the ups, all that I've had so far is calls asking me to confirm the serial number (twice) and another call asking me for the status of the call.....
IBM: "whats the status of call xyz?"
me: "I've been waiting for an engineer to come out....."
IBM: "oh - errr - oh yes - you're right - ok - bye"

grrrrrrrr