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If it's Friday it must be time for me to file On-Call and then start drinking so you can start the last day of the week with one of our always-amusing tales of nasty jobs done at nasty times.
This week, reader "Kevin" shared a story from his time working a hell desk late shift.
With just a few minutes to go before quitting time, Kevin took a call from user complaining her computer "was stuck". Kevin couldn't remote in, so asked her to turn it off and turn it on again.
The user claimed to have done so, but also reported the machine was still stuck on the same screen.
Kevin felt the user had probably flicked the wrong switch, so asked if there was a PC-shaped box under her monitor.
"Yes, there's a grey one," was the response.
"Can you hold down the power button for about 10 seconds until all the lights go out", Kevin asked.
At which point the user asked where to find the power button
Kevin explained it would be at the front of the PC, have a power symbol and should respond to a quick prod of an index finger.
"I can't find it," said the user.
Kevin asked what lettering, if any, was on the machine, in an effort to figure out the maker and model. As luck would have it, the Compaq model on the user's desk was the same one on Kevin's. So he spent the next 15 minutes describing its case, the grey bezel on the front, and using baby steps to direct her to the power button.
To which the user said the following:
"Oh you mean the button I use to switch it off with?"
Please, share your hell desk stories. We all need a good laugh.
(Score: 2) by lizardloop on Saturday November 19 2016, @10:19PM
Normally I dodge tech support pretty well but ended up helping out two friends today. One complained that her typing had "gone weird". Turned out the cat had pressed the "insert" key.
Second one couldn't understand why youtube didn't work. Installed chrome. It started working. Lord knows why it didn't work in Edge. I really couldn't be bothered to find out.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @10:33PM
You should encourage them to use Linux - so much easier. To get Youtube working all it takes is these few simple steps:
The package flashplugin-nonfree has "its own internal solution" for caching the big .tar.gz downloaded from Adobe. Downloading fp10.*.pgp.asc is not cached by flashplugin-nonfree. My advice is to never use a caching proxy with flashplugin-nonfree, because a retrieval of fp10.*.pgp.asc from cache might result in a security update to be installed later than it should. If you must use a proxy because you have no direct way to the internet, then obviously you have no choice than to use the proxy. Then this should work:
http_proxy=http://my.proxy.intranet:8080/ apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
or
https_proxy=http://my.proxy.intranet:8080/ apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
Also this should work:
http_proxy=http://my.proxy.intranet:8080/ update-flashplugin-nonfree --install
or
https_proxy=http://my.proxy.intranet:8080/ update-flashplugin-nonfree --install
Or, with a different environment variable than http_proxy, see: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/html_node/Proxies.html [gnu.org]
Remember that if you need the Flash Player to work with pulse, you can ask libasound to do so in your ~/.asoundrc:
pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}
To verify the Adobe Flash Player version number installed on your system, access the About Flash Player page, or right-click on content running in Flash Player and select "About Adobe (or Macromedia) Flash Player" from the menu. If you use multiple browsers, perform the check for each browser you have installed on your system. (Source: Flash player security bulletins). Flash Player 11.2 is the last supported Flash Player version for Linux. Adobe will continue to provide security updates. (Source).
Adobe dropped support of processors without SSE2 on Linux (you can check with "grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo" the letters "sse2" should be in the list) in an early point release of Flash Player 11. The player will install, but then crashes when it is invoked. This mostly affects older 32bit AMD processors. You can install Flash Player 10 from Adobe, see 697339.
In case the plugin causes high cpu-usage, you can try this: create /etc/adobe/mms.cfg:
# Adobe player settings
AVHardwareDisable = 0
FullScreenDisable = 0
LocalFileReadDisable = 1
FileDownloadDisable = 1
FileUploadDisable = 1
LocalStorageLimit = 1
ThirdPartyStorage = 1
AssetCacheSize = 10
AutoUpdateDisable = 1
LegacyDomainMatching = 0
LocalFileLegacyAction = 0
AllowUserLocalTrust = 0
# DisableSockets = 1
OverrideGPUValidation = 1
Hardware video decoding was considered experimental in FP 10.3 and is not supported in FP 11 for stability reasons and can cause crashes. It is not documented in official Flash Player Admin Guides. Enable at user discretion.
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1
Otherwise, a solution for users on netbooks with an accelerated video card as Intel 945GM and Atom CPU is to downgrade to FP10, in this way you can use again the GPU acceleration features instead of wasting CPU. But this is not recommended since Adobe will only provide security updates for FP 11.2.
Fluent playback with Iceweasel is possible, replace the above options with the below options. This should permit for fluent HD playback with hw acceleration ( or no hw acceleration ) in the browser, except for full-screen HD depending on your machines capabilites.
AssetCacheSize = 50
LocalStorageLimit = 5
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @01:03AM
Bullshit. Must be one of those Mac salesmen.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday November 20 2016, @05:50AM
Ha ha, very funny, but you know YouTube uses HTML5 video now, right?
Also, I guess you just copy-pasted the entire wiki article for some distro's flash package that has every bit of troubleshooting advice anyone might need in any special case, but for most people Flash is as easy as installing a simple package. I personally haven't had trouble getting Flash working in a long time. That said, I wish Flash would die in a fire, because it's a proprietary piece of insecure crap.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Sunday November 20 2016, @12:53PM
I've had to explain the former to a consultant surgeon; it wasn't a cat in that case, just a habit of dumping paperwork on the desk, but I did get a second phone call from the same person about the same thing about a week later. Worryingly this is a person who is allowed to cut you open and poke around inside.