0805: Go to History department and return iPad that I found unsecured the previous evening during security audit. Fit new lockbox for iPad to inside of department store room.

0825: Move laptop trolley from secure storage to Library.

0836: Delete stuck print job from front office printer queue. Remind front office for the 18th time to please use the ticketing system, not just email.

1031: Accompany printer technician who arrives to repair hardware fault on managed printer. Stay with technician throughout repair since visitors cannot be around pupils unaccompanied without a safeguarding check.

1118: Repair completed, exactly 3 minutes after break finishes.

1119: Automatic alert that wireless AP in music department is offline.

1120: Phone call that computer in music department is not logging on correctly.

1122: Find music department comms cabinet without power because someone has plugged in an electric kettle after dropping it into a sinkful of water and tripped the RCDs for the entire floor.

1124: Maintenance attends to make safe and restore power, takes photo evidence of unsafe use of electrical equipment.

1135: Pupil hits 100% of storage quota. Delete copies of downloaded horror FPS and illegal MP3 downloads. Quota usage now 24%.

1140: Late break.

1210: Happen upon urgent parcels that arrived 2 hours ago without goods in telling me.

1220: Email from software supplier about .msi installer I enquired about. Tells me he will “get it done one day” as it’s “a bit tricky to write”. (Spoiler: it isn’t).

1230: Finish testing phantom power microphone for French oral exam recording.

1240: Phonecall from receptionist to ask if I would like to speak to the new account manager for one of our existing suppliers.  Ask them to put the call through. Am told there is no call; the rep has turned up unannounced in person at reception.

1245: Impromptu meeting with new account manager, who is forgiven on account of having brought chocolate.

1255: Lunch

1330: Run Windows Update on all non-Server Core servers. Schedule overnight restarts to complete installations.

1341: MIS consultant emails me about a UI bug I reported. Says that the new behaviour has in fact been the way the product has always worked. Clearly I have been imagining my own workflow for the last two years, and have subconsciously worked around the utterly counter-intuitive behaviour currently in the product.

1420: For the 5th time in 2 weeks, show someone which link on the school Intranet to click on to find the instructions guides I painstakingly write. (It’s in the same place I show to all staff at every INSET.)

1432: Teacher calls and asks why they have a message on their homepage that they have not completed their attendance register for yesterday afternoon. Explain that it is because they have not completed their attendance register for yesterday afternoon.

1450: Toner cartridge change in lower school IT lab. Find stack of confidential paperwork that a teacher printed to the wrong printer 3 days ago.

1515: Attend assembly hall after report that the projector remote needed new batteries. Remove existing batteries and reinsert them the right way around, and they work fine.

1537: Spot check on IT labs via AB Tutor. Find about 1/3 of the class mucking around on email and games instead of on their online languages exercises. Call IT lab to advise teacher.

1549: Email English department about the new software I know they bought recently that has mysteriously not turned up.

1555: Delivery from English department via pupil courier of aforementioned software.

1556: Email from English department asking whether the software will be ready for them to use tomorrow morning.

1610: Diagnose problem with InfoPath form that we use to track server maintenance. Turns out to be a stale cached version of the form being used on the client.

1630: Return laptop trolley to secure storage overnight.

1650: Tip-off from a pupil that another pupil is attempting to impersonate a member of staff online. Investigate and send evidence to SMT for tomorrow.

1704: Leave.

“Sorry, we are having some temporary server issues.”

The error occurred even before asking for any login details, and a quick check of our Internet access logs revealed that Word wasn’t even attempting to contact a server. I hadn’t seen this during testing, and we couldn’t work past the error when we encountered it, so the roll-out session was a bust. To say I was irritated is somewhat of an understatement.

After the session, I realised I had seen something very similar before, when a teacher reported about a month ago that a class full of pupils could not get get the Online Pictures button on the Insert ribbon to work. Lo and behold, the same thing was happening for the affected staff accounts:

“Sorry, we are having some temporary server issues. You can work offline if you plan to insert pictures from your computer.”

After a couple of hours in the office turning the air blue, I discovered 3 things:

1. These problems are related,
2. it’s not a server issue, and
3. it’s not bloody temporary.

I didn’t find much useful online when searching for this error message, other than a few people having trouble activating the Office 365 Click-to-Run apps, and no-one knew how to fix it. What I did find was this thread where a number of users had found that they were no longer able to open SharePoint Online documents after update KB2768349 was installed. Since that was ultimately what we were trying to do, I figured it was worth a shot removing that update.

It worked. As soon as KB2768349 was removed, both problems immediately went away for all affected users.

Later during testing I found I could also get rid of the problem by deleting the user’s roaming profile, at which point I could sign in on the first computer they used (i.e. the one on which their new roaming profile was created), but the same user would then fail as soon as they used a different computer (with the same roaming profile).

I’ve since set the update to uninstall on all clients via WSUS.

Conclusion

At least in our case, the problem seems to be triggered by a combination of having KB2768349 installed, and logging on with an account that has a roaming profile on a different computer from the one the roaming profile was created on. There are other triggers that produce the same symptoms (lack of Internet access or firewall issues, for example), but if you’re seeing this error and the situation matches your environment, try removing KB2768349 as a first step.

Uninstalling KB2768349. I don’t know why it is listed twice, but I removed both entries.

Let’s get started, shall we?

After the innocuous front cover comes a whole page of instructions on plugging the mouse in, followed by many more pages of rubbish on good computer posture. Then it starts to go seriously off-topic around page 10:

Are you kidding me, Microsoft? You devote an entire page of a manual for a mouse on telling me how I should eat healthily and get some exercise? This has absolutely nothing to do with your product. Nothing. You even put a conclusion in, as if this somehow justifies the pages of effluence that precedes it. What kind of crack are you guys smoking in Redmond anyway?

Better yet, the front page – yes, the front page – of the manual has this diagram on it.

OK Microsoft, take a look carefully at step 1 in your diagram here. That’s right, it’s a diagram showing you how to plug the damned mouse in. Anyone with a mental age above 4 needs nothing more than this diagram, and yet here I am holding 109 pages (20ish pages in 5 different languages) of manual. If verbosity were a physical substance, this document would be 100% pure.

Microsoft make decent mice, but I’m not sure whether the manual makes me want to laugh incessantly or give up all hope for mankind.

In previous articles, I’ve given examples of scanning for DVB channels using the scan utility in Linux. However, when I tried doing a channel scan yesterday, it refused to work:

angry-admin@dvb:~$ sudo scan ~/uk-CrystalPalace -u
scanning /home/local-admin/uk-CrystalPalace
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
initial transponder 490000000 0 3 9 1 0 0 0
initial transponder 514000000 0 2 9 3 0 0 0
initial transponder 545833330 0 2 9 3 0 0 0
initial transponder 506000000 0 3 9 1 0 0 0
initial transponder 482000000 0 3 9 1 0 0 0
initial transponder 530000000 0 3 9 1 0 0 0
>>> tune to: 490000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_AUTO:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_2K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_32:HIERARCHY_NONE
WARNING: >>> tuning failed!!!

I got a lot more tuning failed!!! messages after that, and no scan results. I’m not sure exactly what is causing this yet, but somebody else in the UK noticed this too, and suspects it began right after a very recent transmitter retune. Luckily, he also had a solution: use a different scanning tool.

w_scan

w_scan is an alternative DVB scanning tool that isn’t installed with the dvb-apps package, but can be installed from the default repositories on on most distros:

apt-get install w-scan

(Note that the underscore becomes a hyphen in the package name!)

Once installed, you can generate a channel listing in the exact same format as scan using the following command:

w_scan -X -c GB

substitute your own country code in place of GB; a list can be retrieved by issuing the command w_scan -c ?

Advantages

• w_scan does not need any prior knowledge of the transmission frequencies other than the country, compared to scan which needs an input file containing the frequencies of at least one multiplex. This can be especially useful when the frequency information for your region is out-of-date or difficult to obtain.

Disadvantages

• w_scan takes a lot longer to complete a channel scan. A full UK Freeview scan (including HD channels) took around 16 minutes, something which took only a minute or two using scan.
• w_scan doesn’t list channels that aren’t currently broadcasting at the time of the scan, so you may need to run multiple scans at different times of the day to get a complete list.

Some of us use computers for actual work and not just dicking around, so we have Windows computers. Even those die-hard Mac users who actually do work on them tend to install OpenOffice or buy Office for Mac, rather than use iWork.

I’m tired of trying to convert your documents for you because our staff have no idea what to do with them, so either sort your Mac out with a proper office suite or BUY A REAL COMPUTER.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

If you’re familiar with Edmodo, you will already be aware that even when the school has a domain setup for the site, pupils have to create their own accounts and join the school domain using a group code. This means that accounts generally get created in lessons with a class teacher, because the teachers manage their own groups and codes.

For proponents, this is the embodiment of consumerisation in action. The teacher does everything they need to (in the “Cloud”, no less) without any help from an administrator.

And for the most part, it works fine.

Then sometimes, you get an email from a teacher asking when a pupil’s Edmodo account is going to be created, because they’ve been having to email his assignments to him separately for the last four months.

Four months.

FOUR MONTHS.

(And to make sure we have to make the ‘name’ box on all our MIS reports longer.)

On a related note, parents who give their children a first name that rhymes with their surname are sadists.

Or at least it would be a fair question, had the instructions for said task not been on the front page of our staff Intranet since the middle of December. You know, the staff Intranet that is set as the homepage for all staff in their browser.

It’s times like this that I really wonder why I bother.

“Yes, that field says ‘Email address’. That means you need to fill in your email address, not just your name.”

“The reason that help box popped up when you clicked ‘OK’ is because you actually clicked the ‘Help’ button, not the ‘OK’ button.”

“Do you see this big yellow notice that says the IT department isn’t responsible for fixing the photocopiers? You see, right here in the entire top half of the screen where you filled in a request for me to fix the photocopier?”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Exactly 1 person reported this problem to me.

For 3 hours, the web filter was erroneously blocking Facebook access for staff.

I got 16 emails about it.