Jason Abrahamson

As I sit here with the extra time I have this evening I should be working on my book, but my feeling is this subject has more merit at this time.

During my drive home tonight I got a call from one of the many friends I have made in the IT community throughout my career. We have both served in management and engineering roles within different organizations. Somehow or another we touched on the subject of what more or less boils down to common sense and how a lot of people seem to lack it.

As IT professionals we have a duty of sorts to be as proactive as possible in creating the best user experience possible, while protecting the organization to it’s fullest. No, we don’t wear spandex and a cape, nor are we a superhero. We are just simply doing our job.

The modern business as we know it is completely dependent on technology. Up time and reliability is crucial to the operations of that business. When we make changes we need to have a strategy, game plan if you will. This strategy should included projected downtime, projected system or user impact, backup, and always have a contingency plan. Plan B is almost more important than Plan A. Once we make a change we need to make sure that we test, document, notify, and monitor those changes. Should we have an issue we need to either a) roll back b) fix the issues exponentially. In the past for example, when doing a large system upgrade I have cloned the previous system, or simply pulled the drive out of the old system to makesure I had a copy of it exactly the way it was.

When we make changes and don’t document them then we can find ourselves in sticky situations.

This is the common sense part: If you make a change to a system and start experiencing a problem with the system shortly there after roll your change back. Don’t scratch your head, don’t delay, and don’t ask why. Just put it back. My favorite saying in the world is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

As IT professionals it is never our intention to cause undue harm to the organization, but sometimes our actions have consequences not even we could foresee. The true test though of our abilities and skill-set, and more than anything common sense, is how do we react or handle that situation.

There is no excuse for a lacking of common sense. If you make a change, and something related to that doesn’t work the following day, common sense has to say it was probably your change.

So as I said previously, I’m having, er, had, unless I’m speaking too soon, a heck of a time with LSA errors. Now you wouldn’t mind except a LSA error is not specific. It’s a generic “I can’t resolve my DC so I’m going to blow up” error. So I researched this error high and low. Every single white paper Microsoft has written on LSA error, and specifically this event ID (40960) reference domain controllers. Again, very helpful and informative, if this was a domain controller.

I spent weeks trying to figure this error out, replaced hardware, updates, uninstalled updates, everything. Eventually I cried uncle and decided to call Microsoft support. My boss gave me his credit card and I called the Microsoft customer service hot-line. You have three options, you can call and leave a message, email support, and phone support. The cost for phone is $260.00 The cost for email is $99.00. I opted for the phone support as this was getting more critical and my patience was wearing exceptionally thin. Going through the prompt I eventually got a live person on the line only to find out it was nothing more than some poor college girl who had no idea what half of this stuff was and only had one job responsibility: Take your money. As she read from the script and questionnaire it was evident that this was going to be painful and took nearly 15 minutes just to go through the process only to have her say “Ok, thank you for your purchase, we will contact you within two hours.”

As I grasped the phone with my sweaty palm I could not believe the words she uttered. I succumbed to the sheer shock of what I had just heard. Two hours? What? $260 to get a call in two hours? I was flummoxed.

My boss was shocked as I gently rested the headset on the receiver and said “they’re going to call me back.” He shook his head and murmured something about Microsoft under his breath as he left the room chuckling to himself.

At about the one hour and thirty minute mark a gentleman from Microsoft did call. I explained my issue to him and the other end of the phone was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. You could hear him flipping through pages of script trying to ask the next canned question that was picked by somebody in the communications department. Can you hear it? I did, it was my confidence in Microsoft support whooshing by as it left the building. As the time ticked by it was evident that this was going nowhere fast. As he searched through knowledge base articles asking me question that I already had asked myself I began working with my counterpart to remedy the situation.

What was common between the two servers? What was different? What had changed? What hadn’t changed? We essentially went back to the drawing board. Microsoft had me changing registry keys and killing applications like hummingbird in an effort to convince me that UDP on 389 was preventing TCP from talking to the global catalog server.

In the end we ended up fixing the problem without Microsoft. As I’m sure this will shock all of you, the only program that Microsoft didn’t point a finger at was the Windows Task Scheduler. See we run batch files and VBS scripts every minute to process files into this SQL server. Most require domain level authentication to run so we tested our theory by running the scripts as the local admin. Wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t get any LSA errors.

Solution? Use another Task Scheduler. That fixed our issue. So much for Microsoft tech support. Complete waste of $260.00

Non-tech post tonight. Ya I know, I’m over due for one too.

I’m going through a lot of pain right now with LSA errors on a SQL server so I will blog shortly about that. Tonight is a reflection on life, karma, and a random act of kindness.

Today was a very very long day for me. I’ll spare you the details, but I wasn’t having fun to say the least. I went down to my favorite sandwich shop, Santoro’s in Burbank. For those of you that don’t know Santoro’s I assure you…you’re TRULY missing out. It’s located on Burbank Blvd about 5 blocks away from the freeway, as if you were driving away from the mall. The sandwiches are truly a work of art and boy do they taste good.

Anyways, it was a long line, and I don’t shy away from making random conversation with people. This nice gentleman behind me was a regular and we started discussing the quality of the food at Santoro’s. As the long line for the rush hour chugged along, we proceed to talk stocks, politics, life — he was getting ready to retire and was pretty excited about it. As we approached the counter the owner of Santoro’s obviously knew the man and told me that he, the man I was talking to, was going to buy my lunch. I was a little shocked, and insisted I pay for my sandwich as I didn’t even know the man and we had just been chatting in line. Neither one of them would hear of it and insisted. I formally introduced myself to both of them and thanked the man who bought me my sandwich.

I left Santoro’s with my sandwich in hand and a warm feeling in my heart. That simple random act of kindness truly made my day. One day I’ll repeat it to somebody else — not because I feel obligated, but because I can’t help but want to make somebody feel as good as I did today.

You know God answers prayers in very mysterious ways — and he answered mine. That man made my day.

I doubt you’re reading this, but if you are, thanks for lunch Henry. Hope we bump into each other again.