Archive for September, 2008

10 Tips for Success in Tech Support

While most people don’t think of a technical support position as their dream job, it is often the gateway into the IT world. Most computer people live in a completely different world than end users which often causes conflicts between IT departments and those end users. I’ve been through the rank of technical support on-site, over the phone and via email and thought I would share a few things that helped me on my way.

1. Don’t take things personally. Please don’t take this the wrong way. Take your job seriously and take personal responsibility, but don’t take things end users say in rage personally. The user you are speaking with probably got yelled at by his or her spouse this morning, found out his or her dog peed on the carpet, and got cut off 10 times on the freeway on the way to the office. Bad things tend to pile up anger until something or someone is there to take the brunt of their anger.

2. End users lie. Whether it’s intentional or not, end users lie. Sometimes a user doesn’t understand what you are saying, or perhaps they want to pass blame, but they will say things that are completely not true. This is not meant to be offensive, it’s a fact. Just today I was helping my sister with an issue with her iMac. She thought that she was rebooting the machine, when in fact, she was putting it to sleep and waking it back up. Don’t take it the wrong way, it’s not that I’m mad or that she was doing something intentional, she was just mistaken. To assume that something is the way the user things is going to waste a lot of time. In my case, I figured out that a certain process I had running still had the same PID and start time as before the “reboot”. When things appear to be really strange, assume nothing.

3. Define terms. This is somewhat related to number 2. Often end users hear terms that they automatically assume are what they are talking about. For instance, when I worked in an IT support role, I often heard end users refer to the computer as the hard drive. Often they will talk with a coworker or other non-technical (or even more dangerous, somewhat technical) person or only catch a few words of a technical conversation and act like they know what they are talking about. I do this all the time when I have problems with my car. I always want to make it look like I know what I’m talking about so often I will pick up terms from someone I know who knows a little bit about cars and take my new-found “knowledge” and take it to a mechanic. Luckily, it hasn’t backfired horribly on me yet.

4. Learn to ask good questions. This is one of the biggest things that I’ve seen new support technicians struggle with. Problem-solving is something that cannot be taught and is critical to the computer industry. If you can learn to break down problems logically and systematically, problem solving becomes a trivial task.

5. Use Google. Depending upon the nature of your job, probably 90% of problems can be solved within a few seconds using a quick Google search. Often a problem can be solved with a quick search before the user is done explaining the problem.

6. Logs are your friend. Whatever systems you support, they have to log somewhere. Learn where they log and what kinds of events they log. Also, learn how to turn up and down logging levels. You can check the documentation for whatever kinds of systems you support for this. Learning how to read logs is a integral to the logical breakdown of a problem that can’t be solved from GUI error messages. It will give you a glimpse of what is happening ‘under the hood’.

7. Know your limits. If you’re in over your head, tell the user. Find someone who can help or consult Google. When you know you’re in over your head and you don’t consult help you will waste your time and what’s infinitely worse, frustrate your user to no end.

8. Think about the problem from a high level. Most of the time problems have multiple solutions. If you’re struggling with getting a certain task accomplished, move on. One of the most common problems I’ve seen with support technicians is that they (including myself from time to time) get caught on one small issue and lose picture of what ultimately needs to be accomplished. Often there is another way to accomplish the same task. Perhaps you’re using the wrong tool. If you are working on something that will only happen once, sometimes doing the task manually can be faster than figuring out how to do it automatically. It may be more footwork for you, but at least it will get done. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty (or at least the keyboard).

9. Be thorough and follow up. This is one of the simplest, yet shows the type of person and worker you are and often prevents bigger problems down the road. Unless you have a good relationship with a user, never tell them to ‘reboot and try again’ and then hang up. In an email support scenario, check back in with the user. They will be glad you did.

10. Automate. Every time you do something more than once, automate it. One great thing about computers is that a majority of tasks can be automated, so use it. For questions, you can build out a knowledge base or FAQ site or document. Answering the same questions all day wastes your time and your company’s money. Automating those tasks and making yourself more efficient will launch your career much faster.

While this list is certainly not all-inclusive, I found these things to be a great help in working with people of the non-technical nature. This list can help not only help desk support personnel, but also systems admins as well as developers working on websites and user interfaces.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Sep 15th, 2008

Sun Joins the Open Source VM Game

Sun announced today that it is open sourcing its bare-metal hyper visor VM technology xVM.  This comes on the heels of the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V for free, reported last week on What a N00b.  Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Sep 15th, 2008

Mac OS X 10.5.5 Released

The latest patch for OS X 10.5.5 is now available. It includes performance improvements for Spotlight, Time Machine, and Mail. Time Machine and Mail both have some significant fixes. A memory leak in Time Machine along with an issue where permissions are too open on the backup target have been fixed. It seems that issues with searching in Mail mentioned by AppleInsider are not resolved in the update. The update also includes fixes for syncing with several services and devices including the iPhone, Palm devices, and MobileMe. The update weighs in at 136MB and is paired with a Front Row update as well. More detailed info on the update can be found on the Apple support site.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 15th, 2008

The Evolution of the Notebook

HP announced its new EliteBook 6930p notebook a few days ago, bragging up to 24 hours of battery life. To attain this long battery life it needs to have an extra high-capacity battery. If it’s anything like the Gateway or Dell machines with extra-capcity batteries that extend out of the normal case of the machine, then I won’t have anything to do with it, but that’s not what’s interesting here. It appears we are on the brink of the notebook becoming a commodity like cell phones are today. We have been seeing the rise of the use of ‘netbooks’, a smaller, cheaper form of laptops. With the new ‘all-day’ laptops, the small form-factor of the netbook, and wireless signal using WiMaxx or 3G, the computer is well on its way to becoming the new cell phone. In fact, Cnet has mentioned possible deals in the works between Dell and a wireless provider to offer a wireless plan that includes one of the Dell Inspiron Mini9′s. It’ll be interesting for sure what happens in the laptop market, but battery life was one of the missing links in our search for a true mobile computing experience.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 13th, 2008

Fog Computing

Cloud computing and virtualization has been all the hype over the last few years in the technology industry. The idea of being able to start up hundreds of servers (or even one or two, for that matter) nearly instantly and having them ready to start handling loads is life-changing for systems administrators around the world. Having to trust a cloud computing provider with critical data and systems is also life-changing for systems administrators. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Just like any new technology, there’s those who are ready to jump aboard and never look back and there are those who are more cautious and not wanting to jump only to have nothing to catch them. Both have valid points. On one hand, you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to leverage new technology to gain an advantage over your competitors. On the other hand, there’s a reason we call it the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.

Moving infrastructure out into a cloud environment offers tremendous flexibility, but it also comes at a cost since machines have to run all the time. Amazon’s EC2 instances (which are among the cheaper ones I’ve seen) cost about $.10 an hour.. for a small instance. Let’s say, though that I have a fairly resource-intensive application. I’m going to need an extra large instance to make my application work which costs $.80 an hour, still not bad. That means I need to run my instance 24×7. To provide software redundancy for high availability, now I need to have two of those instances. Suddenly, my $.80 an hour turns into $1152 per month. This cost comes before bandwidth going into and out from your instance. Now, I know that there’s other considerations such as networking equipment, rack space, etc. but I’m pretty sure a good lease on some hardware will come under that cost.

Naturally, a good compromise has become common in IT circles. Given the cost of running the instances 24×7 and trust concerns, a lot of shops have been utilizing cloud services as a hybrid alongside their existing infrastructure. Creating new instances during peak traffic times to handle loads or using it for running batch jobs is where the real cost savings comes into play. If you can use 25 servers for 5 hours a day rather than spending money on 25 physical (or space for 25 virtual servers) in your environment and spend (25 machines x 5 hours x $.8) $100 a day, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of money and now you don’t have to deal with the headaches of managing the extra under-utilized hardware.

Employees at Amazon have called this hybrid implementation of cloud computing ‘Cloudbursting’, but I’d like to throw out my own term: ‘fog computing’. There, I said it. I’ve been watching others play on the term cloud computing in their blogs for months and wanted to join in on the action. I couldn’t resist. We can have a cloud but keep it close to the ground, thus the fog. This trend makes perfect sense, and you can see real cost savings right up front rather than having to buy additional servers to accommodate additional temporary or cyclical loads. There’s definite value in the cloud, but a nice balance can be struck by using a hybrid approach and keeping your cloud ‘close to the ground’.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Sep 12th, 2008

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