Autonegotiation doesn't

Standing up a Snorcle x4540 storage server. Nice Cisco 4849 switches, and Solaris 10U9. But wait, the stupid NVidia NGE driver autonegotiates 100/Half to the Gigabit Network switch. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot. My goodness. Years and years of hardware development and standards and two name brand devices can't figure it out. Great.

Start pounding on the various incarnations of the adv_*_cap flags with ndd to see if I can get a clue why it's doing what it's doing. Big chart brewing, and I'm probably gonna have to talk to some guy in a foreign language to see if this problem has a known resolution, or if it's gonna take hammering it for a couple of hours to find the 2^12 combinations that gets me 1000Mbs. At least the network guy is a charm to work with so I know we'll figure it out the hard way.

Office Moves

Another huge time waster. Not only do I get a smaller cube, but right across from the Group Director's office who runs the "can do no wrong" NOC. I'm so happy. NOT.

How dumb do you think we are?

I work in a support organization who has to call support organizations. Often times, I've already done 75% of the "debugging" before I've called so I can effectively bypass that. But one of my vendors has changed, and now they're relying on automated tools, and associated "tools" who make annoying emails about the status of our systems without one clue about what they talk.

An example, I built out a pair of systems about 6 weeks ago. Having some storage problems, and send of the appropriate diagnostics. The rocket scientist on the other end of the line tells me I have a bad disk and I need to replace it. Oh, yeah, Which disk in my SAN array are you talking about? "Oh". mumbles for a while, says he'll get back to me. Things aren't quite right and said rocket scientist again says I need to update the patches to fix things up. I asked him for the specific bug id's he's referring to, along with the patches. "Oh." mumbles for a while. "But our backline says you're down rev'd on patches". Me - Really. 6 weeks ago, this was completedly patched and you've not yet identified any of the problems I've pointed out to you with appropriate bug ids. Yeah, you're using a tool that says patches are out of date. I got one of those too. I don't need you to tell me that. I need you to tell me "here is the bug, here is the bug id and here is the patch or temporary patch". Don't be telling me I need to upgrade my patches on your whim and your stupid tool just because you are out of ideas. What, do you think every system is in a lab and can be upgraded willy-nilly on your say so?

Please buy a clue. and if not, go get a job where they ask "Do you want fries with that?"