Moving day

No, not me. Late Saturday evenings are for the heavy lifting of maintenance, including server moves, which is what I’ve been doing for hours now. People who don’t work in tech don’t realize that probably a third of your time is spent waiting for something: waiting for a copy to finish, waiting for a compile to complete, waiting for a server to reboot after a new kernel is built, waiting for someone to reply to the question you’ve asked them.

A funny: a “webmaster of x years” (x = more than two decades) spent “two hours” trying to configure FTP, couldn’t connect after figuring out what to use like on ALL other systems he uses, which of course were MUCH easier to use, finally managed to get connected to find NO files listed when he KNEW there were files under the account, and WTF don’t we have the configuration information on the page for the FTP accounts, huh? I got to point out that clicking on the handily named “FTP configuration” link RIGHT NEXT TO the FTP account he created had the configuration information listed, that he had been unable to connect because he was using “user@domain.com@domain.com” according to the logs, and that he configured the FTP user incorrectly, assigning it to its own, restricted, directory, and not the directory with all the files in it. I didn’t bother to ask WTF he spent “two hours” trying to figure it out when he could have just opened a ticket and had a reply literally within minutes, as he did with his whiny list of trial and tribulations he was going through. As of right now, almost two days later, he has not responded to our last reply, nor has he corrected the incorrectly configured FTP user as per the instructions I laid out. And what’s absurdly remarkable about all this: he has the actual user’s master username and password. I wanted to ask him WTF he was bothering screwing around with a secondary FTP user when he could just log right in with the master username and password. Problem solved, in two minutes, not two hours of dumbassery.

This is why we use lots of quotes when someone claims to be a “webmaster” of x years, or a “developer”, or an “IT person”, or a “network engineer” – the latter are amusing when they insist there’s an issue with the network (because of course, they are a network engineer, far more skilled then we are even though they know nothing about us) because look at this trace and this ping from my computer and my cell phone can’t even pull up my site, so your whole network must be down, you suck! It’s fun to tell them they triggered the firewall because they tried to access the control panel on the wrong port, having transposed the last two numbers, and perhaps untethering their phone from their home wifi network would yield a different result if they in fact triggered the firewall in the future at some point, because then they would be able to check their site from a network unrelated to their home system.

Thus ends my mini rant about clueless people who proclaim themselves to be experts on something. I find that the louder those people speak about how many years they’ve been in x, or how they hold a high position of y in some random company, the less likely it is that they know what they’re talking about, and they will probably be among the rudest people we have to deal with in any given day.

Until next time, peeps. Be well.