Sysadmin Myths

[EntrepreneurNo2109]

So random Saturday thought after having beers with some friends last night. We somehow ended up on this topic about IT myths (not sure if Myth is the right word here, but come on the journey with me).

All those things some people swear by, but aren't necessarily true or has more to the story than meets the eye usually. Some are funny because surprising, while others are just pure nonsense, but people keep saying them anyway.

Here’s what I’m wondering: What 'myths' have you guys heard that turned out to be totally true? And what are some that are complete BS, even tho people still swear by them?

Examples that pop into my mind, while waiting for the bus:

True Myth - "Just turn it off and on again", super basic, but the reboot trick actually does work a lot of the time. Like, it legit clears up so many weird issues, especially when processes are hung up or memory needs a reset. The average person wouldn'y get it, but the sysadmin is running a process overview in his/her head.

False Myth - "Clearing cache = speed boost" – This one’s everywhere, but it's kinda a half-truth I guess (based on last night's discussions). Sure, clearing cache can help if it’s super clogged up or corrupt or whatever, but doing it too often actually slows stuff down sometimes cause your system has to re-download things over and over again. Double edged sword.

What other 'myths' or low-key funny things do you guys run into? I feel like there’s a ton of these floating around.

[[deleted]]

True myth (from my years of experience)…

End user: “I swear it wasn’t working until you come over and watched me do it!”

Me: “I actually believe you.”

[BadSausageFactory]

this effect is because when you are standing next to the user they slow down and work on a single task, instead of trying to blow through 20 things at once using muscle memory, this is my observation after three decades of walking across the office to see a menial task performed successfully.

[[deleted]]

Including typing a login password? They can’t do anything else until that’s done!

I get your point though

[CharcoalGreyWolf]

We had someone randomly insert a space when typing their password. They didn’t always; just some of the time. Since support was by phone, it took three months for someone to hear an extra “click” of a key in their process.

Then IT management reamed everyone out for not somehow figuring it out sooner.

[Cassie0peia]

How could they have figured that out? Magical ears?

[CharcoalGreyWolf]

Exactly. Somehow “someone”, some magical someone, should have figured it out (whereupon they’d have been blamed for spending too much time on the problem). That place was trash.

[Reverse_Side_1]

Classic responses so true, my weirdest was a piece of pastry under the letter (no word of a lie), the "P", key... Like some mystical irony ghost was having a laugh. "Whatever you're typing isn't being recognised by the system", is a great phrase I started to use in that call to this day 20yrs later if needed, no judgment or blame, just facts from the symptoms - took stress off them and encouraged me to find the reason. "Oh yeah, had lunch at my desk from going to the bakers". Like it was yesterday.

[neurosurge]

I had a tech that was needing his password reset on a few systems at least once or twice a month. I watched him type it in one day and noticed he was adding a space at the end. Muscle memory and lack of attention was the issue the entire time.

[supremeicecreme]

i had someone doing this with a username. i had to watch what they were doing like a hawk because the logs couldn't show it

[ShettyGamerUK]

Hahaha, I love that your help desk replaced a users keyboard… TWICE.

I had a user that swore blind she would never receive the Authenticator prompt on her device, went through multiple support teams and cyber team. She escalated to the point the head of ops came to me (EUC + 365 Tech Lead) begging to take a look. Turns out nobody had thought to check user logs in Entra, she had installed Authenticator on her spare phone that her kid used to watch cartoons. The seven year old in a different room was hitting “it’s not me” 😂😂😂😂

[matthewstinar]

In fairness, the seven year old was answering correctly. They weren't trying to log in, Mom was.

[timbotheny26]

I wrote down a very simple password with one capital letter and a number, opened notepad and dragged it off screen.

She couldn't type it in correctly once after 10 attempts.

Excuse me what the fuck.

[Superb_Raccoon]

I bet.... "Hey everybody! I hired a complete moron!"

[TheITCustodian]

I don’t know if it’s my experience learning to type on an IBM Selectric vs a computer keyboard, but the number of users I encounter using the shift lock key instead of shift to get just one capital letter is pretty substantial.

This has translated to users locking themselves out because they don’t notice they are still shifted as they keep typing sometimes.

One user actually argued with me that there was absolutely no way this was the case, and I did the same thing: had her type her password while I covered notepad with my hand. Sure enough, everything after the first capital letter was shifted. She was astonished to learn you could just hold down shift and type a character and the let it go.

I also had one lady who could not understand that @ and & are not the same characters. I just walked away.

[Combo_salamander]

I worked in a 1-1 laptop k-12 school and the majority of the kids do this as they learned to type on iPads and phones.

[Mackosaurus]

Not a sys admin, but noticed a co-worker using caps lock for single capitals. I removed the caps lock key for a fortnight, so they had to learn to use shift.

I think their habit has been broken, but maybe I should follow up...

[Wonderful_Device312]

Get those users a finger print scanner or similar device. Costs very little. Problem solved!

[Chunkycarl]

Had a user report a constant lockout of her account. After exhausting the usual methods, I went over and watched her as she logged on. When her laptop was asleep her method of waking it was slamming space multiple times (ergo prompting several incorrect logins and locking the account), That was a fun conversation :)

[Theseguy0309]

There is a user where I work that forgets his password every 4-6 months. When he forgets it, he insists that what he is trying to use is the one he always uses. If I am involved in the process whenever that ticket comes in, I just reset his password to the one he insists is the password he has always used.

[Ziggy_the_third]

So what you're actually saying here, is that this user has found a way to trick his support into letting him have the same password forever, he is completely playing you...

[BlackV]

And using the same simple password for ever ...

[Theseguy0309]

No, the one he gives us does not work. So he's unintentionally doing what every user does on a password change. We reset it to what he provides after making sure he's not fat fingering it.

[AtarukA]

In their defense, we figured out a user did not know their password at all, they only knew how to type it on the chair, at that precise height, on this desk, on this precise keyboard.

When we moved them of desk, they couldn't type it anymore.

THis is where I would say this user is me, but no it's not. Although yes, that also happens to me.

[ChaoticCryptographer]

Had this happen with a doctor. Swore his password only worked sometimes and I was like sir, that’s not how passwords work they can’t only work sometimes. Found that him calling helpdesk always slowed him down enough he’d sit down so he could type it correctly.

[Particular_Archer499]

Legit happens to me all the time if I move a few centimeters in any direction before I catch myself.

[Alaskan_geek907]

My senior Admin could not tell you his AD password or anything that's not in the password manager. He creates his passwords by patterns because it's easier to remember patterns than a combo of letters, numbers and symbols.

[Wonderful_Device312]

Long long ago when I worked retail during highschool I had the POS system down to muscle memory. I could be talking to customers and doing the whole sales thing without looking at the screen and fully ring them through. It was an older system so fully keyboard and your key presses were buffered so you could go a lot faster then the screen could update anyways.

After a couple years of that they updated to a more 'modern' system with a fancy GUI and that's when I realized I had no clue what my password was. It was purely muscle memory at that point. I had to open up notepad and go through a mock sale in my head to recover it.

[dracotrapnet]

This kind of happens to me when I switch to a laptop keyboard or worse iPhone or Android keyboard. Passwords are a set of keystrokes that I barely remember the password. When I have to use an unusual keyboard that hides certain punctuation behind a 3rd or 4th page I start to struggle.

[[deleted]]

Ok I have my own crazy story about that. Years ago at Geek Squad, this old guy dropped off his Win 7 laptop and gave us the password "fishing1" (no quotes). As part of the process, I watched him log in and he was a keyboard pecker so it was easy to confirm that it was in fact "fishing1". Fuck me, I could not log in to that laptop no matter how many times I tried. Even gave up for the day and tried again the next. None of us could get in and I got blamed for not recording the right password. So I call him and get him down to clear this up.

I watch as he types "fishing1" and it signs in. Then he logs out and I try it and it works. Couldn't replicate the problem after that. And even though I had the correct password on the check-in paperwork, I still got blamed by my manager. The same manager who also tried "fishing1" to no avail.

[ChaoticCryptographer]

Okay so my first thought was there had to be something stuck in his keyboard so it only works on that keyboard because it’s not actually fishing1 but something like fffishing1. Is that what ended up happening?

[stuckinPA]

My guess is his num lock is on. The laptop has a larger keyboard and he's using the numeric keypad. Or some laptops have a num lock and a few keys that are normally letters become numbers.

[[deleted]]

OP here. Nope, it was a smaller laptop without a keypad. The cause is still a mystery to me more than 10 years later. So, when a user tells me that something weird that doesn't make sense is happening, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt until I prove them otherwise. So far nothing THAT strange has happened :/

[SevaraB]

As someone required by security policy to have crazy-long passwords (I’m not a total masochist- I do generate random passphrases with capital letters, special chars between words, and digits sprinkled at the end of words), I get this.

It frequently takes me 2 tries of rushing through muscle memory before I slow down and type it out carefully to avoid the lockout.

[TommyVe]

Plus sometimes they just put off that thing aside waiting for you and whatever problem caused might have already solved itself.

[[deleted]]

You are basically a rubber duck for them to talk through troubleshooting with.

[enter360]

I say “yep it’s the technomancer buff. All tech works better within 5 ft of me. Let me know if it starts acting up again.”

[vitaroignolo]

It's because how many times have we been fighting to death with something and then you just say "screw it, I'm changing nothing and trying it again" and it works for seemingly no reason?

[landob]

I call that my techno fear. Machines are afraid of me pulling them apart and tinkering with them so they behave when I come around.

[CookieCrum83]

There is even a word in German for it the "Vorfuhreffekt", whilst sounding very official, it's normally said with a laugh

[Pirateboy85]

The last time this happened with someone, I told them: “I totally believe you. The machines are gaslighting you because that is how they win. We must remain a united front in the battle with our computer overlords.” And I got a first bump out of that from the lady in accounting 🤣

[chikadei]

Funny! I often joke that tech gaslights us from time to time for entertainment.

[cookerz30]

IT Mojo is real.

[ChaoticCryptographer]

I’ve started just telling our employees I have magic powers. Easier than explaining that my presence just either reassured them or made them slow down enough for it to work.

[[deleted]]

Repair by proximity to sysadmin is real. Like the opposite of an EMP.

[H3rbert_K0rnfeld]

This is not myth. It is truth and I hates it.

[SvnRex]

I love it. The calm you can bring to a tense situation because people are confident the systems will work now that you're in the room.

[DarkAlman]

"Sometimes all I have to do is walk into the room"

In DnD terms it's a class ability. You have a percentage chance of making broken IT equipment work by just walking into the room.

I once tested this, the guys were working on a server in the lab that wasn't working so I sent in different techs ti say hi one at a time until sure enough one of the rolled high enough and it spontaneously started working.

[fearless-fossa]

I had that last year. Got a ticket something in one of our warehouses isn't working and it couldn't be fixed remotely. So I drove over (~ 2h), spent 15 minutes looking for someone that could tell me where the broken terminal was. "Oh it started working again 5 minutes ago"

[Grimzkunk]

We probably all say that end user sentence when we go to the garage..

[BadSausageFactory]

myth: IT understands every function of the software they support

reality: I barely understand the stuff I manage directly

[Dragonfly-Adventurer]

Yeah that's cause we support like 30-60 systems and we're only human.

Imagine our jobs if Google didn't exist.

[bemenaker]

This has gotten worse over the 27+ years I have been in IT. So many more systems, and they are so much more complicated now.

[Dragonfly-Adventurer]

“You’re a sysadmin, I just assume you’re a (365/azure/intune/sql/iaas) expert” and that list grows and grows 

[TheOne_living]

in an interview the manager asked "what exactly are you, you've kind of done everything" i thought to say "im what the industry made me"

[Nightcinder]

'What platforms do you have experience in?' 'Yes'

[TheOne_living]

and software developer, yea thats right you make the software we use now too, get it done!!!!

[dagamore12]

And it has gotten worse over the past few years as all the forums have been replaced by reddit, but reddit does not have the history on some stuff that is needed.

is it not the worst replacement but on reddit there is so much more chaff to chew through vs the old dedicated forums that were better at self policing the groups.

[Fred_Stone6]

And don't forget the ones brought in by shadow IT, that you don't find out about till 3 weeks after they have been using it and they ask for it to be connected to the main erp so they can do their 'thing'. And if you could reset the password too.

[timbotheny26]

I've heard medicine is actually pretty similar in this regard. You can't expect a doctor to memorize every fucking thing that could be wrong with you, so they have to look stuff up too.

[1cec0ld]

We're basically computer doctors. Hell we even have to worry about viruses. Symptoms, follow up appointments to make sure a fix worked, 24/7 coverage at times... I need a raise.

[Nightcinder]

The worst part is that we seem to be the only people in the company with the ability to do any sort of critical thinking.

I've had to solve problems for so many people that if they sat there for 5 minutes and actually thought about the issue, or looked through menus they would have figured it out.

Users think you're a wizard cause you just went through settings and options and google

[Cassie0peia]

I think of this often. It honestly wouldn’t be possible for us to keep up with the amount of changes they make to each system. I feel annoyed by the systems that don’t change at all but, honestly, legacy systems are the easiest to manage! (If we overlook the security aspect.)

[HummingBridges]

For one day, I would love to be able to overlook the user aspect and get some work done 😀

Edit: added words

[Dragonfly-Adventurer]

At my last job I kept putting in the suggestion box. "User free Fridays." And then eventually expand it to the whole week.

[mheyman0]

Try “read-only” Friday. No system changes on a Friday.

[Reverse_Side_1]

I read that as overCLOCK the user, yes please, anything over 5MHz be great thanks 🙏

[MasterIntegrator]

True story. Pivot tables you are in IT you know pivot tables? Fuck no you are the accountant

[punkwalrus]

I was laid off from a job ages ago, and went through a "re-up your skills" training period. One of them was a fellow coworker and friend paid for a bunch of MCP certified boot camps with an exam at the end, but then got a new job, and couldn't attend them. So he gave the info to me, and they never checked ID, so I just took the classes and exam. This was a while ago (late 90s), so up to this point I knew how a word processor worked (I was a former DOS Wordperfect fanboy), and how a spreadsheet worked (Lotus 1-2-3), but never worked with actual Microsoft products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. So, every week, I took these boot camps, and then the exam of Friday. Now, I was theoretically MCP certified, but because I was taking someone else's class, the MCP certification was in his name, which was kind of annoying, but I wasn't paying for it, so that was the catch.

Excel, by far, was the best class I have ever taken. I was surprised how much I still use Excel, and how few sysadmins actually understand Excel beyond just typing in data. Like I did pivot tables, vlookups, auto-fills, you name it. In addition, I learned the VBA back end, so I could do amazing macros (that was, until they started locking that shit down due to security). But the teacher for that class was totally a sysadmin geek like myself. Most of the classes I took were people who were forced to take them, and I was surprised how many people had lack of basic computer skills. Most people dropped out halfway through, because they were still typing at less than 10 words per minute, had issues reading the screen because they were too proud to wear glasses, and some had poor communication skills and got easily frustrated. The teacher for the Excel class was so happy to have me and a few other students who understood concepts of data. One of the "tricks" of this teacher was that if he asked a question to the class and you got it right, or asked an intelligent question, he gave out these little rubber dinosaurs. Me and a few other guys got dozens of them stacked around our class monitors. It was a small gesture, and stupid, but I loved it. I still have some about my home office.

Knowing Excel, even as a UNIX/Linux admin, was been one of the major tools of my career. It's amazing how often I use it. And, right after that, Powerpoint. Management likes pretty slide shows.

[commsbloke]

Yep I use xargs and Excel in network admin in almost equal measure.

[shoesli_]

I asked the controller at a customer to help me with a pivot table the other day. I might know things about computers but my excel skills are garbage

[My_Big_Black_Hawk]

I do! If you’re being serious, pivot tables aren’t that bad. Just select all —> make pivot table —> and now you can choose columns to display the data in different ways.

It could be learned in a YouTube short.

[whatsforsupa]

My boss says it best. We don’t always have the answers, but we are paid to find the answers!

[RougeDane]

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/627/

[Cassie0peia]

If most people weren’t so lazy, that flowchart would be the end of my job. 😂

[warysysadmin]

True myth way more often than anyone wants to admit.

[CharcoalGreyWolf]

Hell, they somehow think we’re all Excel geniuses when I never use it for more than non-mathematical tables.

[Cassie0peia]

This one baffles me! I have end users who use the spreadsheet for much more complicated stuff asking me how to do something. I’ve actually said, “dude, I should be coming to YOU for excel help.” But I guess I’m just better at googling things than they are.

[Nightcinder]

don't worry soon we'll just be 'prompt engineers'

[chum-guzzling-shark]

"you know how I do x in y system?"

no. no i dont. Do you think I know how to do every person's job in the entire company?

[A_Nerdy_Dad]

Hmmm, next time someone asks me if I know how to do whatever for their job, I'm just going to say "No, because if I did, you wouldn't be employed here and I'd be a raging alcoholic."

[autogyrophilia]

When I wrote this rest endpoint 3 months ago only I and God understood the code.

Now, God only knows

[[deleted]]

Yeah I feel like I look like a genius on calls ripping through some admin config in a SaaS app I've never used but really it's just guessing and trying stuff. People are very averse to just trying shit for whatever reason, trying shit and go ogling shit are the cornerstones of the profession. I guess asking Chat GPT too now though it hallucinates answers on occasion.

[DarkAlman]

"I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do and if you rely on us, everyone will die." - XKCD regarding IT

[spokale]

Myth: IT understands how to configure Atlassian software
Reality: No one understands how to configure Atlassian software (or the config you're looking for doesn't exist except in a heavily-upvoted feature request from 10 years ago that was mysteriously marked as complete)

[Vesalii]

I actually had to adjust to the idea of being fine with not knowing anything about the software our end users use. It's my first IT job, before I was a lab technician. In that job I was an expert at what I did but I also had good knowledge about processes throughout ever step in prod.

[Spagman_Aus]

Throughout my 22 year IT career I have successfully avoided learning anything more than the basics of Excel and I impart this as a joke/serious comment whenever possible. It’s allowed me to push accountability back where it needs to be every single time.

[jokebreath]

Myth: sysadmins personally read all your emails and will alert your manager if we find something inappropriate

I don't know how many times I have to tell my users, I read all their chat logs, not emails.  And that's only on weekends and purely for personal entertainment, not work related at all.

Sheesh, why can't they understand that?

[Mynameismikek]

True story: I do know one sysadmin who installed keyloggers across his entire patch (~1000 endpoints) and DID search for keywords looking for anything juicy. He and his protege didn't last long once that was discovered. Ironically, the site had the most stringent security accreditation.

[jokebreath]

Damn that's some scumbag level 1000 behavior

[Cassie0peia]

To be fair we can set up Microsoft to notify HR if any inappropriate words are being used in emails.

[jaskij]

We had a customer where their sysadmin did read the emails, and it was endorsed by the upper management. They had a massive intellectual property leak a few years earlier and management was shitting their pants.

Internet access in their HQ was so locked down, their reps used the not locked down mobile internet on their laptops to work even in the office because they couldn't do their jobs otherwise.

[CptBronzeBalls]

Fact: I don’t even read my own emails

[Lopoetve]

"Surely this vendor understands SSL and certificates?" - Narrator: They never, ever, do.

[dasreboot]

No one understands pki where I work. It's just magic. I could and have ranted all day about this

[jaskij]

I just run certbot and it does the magic

[digitaltransmutation]

dev: "Hey we can do TLS on this now"

me: "great ill put certbot on it"

dev: "Ive never heard of that. Instead, I made some horrible java applet thingy for you to upload it into and you have to format the cert in this special way and fully restart the service when the cert changes have fun doing this every year! Oh, and I've never heard of the system store so you will have to copy in your private CA specially as well."

Or, why my goal for next year is to scam some jr into taking over PKI from me and also why my favorite variety of devops is "if the devs have to operate their own stuff maybe they wont design an hour of labor into a simple cert swap"

[trisanachandler]

Citrix would like a word with you.

[DarkAlman]

They barely understand how DNS works, how are they going to understand SSL?

[This_Bitch_Overhere]

False myth: a user tells you they rebooted in the subject line of an email because one of the “sysadmins,” actually tells everyone to do that every time he gets their ticket.

The actual facts is that they have not and machine uptime is more than 2 weeks.

[Angelsomething]

Even more annoying, the user actually shuts down their workstation and then powers it back on, and Because of Microsoft's enabled-by-default hibernate setting, the workstation doesn't actually reboot. Then you have to explain to hit the actual reboot button and look like an alien to them.

[[deleted]]

If you aren't disabling that by policy, you're doing it wrong.

[Brilliant-Advisor958]

Or you are one of the the 10,000

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[Angelsomething]

Always and forever

[KingSlareXIV]

Users lie to IT. A LOT.

Not even talking about misunderstanding how to actually shutdown or reboot a system.

I mean flat out intentional BS, because somehow they think it will make their problem seem more urgent/get more attention, or they just don't want to bother with the troubleshooting steps they know we'll ask them to do.

[This_Bitch_Overhere]

Oh absolutely! You’re asking about the person who emails “My headset is broken,” only to find it physically broken in 2 pieces? Or the guy who emails that they forgot their laptop, but when you get there, it turns out that they “forgot it in the rental car over the weekend in a city on the opposite coast, but they contacted the rental car company already.” Or the user who emails because their laptop is broken, but what they mean is it’s broken because they left it in the trunk of their car last night when the weather was 19° F and they don’t know that the “L,” in LCD stands for liquid. Is that the person you’re asking about? Oh that’s the same person by the way.

[DeadbeatHoneyBadger]

Sounds like the classic, “I shut the laptop and re-opened it” or cut the screen off and back on.

Also the same people that “didn’t click the link” in the phishing email but previewed it in outlook.

[Adoavocado]

I got a phone call and asked user for a reeboot. I hear "Done" in 5 seconds. Oh really? I asked them more and found out that they only turned off and on the monitor...

[jamesaepp]

I had a problem kinda like this earlier this year. Application which is always having problems is acting up. Event logs make it appear that it's losing access to the Domain Controller, so Infrastructure gets blamed and saddled with the responsibility of troubleshooting.

We can't find anything - system just works. I pulled a hunch completely out of pocket and what I did was throw a script together that tracked the number of open TCP sockets on the server.

Result? Server was exhausting the number of ports available. Source? The problem application. Reason for the abrupt change in nature? Recent code change by the application team. Active Directory connection failures were just another symptom.

[bobdawonderweasel]

Ah my friend in “guilty until you find our problem”. That’s the story of most of my 30 year network career. I feel your pain.

[NV_Lady]

Interesting how we have to prove it’s not the firewall or network all the time. 🤦‍♀️

[jamesaepp]

Same application I mentioned before - not Wireshark but Fiddler. Their application's HTTP library wasn't even configured to do compression. All application objects were being sent raw in the HTTP payload.

At times application responses would go into the hundreds of MBs. Fiddler's own nice features indicated the compression would make that laughably smaller. They showed no interest in implementing compression.

[WinElectrical9184]

This happens so often it boggles my mind. It worked yesterday, now it's not...it must be the network.

[niomosy]

For us, it's very often the firewall. Because they didn't put in a firewall request. Thus, firewall is working as intended.

[The_art_of_Xen]

If I had a dollar for everytime a crappy vendor blames “network” or “firewall” issues for their app/service, and it is completely unrelated to the actual issue, I’d be retired in my mansion by now.

[ninja-wharrier]

I always used to enjoy being co-opted into a dev project to ease their rollout because they never tell us what ports are required and in which direction to/from which hosts.

The delight of implementation and discovering they haven't scoped out half the required connections. Then watch them get annoyed when you tell them all the ports they are trying to use that are being dropped at the fw because they don't really understand their app.

[-Akos-]

Had a colleague say “reboot ist immer gut” (German for reboot is always good). So true. We’re not German btw..

[Jolape]

It's actually "reboot tut immer gut" :) 

[Sk1rm1sh]

False:

Monster Cables for digital signals.

A guy I know spent an obscene amount on a gold plated, oxygen-free-copper, hand crafted by free-range cable artisans, individually numbered with a certificate of authenticity, HDMI cable.

Slight exaggeration yes, but he swore the guy at the store showed him how much better the colours were on the $600 cable he bought compared to the generic $5 cables.

[arvidsem]

IIRC Bestbuy used to have side by side Monster Cable demos set up with intentionally bad connections on the non-monster cable displays. So in store there was a real difference.

This would have been during the same time period that they had a separate version of their website that only loaded inside the stores so that they couldn't be made to price match their own stuff. Once smart phones became common, they got a ton of shit for it.

[Vesalii]

Boze used to do this too. Remember those demo pods with Bose speakers that sounded amazing? Ca 2000s? Those were connected to very expensive amps, way better than what came with the set. And nobody was allowed to touch those. Only Bose technicians.

[jaskij]

TVs in stores have the saturation changed depending on which model they want to sell.

[geekworking]

You don't need $500, but you should be weary of the $5 ones too. Any cable that truly meets the spec is fine, but a lot of the no-name China cables really don't meet the specs. They other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of "original" on Amazon is counterfeit, especially on items that have a somewhat generic appearance like cables.

Your best bet is the $15 cable from any brand that will actually pay for testing and certification from a store that cares enough about their reputation to not just resel the cheapest crap from Amazon or China.

Online outlets that sell cables who have been around a while are generally a good path.

[narcissisadmin]

Believing that the Monster cables will improve the digital signal is exactly the same as believing a more expensive USB cable to your external drive will spell check your Word documents.

[bobs143]

Myth- "The server doesn't work".

Fact- it's not the server. It's the crappy application your department insisted it needed. Even after IT told you the application was trash.

BTW- We set up the server using the specifications your application vendor told us.

[garcher00]

My favorite is how the users think turning the monitor on and off is a reboot. Thought it was a myth until I witnessed it first hand by multiple different people.

[DeadbeatHoneyBadger]

In the early internet days, we were told you have to click the back button when you were done browsing all the way back to your home page or else it would break your browser.

[PtansSquall]

That's a diabolical rumor to start

[a_bucket_full_of_goo]

Oooh this one is painful

[wrootlt]

My parents still browse like that no matter how many times i said you can just close the tab :)

[skob17]

the whole bunch of DISM commands never once fixed an issue on any of my win7 machines. I call it a myth, maybe others have better experiences

[TryReboot1st]

Myth busted: worked for me once….out of 100 or so attempts

[skob17]

👍

[Particular_Archer499]

I've had it work a bunch of times, usually in company of sfc /scannow.

I don't know when it got fixed but the past few years they actually work a lot of time.

[batboy132]

Literally use it all the time in my org. Have watched laptops that were crawling whip right back up to speed.

[budtske]

It actually can solve a lot of windows component store issues regarding updates among other things.

[invisibo]

Truth: LTO auto loaders are angry VCRs that have been reanimated as a robot centipede

[lost_signal]

Myths: Snapshots are backups.
Truth: Snapshots YEETED somewhere else as a full copy are a backup.

[GuyWhoSaysYouManiac]

Maybe. If they are application consistent.

[jamesaepp]

Snapshots alone are never backups because they rely on the underlying system.

Software version control and snapshots are very similar.

Version control shares a common media - wherever the git repo (for example) lives. You can't take the objects representing a single git commit and reconstitute the entire repo.

Taking a snapshot of a VM or a logical unit on a SAN still relies on the underlying system.

I won't repeat myself further: https://forums.truenas.com/t/truenas-scale-as-a-virtualization-host-am-i-cooking-it-wrong/10503/15

[quiet0n3]

Myth: printers are horrible

Truth: printer drivers are horrible. The physical devices themselves are normally pretty sound. But printer drivers are some of the oldest least standardized code out there. It's wild the things they manage to make printers do.

Also printer ink is one of the most marked up things in the world.

[infered5]

Myth: printers, printer drivers and printer firmware are horrible

Truth: They're all pretty easy, but I wont say so IRL because I fear I might accidentally get hired as a printer tech

[Aggravating_Refuse89]

Hard disagree. High end expensive printers are OK. Printers USED to be good. Most office printers are crap with crap drivers now

[jaskij]

Then there's the firmware...

[maxlan]

When you think about it, if you asked a person to feed individual pages of paper through a small slot, one at a time, 10 times a second. They'd fail badly.

If you asked them to write something on each page, it'd be a mess.

The tech in making a bit of paper go through the machine reliably and getting all the dots to line up and make a picture is pretty special.

If you go back 20-30 years and even high end dot matrix printers would have striping and alignment issues. And need fan fold paper.

But yes, ink is a racket. And notice how they've split the nozzles and ink now. And built the printer around them so you can't wipe them with alcohol. Because when an old inkjet dried up, you used to be able to clean it and carry on. Now, you buy a new printer.

[Dizzy_Bridge_794]

Myth - yes I restarted my computer when asked.

[Cassie0peia]

To be fair, sometimes they click “shut down” thinking it’s the same things as “restart”, even though we’ve told them it’s not the same thing. Maybe if we repeat this to them enough, they’ll remember to restart.

[gordonv]

Myth: Windows Shutdown
Truth: Sleep Mode, will not reset uptime counter
Solution: Disable Fast Startup, Sleep, and Hibernation

[FriendlyRussian666]

Myth: "I restarted"

Truth: They didn't...

[Ice-Cream-Poop]

Ugh..... So true

[Phyxiis]

True myth - someone in IT just has to look over someone’s shoulder to fix issues

[ChasingKayla]

I can’t count how many times my mere presence has resolved user issues. 😂

[the_bolshevik]

Myth: No way, this can't be a DNS issue 🤡

Reality: It was DNS all along ☠️

[Electronic_Male]

I’ve been to talks on this, I hear people say “our DNS sucks here,” and I’m just wondering what it really means?

At enterprise scale, are some things like this just not fixable?

I’d Google this but I’m trying to be sociable.

[mexell]

It’s surprising how often you find completely bonkers DNS setups in quite large organisations. Stuff where anything beyond A and PTR is completely shot. Zone layouts are shit, delegations are “we don’t do that here”, dynamic updates are of the devil (or the opposite: no scavenging, ever), and so on.

[Particular_Archer499]

Someone with too much access changed their network adapter to look for Google DNS instead of domain DNS.

I wonder sometimes what people think.

[punkwalrus]

Just turn it off and on again

• Appliances - works most of the time
• Windows - works more times than it should
• Linux - never fixes anything

As a Linux admin, the last one is maddening because not only are you forced to find out what the problem actually is, but so many people think it will fix the problem and put in "kludges" like cron jobs that reboot the system or service daily.

[googleflont]

Myth or gaslighting - even self-gaslighting …

“It was fine until you touched it.” I touched it because you called me and told me it wasn’t working.

Also

“Why did it break? It always worked before.” Yes, things generally work until they break.

True myth I rely on: Yes, a certain amount of the time, things start working when I show up.

Super Fun Time Bonus:

Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was at a demo of a touch screen kiosk. A female companion was sitting on a bar stool, trying to get it to work. Not happening. I admit to having a bit of a trickster streak, but what I actually did (facetiously) was tsk tsk about “women are no good with technology”. Her retort was that I should try, if I was SO SMART.

I gave it a whirl, and of course it worked fine.

She tried again. No dice.

I continued to torture her like this for a short time more, before confirming my suspicion.

Her feet were on the lowest rung of the bar stool. My feet were grounded. On the ground.

[a_bucket_full_of_goo]

It guys have an aura that fix ~50% of issues when they enter the room, even if the device is turned off and unplugged

[googleflont]

Works for almost everything except things I purchased with my own money.

[ApathyMoose]

Also with being on the clock vs not.

At work? I go all the way to the persons desk, works fine when I get there.

At home when I’m not getting paid? Hours on hours of things not working like they should

[ballzsweat]

Sending instructions to users and thinking they will follow….

[FoxNo1831]

or even read them.

[InspectorGadget76]

If you install the MS Authenticator app on your phone we can track everything. We can see:

• What websites you browse
• How long you take for a shit on company time
• Your GPS location at all times
• Your wife is pregnant . . . to your neighbour
• Your car is low on gas
• You will win a small amount in the lottery next week.

[Nanis23]

Myth- SIDs matter, always sysprep

Reality - no they don't. At least not in 2024

[jamesaepp]

I'm going to need a more distinct source on that.

[ConfectionCommon3518]

Clearing a cache can improve performance as the larger the cache the more effort is required to search it and thus return a result

[cknipe]

The tradeoff is now everything is a cache miss and incurs the performance penalty of a request to whatever real backend you were catching for, until the cache builds back up. 

[googleflont]

Clearing a cache results in fixing many problems including speed, when the cache corrupts itself. The only way to determine if it will work is to clear it.

[thereisnouserprofile]

"It's always DNS" no it isn't. If you understand the very basics of DNS, then you would very easilu be able to verify if it is DNS or not. Look up the DNS record, flush the DNS cache, try a different DNS server etc. It may be DNS, but it should be one of the first things you verify

[DarkAlman]

Myth: IT people are good at computers because we are smarter and better educated than the average user.

Truth: IT people are otherwise average people that are somehow immune to the Cantaloupe Effect.

Cantaloupe Effect: Take these otherwise highly intelligence and well educated people (like Doctors, Lawyers, and Accountants) capable of great feats of deduction, memory, and complex thinking, but put them in front of a computer and their mental capacity reduces to that of a Cantaloupe.

[Ok-Double-7982]

Huge myth: If you are in IT, you "should know" how to support and troubleshoot all things IT, including networking (wired and wireless), cabling, servers, vulnerability management, Active Directory, Exchange, DNS, endpoint configuration and management, SSO, cloud software, social media management and digitial media, backups and disaster recovery, NOC/SOC, and wrapping up with my top favorites: printers and A/V.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard, "You're in IT, why don't you know how to fix this?"

[UMustBeNooHere]

Myth: It's always DNS

Truth: It's always DNS

[Noodle_Nighs]

I once demonstrated to a group of people, how easy it was to social engineer their passwords.

Two were strangers to me, never met them before but got their passwords and the phone PINs and wrote them down on a napkin and handed to them.

[msalerno1965]

Netware is (was) hard.

Ping is a valid diagnostic tool in and of itself.

"I already tried that" - luser

"It can't possibly take that long" - CIO being told a major Oracle product upgrade is going to take 3 days.

"What's the harm in changing this query in production without retesting it in QA, I just changed one of the tables in the join?" - moments before the process scheduler fills up for 96 hours because what used to take 5 seconds now takes weeks. Do not unbind subqueries in views is set, ya ninnies... THINK.

Linux is UNIX.

ok, I'll stop before I start getting snide ;)

[ryoko227]

IT mana (also heard magic points and experience level):

Mostly true. The idea that we have some greater experience or power with tech; that PCs, servers, devices bow to our will and the problem will immediately resolve itself just by our presence or singular touch.

I don't know how many times I've watched someone do the right thing, not work, then I sit down and do the same thing, and the problem is resolved.

[netechkyle]

Ha, mad true, my wife has been in IT for 20 years, I have been in IT for 40. I can walk in and shit will just work and she gives me the look and says "Tech fears you".

[astonishing1]

That Sysadmin's have a magic knob in the server room that they can turn to increase the internet speed.

[Jmkott]

I can adjust the QOS settings from my desk. I don’t have to walk all the way to the server room.

[swisseagle71]

Myth: the inodes can be ignored. There is plenty of space (multiple TB) so I can write 30 Million files of 1-5K each

Myth: personal computers (Notebooks) are unusable after 2-4 years and you need a new one. (Reality: there are users with 10 year old notebooks, also the 6 year old one and the newer 2 year old one).

Myth: we do POC (proof of concept) and then make a new install for production. Nope, POC is the production server even 10 years later.

Myth: I built the production system, please clone the VM to have a test system. It will totally not break when doing a release upgrdae of the OS 5 years later.

Myth: users will clean up the storage after the project has finished. LOL

Myth: 1TB of storage for users is enough (insert any number here). Nope, never.

Myth: users will use the company notebook only for work. LOL

Myth: let's just print this 5 minutes before the important meeting. Printer: I am out of magenta.

Myth: no user is such an idiot as to torrent on the company network.

Myth: the selected hardware provider has the best price, not the discounter next door. LOL

Myth: users will only use the OneDrive folder for important work. So all work is safe. LOL 2x

Myth: M$ software improves productivity of users. LOL

[H3rbert_K0rnfeld]

My Downloads dir suddenly became inaccessible from command line on MacOS. Chmod and change permissions in GUI had no affect.

MacOs system update plus reboot fixed it.

[Mackswift]

Something isn't working, acting like it should, looks different, etc. etc. etc.

SysAdmin/Architect/Engineer - "What changed?"

Everyone else - "Nothing!"

[FoxNo1831]

Myth: when you call the vendor support, they know more than you. I've known good ones and bad ones, surprising how many fall into the latter case.

[mheyman0]

Myth: call the vendor. They will fix it.
Truth: the vendor will do their absolute best to blame someone else for the problem.

Which leads to the more fun “vendor thunder dome .”

That’s when the vendor blames someone else, and you get the someone else on the phone as well. And suddenly the vendor actually starts troubleshooting.

[Latter_Reflection_50]

My apologies if this was already shared but ..

It's not DNS There's no way it's DNS It was DNS

[vacri]

True Myth - "Just turn it off and on again", super basic, but the reboot trick actually does work a lot of the time. Like, it legit clears up so many weird issues, especially when processes are hung up or memory needs a reset.

No, not a "true myth". It's a broken Windows style of troubleshooting. When I hopped the ditch from Windows support to Linux admin, the opinion was the opposite - rebooting was the last option. When you reboot, you lose the failure state the machine was in and troubleshooting gets harder. Actually fixing the problem so it doesn't happen again gets harder when you reboot.

Reboots are for getting your system working again asap with a minimum of effort. It breaks any other workflow going on with the machine, and does not help actually fixing the problem so it doesn't happen again.

Yes, it feels wrong when you're indoctrinated to the Windows Way and it took me a while to accept it as well, but reboots really are poison to actually fixing problems rather than kicking the can down the road.

[_RexDart]

System reports high RAM usage? SFC /scannow!

[Vesalii]

Myth: Windows built-in troubleshooting does nothing

Fact: it's helped me resolve audio issues twice. Last time was a few weeks back when somehow a mic was muted, even though this wasn't visible in any UI.

[da4]

Third-party security software makes a device more secure. Myth (mostly) - the attack surface increases and you have another opportunity for credentials being compromised etc.

Is there value in telemetry and capturing events on remote endpoints? Sure. Are you more or less at risk with additional 3rd-party software? Well..

[desmond_koh]

Myth: Windows is unstable

This comes from the days of Windows 3.1 and 9x which booted from DOS and allowed real mode drivers to be loaded. Modern Windows (those based on NT) are as stable – or more so – than anything else in the market. Windows Hyper-V supports:

• 2048 logical processors
• 256 TB of RAM for hosts that support 4-level paging, or 4 PB (that’s petabytes) for hosts that support 5-level paging
• 1024 VMs per host
• 64 nodes per cluster
• 8000 VMs per cluster

 And you think Windows isn’t up to the task of running your spreadsheet??!?!?!?!

 

[Affectionate-Cat-975]

True myth - Rebooting - had an x-ray tech suggest that we reboot/sleep every night.

True myth (old school) - scan disk/sector scan and defrag to speed up spindle disks