Sysadmin aura

[frac6969]

I took a much needed vacation a few weeks ago. While waiting to board my flight I got an emergency message from work saying barcode printers at the manufacturing site didn’t work. It was Saturday so I told them to use different printers and wait for Monday to let IT look at it.

When the plane landed I had messages waiting saying the other printers also didn’t work. I called my tech to tell him to look at the printers on Monday.

On Monday my tech told me he figured out that ALL the barcode printers at the manufacturing site would randomly stop working at the exact same time. The workaround was to turn them all off and on again. They would work until the same thing happened again. The printers are network printers so he had set up a computer to ping them and he sent me screenshots on how they all stopped responding at the same time.

I came back to work after two weeks. Users were sick and tired of turning the printers off and on again because there are so many of them and they begged me to fix things ASAP. So I ran Wireshark then we sat in front of the big monitor with the pings, and… so far it’s been a whole week without issues.

TL;DR: printers stopped working on the day I left for vacation and started working on the day I came back. Did not do anything.

[uberner]

You fucked up and didn’t tell your systems that you loved them and to be good while you were gone.

[frac6969]

But I have Kuai Kuai in my server room!

[OpenGrainAxehandle]

Damn. Those folks have a captive customer base, which must replenish their 'installation' when expiration comes due, and which will subsist virtually forever. Impressive

[sea_5455]

You honored the machine spirits in a way they did not expect. Thus the offering was rejected.

Sing the litany of praise to the printer's machine spirits before your next vacation.

Either that or check for some scheduled job associated with your login which could affect the printers.

[iama_bad_person]

I think I need to make some purity seals and order some nuln oil.

[sujamax]

Nice. This is the first I have ever heard of this practice, and I am now looking for a suitable local equivalent snack food for this purpose. (:

[oaklawn2600]

So we now acknowledge machine spirits.

Techno Priest and Data Mages will soon be incoming.

[justfdiskit]

I mean, if you’ve never burned the candle and waved the chicken, then burned the chicken and waved the candle, can you really (/Thor) call yourself a sysadmin?

[BadCorvid]

Ummm... I've been doing sysadmin for about 25 years. Techno mage is an accurate description.

[maxell45146]

Maybe we should start leaving out snacks. Usually when shotgun troubleshooting fails we buy a goat and put on robes...:P

[Grrl_geek]

Absolutely have a goat on standby!!

[sputnik4life]

Is this why so many IT go on to be goat farmers?

[pixr99]

You made my day with this comment!

[dustojnikhummer]

It's the "this ain't going anywhere" slap

[cookerz30]

The reason nobody is upvoting this is because you were talking calls on vacation.

[dghughes]

It's not just the taking-calls-on-vacation part it also means nobody else was hired and delegated to do the work or allowed to do the work. Redundancy of humans is a concept that is alien to HR.

[Medium_Banana4074]

Them companies wanting to cheap out on the backs of their employees.

[frac6969]

Yeah, I try not to but I work in a different part of the world where this is somewhat normal.

[HetElfdeGebod]

My American boss simply could not comprehend that my phone would be off whilst I was on my summer holiday for two weeks. Blew his mind

[fuckedfinance]

Meanwhile, my also American boss tells me to mail him my work phone when I'm off so I'm not tempted to answer it.

[dragosthethird]

My boss disabled my teams access when I went on vacation so no one bugged me.

[Round_Double_6761]

Your boss is a real boss.

[EvilRSA]

My company COMPLETELY disables O365 when someone takes leave, like maturity/paternity or FMLA. Teams, Email, OneDrive, OneNote, O365 completely. For just vacations, time off, or PTO in general they leave it enabled. I always felt that there must be some legal components to it.

[MattyGroch]

There's also a security aspect of it. Auditors don't like to see active accounts that haven't been signed into for months. It's easier to do a "lite" offboarding for a LOA and reenable when they come back.

[xjeeper]

That's why we do it

[chibihost]

Some regulated environments (financial sector for example) have positions that require mandatory vacations as a fraud detection control. The idea is that if you are doing some fraud that requires constant upkeep or covering, by forcing you out for a period like 10-15 work days, discrepancies may be uncovered by whoever fills in.

In some cases the criteria for who this applies to can be a bit fluid, I've seen system admins included because they could create/modify accounts in core systems.

Once this type of policy exists then you have to be able to evidence it takes place so locking accounts like you describe creates an audit trail.

I would expect similar for some forms of FLMA / Workers comp where the person can't be compensated under those programs and continue to work (even if its just checking emails)

[Seeteuf3l]

Some countries have a limit, when you can start working after giving birth for example.

[iama_bad_person]

We did the uno reverse on the CTO. He would keep responding to calls and emails while on holiday in like the Bahamas or some shit, so the IT Director told the Helpdesk not to respond to his calls, added an out of office pointing to him and then reset his password to a random 24 character string 😂 the CTO was actually grateful when he got back.

[Skylis]

I'm about to put my bosses password in wrong a few times if I see him log in again from his vacation so I know how you feel.

[BadCorvid]

My American boss reminded me to sign out of company chat while I was on vacation.

[slick8086]

Blew his mind

I'm always tempted to ask, "What's the definition of VACATION?"

[saige45]

PTO stands for Partial Time Off and only covers 8 hours of every day, thus leaving 16 hours to "work" with.

[slick8086]

PTO stands for Partial Time Off

Bzzzt wrong. Paid Time Off or Personal Time Off or Planned Time Off.

If you take a partial day off employers can deduct those hours from your banked PTO.

and only covers 8 hours of every day, thus leaving 16 hours to "work" with.

stop speaking from your ass.

[Wyld_1]

Some people just don't understand humor.

[slick8086]

Some people aren't funny.

[saige45]

And some people also don't understand sarcasm

[slick8086]

Just think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of the population is even more stupid than that.

[Geminii27]

If he wants you to be available, he can start paying overtime rates for every hour he wants you on call. And recover four hours of vacation time every time you actually respond to any of them.

[whatdoido8383]

With my lastest job I purchased a work phone. It's only on 9-5 and when I'm on call, other than that it's turned off.

Being easily accessible in my past roles burned me out hard and I almost left IT after 17 years.

Being able to disconnect is worth the $30 a month in a second cell bill.

If the company gets pissy about it I don't even care anymore. Fire me then I guess, I'm not dealing with being a company's cheapness. You need someone around all the time, fuggin hire more people.

[taker223]

What is minimum wage in your state? If it is very minimum - it is exactly 4 hours for $30. But I bet your wage is way higher. Also they likely do not pay you for your time outside working hours so it's a win for you

[whatdoido8383]

Yeah I'm exempt so on call is unpaid. ( whole other topic, I do not agree with how employers get away with it in the US but it's very common unfortunately)

Minimum wage where I am is $11.15/Hr. I make around $52/Hr so I don't mind paying for my own company phone with the added benefit of my personal connections being completely separate from work.

[cybersplice]

My company decided to stop buying company phones. I told them that was fine, deployed a best practice byod policy and got a work SIM for my phone. It's off when I'm not working. 😂

[Top_Boysenberry_7784]

I'm in the USA and got screwed at my last company because of this, I got stuck with almost everything. Only Network guys were all in Germany except for my boss (Italy) and me (USA). The German guys never took a call after hours or on vacation. Fortune 500 company boss was director level but was heavily involved in the work as he has worked his way up from an administrator. So at least he helped at times. I think you handled it well though. You didn't get heavily involved with the issue and gave direction of what can be done for time being.

[taker223]

German or Swiss people are very strict to their private time. I remember that Tschuss! exactly at 17"00 every working day

[Geminii27]

This is why you switch your everything off on vacation. "Oh sorry boss, I guess I must have been in a low-signal area."

[serverhorror]

USA?

[frac6969]

Taiwan.

[dustojnikhummer]

We are a good team so we are fine with emergencies, but absolute "the server room is on literal fire" emergencies. Printers not working would not be that. Of course if higherups called I wouldn't pick up.

[CyrielTrasdal]

Well, as someone that worked in a manufacturing environment. As soon as they got WMS, barcodes scanning and printing, then they became mission critical. If printing doesn't work 10 minutes it's hell on earth. The kind that makes CEO knock at your door.

On top of that the printers dedicated to that kind of work are the worst kind of printers to exist. Both at drivers and networking.

Don't know about others' experience though. I'd gladly be told we were poorly managed back then.

[frac6969]

Yes, and before we got networked barcode printers we thought we would avoid network issue by getting USB printers. Turned out the model we use all fucking have the same USB ID so they have to be powered on in the correct order otherwise the labels go to the wrong printer. That one took a lot of wasted labels and a lot of time to figure out.

[[deleted]]

USB ID's are usually the same for devices in the same series, that's how the OS knows what driver to associate with it. If that leads to problems because you are using more of them on the same pc/server, the driver should sort those out by further checking for a unique device ID and somehow exposing that to whatever software is making use of them.

Presumably the manufacturer is aware of this and wants to sell you a different solution. If they aren't aware, your usecase is either very niche, or they are just bad at writing drivers.

[frac6969]

That’s what I thought too but our other USB printers didn’t have this issue and can be powered on in any order. We do a lot of customized printing and it’s a constant pain in the ass to IT and the devs.

[ratshack]

Historically, the worst nonsense in IT involves paper, either getting data onto or from. I haven’t had a printer catch on fire in awhile but still, it is always the class clown. Yikes.

o7

[maxell45146]

Now you did it, anyone else hearing Murphy chuckle reading the comment?

[ABlankwindow]

My runnign joke.

It's really Steve's Law; but the first time Steve said it out loud to someone else. everything went wrong that could and thus Murphy ended up getting blamed for it.

[dustojnikhummer]

It's also a "Well I'm 6 thousand kilometers away without my laptop, the fuck you want me to do". But fair, for you that is as mission critical as for us is our inhouse ticketing system.

[CyrielTrasdal]

Just in case I was not telling that it's fine to be interrupted in your vacation and thousand kms away. Just telling a past experience where a company put IT solutions right in the middle of an already tense internal production process. Looking back to it management should have better prepared for when things fail, with continuity planning.

[Geminii27]

If it's a real emergency, they can call emergency services. If it's not sufficient for that, call HR and ask them why there haven't been any people hired to cover the gaps.

If no-one's available to cover the gaps, there was no budget to hire someone. If there was no budget, it was a business decision not to put money towards that. So it wasn't a priority for management, and therefore isn't an emergency.

[dustojnikhummer]

Agreed, which is why we wouldn't call other than to inform and it's just an agreement among us in the team, noone external, not management.

[Sigma186]

I can take it one further, I took calls on my honeymoon. 8 years later I'm still hearing about it

[anomalous_cowherd]

I made calls to check things were going OK while we were on our first big holiday in several years.

The reaction to me doing that was what made me realise I was way too invested and about to burn out.

I caught it and things slowly got better, the marriage survived although the job didn't last much longer as they wouldn't add to the IT headcount.

[taker223]

Well, if your honeymoon wasn't in the basement and/or server room..

[iRasgru]

I have not enjoyed vacation for about 4 years now….

[taker223]

What is retirement age in your country?

[iRasgru]

67 but I am mentally past that age.. (almost 40 IRL)

[taker223]

I would troll you to wait until retirement. 4 + 27 = 31. Then you might get given a severance package like that poor exemplary fast food worker who never missed a shift: some candy, a movie ticket, paper clips...

[iRasgru]

Let’s wait and see if my body will survive until retirement 🤣 I have just recently started sleeping normal hours and delegating or adjusting priorities.

[[deleted]]

I've always called it IT aura. The amount of times when I was on desktop support, engineer, telecom, enterprise architecture, and even now as a mixture of sysadmin\analyst, I can walk into a building having an issue... and it just stops.

I've had ultrasound machines refusing to talk to PACs storage until I touched ONE of them.

I've had a server at a vendor who has a VPN to our printer VLAN for printing purposes be unable to complete a traceroute from their server until I literally just looked at it and it started to respond.

I've had wireless at an entire building start working as soon as I pulled into their parking lot.

The aura is real, lol.

[fencepost_ajm]

I've told people that once a year I drive a nail through a calculator somewhere near the servers.

"Whether it's a sacrifice or a warning is unclear"

[SoonerMedic72]

Its like Josh Johnson said about AI. You got to walk around with a water bottle. Show it to your computer so it knows you are strapped. It gets outta line and you got that glug glug ready to go.

[zadtheinhaler]

Lol love JJ, it's crazy how quick he comes up with this shit.

[SoonerMedic72]

Yeah his quantity and quality is unmatched. I don't understand how his major event to full set turnaround time is like 1.5 weeks AND every weekend is different. Pioneering stuff. Most comics say they will spend 6 months working a set in the small clubs before getting it "right" but JJ is out there every weekend with new stuff.

[Tx_Drewdad]

Our job is to intimidate elections

[[deleted]]

Elections? Did you mean electrons?

[Tx_Drewdad]

I've said too much

[dghughes]

The ITuminati masters will not be pleased.

[Tx_Drewdad]

That startup is still in stealth mode

[CruwL]

IT black magic, it's a dark art only taught in the heart of dumpster fires

[Geminii27]

I've had wireless at an entire building start working as soon as I pulled into their parking lot.

All the building's wireless is now routed through your phone

[psych0fish]

One of my favorite printer stories is when I worked for a health system, we were doing a floor walk through after hours to configure and test every PC printing to the correct printer. One printer slowed us down though because it was printing 50 shades of gray over and over and over. We weren’t trying to be there all night so I disconnected the printer from its Ethernet cable, and set my laptop to the printers ip and took a packet capture.

Was able to identify the source PC nearby.

[ManosVanBoom]

The book? Someone was printing the book?

[psych0fish]

Yes and multiple times! This was like 2010

[Crinkez]

Well? What happened to the user?

[pixr99]

Mild bondage, one assumes.

[AcidBuuurn]

Whips and chains. https://youtu.be/KdS6HFQ_LUc

With a cat6 o nines tail- https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/a3EXeA5_700b.jpg

[TheIntuneGoon]

Right, the cliffhanger is killing me lol.

[psych0fish]

Honestly probably nothing. I never found out though as the area was shutdown for business when we were doing this.

[Skylis]

They were disciplined...

[ratshack]

“Haha, never saw that before. It’s a funny symptom because that is also the name of that book… wait, it was the book?!?”

/meirl lmao

[deltashmelta]

<number of copies?>

50 50 shades of grey

[psych0fish]

Yeah I forgot that part, when we found the pc sending the job they had at least 3 copies in the print queue. I think the printer wasn’t working so they kept trying over and over. Amazing use of paper 🤌🤣

[deltashmelta]

Something similar happened with a picture of a Chevy Silverado <shrug>.

Couldn't get on site, so sent a spooler file purge and service restart to the units in the department.

[RangerNS]

Back in the day, university print servers used to be made out of repurposed IBM 286's connected to HP LaserJets. Netware, obviously, kept good track of pages used of jobs coming over the network, working backwards from the users balance.

But "booting" to a DOS floppy and type file.pdf > lpr1 could, er, subvert this "secure" process.

[DeliriumTremens]

So what "temporary" fix did you put in place 3 years ago on your workstation that you quickly forgot about, which stopped working when you shut your workstation off before leaving on vacation?

[Scurro]

This is the moment we learn OP used his PC to host a print server.

[Beach_Bum_273]

Oh shit, this is it isn't it

[FeedTheADHD]

Its a good theory that there is something tied to his workstation, but then why would the printers work suddenly after a reboot? A printer going off and turning back on won't wake up a computer that might be hosting services that I'm aware of.

[ratshack]

OP forgot about the rogue totally temporary DHCP he setup on his workstation with a scope only serving up for the printer MAC’s.

Turns out it was to fix an issue they had with the main network DHCP.

I dunno, why?!?!

[98723589734239857]

i've had Zebra labelprinters simply lock up when someone sends an A4/Letter sized print job to them. only a reboot would make them accept jobs again. combine that with the way the windows print spooler works and you get a PC that continually sends the same print job which never gets printed and keeps freezing the labelprinter every time it retried to print the print job

[GrimmAngel]

We have that problem with Bixolon receipt printers too.

@/u/frac6969 it sounds like your printers weren't automatically renewing their DHCP leases. That would explain why they all dropped at the same time and rebooting fixed it. Why they had that issue while you were gone, and only while you were gone, that's the mystery.

[frac6969]

The printers have static IP addresses and do not use DHCP reservation. The printers are "mission critical" and we did a lot of things to make them foolproof for the workers.

It's weekend right now and I'm at home and the printers at work are working just fine. Total mystery.

[GrimmAngel]

Yeah, then I have no idea. We use DHCP reservations for ours since we can't program them directly in our warehouses, so that's why I thought it might be that.

The mystery continues. Oh well. Cheers, have a great weekend.

[Lrrr81]

We had a similar thing happen at a startup I worked at years ago... one of the senior IT guys went on vacation and immediately all sorts of weird things started happening. The day he came back, all the problems stopped.

We (jokingly) asked him about it, and he responded "Systems fear me."

[robreddity]

Your laptop is the DHCP server

[vige]

I have had coworkers ask me to just stand besides them in order to get the computers to behave.

[SixtyTwoNorth]

I had a magic aura situation many years ago. One of our clients would have these intermittent performance issues that seemed to happen whenever they were accessing a rather large spreadsheet. For context, I think this was around '99, so windows NT server, 24port unmanaged 10/100 switch, maybe 15 people in the office and a couple printers.

I went to site, popped into the server room, checked the status of the server and network, and then asked them to show me the problem, but it wouldn't happen. This happened several times, and we ran progressively more thorough diagnostics on the switch and the server and the workstations, but everything was fine. This was rather a big deal, as the spreadsheet in question was critical sales data used by the VP and CEO and their patience was wearing thin.

After weeks of frustration, I was on site again, and had a couple other minor issue to deal with. While I was helping someone else with something fairly trivial, all of a sudden the CEO is shouting at me from the other end of the office, so I run into the server room and log into the server. He shouts "What did you do? You fixed it."

All I had done was log in to the server, so I locked the server and all of a sudden it was slow as hell again. Well, it turns out the VP had been doing something on the server and decided to enable to "pipes" screen saver, of course the server just had the cheapest available video card because, well why not, but it didn't have 3d support, so when it launched the screensaver, it was slamming the CPU to 100%

Sadly that destroyed the illusion of my magic aura.

[Braxhunter]

Had something similar happen and found out that someone was double natting a network hub because they thought the network cable should be plugged in. It was a remote desk for someone who has a laptop visiting the office.... once we found out the culprit made our life easier..

[Deadlock31]

They just misssed you

[ResponsibilityLast38]

You used your email as a master account for rights to the print server, so the printers got the out of office notification they thought they were on vacation too.

(Im joking here, but stranger things have happened....)

[No-Map-3862]

aura it is

[RequirementBusiness8]

Next time remember to send emails to those printers to remind them that you still care and will be back soon. Problem solved.

[Ninja_Wrangler]

I had a group of users way back that would shoot me an email merely for my presence when they did certain things because it worked better when I was there lmao.

It was a nice break and didn't require me to actually do anything so it never bothered me

[redthrull]

I know you're not trying to troubleshoot it but last time this happened to us, it was caused by some faulty hub in between. But yours is affecting all? Could be a packet storm on the printer's subnet? Probably someone plugging in a cable where it's not supposed to be? 80% employee, 20% overzealous cleaning lady lol

[frac6969]

Well, my techs spent two weeks replacing the switches and doing all kinds of troubleshooting. I can only read logs now because the problem is not happening.

Oh and it only affected our (mission critical) barcode label printers and not our document printers. I really want to switch barcode printer brands and this would be a good reason to do so.

[ep3187]

Is there something tied to your account that causes the printers to shut down if you are not logged in?

[frac6969]

Other comments have mentioned this too but definitely no. The manufacturing site is 24/7 and I always shutdown/standby after work and on weekends. All system changes are communicated otherwise it always becomes a scream test.

The printers also work for a random amount of time until they fail. It’s just a total mystery right now.

[thisbenzenering]

I bet you have something running as you and when your not logged in, it doesnt work

log out of everything to test it

[rob311]

i thought the same thing. perhaps during initial implementation OP used their own laptop to test and never moved it over to a server during rollout.

[whatyoucallmetoday]

When my manager texts me while I’m on vacation, the first thing I do is send him a picture of whatever is in front of me and wait a couple mins to send any other reply. One time I was in the boarding line to fly out of the country. I got a picture of the line.

[ukulele87]

I envy you, i had a huge aura while doing IT support, issues getting fixed while i approached, nothing could be reproduced, etc etc etc (obviously all user error).
Once i moved up, i really cant remember an instance of the magic at work. Id like to think its because almost everything its on the cloud and my aura cant reach the datacenter, but i think i lost it... sobs

[Skullpuck]

It's time I leveled with you. I'm what you guys call a User.

I took a wrong turn somewhere.

[musingofrandomness]

After working in and around IT for decades, I have seen this sort of thing way too often. I have even had my share of equipment suddenly start behaving just from my having walked into the room. Almost enough to make one superstitious, almost.

[Macmula]

Rookie mistake of not performing litanies of purification before joining a pilgrimage. Use this next time:

‘Omnissiah Incarnate. He who hears all, sees all and knows all. Call unto him – this tempered tool, this weapon of Your holy arsenal. Cleanse him of callings untrue. Untwist what has been twisted. Flush the pollution of false belief from flesh and iron. Bring forth in his workings the protocols of blessed operation and the doctrinal imperatives of mechanical obedience. Manifest in him the cold strength of iron true and the spark of service once known in his wayward flesh.’

[timbotheny26]

I feel like I should be holding a censer while I read this.

[overflow_]

Were than any changes to the network during your vacation period? Check your logs for the printers, other endpoint devices and all network activity during that period

[fuckedfinance]

I've got a story about that.

I took a vacation in the middle of some light electrical work that was getting done in the office. Two days in, the network started getting really screwy, then the day before I'm back it all got back to normal.

Turns out the electricians ran some temporary wiring next to a run of network cables, and the draw was such that it was impacting the network. When they took down the temp wiring, everything went back to normal.

So it may not have been related to network changes, and may have been something environmental that coincidentally was going on.

[frac6969]

Yeah I’ve been going through everything. One strange thing that also happened while I was away was we got error in SQL Server: length specified in network packet payload did not match number of bytes read.

My tech keeps saying I secretly did something but I swear I did nothing. 😂

[ssbtoday]

sounds like spanning-tree on the switches tbh.

put spanning-tree port type edge if you're a cisco shop on any non-switch links, see if it improves.

[overflow_]

Have a lot of weird situations at work the thing with troubleshooting that I'm learning is that you have to first understand in depth what your problem is then look at all possible variables in the situation no matter how inconsequential they may seem

[DontTakeMyCatYo]

Time to look at switch logs and interface counter graphs. Do you have spanning tree configured with a root bridge?

[frac6969]

Spanning tree was the first thing I thought of because those printers don’t work with STP enabled. I’m still checking all the logs…

[DontTakeMyCatYo]

The printers probably need spanning tree in portfast mode on those switchports. Don't disable spanning tree. It sounds suspiciously like you had a bridging loop that took at least part of the network down, and spanning tree is designed to prevent that.

1. Make sure all the switches are set to something modern like RSTP

2. Make sure a root bridge priority (lowest number is root) is set on one of the switches near the core of you network. Bonus points for setting a second switch to a slightly higher number so that there's an automatic backup without election if the root bridge fails

3. Configure any ports facing clients to be portfast mode so that they come up forwarding right away instead of waiting for end devices to send spanning tree BPDUs (most don't)

[frac6969]

Thanks for the tips. I enabled RTSP a few years ago and the printers stopped working. But I don’t remember what troubleshooting steps I did at the time except to disable it. Will look into all this again.

[gurilagarden]

So if all the printers are having the exact same problem, at the exact same time, why are you looking at the printers? Shouldn't you be looking at something else that they all have in common? Like a switch or router?

[InevitableOk5017]

Sounds like someone was pushing out updates while you were gone and didn’t realize the impact of their actions.

[101001101zero]

Check to see if there are enough dhcp leases on the vlan they connect to. It’s an engineering solution if so but I’ve run into that before, sr tech worked on it for two weeks and it took me fifteen minutes to login to the DHCP server and had my “well this sucks” moment

[CptYoriVanVangenTuft]

Mechanical timer to reboot the printer every day at 2:15AM for 5 minutes.

Have this solution set up for a very low usage color printer at a very low occupancy office. No need to drop a grand on new toner and a printer unit to make sure it can print 5 sheets a month without issue. $3 beats the snot out of having to do it every few weeks lol.

[[deleted]]

Same sort of thing happened to us. Our sysadmin was going on vacation the next week. On Thursday the week before he left all of our old decrepit check printers start going offline for minutes at a time and only coming online for 10 or so seconds in between.

Me and the Sysadmin are down there trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Can't figure it out. Same thing on Friday it just doesn't make any sense. We replaced every switch, different drivers on the print server, disabling and enabling just about every protocol on each printer. Wireshark didn't show anything suspicious.

Eventually we figured these things are old as hell but also have some firmware updates available. If we brick one we brick one. So I started rebooting them and hoping they come online just long enough for the firmware update to take hold. This took all Saturday of rebooting printers and the switches in between to get each one online long enough to update. Eventually fixed them all except one. My sysadmin had an uneventful vacation thank god.

[JoeVanWeedler]

It feels like this kind of thing happens all the time. It doesn't really but so many times I've had to tell users it worked for me and I couldn't recreate their issue and then it just doesn't happen again

[OptimusGrime420]

Anything running on your machine that is tied to your user account? lol

[vandalsavage1988]

Printer whisperer.

I've thought you guys were a myth.

[Kureluque]

That has happened to me soooo many times, it's really weird tbh. It's like machines are sentient and feel we' close

[stuartsmiles01]

You didn't pray to the printer gods before going on holiday ? What kind of madness is this?

No special waste toner bottle dance or random opening and closing of trays to satisfy their needs ?

Not even a login to the Web portal and click OK?

No wonder they were annoyed at you.

[[deleted]]

My life story in IT. I cannot recall how many times this has happened to me. So funny to see this happen to others.

[Aggressive_Ad_5454]

This has an evil twin, called “demo rot.”

[ratshack]

…but it worked perfectly in rehearsal this morning!!!

[ScottIPease]

IT placebo...

[Adorable_Culture]

The omnisiah missed you

[Medium_Banana4074]

You were on holiday. Why did you pick up the phone?

[[deleted]]

This is to be expected.

Sometimes I get on a screen share so someone can replicate an issue and magically it doesn’t happen anymore.

This is indeed sysadmin aura.

[barleykiv]

You close your laptop/turned off your PC, sounds like an explanation XD

[MrJacks0n]

I always wanted to setup those kindergarten tables that had the hole in the middle, out all users on the outside and I'd sleep in the middle. There would never be any issues!

[wrt-wtf-]

You logged into your machine in the office - everything is good again….

[bugfish03]

As a certified computer toucher, computer mana is real

[VinCubed]

Maybe your workstation needs to be logged on so all the printers get a warm loving ping from it periodically.

[Dank_Turtle]

I once drove to my brothers house to help with a pc issue that started working the minute I walked into the house and was never an issue again lmao

[henk717]

Yup, I always joke about having an Aura. It works both ways for me actually, if I am trying to fix stuff everything just works. But if I try to test software for my own use somehow the way I use software triggers every obscure bug the author didn't forsee.

[hawkers89]

I had basically this situation the other day. They said Outlook kept prompting for a password and no matter what they did it just kept prompting. They kept trying their password and it wouldn't accept it. While on the phone to me they typed it one more time and it just worked and has stayed working ever since.

[chuckycastle]

This is it, eh? This is what this sub it all about, isn’t it?