Pres. Bill Clinton, System Administrator

Imagine one of those porcelain bobble-head figures mounted on the dashboard of a 1944 Jeep driving 90mph over, say, the lunar-like lava fields of Iceland. That's pretty much what my noggin looks like today as I repeatedly smash it into the my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard while perched high atop Munich on the first floor of the Panopticon.

1) Please let me know, what is the meaning of “YES” under "CHANGES REQUIRED" column in patch installation document.

Gaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!

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Maybe it was the full moon on Tuesday, but this ticket was submitted last month.

He also asked:

2) Do we need to do all the config changes mentioned as “YES” in the list?

No, not really. We only wrote that because we like making our customers do a lot of busywork. You see, it not only makes them feel special but it also requires companies to keep more admins on staff. This keeps admins in general short supply and thus props up our ridiculous salary demands.

But that's not the only one, not by a longshot.

Hi,

We ran chkdsk on our File System Drive, and encountered numerous issues...

Please let us know if $YourBigApp files are Windows standards compliant, and if its ok to run chkdsk on our File System Drive and other $YourBigApp drives.

No, dude, we totally bypass the Hardware Abstraction Layer, go straight to the motherboard and write to the drive in a compressed, interleaved trinary format. In order for you to be able to see the files we also replace the Explorer and other Win32 DLLs with our own versions.

Having finished up with Bobo, I came across Leonard's updated ticket. It started a month ago with:

We have an ofices in Asia and they are expiriencing poor application performance.
Our servers are in US.
Do you have any reccomendations?

My first recommendation: give me some info, and I specified what kind of info: traceroutes, pings, network diagrams, router and WAN specs, an Ethereal trace... the usual kind of stuff.

OK. Here is a snapshot of Asia's Reponse time for Friday. Let me know if you need anything else.

The attachment was called "response". Not "response-dot-tee-are-see" or "response-dot-gee-eye-eff", just "response". After some trial-and-error followed by looking at the header with a hex editor it turned out to be a JPEG picture of nothing but a meaningless two-line graph made by some no-name monitoring software.

Three more tickets in need of my Root Cause 17 in one day.

Also in my mail was a note from an ex-girlfriend from some years ago who's decided she needs to help me find the right girlfriend. Considering my track record she couldn't really do much worse than I've done so far.

So really what you need is a 5', 86-pound, redheaded Japanese nympho with an Aberdeen accent who's well-read and seriously into kinky. I'm going to Scotland next month so I'll keep my eye out for you.

To take my mind off that odd and eerily fascinating image I went back to re-re-reinstalling SQL Server 2005 in the hopes that if I do it often enough it might finally work.

x-posted to HuSi.