Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates the frolicsome fun that readers have experienced when asked to deliver tech support.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nigel" who shared a story from 2004 when the office he worked in found itself in the path of Hurricane Ivan, the superstorm that rampaged its way across the Caribbean and the USA for almost three weeks.

I am trying to use powershell to setup a process that off boards users and doing the AD side of things is great but I am not sure how to use powershell to interact with our other software that only has a gui.

For example user management in studio3T where they only have a web UI or an application that you can download and run locally.

Hi all, hopefully this question isn't out of context.

I'm currently working with OpenText Content Management Solution hosted on AWS using Kubernetes.

Currently facing a challenge related to case sensitivity in our PostgreSQL database.

We are using AWS RDS PostgreSQL v15.0 with OpenText version 24.4.6.

By default, PostgreSQL is case-sensitive, which is causing issues with the content management services; Users are looking for case-insensitive functionality, but our current setup does not support this.

Did want to suggest switching to Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL, as both can be configured for case insensitivity. Unfortunately, due to organization requirements, I cant change it.

I have a friend who also used OpenText Content Services, but he didn't encounter the same issue because he was using Microsoft SQL. Additionally, he was running it on a bare metal Windows server rather than Kubernetes.

I looked through the official Cloud Deployment Guide for OpenText, but I couldn't find any configuration options related to case insensitivity.

Additionally, I explored suggested solutions on StackOverflow regarding case-insensitive queries or collation, but these are not applicable since we do not have control over the SQL queries or table creation in OpenText.

Currently the organization is trying to get developers to customize it on the API level to make it case-insensitive. But was wondering if anyone encountered a similar issue and managed to configure OpenText to be case-insensitive instead.

So that's why a 2 systems were getting crappy speeds. Yes, 2. It had been used only to split a single drop from another switch between two systems.

New drop, happy clients.

Some stuff here is museum material.

How can I reject mail that does not have a DMARC policy enabled? Using Postfix 3.6.4 and OpenDMARC 1.4.2.

Hi, I can't seem to find if there's a consensus on this so asking here.

Not all CIs are assets and not all assets are CIs. But many assets and CIs are the same physical or virtual thing.

I see some vendors (e.g. ServiceNow, Freshservice) have separate asset databases and CMDBs. and other (e.g. Jira Service Management) have a combined database.

Do you have any preference one way or the other? Are there pros and cons to do it a certain way? To me it seems like maintaining two databases is more fiddly and time consuming but I don't know.

Instead, I want to take aim at a misconception that I think Pablo shares with many, many people in the software industry. Namely, the idea that if a software system is built correctly, it will work. Or, equivalently: if a software system doesn’t work, then it wasn’t built correctly.

Hi, I apologize if this is not the place for this (if not please direct me where to) but I am in need of some advice for LAN RDP solution. These will be used in recording studios to minimize noise. The configuration goes like this; there are two different computers being remoted into over the LAN. In the studio are three monitors, two of them are used for one RDP session while third for the second tower. I initially had some trouble with Multi-mon until I checked the MS Learn rdp page. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mstsc

The problems start occurring when recording audio to Adobe Audition (I think that's the name of the product). Initially the sound card wouldn't show up until I set the audio flag to 1 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/rdp-properties#device-redirection. One of the things done in the user's workflow is to capture audio from the browser into the Adobe product which also wasn't initially working until I checked "Release Audio Driver to the Background" in the settings menu. However, this only works in Edge not even Chrome can do that surprisingly. And even then, it's not consistent, there are some weird things the user has to with which program's window is active. In the same vein of the issue, the fixes I just described only work on towers with a dedicated soundcard. Another employee installed something called Virtual audio cable (https://vb-audio.com/Cable/index.htm). Unfortunately, I wasn't around at this time to see what problem it solved and how. And furthermore, I've a single complaint about program windows not showing up on one of the remote computers. Not sure if that is a result of their RDP session not being an administrative one (that's my first guess). I haven't been able to observe this myself, so I don't have any details, and my emails aren't being returned.

Prior to my attempt at an RDP solution, we were using Dell Wyse thin clients and Teradici gpus. This equipment is fairly old, failing consistently now and also very expensive to replace. I'm open to all suggestions though, I've been sort of eyeing VNC but I'm unsure of how it interacts with audio recording and multi monitor sessions. Sorry for the wall of text and thanks to any who reply.

Oh look, Oracle fucking up again!

Aw yeah, because Salesforce is sooo much better. Our Savior!/s lmao

What are your strategies when a MySQL/MariaDB database server grows to have too much traffic for a single host to handle, i.e. scaling CPU/RAM is not an option anymore? Do you deploy ProxySQL to start splitting the traffic according to some rule to two different hosts? What would the rule be, and how would you split the data? Has anyone migrated to TiDB? In that case, what was the strategy to detect if the SQL your app uses is fully compatible with TiDB?

LinkedIn damned near landed me a sweet job. They were ready to offer, but HR put their thumb on the scale for their guy. Just barely missed another this week from Indeed, think asking $60-$70K was too much for that place, and if so, fuck 'em, that was a serious lowball. Networked what little I could, don't know may people any more, and certainly not in tech.

What are your go-to places to job hunt?

It's been sounding like a dead fan bearing in the rack for a while, there's really old machines in there. Turns out no! The drive did the screeching. I was stunned for a second when the noise stopped upon its removal.

Platter smoke. Don't breathe this!

F'in Oracle strikes again lol

I'm trying to set up a Windows system so that all multiple logins are tied to the same local user. I want it to be multiple logins so nobody has to share a password and it needs to be effectively the same user so that saved items are easy to find. Other than using GPOs to remap things like documents to be a logcal user at login does anyone know a clean way to go about this? A lead hand signs into the system at the beginning of a shift and then other people use the computer to operate a connected device. So if they save a file another person could have logged in next time they try to open it and our users aren't always the smartest and the more uniform it is for them the better.