Fun and games with the internet
Jan. 30th, 2002 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerIn an effort to keep track of all the stupid questions that I have to deal with in my position as support , I grabbed a copy of the GPL'd helpdesk liberium. This rather neat helpdesk system works with the web and can use either an access database or SQL Server as a back end. I installed it in about half an hour (it turned out to be remarkably easy) and got it nearly up and running.
I say "nearly", because some older machines resolutely refused to work with it, refused to see the web site and, in fact, refused to ping the machine it was sitting on. This turned out to be a complication caused by the stupid way our network is set up (would you believe that the machines here that have internet access all have 2 IP addresses, one on the internal network, one on the internet. And no firewall at all. I know, I know. It's getting fixed next week).
So, when we get the SQL Server moved across to its new server (as happened a week and a half ago) the helpdesk stopped working. I eventually tracked down the stupid validation error (we can automatically recognise the user name of people accessing the help desk, to make sure that calls are logged to the right person) and the stupid access denied error, to finally discover that the root of all our problems is..... the 2 IP addresses per machine means that the helpdesk machine isn't using DHCP, which means that it's DNS is coming from the internet directly rather than from the Active Directory Servers, which means it can't find the main servers, which means it can't validate people's IDs. I switched across to using DHCP and it all worked - but then I couldn't access the internet properly because the proxy server isn't set up fully yet (Web is, but nothing else), so I switched it all back.
Anyway, I'm just ranting here, to give people an idea of the stupid shit I have to go through at work, just to figure out why people can't use the helpdesk this week to tell us what problems they've got.
Not that I've got time to read the helpdesk, I'm far too busy trying to work out why it isn't working :->
I say "nearly", because some older machines resolutely refused to work with it, refused to see the web site and, in fact, refused to ping the machine it was sitting on. This turned out to be a complication caused by the stupid way our network is set up (would you believe that the machines here that have internet access all have 2 IP addresses, one on the internal network, one on the internet. And no firewall at all. I know, I know. It's getting fixed next week).
So, when we get the SQL Server moved across to its new server (as happened a week and a half ago) the helpdesk stopped working. I eventually tracked down the stupid validation error (we can automatically recognise the user name of people accessing the help desk, to make sure that calls are logged to the right person) and the stupid access denied error, to finally discover that the root of all our problems is..... the 2 IP addresses per machine means that the helpdesk machine isn't using DHCP, which means that it's DNS is coming from the internet directly rather than from the Active Directory Servers, which means it can't find the main servers, which means it can't validate people's IDs. I switched across to using DHCP and it all worked - but then I couldn't access the internet properly because the proxy server isn't set up fully yet (Web is, but nothing else), so I switched it all back.
Anyway, I'm just ranting here, to give people an idea of the stupid shit I have to go through at work, just to figure out why people can't use the helpdesk this week to tell us what problems they've got.
Not that I've got time to read the helpdesk, I'm far too busy trying to work out why it isn't working :->
