Random Tech (or IT Work!) Fail

[Hellfury]

I'm hearing a lot of Government groups who, for some fucking reason, still don't understand why most of us delay updates for a few weeks are being hit hard right now.

I get wanting to patch as quickly as possible, but if it bricks your site every few months, you would think you would start putting a delay on things.

It came in via defender security updates and not regular windowsupdates, so if you have the ASR rule it goes haywire, regular deferral on updates haven't saved any of the clients I work with at least.


(edit for more info

Windows Update for Business provides three types of updates in Windows:

Feature Updates. These updates include security and quality revisions, and feature additions and changes. They're released approximately every 4 to 8 months.
Quality Updates. These operating system updates typically are released the second Tuesday of each month (though they can be released at any time). These include security, critical, and driver updates. Updates to other Microsoft products (such as those for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Visual Studio) are also treated as Quality Updates.

Non-deferrable updates. Antimalware and antispyware Definition Updates from Windows Update are mandatory and cannot be deferred. )

[The Stig]

I surrendered today over an issue, here's my report if anyone has seen it:

Win 10, Office 365 by the way. I scrubbed out personal identifiable information like names

Hey team, I have an extremely curious problem that i wondered if you have any input on
I've just been troubleshooting mark's laptop over about 1.5 hours regarding his issue in office 365, specifically in excel and powerpoint.initially, I could not figure out why his Excel was taking ages to load (it freezes for a bit on startup before the main excel screen loads or before the file loads); this was causing frustrations when trying to work as he works with loads of spreadsheets
So I decided a reinstall of office should be done. This was done and the problem has gone away...... but has moved to the other end. It now hangs for a while on shutdown. The powerpoint issue is gone though, they seem to load fine and close fine.Now, I've done a significant amount of testing and found this

· Excel will hang upon closing even if no file is opened. This is not a file issue

· If you leave Excel open for about 3-5 minutes, Excel will close fine like normal

· If you immediately close Excel under 3 minutes, then Excel will hang and take a while before it actually closes

· Task Manager does not report any irregular CPU/RAM/DISK/NETWORK usage

· This is not an add-in issue either; I compared mine and his add-ins and it was the same

· This issue does not happen in safe mode Excel

· If you open multiple Excel files; only the final file to be closed and if in under 3 minutes would Excel hang. Closing other files except the last one does not trigger the issue

· Event viewer doesn't provide any information. It only logs it as a crash (application hang) if you end task Excel

· Currently I have suggested that for as long as he don't close Excel within 5 minutes, the problem shouldn't be noticed

Other things are that it's not an account issue too, the problem is still present even if Excel is not signed in. It's not a onedrive issue either (I've seen Onedrive can affect it closing because it waits for upload to upload/sync). Except reformatting, or providing a new laptop, I have no more ideas

[Melena]

32bit install or 64bit? If it's a fairly large workbook or has a ton of formulas or addons, 32bit will hang pretty easy due to memory limitations.

Also, as dumb as this sounds, I've cleared up a ton of excel performance issues just with bios and chipset driver updates (Dell laptop).

[The Stig]

64 bit, no file involved

All the tests i've performed were without a file open, or on a blank file where 1 cel had a food value as a test

This is dell laptop too haha and indeed updating bios and chipset drivers does sound dumb. but, I admit I didn't think down that line. I'll see when I can get on his laptop tomorrow and run the dell thing. I'm happy to try anything at this point.

[Yabby]

Second the drivers. You will be amazed what will cause issues.

We had an issue where Vmware Horzion would crash without any errors and would create large dump files (5 gigs a pop). It only happened when using PCoIP. It was filling up hard drives in just a few days of use. Turns out it was an intel G-card issue only happening to dell laptops, and there was a range of drivers version that all had this problem (This is what made it hard to track down, we had hundreds of laptops deployed and this was only happening to about 20 people). Doing windows updates would update almost all of these drivers/firmware, but the G-card driver that fixed the issue couldn't be pulled from windows update. I had to go to intel to get the correct driver.

[Melena]

Also for Dell's, download and install Dell Command Update, don't use their other software. Command Update only needs to be installed with admin rights. The Dell Support Center though flat out will not update unless you are logged into an administrator account.

[zoobernut]

The school I work for part time is isolated due to a major mud slide right now. It would take me about 4 hours to drive to it instead of the normal 45 minutes. The firewall there is dying and continually rebooting. It is working in between reboots though. Their main WAN connection keeps going down because of all the storms we have been having and the backup connection is two old school satellite connections that are super slow. In addition to that the DHCP server database became corrupted and crashed and wouldn't come back up. I tried to restore from the backup that was taken automatically and the backup was corrupt too. It isn't a hugely complicated LAN environment but it was still a pain in the butt to rebuild it and it isn't quite 100% back to where it needs to be. Too many darn issues all at once.

[The Stig]

The user is busy for the rest of the week for me to revisit the laptop. Might an update next week now lol

[Melena]

That is always the damn case. I got a laptop to ship back to HP but the person is on vacation and won't be able to drop it off till monday

Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk

[Yabby]

I remember closing tickets a long time ago because this bitch put in a ticket at 4:59 Friday about an issue she was having, then went on vacation for 2 weeks.

Ticket Closed: Don't put in tickets if you are not going to be available for support. When she came back, we didn't service her ticket for another week because everyone was pissed off at the move.

[Jamison]

Ticket status: waiting on caller

Ticket closed: no response from caller in 48 hours

[Melena]

That's pretty much our policy. 72 hours with a follow up each day. If no response, close and tell them to open a new one.