Posted by Jim at June 26th, 2004

Doing technical support/system administration has some odd moments. Here are a few:

1. One of our directors has occasionally mentioned to me that she has pop-up ads come up on her computer a lot. No big deal, she uses Internet Explorer, what do you expect, right?

This week I had a little time and happened to be there when she had one appear. Her browser was not open. In short, someone had installed adware on her machine.

After a bit of work with a program called bazooka, I determined that someone had installed “System Soap,” a program that removes evidence of what web sites you’ve gone to. “System Soap” also installs adware which allows you receive ads at any time.

More investigation showed that System Soap could not have been installed accidentally. It apparently requires both a credit card number and an email address. When I mentioned that, she said, “Oh, that would explain these.” She’d been getting a System Soap newsletter for months, assuming that it was just spam.

Thus, it appears that someone else has been using “System Soap” at her computer for at least 3 months, looking at who knows what websites.

The person also appears to be stupid enough to provide our director’s email address rather than his/her own in the product registration section. Unfortunately, the person is not stupid enough to leave me enough clues to identify them.

Yet.

2. Yesterday morning I decided I’d finally install Windows XP onto one of the older computers at work. It’s primarily used by the business manager. The computer is fast enough to run XP, but it turned out that there were some other problems. The cdrom and the floppy drive both didn’t work, something that makes it impossible to upgrade the computer and calls into question a number of other things.

I knew that the floppy worked in another computer so the chances that it was the problem seemed small. Thus, the problem would have to be either the motherboard or the power supply’s connection to the two drives. Power supplies are $30-40 parts, but this was a custom Dell power supply… So, no garuantees that I could ever find one. And with motherboards you may as well buy another computer. It’s just not worth trying to upgrade only a motherboard unless it’s new.

So, the computer’s totalled. We bought another. It seems like such a waste because the computer works, doing everything it needs to, but, at the same time, if we ever need to upgrade anything at all, we’ll have to buy a new computer. Best to get it over with.

Still, on a gut level it annoys me.

3. After a few weeks of good service, SBC is again causing me pain. Sending email has been inconsistently available all week. The error message explains that the server does not recognize the username or password. Anywhere from an hour to four hours later, it will recognize the password.

SBC’s technical support has been very polite, but ultimately useless. They’ve explained to me that it’s probably a result of Yahoo upgrading their email services (SBC outsources email to Yahoo). Unfortunately, they also say that only webmail should be affected by that. We don’t use email via the web at all. We just use SBC’s smtp to send. Testing the webmail, however, did show that webmail works for us.

It’s just smtp with mail clients (like Outlook) that doesn’t .

Bearing in mind the sheer hassle we’ve had from this, I’m going to install our own smtp server next week and avoid the problem entirely.

Amusingly, sending via Yahoo’s smtp servers works just fine from my home account.