Current Events > Life lessons from tech support agents episode 1

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm gonna start a new rather-infrequent topic series about weird things that tech support agents tell me. The words of the tech support agents shall be treated as gospel.

Today's episode:

1) C is for server, and S is for client.

Backstory:
I was working with HP's technical support team for a weird issue with our wifi speeds a few months ago. To troubleshoot the throughput speeds, we used a tool called iperf. With iperf and many other things you can run via Windows command prompt, there are different "flags" you can add to commands to perform slightly different functions. For example, if you use the tracert command to do a traceroute, you can add -d after the tracert command to stop the computer from doing DNS lookups on every hop and therefore run the traceroute faster. tracert -d google.com.

Iperf has similar flags. The most commonly used ones are -c and -s. You use -c on the "client" computer and -s on the "server" computer. The server listens for the traffic from the client, and the client sends the traffic to the server.

The Aruba TAC agent insisted that -C stood for server and -S stood for client, even though the built-in help output confirms the opposite.

So, C is for server and S is for client. So it was written and so it shall come to pass.

2) Ping is now an advanced network troubleshooting tool.

Backstory:
This morning at 3am, Google Fiber took a part of their network down for maintenance. Their support team said the maintenance would end by 5am. We were still down at 5am. So, I called them again. I told them they were still down. They swore up and down that nothing was wrong on their end. From the little bit of troubleshooting I was able to do remotely, it looked like there was still something wrong on their end. I asked the Google Fiber tech support rep to ping their IP. He said they couldn't do that. His exact words:

"Advanced troubleshooting tools like ping are outside of our scope of support."

So, ping is now an advanced troubleshooting tool. So it was written and so it shall come to pass.
---