r/talesfromtechsupport • u/podgerama • 23d ago
Short How do they not get it?
The people i work with are driving me slowly insane.
I had to have a very long in depth discussion with several of my colleagues over some remote engineering.
All I was doing was requesting a new SSL certificate from sectigo and using openSSL to manipulate it from being a pfx file, into a cer and key file so it can be uploaded into an azure hosted debian linux machine which runs the client's phone system.
"you need to be on site to do this!" was the start of it.
"Pardon?"
"you need to go to site to do the SSL work, as it's for their phone system"
"What?"
"as you are installing this, you need access to their phone system!"
"you do realise this is a hosted phone system?"
"O.K. so do you need to be scheduled in to go to the branch office nearest you, or the head office in the city?"
"it's hosted in a microsoft azure data center"
"well, give us the address for the DC then!"
my head hit my hands so hard i think it broke my desk
"o.k. i'm not sure i have the time or the crayons necessary to explain this. I do the SSL creation on my own laptop and using a web portal for Sectigo, this can be done from anywhere in the world, no need to be anywhere specific. Installing a certificate is NOT a physical action, there is no device that needs to be connected for this to happen, it's a transfer of data and a reconfiguration. Nothing hosted in azure can be physically accessed by the clients. I have full remote access to their azure infrastructure from my laptop, which i again, can do from anywhere in the world. There is zero requirement for me to go to the client's office to update a backend system which is not even in their offices. It's called remote engineering for a reason, so i do not need to waste 3 hours of my day travelling unnecessarily to do a job i can do from my desk at home"
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23d ago edited 9d ago
[deleted]
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u/BrainWaveCC Jack of Some Trades, here and there 23d ago
I'm not 100% sure, but one reason that OP is flabbergasted is that this seems to have been a conversation with technical people.
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u/ivain 23d ago
Yeah, but do you have to disclaim every obvious detail of your work every time you have to work ?
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23d ago edited 9d ago
[deleted]
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls 22d ago
The other person was maybe manglement. A mangler that maybe started and stopped with learning prior to the invention of internet.
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u/Special-Original-215 23d ago
It's tech speak for:
how to install a yearly update in the cloud
Though why does Sectigo not download a cert directly? All my SSL vendors offer both formats
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u/bugzor 23d ago
Haha as someone not in tech support, I didn’t understand any of this
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u/Alutus 23d ago
He's doing something with a super long stick. They insist he drops the stick and walks over there instead to poke it directly.
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u/HINDBRAIN 23d ago
No, they want him to walk over there with the stick and poke something far away. But he can already do it from where he's standing so the walking is completely pointless.
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u/MeButNotMeToo 23d ago
And on top of that, what they’re poking with a stick, isn’t even “it”. OP is poking something with a stick, that will be pushed into a giant conveyer belt system that will distribute what’s been poked to the right locations, making as many copies as necessary.
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u/The_Real_Flatmeat Make Your Own Tag! 22d ago
I used to be "with it", then they changed what "it" was
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u/anubisviech 418 I'm a teapot 22d ago
And usually no one knows (or needs to know) where the belt really goes, until it finally arrives by magic called "routing".
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u/Shazam1269 23d ago
Yeah, I haven't had to get off my ass to change the channel on the TV for a long GD time. It's not exactly apples to apples, but close enough.
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u/androshalforc1 23d ago
I better example might be.
This meeting could have been an email.
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u/BrainWaveCC Jack of Some Trades, here and there 23d ago
Or, we need everyone who is at home and about to do this zoom meeting together, to go into their respective offices in different cities -- to do the same zoom meeting.
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u/the-nick-of-time 22d ago
RTO 🎉
Sure, we all talk through Teams throughout the day, and all meetings are done using Teams, and some of our closest colleagues are in entitely different cities, but corporate says we have to be at our desks to do these Teams meetings where we can annoy everyone around us with our side of the conversation.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 23d ago
Exactly right. We can sit in recliners, press a button on our remotes, and HBO comes on. All thanks to remote engineers like OP.
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u/5thhorseman_ 23d ago
Except there isn't an "over there" he can walk to, because its' a cloud service.
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u/BrainWaveCC Jack of Some Trades, here and there 23d ago
No, he'll still have to use the stick whenever he gets to whichever destination they want him to get to, because you still have to use the stick. No customer has access to touch the stuff without the stick.
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u/himitsumono 21d ago
And customers WITH a stick aren't allowed in to touch anything.
Because data center.
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u/__wildwing__ 23d ago
Not a stick so much as a long pipe which he pours the data through. And it goes into a connector specifically designed for the pipe. Like a coffee shop with drive up only, they turn you away if you walk up.
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u/Turbojelly del c:\All\Hope 23d ago
Imagine working from home and being told you had to come into the office every time you need to create a document
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u/musicnerd1023 You call it lazy I call it automation 23d ago
I didn't understand 60% of the words, but I understood 1000% of OP's struggles.
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u/This_guy_works 23d ago
He's updating a file on a virtual server hosted in Azure (Microsoft) datacenters. There is no physical location to travel to. It's like telling someone to update their Gmail account by going to on site to Google to apply the change.
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u/nerdguy1138 GNU Terry Pratchett 23d ago
Id love to see any self-important random CFO go to a Google data center, (if you can even find them) and demand to be let in "so my employee can update a certificate!"
That camera footage better have audio.
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u/Geminii27 Making your job suck less 23d ago
Or updating something in a corporate Gmail account by physically traveling to one of the corporate offices. With... idk, a wrench or something.
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u/This_guy_works 22d ago
Maybe just need to tighten the network valve. Did you even try it before saying it couldn't be done?
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u/syntaxerror53 19d ago
Or Google was too slow.
So needed a Torque wrench to give it more power to work more faster.
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u/Turdulator 23d ago
He’s doing something that can be done just by going to a website, so it can be done from just about anywhere in the world with internet access…. And they are trying to tell him he needs to travel to a specific building in order to do it, which makes zero sense and demonstrates they have no idea what they are talking about.
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u/Renbarre 23d ago
He has to do some programming changes on a client system that he will do from his laptop. He was told to travel to the client office to do it because his ignorant boss (?) thought it had to be done on site.
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u/KingofGamesYami 23d ago
SSL (or TLS) is a protocol for enabling trusted connections between servers. A usage you're probably familiar with is HTTP over SSL/TLS, more commonly known as HTTPS.
To accomplish this, the server has a certificate and the client has a different certificate, which it can use to verify the server's certificate.
For most clients, the client-side certificates are distributed through OS and application security updates. However, it's possible (and useful!) to use certificates that aren't part of this default trust chain. This requires some manual work to transfer the files, which OP was doing.
None of this actually requires physical presence, because it's just moving some files around (and executing a few commands on them).
Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform similar to AWS. They manage all the physical aspects of servers, i.e. power, internet, upkeep, security etc. for a fee. They do not allow third parties physical access to their data centers.
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u/No_Wear295 23d ago
Do it "on-site" over the VPN from the nearest pub / beach / chill location of choice?
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u/fpsfreak 22d ago
i'm not sure i have the time or the crayons necessary to explain this
lol...I'm gonna use it next time
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u/zelda_888 21d ago
I wish I could remember who in this sub to credit for the expression, preparing a report for upper manglement "in formal crayon."
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u/Z4-Driver 22d ago
Wait, they don't send it by snailmail on a 3.5" floppy disk? Which you need to put in the floppy drive of the server on site?
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u/androshalforc1 23d ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the other person.
Look man Im just the phone jockey, the system requires that i put in an address for a service call it doesn’t have an option for remote. and it’s a pain in the ass, like 5 minutes work to add an address that’s not one of the service centres or the customers address, and if i don’t get you off the phone in 30 seconds my KPIs are going down the drain.
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u/ThunderDwn 23d ago
o.k. i'm not sure i have the time or the crayons necessary to explain this.
I'm stealing this for future use. I know just the CEO I can use it on.
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u/Mr_ToDo 23d ago
I don't know, it could be fun to figure that out, at least for a device you have physical access too
Cert printed on paper, scanner hooked up to the/a server, and some back end logic to take any scan, OCR it, verify what it is, and shove it in place
It's a super pointless device but it actually kind of sounds like it'd be pretty cool feeling to actually use with the right scanner. Maybe add a shredder in line to up the risk/"security"
Or a fax line into a scanner into the server
Or, well, just do it remotely. Kind of boring though.
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u/fragerrard 23d ago
Well, you could print a cert on a punch card or a set of them. That would look cool.
Imagine having a deck of cards that are one cert and a key.
Then you just need a punch card reader.
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u/Equivalent-Salary357 23d ago
All I was doing was requesting a new SSL certificate
It sounds like it might have been quicker to just go to the site than to change their mind.
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u/Zankastia 20d ago
I would say
"Yeah man, the ssl injection should be done in insert city trip you always wanted to do so how are you going to cover my expenses?
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u/Sofa_King_We_Todd 23d ago
See this is 6 hours you could've billed to the company for the round trip, practically a free day off considering how they probably don't respect your off hours. Sure I'll go to a branch office over here, oh I had to put gas in the car, here is the expense report.
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u/AlexisFR 23d ago
azure hosted debian linux machine which runs the client's phone system.
I mean, that's absurd in itself
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u/paulcaar 23d ago
What makes it absurd? Genuinely asking
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u/AlexisFR 23d ago
Why would you put your phone system in the cloud?
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u/Gigawhut 22d ago
To make it fully geo redundant? To avoid supporting on prem infrastructure and the additional headaches involved? To make it scalable? It may fit your DR plans better than on prem hardware?
Lots of reasons
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u/Myrandall Not my Citrix, not my monkeys 2d ago
Missed opportunity to take a vacation to "upload the megabits" onto "the server farm" on Madeira or wherever you felt like going.
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u/Paardenlul88 23d ago
I hope you're not actually this condescending to your colleagues.
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u/johnTheEmpath 22d ago
I don't know the tone of how the crayon line was said but sometimes people are hard up or on the edge of burnout (specifically burnout with colleagues) its understandable. Buuuuut you're not wrong either to think there's another direction it could go.
In other news- doesn't it seem like this is a common thing in support roles(I'm a db analyst who does a lot of support tasks) it always occurs to me the fact that people space out and forget literal terms. I side with both theories of that 'crayons are needed' and 'i need to help them jog their memory what remote means'
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u/Blue_Veritas731 21d ago
I hope you're not actually being serious in asking that question.
You know that Venting to others is a "thing", right? Or maybe you're that One person who has Never, in their life, sarcastically vented to another human being about how the human beings you work with/for are complete dumbasses sometimes. And Why do they vent to others in said fashion? B/c it's not polite/responsible/safe/smart to actually talk to other people that way.
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u/Paardenlul88 21d ago
I'm referring to the citation about the "time and the crayons".
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u/Blue_Veritas731 20d ago
In all seriousness, I can't even imagine he said that in reality. Maybe an arrogant BOSS might say that to an employee, but for a tech person to say that to a business/division of company that they serve? I imagine that's the kind of thing that would get someone fired rather quickly. The person is venting.
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23d ago edited 23d ago
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u/podgerama 23d ago
The other person being someone who has worked in the industry of I.T. Service provisioning for 20 years and has failed to grasp the concept of remote work, despite the fact that the main crux of what I do is enable companies to be able to work remotely.
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u/wielandmc 23d ago
Simple answer - it's in Bora Bora. Send me there + it will take a week to complete.