Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help Welcome again to On-Call, The Register’s reader-contributed tales of tech support tension, terror and technical tragedy. This week meet “Calvin” who told us that “For many years our small family business had run on paperwork, but increasing amounts of government red tape meant we had to go digital.” “After sharpening my …
On a more serious note, on a dos fs once you exceed 512 files in the root directory, the chances of catastrophic loss start skyrocketing.
It's more complicated than that.
On a FAT-12 or FAT-16 hard disk partition, the root directory has a specific maximum size, and that size is (wait for it) 512 entries (including the ones uses to store the UCS-2/UTF-16 "long name" characters if there are any).
On a FAT-32 partition, the root directory is, in effect, just like all the others (as it is in a UNIXish filesystem), and does not have a fixed limit.
My mum wasn't especially computer literate either, but as a primary school teacher she increasingly started to use the PC at home for creating work sheets, reports and various other bits of work. Incredibly, she did manage to get the hang of selecting the "Sue" folder in "My Documents" when saving the files, but had a nasty habit of simply accepting the default filenames that Word suggests (ie, usually the first sentence of the document). She also did not get the hang of subfolders.
Result, one single folder after a couple of years with about 400 documents in it, all called things like "Chapter 1.doc", "Chapter 1 (2).doc", "4+3=.doc", "Ben and Sarah went to the shops to.doc" etc. And then she wondered why it was difficult trying to find some earlier work she'd done so that she could modify and update it...
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If she couldn't figure out document naming, right clicking and looking at the modified date is going to be a stretch.
Plus, can you remember what date you created a certain set of worksheets last year? Helps to narrow things down a bit I grant you, but still hardly a perfect solution!
A conversation from about 20 years ago, when we got our first computer in the 'product development' department:
Colleague: What shall I name the file as?
Me: redgiraffe17
Colleague: That's a stupid name!
Me: Can you think of a better name?
Colleague: (long silence)
Colleague: How about 'specification.doc'?
Me: That might cause problems later.
Sub Folders are a double edged sword.
I've seen too many examples of 30 or even 40 levels of sub folders and each folder name and different variation of the folder above
reports/annual reports/2017 reports/hr reports/finance/2017/directors reports/finial reports/ etc etc etc
Oh I spent a while working out why a program had ceased to work with some files at an employers. Nothing had apparently changed but the damn thing did not like the files anymore. Other files worked fine and it was bizarre that just these ones were causing it to throw a hissy fit. Someone then pointed out that they'd added a few sub folders and moved the files there the day before. The program couldn't cope with that many subfolders and just had given up.
Google Drive on Windows chokes on this all the fscking time. Even with the long path registry hack. If you have a gdrives synced to your PC and try and open a file in some moderately nested folders from the Explorer, it claims the file doesn't exist.
It's got so bad I've started using SharePoint. Reg readers know that to make that decision means I am at DEFCON 5...
Had a user with nested subfolders containing archives of the previous years, nested with the same archives saved once again further down.
Or the Legal executive with every contract that this large oil & gas company were working on, stored on her desktop in folders. There was little to no real estate available on her desktop.
-"There was little to no real estate available on her desktop."-
Have a client that I've been warning that if I go into some kind of seizure due to all the files on her desktop, I'm suing... this was a while back, recently I noted she only had one more space on the grid for docs.
Suggested one of those big curved widescreens to increase storage space... I'm just tired of talking, you know?
"Or the Legal executive with every contract that this large oil & gas company were working on, stored on her desktop in folders. There was little to no real estate available on her desktop."
Surely you got her a second screen, thereby solving the problem?
I used to support an environment that had, amongst other astonishing stuff, a folder structure that looked something like this
Operations\NOC\
Operations\NOC\NOC OLC\NOC NEW DO NOT USE\NOC\
Operations\NOC 2012\
Guess which was 'live'
I also made the mistake of mapping a drive for end users that already had a 40 char folder name, so where they saw U:\ the server saw \\server\share\some folder name\some other folder name\accounts
The users then built out a folder structure that used the full 255 char limit from where they were mapping too. Of course when it came for me to do any work on that server I'd hit this huge chunk of files that windows was no longer able to deal with thanks to the fact the file names were too long.
I've seen worse in a professional situation - we delivered a suite of reports to a Banking client once and were called in again 2 months later to offer support. The original reports were there, but they'd added some new versions. They had decided the best way to differentiate these versions was to use a space at the end of the original report name.
Hence about 60 reports named:
'Monthly Transactions.rep'
'Monthly Transactions .rep'
'Monthly Transactions .rep'
'Monthly Transactions .rep'
"Which version's causing the trouble?"
"Oh I think it's version 17, or it might be 21, hold on I'll count the spaces."
I've posted this once before - but it fits here perfectly.
I got a call saying "I can't find the right page 2."
Pop round and find a desktop full of 'Page 1s' and 'Page 2s'
Turns out that she hadn't realised that when you reach the end of page 1 page 2 follows automatically.
For several months she had been treating every page as a separate peice of paper.
As some of the docs (all progress reports and assessments) were only 1 page in length, her filing went right up the shute when page 2-5 actually married up with Page 1-8. (Or was it Page 1-11?)
Have you tried sticking it up your arse ?
Ooohhh.... I just realised that was my mother...
Rubbish touch pads on cheap laptops cause all sorts of strife and user confusion. Some parts of the unmarked pad result in scrolling, some selecting. In these cases, it is not the user's fault if they want to throw the machine out of the window.
Thankfully, market demand is finally beginning to result in decent touchpads on laptops. There isn't always a mouse around.
(And indeed I'm reluctant to lend out my carefully chosen mice since someone threw one against a wall - it's handy Forward / Back navigation buttons caused to lose a long rant he was writing on a forum.)
And incredibly, some (I'm pointing at you, HP. Well, jabbing you in the eye) have an area you can tap on to turn the whole touchpad off. So on a new machine where you can't rely on muscle memory to always tap in the middle, you end up disabling the thing. I've had to fix many, many of those "issues".
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