Ok so I just had a frustrating hour.

Basically the railway campus has its internet provided by the university network, which means no downloading of music etc, no viewing of sites that are too pornagraphic etc.

Anyway earlier when I was randomly browsing my internet decided to stop working. as in, my browser wouldnt access any sites but my IM programs were working. I restart, unplug replug cable etc and cry to tempy on msn.

I then ring ITSS and ask them the problem. They asked my UPI, name, problem and loads of other useless questions. After calling me back they say

"Go to Railway Campus reception, and tell the manager, because its not worth us sending out someone to look at it. They will report it to the property services manager and then they have to tell us"

Ok, fair enough, one person, but we do pay for the internet here so really they should provide a decent service.

But WTF is all this "we cant do anything" crap about? it seems like a fucking massive waste of time and just a load of bullshit bureaucracy to me.

I hate living in university accomodation sometimes. in fact, all the time.

/rant over.

That's bloody slack eh. If I was you, just ring them back and say that you really need your internet for a big assignment. if they don't accept that, they're still a pack of bastards.

Well its working now thank god.

But I mean, what if it was life or death? Then what!

ITSS are dorks. Here's my personal sob story:

I had a 10-page essay to hand in on a Friday. I loaded $3.00 onto my print account - enough for two copies, plus a spare dollar in case something messed up. So I go to a lab, finish the essay off and send two copies - 20 pages - through to print. I go over to the print station and log in to find no document on my account! How stupid is that?

So I decide to cut my losses and print off another copy of the document. Well, when I go to print it again, there are now not 1 but 2 documents there again! Excellent - maybe I haven't lucked out altogether and I'll be able to get my original 2 prints. Unfortunately I don't remember to check the times on the documents...

And so out they come, right beside the office of the IT head honcho in the Arts department. Then I look at them and realise they are both screwed up, with a misplaced paragraph. Then I check my account balance - which is now -$1.00. I have been charged $4.00 for twenty pages, all because of the initial fault with the print system.

So I go to moan to the IT guy who tells me they can't do anything, even though he actually saw me print the things off right outside his office. Doesn't matter that it all resulted from their system screwing me up and charging me additional fees - it's hard luck apparently.

I go and load up another dollar to print off one last corrected version of the document. And, naturally it shows up as $0 - all I've done is repay the dollar ITSS mistakenly charged me in the first place...

:frustrated:

... A helpful person at the Edgar Commons allowed me to print off a single copy free of charge on their printers. Nice, but it doesn't make up for the organised litany of uselessness that came before. And my assignment wasn't really worth 25 cents an A4 page.

/rant over.

Sounds like you didn't give it enough time to send the document to the printer. How long did you wait?

Your PC or the Unis? If it was a Uni PC, then they should do something, but of course if its your PC then it's different. Plus, if there were other, working PCs next door to yours (i.e. if you were in that small computer lab) then it's not like you had no other way of getting online.

It was my own PC, yes, but it was a problem with the network as I hadn't altered it. I made that clear to them.

It's always a tricky issue when its your own PC, because the ITSS doesn't have any control over the setup.

For instance, if you had windows updates set to automatic, then it's possible that something on your PC did change. Or you had a problem with your software firewall, or any third party plugins to your web browser, or your anti-virus configuration. You could even have a bad DNS setting (Xtra recently changed their DNS servers, their old ones only work half the time now).

I gather from your ability to post it is now fixed. Did they actually do anything to your PC? My guess is that they didn't, and it was a problem further up the line with their web proxy which they only started to look at once they got enough complaints about it to suspect something major.

Must have been at least 10 minutes. I trekked up from the arts labs to a lecturer's office and then went over to the KEC to print (this I left out of the original post as it was miles long already!).

Sam,

artsnet and EC are two seperate login domains, hence two seperate print spoolers. Don't print something in the HSB labs and expect to be able to go to a Print Station in the IC and print it out -- you have to send the job again.

Of course you *should* be able to do what you attempted to do, but that's a whole other can of worms I don't want to open...

--Hugh

Moreover, ITSS are only paid to deal with University owned/leased equipment: in other words, if it doesn't have a UoA assett tag, they don't wanna know about it.

Having said that, it seems that it could have been a network fault, in which case it becomes their problem, not yours.