Do you ever get tired of answering those support calls?

Make the person on the other end of the phone feel like you understand their problem and can fix it for them. With a roll of the dice, you can effortlessly give the caller the answer they are looking for (so long as they are asking the right questions).

As you get older, you realize that people don’t necessarily want to know exactly what the problem is. What they really want is assurance that someone is there, listening, and is ready to come to their aid. The chances that you can actually walk them through fixing their problem is minuscule - you’re going to have to take a visit anyway, so why bother putting in the effort now?

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Too many people forwarding stupid emails about how to make money by forwarding this email to everyone in their address book…

Too many people surfing youtube for latest video of some idiot singing…

These sorts of things ruin the whole web experience for people who really need it for something useful. Why not slow down their connection in order to speed others up? They can wait a couple extra minutes for their videos and emails to load, right?

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Today I received a call from one of our stores. The guy told me that all the applications were missing on the video surveillance server except for System Preferences.app. So, the first thing I did was to connect via Remote Desktop to take a look and of course change the admin password. Very odd indeed. I looked in the trash and saw some files that definitely shouldn’t be there, but none of the applications were in there. This led me to believe that a Stupid User™ was responsible for this. Since practically every application was missing, I could not poke around with the Terminal or look at log files with the Console, so the next step was to remotely log into this computer via ssh.

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At one point I decided to have the web server email the day’s access_log to me. Instead of emailing the entire log, I grep’ed through the log to only get “today”, piped that to grep again to exclude entries that contained the IP address of the Intermapper server, and then piped that to mail. So, everyday I have the previous day’s log waiting in my inbox.

#! /bin/sh

today=`date +%d/%b/%Y`

/usr/bin/grep "$today" /var/log/httpd/access_log | /usr/bin/grep -v 192.168.1.70 | /usr/bin/mail -s "access_log for $today" me@email.net
exit 0

I save this shell script and schedule it with cron to run ever day right before midnight.

59 23 * * * /bin/sh /Library/Scripts/mail_log.sh