That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

This is the main reason why I quit Facebook and other services. Anytime you access them from mobile via a web browser it corners you into a “download our app” page. Facebook started doing it with messenger and I knew I had to get out.

I’m not giving Zuckerberg that level of access to my data.

Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. People hit the most minor roadblock and just stop working until someone else fixes their shit.

It’s an attitude of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!”

I don’t like those people either.

I dunno about OP, but I am, and I have definitely prioritized tickets based on how interesting they sound.

User setup for a new hire that is already here and waiting? Meh. Weird network problem with no apparent solution which will likely require days of investigation? Sounds good.

I find that when a user continually makes a stink to get their ticket dealt with first, I gently try to correct them, and when that inevitably doesn’t sink in, and they call during a critical issue, I tell them quite firmly that things are down and nobody at x site can work, so your printer will have to wait. Log a ticket and I’ll address it when I’m done Brenda.

… They usually back off when you make it clear to them that they’re not the most important thing you’re dealing with at any given moment.

I fucking hate this.

Most days I spend more time accounting for my work than I do actually working.

Only if we like you.

I’m pretty sure I’ve done most of these at some point or another.

It really depends whether I like you or not.

Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.

I’ve gotten tickets that were literally “$thing is broken”, or “help! Call me!” With no information given, not even a callback number. I’ve also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn’t identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn’t available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn’t even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.

There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.

There’s also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they’re busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don’t reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but “critical”) issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn’t solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.

Most of my users do fine, and it’s usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear… But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.

Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it’s not getting fixed. I don’t care if you own the goddamned planet, I can’t fix your shit without access.

Can we call this out on terminal text editors too? Some just color lines based on their content, and frequently comments end up being blue on black and it’s impossible to read.

This comment describes the options for the next parameter in this config file, but I have no idea what it says, so I guess I’m fucked?

Always has been

At most, the difference between your experience and mine was that the support I recieved at least understood what IPv6 was, which is likely a function of most of my stories being from business support, rather than residential support.

Almost every time I call I get nowhere. Which is why I’ve given up. Obviously, someone high up in the technical teams is trying to implement IPv6 with very limited success. So I’m just trying to be patient, as they navigate the hellscape of corporate approvals and get things working.

It’s slow going, but at least it’s going.

This is less to do with the ISPs and more to do with the implementation of DHCP-PD renewals on various software/hardware devices. I’m not going to point any fingers, but it seems that some vendors don’t play very nicely with other vendors.

DNS, by its very nature is redundant. So DNS shouldn’t just fall over. If it does, you’re doing something wrong.

If you absolutely need to go to IP addresses, they should be documented.

Unless DNS is outright wrong, there should not be an issue.

For scrolling: are you staring at active log files? Who isn’t using a syslog aggregator? You can easily look up the IP of whatever device that is interesting and filter the log by that IP.

So, my argument here is… Why the hell are you memorizing IP addresses?

Is your DNS so misconfigured that you’re still punching in IPs by hand?

DNS is the solution. Going to “router.domain.local” or whatever your internal domain is, is easier to remember than… Which subnet am I on again? Is this one 192.168.22.254? Or 192.168.21.1?

Stop punching in numbers like a cave man. Use DNS. You won’t even notice if it’s IPv6 after that

All I want to say about this is that the technology specialists, especially in networking, are usually not this opposed to change. Things change for networking and systems folks all the time. We’re used to it. Most of the time the hard sell is with the management folks who Green light projects. They don’t want to “waste” money on something that “nobody wants”.

Legitimately, one company I asked about IPv6 said to me that customers had not requested it, so they haven’t spent any time on implementing it.

As if customers know what’s good for them…

The important bit is that almost every major web service is already running fully dual stacked. Azure, Amazon, Meta, CloudFlare, Google… If it’s a commonly known internet company, it’s probably ready for IPv6.

There’s still plenty that isn’t ready, but most well known things have been ready for years at this point.

This is remarkably common. A major factor is how to handle renewals. There appears to either be bugs with the procedure or there’s disagreement on how it should be handled. So it will work, for a while, until a renewal needs to happen, then everything goes to shit.

I’ve directly witnessed this in router/firewall logs. That there’s an attempt to renew the DHCP-PD, which does not get a valid reply.

As a networker, ipv6 is the future. I’m a fan of it, but I don’t really talk about it anymore because there’s no point.

I threw in the towel after an ISP messed up so badly that I just couldn’t bother anymore.

At a previous job a client I was doing some work for got a new internet connection at a new site, the ISP ran brand new fiber for it. This wasn’t a new building or anything, but the fiber was new. They allocated them a static IPv4 thing as usual, and I asked the tech about V6, and they said we would have to take it up with the planning team, so I did. I was involved in the email chain at the end of the sales process to coordinate the hookup. So I asked. After many emails back and forth, I was informed the connection was allocated.

They allocated one single IPv6 subnet directly off of their device. I couldn’t even.

For those that don’t understand, the firewall we had connected to the device is an ipv6 router. What normally happens, especially in DHCP customer connections, is that the router will use DHCP-PD to allocate a subnet for the router to use on the LAN, and automatically set up a route to say “reach this subnet we allocated for this router, via this router” kind of thing. I’m dramatically simplifying, but that’s the gist. In DHCP-PD, the router will also have an IPv6 address on the ISP-facing link to facilitate the connection. In the case of the earlier story, they gave us an entire subnet to communicate between the ISP and the router, and didn’t give us a subnet for the client systems inside the network.

I did ask about this and I can only describe their reply as “visible confusion”.

I know many who will still be confused by this point are people who have not used IPv6; to explain further: the IP on your local (LAN) systems needs to be a public IP address, because the router no longer does network address translation when sending your data to the internet. So the IP on the router has no bearing on your computer having a connection to the internet over v6. If your local computer does not have a globally unique ipv6 address, you cannot use IPv6. There are ways around this, NAT66 exists but it’s incredibly bad practice in most cases. The firewall I was working with didn’t really support NAT66 (at least, at the time) and I wasn’t really going to set that up.

ISPs are the reason I gave up on IPv6.

I’ll add this other story to reinforce it. I’ll keep it brief. A different ISP for a different company at a different site entirely. The client purchased a static IPv4 address, and I asked about IPv6, as you do. To preface, I know this company and used them for my own connection at the time. They have IPv6 for residential clients via DHCP-PD. I was told, no joke, that because of the static IPv4 assignment, and how they execute that for businesses, that they couldn’t add IPv6 to the connection, at all.

The last thing I want to mention is a video I saw, which is aptly named “CGN, a driver for IPv6 adoption” or something similar. It’s a short lecture about the evils of carrier grade NAT, and how IPv6 actually fixes pretty much all the bs that goes with CGN, with fewer requirements and less overhead.

IPv6 is coming. You will prefer IPv4 until you understand how horrific CGN is.