Professionally I deal with much of the fallout from problems such as yours, and leading techs doing this kind of work. It really sucks, but for many problems like this the choice becomes spend-four-hours-reimaging-the-machine or spend-unknown-period-of-time-trying-to-fix-new-problem. The latter would be great if it was less than four hours, but it's often not, and until that time you / the user are without a machine.
After an hour or so of troubleshooting it's usually better to go with the reimaging, since all you / the user wants is to get back to working.
Ideally I try to get the entire broken machine captured and the user issued a new, fixed machine because then a fix can be developed and documented, but for those who end up in a new failure mode, it sucks. And with something like the Cisco VPN Agent? That's not uncommon at all...
>spend-four-hours-reimaging-the-machine or spend-unknown-period-of-time-trying-to-fix-new-problem
Definitely. In our case its 8 hours minimum though for a re-image. Somehow the FDE makes pulling the old data off the machine slow.
You've got my sympathies though - I'd not like to be the one doing the IT in these cases. Can't be fun troubleshooting IT with that kind of time pressure.
Thank you. It really, honestly is hard on our tech because they feel the pressure from all sides. Eight hours sounds rough for a reimage. I think ours are... maybe two or three? We've done a lot of work to get the reimage time down, and Win7 (WIMs) have made this really nice.
If this is something that smells of a bigger problem (or has been seen elsewhere) then I push for them to get the user a wholly new machine, capturing the old one for analysis. If the user is given an upgraded machine, then there is usually little resistance, even with the downtime that'll be incurred.
On the upside, if the issue can be reproduced readily, from this we can almost always get root cause and put a systemic fix in place. If it's sporadic... Well... I'm sure you understand how it goes trying to fix something that you can't yet reproduce. ;)
(I'd love to troubleshoot your slow data backup issue... That's the stuff I rather enjoy.)
>I'd love to troubleshoot your slow data backup issue... That's the stuff I rather enjoy.
I'm not directly involved with the tech side so I don't know the details. I gather they pull the old data off the disk using some offline low-level tool though (like you would for harddrive damage recovery). Between that and the encryption its somehow very slow. No idea why its like that though.
>get the user a wholly new machine
I wish it was the same here. They just give loan machines :/
I guess it depends on where your line for 'best minds of the generation' lies. If it's the top 25%, I wouldn't be surprised that many software devs / devops people lie in that category.
