Kayako Helpdesk Software

NOPE.

I have finally moved my blog to http://cottoncourtney.com ! I will no longer be updating here, but rather all updates and a merge of my two blogs will occur at my site.

Thank you for reading!

I. fucking. hate. Kayako.

I am working on fleshing out a Support environment. I was interested in Kayako because it had ‘screen sharing’ capabilities that my other choice, Zendesk, did not. Having screen sharing a part of the whole package deal would allow me to potentially nix another tool we use and save a lot of money in the process. Victory, right?

My tragedy starts when I first attempt to run a trial account of Kayako. I go through the process (name, e-mail, etc) and it says, “WE GOT THIS. YOU READY BRO!” So I attempt to go to the link I had signed up with — it didn’t work. So I thought, woah, their servers might be a little slow, I’ll give it a bit. Twenty minutes later,  nothing.

I decide I should talk to their support team! I go to their website (I refuse to link it, god forbid I give them any business) and utilize live support. Whoo!

After about 15 minutes, the guy tells me the URL address and then username and password. Now, mind you, this was without any verification on who I am that he pasted this information into chat. To have a chat, all you do is fill in data a name, email address, and question. I could have been anyone. So I was a little peeved about that, but then he didn’t answer my question. I didn’t say I couldn’t find my credentials, I said THE SITE URL was not working. He goes back again to find out what is wrong … and I find out that the installation automation process didn’t go as planned and they are simply going to redo the entire thing. Ok … I love starting out on the wrong foot, but that’s cool, stuff happens!

I then log in. I’m not going to lie, I was enjoying the interface. See, I like Zendesk, but I don’t find their interface to be nearly as nice. I was getting things set up, it was going swimmingly. However, I created a Department and then I created a Team and then I created a Staff Member. This Staff Member inherited its permissions from the Team and in the Department this team was enabled for Live Chat Support. If you viewed who was having the right permissions to the module, you’d find this;

So obviously it should work, right? Admin is a staff member a part of Team Support who has the Department Live Chat Support assigned to them. Wah-lah! It’s just how it should be. Yet, it didn’t work.

So, ROUND 2 with Kayako Support — LETS GOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I’m going to go over it as fast as I can…

THE FIRST HOUR (I am going to pretend to be the support person, read it from their mind): I have no idea what’s going on. It should be working. I’ll try switching around some options and take forever to do it. Crap, it’s not working. You know what? I will give her a work around and hope she doesn’t notice! I WILL INDIVIDUALLY MAKE EACH STAFF MEMBER HAVE PERMISSIONS EVEN THOUGH IF SHE HAD 40 USERS and each of them had their very own permissions it would become grossly unmanageable, but that’s okay, she wont notice, she must be dumb, lololololol. However, of course I noticed he was not doing things based on Team permissions and had just switched them to Staff permissions and that he had actually not solved my problem — AT ALL and tried to act like he did. I had been perfectly pleasant up till this point, but when he tried to tell me he fixed it, but did not actually fix it,  I got a little upset.

Next, for some reason, he tried to use the Remote Access feature of Kayako with me — on their Support system. However, it failed. LOL. They couldn’t use their own damn Remote Access feature to connect with me and wanted me to use Teamview (or Teamshare? IDK) as an alternative source since their’s was not working.

At this point, I was done. This was a trial and I had just spent 1 hour and 4 seconds of my life in chat trying to resolve why their Chat module wasn’t working with no progress and I had already. I of course complained, noting this was a trial and it was not going well. He swept me off to a Supervisor after that.

THE SECOND HOUR: At this point, it’s getting close to lunch. I’m upset, tired, and a bit exhausted from dealing with them. The supervisor– first thing she tells me without trying anything, “DID YOU CLEAR YOUR CACHE?” The fuck? YOU CANT DO IT FROM YOUR END EITHER. You can’t see Support as Online from YOUR SIDE, yet it’s MY CACHE? I knew from this moment on she was going to be absolutely useless and so was their Support team.  After about ~15 minutes, I  had to leave. I had a meeting. She said she’d create a ticket.

I went off to lunch hoping that when I got back my issue would be resolve because it completely impedes half of the functionality of this trial if I can’t use Live Chat. This was from 11:30-12:30. At 1:00PM I notice my ticket has no update and was placed on priority: low. So I thought, “Hey, I’ll ‘Live Chat’ again and see if they will work on it again!’ That went like the following;

See, now that I wasn’t in Chat anymore I was a ticket. I could not go back to being “Live Support” because I had been turned into a ticket. She let me know my ticket was being worked on and that was it. So, I kindly told them that Kayako was the worst fucking product I’ve ever had the displeasure of using, I will not be buying it, and they are a support team for a help desk software that can’t support their platform. I left.

Edit
They got back to me about my ticket, but did they solve the issue? NO! They told me to just use Kayako Desktop. NO BIG DEAL THAT I CANT DO IT THROUGH THE WEB BROWSER. No, no, that’s okay. See, having the functionality work correctly is not really our main concern! No big deal, you can just get around the problem, why fix it?
Thank you for contacting Kayako.
To trace the issue you are facing, I created a test account in Kayako Desktop and was able to see Live Chat online. Please refer to http://imtp.me/2p5b01ovh link for more information. I have checked all the settings and found that they all are properly configured. So, could you cross check once after creating a new account in Kayako Desktop?
In case the issue still persists, please update this ticket. I shall be glad to assist you.
Regards,
Neketa (I shall remove last name out of kidness.)
 
…
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ 

Now I’m writing this.

I will also note that during my 3 hours of just playing around in Kayako I ran into a lot of bugs. They were little, but I noticed them. One was that one of my staff members, if they clicked ‘Home’ — would not go anywhere. You had to click ‘Fusion’ and have it act as a ‘Home’ button to be able to get back to your summary page essentially. There were a few others, but I can’t remember them at this point because of the RAGE.

TL;DR: FUCK KAYAKO. 

Fix: Outlook 2003 & Normal.DOT corruption!

Problem

“Whenever I try to reply in Outlook it freezes on the ‘Opening Word 2003′ screen!”

( How I feel about Outlook 99.8% of the time: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ )

Solution

“If you are using Word 2003 to edit your outgoing messages and suddenly one day it begins to freeze — the culprit can be a corrupted hidden file called ‘Normal.DOT’. Deleting this file will fix the issue!

What is Normal.DOT? It’s the default template Word uses. Once deleted, it will be recreated by Word– so you do not have to worry about rendering anything unstable.

Description & Steps

One day I leisurely strolled into my office and was greeted with 3 flashing IM’s— all with the problem, “My Outlook freezes whenever I try to reply to a message.”

Now, here is what I understood– none of them had run any updates, all of them had SP3, and none of them had shared a file recently (virus). Here is what they had in common: They all used Word 2003 to reply in their e-mails.

The culprit was obvious.

After unchecking ‘Use Word 2003′ the issue no longer presented and they could reply to their hearts content. The bad news is– this isn’t always a solution when a user is used to a certain tool for responding.

I attempted a ‘Repair’ on the Microsoft Office 2003 suite, but it did not work. Also, Word 2003 opened on it’s own outside of Outlook fine.

After a bit of research, I found out the culprit was a hidden file called Normal.DOT located in…

C:\Documents And Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

SIDE TUTORIAL

If you are unfamiliar in how to view a hidden file;

ON XP: click ‘My Computer’ > Tools > Folder Options > View > ‘Show hidden files and folders’ !

ON Vista/7: click ‘Computer’ > ‘Folder and search options’ > View > ‘Show hidden files and folders’ !)

After DELETING the Normal.DOT file, I restarted the PC (because, restarts + windows = hand in hand) and then went back to Outlook, checked it as the default editor — and WAH-LAH … no more problems and the user can utilize Word 2003 to reply to people.

Tidbit: Outlook 2010 does not use NK2 files.

I was recently doing some manual profile migrations (long story) of two machines and despite importing the Local Settings & AppData, a surly user noticed that their autofill on names was not working in the new Outlook 2010.

I was unfortunately unaware the Outlook 2010 does not use NK2 files and often renames them NK2.OLD.

File located: %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook

Of course I was a little annoyed on discovering this, fortunately, there’s a rather easy fix if Outlook 2010 on first run does not import the names (my case). You can easily run …

outlook.exe /importnk2

Problem solved. Although, you have to make sure the profile names are the same. By default, Outlook is the default profile name. You can verify by looking the profile up.

Also, according to an old coworker of mine, the reasoning for the NK2 file is as follows;

daedalus01 : @courtneycotton Your “autocomplete” info (the NK2 data) is stored Exchange server-side in Exch2010, so no need to back it up locally.

RHCSA & RHCE

So, I’ve basically come to a point where I sort of need to decide where I want to focus– and the only thing that’s been of interest to me lately has been Unix based systems.

I want to be a Linux System Administrator. Unfortunately, though I do use a Linux machine, my knowledge is fairly limited having only ever used Windows before my current position. I decided to start out in an attempt to get my RHCSA and RHCE (RHCSA first!). I’m just not sure how to go about it as it’s quite expensive.

You can take the test, or you can pay $2,400 to take a course followed by the exam, which has a significant fail rate (less than 50% first timers pass). So, time to come up with a solid study plan without being able to take a course (sadface?)!

Anyways, dropping these links here for reference:

RHCSA: https://www.redhat.com/certification/rhcsa/

RHCE: http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhcsa/ (RHCSA required.)

Anyone whose been in the same situation have any ideas?

Walkthrough: How to get rid of the “Malware Protection” virus on Windows Vista.

The solution is similar to getting rid of “Windows XP Anti-Virus 2011“, however, this only goes as far as saying it’s similar in that you use our good friend– Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

I tried a few different methods to get rid of this virus– one included a registry fix & rkill, but much to my surprise, the ‘Malware Protection’ virus was able to cancel them out after running, not to mention I had to time it so that I was able to click it BEFORE the program started running, despite it being said that you should run it during. Even then, I tried both ways and Malwarebytes was unable to install each time.

So then I decided to go ahead and try renaming the malwarebytes install to moopies.bat to at least install it. No luck there.  Finally, fed up, I tried the option that seemed least likely to work — ‘Safe Mode with Networking’. Alas, it worked best.

Step 1: Restart your computer. Press ‘F8′ repeatedly like a mad person until the options for Safe Mode — With Networking‘ pop up.

Step 2: Install Malwarebytes. I, personally, have it on a CD. I navigated to the D;/ drive and opened it. I double clicked ‘mbam-setup.exe’ and allowed it to install. Leave the default settings! After the Install, I was prompted to update to the latest definitions– YOU MUST UPDATE TO THE LATEST DEFINITIONS.  So allow it to do so and follow the steps, it might even prompt you to “install” again. Just follow the prompts.

Step 3: Run a “Quick Scan”. After the scan has finished, you will noticed in red the # of infections found. On this same screen, click “Show Results“. There will now be an option on the screen to “Remove Selected”. Make sure all are selected and click ”Remove Selected“.  You will then be prompted to restart– allow it to do so and restart as normal. Do not go back into Safe Mode.

Step 3: The nasty virus should not be there. However, it is crucial that you run another ‘FULL SCAN’ with Malwarebytes. For double protection? I also ran AVG Free after Malwarebytes to give myself multiple databases to pull from.

That should pretty much take care of this virus. As always, be careful of what files you download and if you ever see anything that says “It’s found a virus!” — DO NOT click OK.

Question: “Does Windows 7 do strict-order DNS?”

Answer: Yes.

Straight from the help file:

“DNS server addresses, in order of use lists the DNS servers by IP address that this computer queries to resolve DNS domain names used on this computer. DNS servers are queried in the order in which they are listed here. The local setting is used only if the associated Group Policy is disabled or unspecified.”

Status

So, I haven’t written lately. I’ve decided to go ahead and break the silence…

I have spent most of my time racking servers, conquering failed drives in the data center, ordering replacement parts, fighting with a often used scanner, and answering the random questions thrown my way by users in my environment. Outlook 2003 is the bane of my existence, thanks Microsoft.

I will have some exciting updates here in the future! For one thing, I’m going to be doing an SCCM installation as well as a Windows 7/Office 2010 migration! We’re just backing things up while I get ready to toss VMWare on a server and cut it into darling VMs for the new Active Directory I’m spinning up as well. I will also post a guide detailing how I get AD to work with a SAMBA File/Print server.

As I learn Linux, I’ll also be posting Linux tidbits here. For instance, how to get flash installed on both Mozilla and Chrome on Fedora 14– because as I’ve discovered in Linux, you can never, ever, ever, ever, ever do anything the easy way. I’ve also discovered that one people post fixes on how to do things in Linux, you have to take multiple solutions to get the right fix. I’ll post them all in one place so you don’t have to do one billion (exaggeration much?) difference searches to get the right answer you’re looking for. It also doesn’t help that people post answers that assume you know Linux — because it’s not as easy as people make it out to be, command line never is.

Also, to keep this blog a little more interesting,  I’m going to be posting some other tidbits that I find amusing — comics (I love the Oatmeal), new technologies, etc.

Just wanted to let the people who read this blog know I’m not dead or abandoning it! I’ve just been busy with the whole new job thing and all of the above!

Walkthrough: How to get rid of “Windows XP Security 2011 Malware”!

I recently came across a nasty little virus called “Windows XP Security 2011″ in my line of IT Support. The symptoms of this virus are noticeable, starting with a frequent pop up from your “security center” and “anti-virus” about how malware has been detected and you should run it! Meanwhile, the trojan is actually on your machine and it doesn’t allow you to connect to the internet, then it doesn’t allow you to run certain .exes (specifically your spyware/malware, anti-virus exes) and it has control over any/all processes because the virus is a tree-type trojan.

Yes! I believe you! You look safe and comforting and warm, let me click you ...

It’s hell– really. The first time I saw it I ended up reformatting, but that same day another person got the virus who was off-site (relieved it wasn’t a network jumper). I stumbled upon this guide and it worked like a charm: http://itechlog.com/security/2011/04/06/removing-the-windows-xp-security-2011-malware/

I found this virus to be incredibly hard to remove manually and failed — as the file gives itself a random name in several different folders (usually located in your Application Settings). I never found it.

Things you will need: You will need a second computer to be able to eliminate this virus and you will need to have a CD/DVD to burn these files to.

Step 1: Disconnect your Ethernet cable from the back of your computer, or make sure to Disable your wireless card/ethernet card. The virus allows for a user to remote desktop into your computer unnoticed, so the faster you remove this threat the better.

Step 2: Download RKILL. This stops the malware process that is occurring. The virus actually has different types of processes, I saw it once as trr.exe and then again as another. The problem is it can mask itself with other processes that are currently running. This is the best way to kill the process when not knowing what it is.  Download here: (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/anti-virus/rkill )

Step 3: Download  xp_exe_fix.reg ( you can read more about it here ) (you can also right click – save as on the xp_exe_fix.reg link, but for safety purposes feel free to go to the actual site) – This will fix your registry and allow you to run an .EXE — like MALWAREBYTES!

Step 4: Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware – it’s a simple and easy to use anti-malware by Malwarebytes. Install and run, it will ask you to update, reconnect the internet and allow it to update, disconnect internet after update is done. Run the full scan. After the Malwarebytes scan finishes, click on “Remove Selected” to remove all malware from your computer.  After removal, reboot as instructed and your computer should be free of the virus. I’d run a second scan with Malwarebytes just to be on the safe side, and I also ran AVG Free Edition 2011 after I had run it a second time for redundancy.

Most of this post is just relaying information from the itechblog that I linked to earlier. I’d be a miserable if I had not found it and it honestly wasn’t easy to find! Hopefully the pingback moves them up in google search.

Things you can do to avoid getting this virus…

  • If you are using Firefox, http://noscript.net/ is a good blocker. (Thanks Matthew Boyd!)
  • If you are using Firefox or Chrome — be sure to have Adblock up and functioning. No accidental clicking that could lead you to an infected site.
  • Don’t accept links from friends that are unprompted. One person got the virus from a friend who had sent them a link through e-mail. Be smart about looking at what the link is BEFORE you click on it because some virus’s will hijack a person’s contact list and send out an automated “viral STD” for you.
  • If you are using Internet Explorer — DON’T! Why don’t you upgrade to Firefox or Chrome and stop living in the past? Here are the links… Firefox and Google Chrome ! (I use Chrome because I <3 Google)!