Tech Support

[Grok]

Do we have a tech support topic on any of the forums?

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I was asked to send a large file to another company.  The file contained data protected from disclosure by law.  All anyone would give me is standard FTP over internet.  Not even SSL.  It was not up for argument, so I encrypted the file using AES and transmitted it to their FTP server.  The key I sent a few days later by email (yes, I know).

So about a week later I get this call from the receiving company's network tech who was tasked with decrypting the file.  Turns out they were running into problems.

First, the file was over 400MB, and the guy was saying he was having trouble decrypting the file through the firewall in the DMZ from his PC behind it.  He seemed lost so I had to tell him to copy the file to his PC first, then decrypt it.  He's like oh, good idea.

Once he gets the encrypted file to his PC, it took nearly an hour to teach him how to copy and paste the key from the email to ABI Coder.  Since he had multiple failed attempts, and was using Outlook, I suspected he was copying rich text or the CRLF at the end, so suggested he copy to notepad first, then copy from there to ABI Coder.  Still failed.

Finally I had to take screenshots and email to him.  As it turns out his email virus scanner removes bitmaps, so I had to save as jpg and send again.  Someone tell me how jpg is any safer than a bitmap.  Both have to be rendered by some code, either of which could have a vulnerability.  Oh well, off topic.

He gets the screenshots and finally unchecks the boxes which I had confirmed were unchecked about 10 times with him earlier.  Now he can rename the file.  So he asked me what to name the file.  I say anything you want, just give it an extension of zip.  (the data is zipped, then encrypted)  This baffles him.

So he runs a test of encrypting and decrypting a small file.  He cant find the file on his system after he encrypts it.  Turns out he barely knows Windows.

On and on and on.  Now I've got their PGP public key and am transmitting the newly encrypted file.  But I don't have any optimism.

Why do companies put such weak people in positions to interface with other companies?  Keep your slow people working on internal projects please.

</rant>

[Grok]

Addendum.  Oh, to verify the big file was correct, I asked him to verify the 32-bit CRC.  He said how?  Told him to zip the file.  Took us 30 more minutes to zip the file in order to check the properties and the CRC.  The CRC matched mine, so we definitely had the same file.  But just getting him to create a zip file with winzip was making me sick.  How can anyone get confused for more than 2 minutes over Winzip???

[iago]

Should have made him use pkzip.  

That guy sounds like a serious headache waiting to happen.

[jigsaw]

You should send him a virus and teach him how to infect his whole network.

[Thing]

Hey, I know the guy that trained him!  It took me 3 days to get this "DNS admin" to make a correct
MX record for a domain.  I think I mentioned this to you in an email, Grok.  By the way, they paid the invoice I sent them.