Paul Nicholls Stuff

An Open Letter of Complaint to ITS

As some of you may know, I've been involved in a rather frustrating issue with ITS (The Durham IT Support Service) for over two months now regarding the non-personal accounts that I look after. Basically a non-personal account is like a special account I can use as extra storage etc for use within the JCR. For example we have a vm.jcr account, which hosts the website; a vm.jcr-secretary account which hosts all the important JCR files I have to keep shared as secretary (such as minutes, agendas, the constitution, etc) and a vm-exec account which hosts all kinds of other miscellaneous files, and is used by the JCR Exec to share files between themselves. Each year the accounts have to be re-registered with ITS, to show they are still going to be active, one person must agree to 'maintain' the accounts, and the President must also sign the form to show the person has been authorised to have this extra account by the JCR.

I've worked in IT Support myself, I know it doesn't have to be this way! Annoyed with the lack of progress from ITS in my particular issues, which revolves around them losing my registration forms in the post, I sent this open letter of complain to them earlier, which I'm posting here, a) because its funny and b) because I want to make this complain public... Its a bit long, but worth it (I'd like to think).

Once upon a time a happy member of the Van Mildert College JCR Exec maintained two non-personal accounts for use by the Executive committee, and for hosting important JCR documents they were constitutionally bound to display on the web. Life was good. The college made good use of their two accounts, dvm8jrsc dvm8jcr and everyone was happy.

One day there was an e-mail reminding the students that the accounts would soon expire, and a re-registration form would have to be completed and signed off in order for the accounts to remain active after the end of term. Being a motivated and organised worker, the JCR Secretary dilligently downloaded and completed the forms, had them signed by the JCR President and merrily posted via internal post to the IT Service Desk. Confident everything was going to plan, the JCR Secretary was even pleased to see an e-mail from ITS to one of the accounts, pointing out that as part of reregistration the account would even be upgraded from sendmail to exchange, what a bonus!

All was not well however, and one day after the accounts were expected to expire, the JCR Secretary got an e-mail from ITS saying if the account was not re-registered it would be disabled yesterday. The happy-go-lucky secretary was puzzled how an account could be disabled yesterday and even more puzzled as to why he was even getting a reminder when he'd posted the forms aaaaages ago. He decided, just to be safe, to drop the helpful people at ITS an e-mail and find out what was going on.

A short while later he recieved a rather abrupt reply from ITS, telling him they had never received any renewal forms and as such his accounts would shortly be disabled unless he could produce a valid renewal form. The poor JCR Secretary was dumbfounded, he argued he had definitely sent the forms, and pointed out he was no longer in Durham (since it was by now early in the summer holidays) so getting hold of a new form could be somewhat troublesome. To make the matter worse, he discovered the JCR President was going to be out of the country for the next three weeks and out of reach by e-mail for most of that. He did his best to explain to the somewhat reluctant ITS staff that gettign hold of a new form was going to be a problem. He urged them to keep the account enabled for the time being, since by mid-August he would have no problem producing the mischevious registration form.

ITS weren't happy to play though, they said a registration form signed by a bursar or principle of the college would also suffice, although the JCR Secretary soon discovered that both these college staff as well were unavailable and not able to sign his form. Again he urged ITS to take pity on the situation and leave the account enabled in the short term, it was - after all - displaying a lot of important documents that the JCR were constitutionally bound to display online to its members, if the account was disabled it would not also be an annoyance to him, but potentially problematic to the entire JCR - a body of over 800 students.

After a barrage of e-mails which left the helpless JCR secretary weary from the blunt and unhelpful nature of the replies, he eventually gave up, he would have to wait for the JCR President to return, at which point he could print and sign the forms, scan them into his computer, e-mail them up to the president and have her print, co-sign and post them to ITS. Before resigning himself to this inevitable fate, he decided to make a quick and very important check with ITS - would everything in his accounts be safe? Unfortunately, living in a land far away from normal civilisation he had no fast broadband with which to backup the files himself, he would have to ensure they remained safe on the Durham computer system. ITS were confident though, as long as the forms were sent swiftly his files would be secure! Hurrah! The poor Secretary was also concerned about how he could collect his password, after all he was over 300 miles from the helpdesk, ITS however were quick to the rescue again - making up for past misdemeanours they promised though would be no problem at all to send the new password to his durham e-mail account. Brilliant.

Time went by, and the President returned from a lovely holiday far accross the oceans blue. The patient JCR secretary quickly dispatched his partially-completed registration forms, and was pleased to hear back from the President that she had signed and completed the forms and sent them off to ITS, again making use of the internal mail service. It was a lovely sunny day, and as the ducks and rabbits frolliced around the Van Mildert Lake, a gentle breeze blew through the trees - everything was peaceful and calm. There was nothing to worry about, the forms had been posted away, and after the blunder first time around, surely this time they would be safe.

After a little over a week though, the Secretary was starting to get concerned again. The new term was drawing near and he still didn't have access to either of his accounts, locking him out of access to many of his important files and rendering him unable to get on with his summer work. There had been complaints from the JCR too, minutes of important meetings and other important documents weren't available online. This was starting to become a problem, the President had posted those forms off some time ago now -- what had happened to them?

Still being in a land far far away the Secretary asked the President to check out the situation for him, his previous adventures with ITS hadn't gone too well, maybe a member of staff - with a higher level of authority in these matters would succeed where many before had fallen. The kindly President ventured down to the service desk in search of answers, only to be greeted with more confusion tales. ITS only had record of her sending them one renewal, for the dvm8jrsc account (vm.jcr-secretary), how strange, they had no record of dvm8jcr (vm.jcr-exec). Well this was getting a bit frustrating, both forms had been posted together - how could one have got lost? Well, there was nothing for it, the President gave the Secretary a quick phone call, and jointly they decided the best plan of action was to comple a third renewal form for the vm.jcr-exec account, it would mean the President would have to be the maintainer of the account but ultimately that would cause little woe between the Exec, and in such dire times any compromise had to be worthwhile to get things sorted. The President also learned from the helpdesk that the other account, vm.jcr-secretary had been renewed and was enabled again. Hip Hip Hooray. ITS promised everything would be sorted overnight, in the morning, all these issues would be over and the college JCR could once again sleep peacefully.

Later the next day, the Secretary tried to get into his dvm8jrsc account, but found the password must have been changed for his old details no longer worked - didn't ITS promise to send him a new password? Oh dear, that didn't seem right. Well, at least the links on the website would work again since all his files should be active still in his /public_html/ folder. But what, his web share appeared to be empty? What happened to his hundreds of megabytes of files? This was very strange indeed. What about the exec account (dvm8jcr), he at least had a new username and password for that one - but that too was also empty of files. How strange. Didn't ITS also promise all the files would be restored automatically? How very peculiar. The secretary was starting to lose all hope of this situation ever being resolved, he gave the President a quick call and explained the situaton, she promised that as the sun came up on a new day, she would ride forth to ITS and demand audience with someone who could explain this whole sordid situation.

Sure enough, the sun came up and the President prepared for battle. She rode down to ITS, ready for an engagement of truely terrifying proportions, armed with service desk call IDs she battled bravely with the service desk, demanding explanations. ITS were sneaky though and threw her off the trail by attempting to blame the lack of restored files on 'server upgrades', and gave no explanation for why the Secretary had not been sent new login details nor made any attempt to offer to do so. The president was forced into tactical retreat, and with a distant rumble of thunder in the air she returned up the hill deflated; a storm was brewing.

... Can this story end happily ever after? You decide....the power is in your hands now.