My wife is wicked smart and uses computers as a tool. She is not a geek but an egghead as she puts it. She is completing her PhD and having her desktop function for MS Word and SPSS is critical.
The Dell OptiPlex GX280 was a great machine when it came out in 2004 but when the Univesity went to Office2007, that little box would huff and puff and try to keep up but the CPU and memory were pegged most of the time. She was on Office2000 but was forced to upgrade. From here on, I will call her system Oliver.
Hello, welcome to Tech Support. How can I help you?
A little about me.... I built a monitoring and operational workflow system for LoudCloud. That system eventually ended up monitoring over 300K physical servers (around 2008ish) after the EDS acquisition.
Ring Ring
Me, "Hi honey. What's up?"
Her, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY COMPUTER!"
Me, "I don't know"
Her, "I CAN'T HAVE THIS. I AM WORKING AND IT JUST FROZE!"
Me, "Honey, I don't know. I will have to take a look when I get home. Maybe you should reboot."
Her, "FINE BUT I WILL LOSE THE LAST HOUR OF WRITTING AND RESEARCH".
This same conversation would happen multiple times a week if not more and one of my jobs was to be the family IT guy.
Suggested fixes
- Buy a new computer (ie. replace Oliver)....
She actually had a strange sense of connection with her lil desktop. She had written her masters thesis and was awarded graduate student of the year during her masters. All on that lil'Puter.
or
- Do what I know, monitor her resources and be proactive.
I have set up and advised on monitoring for systems that generate 100s of millions in revenue a year so why can't I monitor her system? I can...
Materials:
- Ubuntu desktop, CHECK
- VirtualBox, CHECK
- Nagios, CHECK
- Windows SNMP agent, not check :-(
Another annoyance that I'm sure many of my geek brethren have experienced is, "you broke my computer". It seems that when ever there is a patch upgrade I "oversee", something doesn't quite work the same. After a bit of poking and minor tweaking, things usually go back to normal. Now as a policy, I don't touch the wifes computer so if anyhting happens, it's not my fault.
So I search around and found a suggested SNMP agent for her XP system, hello nsclient++. I am not going to go into a ton of configuration details here but basically I looked for CPU sustained usage, memory sustained usage and the event log items for MSOffice specifics.
During one of the "tech-support" sessions I had on Oliver, I installed the agent and sent the community string. Fire up virtual box and run Nagios. Set Nagios to recognize nsclient++ and to poll it as well.
Being proactive!
Now I send myself mail once her CPU/MEM and event log match a few conditions and here is how the conversation goes....
Me, "Hi Honey"
Her, "Hi, I'm working"
Me, "I know. I think you might want to save your work and re-boot. I have a feeling that things are about to lock-up on you."
Her, "Really? Ok, thanks!"
Symptom solved (Part II is problem solved)
