TRJ Weblog

Here in San Diego, we are still tied to setting proxies to connect our browsers to the internet. I recently switched over to Firefox from Mozilla and have been having intermittent problems connecting to various sites. Most annoying was not being able to connect to blogs.sun.com! In the past, it seemed I could muck around with the settings, then connect to a site, then I would have to reset the proxies to connect to another site. Last week, I was having problems connecting to just about any site, so I opened a Service Desk ticket. I got my first experience with one of the new Service Desk Improvements, where they connect to your session via VNC in order to diagnose and hopefully fix your problem. Service Desk seems to take a lot of flak for just about anything they do or don't do, so I am pleased to report that I was very impressed by this latest effort.

I got a call back from a Technician within two hours of opening my ticket and he quickly explained what I needed to do to set up a VNC session for him to use. He checked my proxy settings and made a couple of changes, then went into my Firefox profile directory and deleted a few files. I wish I could tell you what they were, but I don't remember. He had me try to connect to the sites that were giving me problems and together we verified that everything was working. Total time spent was about 5 minutes. Typically for the type of problem I was having, I would have expected there to have been numerous e-mails and phone calls back and forth with me trying to explain the problem and then hoping the Technician knew what I was talking about, so he could give me something to try, which probably would not work, whereby we would start the process all over again.

This new service is quick and painless and it gives you a chance to give immediate feedback as to whether or not the problem is really fixed. It also clarifies to the Technician that the problem has been fixed and that the ticket can be closed as resolved. Good job!