"just a change we rolled out"
Heh, good one. The BOFH basically admits that he's responsible for the situation and manages to get dinner expenses paid to correct his own problem.
Impeccable.
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "What's up with the network?" the Boss asks. "What do you mean?" I ask. "Why's everything so slow?" "By everything you mean what? Our local systems or the internet?" "Our local systems – like email. It's taking ages to update." "That's not local, that's the internet," the PFY …
Only partially-lost them. They presume you're referring to some variant of "Calvinball."
See:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/calvinball20127.jpg%3Fw%3D637%3Fquality%3D90&opi=89978449&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjP56Syq_CGAxW_FTQIHb5sDdkQ5hMIBQ&usg=AOvVaw0kXnjqHSOtZHOJhOsc3xcq
> And at this point... we've lost the Yanks
Yeah, they have an old map, which still shows the Circle Line as an unbroken loop, and they were told to get off four stops after Edgware Road coming from Baker Street.
Mwaaa-haaa-haa (sorry, that just sort of slipped out)
I think it was when Simon introduced the stack model of bosses' brain, namely that they could only keep max two technical terms in mind at the same time. After the third one their brain stack overflowed, and the bosses entered "dummy mode".
I was at a site that had a "slow" network for about 2 years. Tried everything right down to including checking for assorted handbags against fibre connections... The works and nothing helped.
Turned out it was the auditing on a web app that everyone was using. The audit_end query was having to scan the audit table for the audit Id to update the table, hence "slow" network from the users' perspective. Created an audit_end table that just inserted the id and datetime and created a view of both tables for reporting purposes. Blindingly fast network and everyone was happy. .
Sounds to me like that your audit table was a heap when it should have had a clustered index on audit ID, leading to table scans on key lookups, but what do I know?
Your bottleneck there is most likely to be on disk access on your database server, not network, and proper fault analysis would have shown that.
Consultancy fees are payable in beer.
Your post reminds me of the classic Flanders & Swann A Song of Reproduction (YT link).
M.
The only check you would need to do is a few pings that would show you there isn't a network fault, and look at the response time column in the browsers debugger to see that the server is taking ages to respond... At which point "the network" is exonerated and you ask the app developers to fix their broken app. Which would be fixed by adding the missing index to the column that likely should actually be a primary key...
Chatting to a bunch of women I met after a gig in Brixton and we had a competition of who got the most f**ked up on a night out.
One woman from Swansea recalled how after a particularly hedonistic night out in London, she woke up dazed and confused, couldn't work out where she was, couldn't understand the locals so called her mate from a phone box (remember those). Her friend asked for her to get someone on the phone and after a brief conversation was put back on the phone to her friend. "Alice you stupid b*tch, you're in Edinburgh!"
Guy I worked with regaled us with the story of how he got so fucked up on a night out he woke up in a ditch, 12 miles outside the town he had been clubbing in, wearing someone else's clothes.
Which was fortunate as he'd shit himself.
I once woke up in bed, stark naked, two naked women with me and have zero memory of how or indeed what had happened to get me there or after I got there.
Two mates of mine picked up a drunk hitchhiker at Hilton park services. The guy wanted to go to Preston, he fell asleep in their car, they dropped him off in Edinburgh.
On a two week manufacturers course in Nantes, towards the end of the course the instructors took us out on the tour of the bars.
Following morning one of the two scots made it to the hotel breakfast, citing he'd lost his colleague from his branch of our company, after a coffee or three, he went to get the other one out of his hotel room, which against all odds he succeeded in & sat down at the table with eyes & iris's as closely closed as inhumanely possible & while looking like a rabbits pink eye with extreme conjunctivitis. He made a valiant....sorry pathetic effort to function, but opted to spend the day nursing his hangover back in his hotel room.
I'm not sure which one of the two it was, I think the more sober one but he left the group & the bar about 3am, got to the river & headed West towards our hotel, which was unfortunate as our hotel was East once you hit the river, having failed to notice the thinning out of buildings until he hit the city limits 45 minutes later, he clued up & walked back to the hotel, arriving back there at something like 5am.
I'll follow up with the story of the two Swedish guys on the same course (Though they didn't get drunk) they wandered into a very expensive looking neon lit bar near the railway station, failed to notice how scantily clad the ladies were, made a query of drinks & how much that cost, which was somehow translated into they wished to buy a round of drinks for all the whores.
After they got taken for every Franc they had & kept their teeth, the following day was a flurry of phone calls & faxes, that resulted in them being given a cash advance by the manufacturer & that amount charged to their employers.
"So your plan is to walk to Tottenham Court Road and ride the Central line to Ealing Broadway, change to Elizabeth Line and ride that to Slough.""
This is one of the more subtle digs at the boss's intelligence. For non-London-based readers, it should be pointed out that the Elizabeth Line also calls at Tottenham Court Road and takes about 15 mins less to get to Ealing Broadway than the Central Line...
This is utter pedantry however:
your plan is to walk to Tottenham Court Road and ride the Central line to Ealing Broadway, change to Elizabeth Line and ride that to Slough."
[..]
"But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter [...] you're going to avoid the hippies and maybe leg it to Farringdon where you can ride the Elizabeth line direct.
If you're on Oxford Street and walking towards TCR, you're walking East. To get to Farringdon from Oxford Street, you go down Oxford Street, New Oxford Street, High Holborn and then Farringdon. So you cannot go to Farringdon and avoid the hippies without diverting off Oxford Street, and if you're doing that, you might as well go to TCR.
Besides which, you're on Oxford Street walking to TCR, and blocked by hippies so you walk to Farringdon? When Oxford Circus or Bond Street is .. right there.
I once tried using the Network Rail site to check the times of trains from Kings Cross (Harry Potter platform) to Cambridge...
One of the suggested routes was to take Thameslink from Kings X (Thameslink) to Farringdon, take the tube back to Kings X then take a train to Cambridge... luckily this has now been simplified this as they closed the Thameslink station and moved it across the road into the main Kings X station
tfl.gov.uk is a lot better since they included the concept of 'walking'.
Places like Tower Hill, Tower Gateway and Fenchurch St are now considered adjacent despite being on different lines because they are just a short walk apart... much like Bank and Monument have been been depicted for decades (they are linked underground by an endless mazes of passages, all alike)
I'm sure it did, same way Google Maps will route you over a toll road if one is nearby regardless of what it does. Turn onto toll road, travel north 200 miles, get on local access road, travel south 200 miles, arrive at destination. Or, check the avoid tolls button and it says go east 50 feet, arrive at destination. They were hoping to sell 3 tickets for a 1 ticket ride.
Or just a major road. From my house I can get to a nearby location by turning right and then left, in about 3 minutes. Google notoriously would send you to the left for a half mile or so, and right again, and along the slip road onto the three lane ring road, along to the next rather slow and busy exit, bring you off and turn right (roughly a 12 minute, one mile journey) which brings you to a point less than quarter of a mile from where I left home.
Yeah I was trying to figure out if that was an in-joke!
After living in Ealing for ten years it seemed an odd route choice
Always more fun getting on the wrong Piccadilly line train West..
Once had the nightmare of being, well, drunk. No cash. Rang Mrs to say I was on route home, wrong Piccadilly train, phone died, walked for three hours to Acton by mistake. Efff me did I get a row when I got home
Naturally, because I work as a software engineer, I'm deemed an IT expert in all related subject matters.
On this one occasion, my father-in-law who runs his own accounting firm called me in a panic - nothing in his office was working (unreliable internet, email, file shares, printers, the lot).
I head over that evening, and instantly notice that the office has been significantly rearranged. I ask if he's touched any of the IT cabling - knowing full well he _must_ have, and was assured with confidence that he plugged everything back to where it was.
I walk around, trying out a few machines, confirming the reported symptoms. A ping from his iMac to google showed peculiar results, so I began tracing all the cabling.
Eventually I found his desk phone - a VoIP handset provided by his business ISP - with two cables going to the BT Business Hub thing. One port was clearly intended for the LAN, the second to daisy-chain a desktop PC.
I pick up the BT Business Hub, to find it is - as a possible understatement - "alarmingly warm to the touch". The poor little blighter is visibly power-cycling every minute or so too.
I unplug one the rogue cable which introduced an unwholesome ethernet loop (unsurprisingly the BT Hub doesn't provide STP or any such protection) and instantly all returns to a state of normality.
Poor little hub!
Oh the BT business hub, the bane of my existence 2006-2008. I was on the frontline Helldesk for BT business tech support.
I would have just taken the little thing, and put it out of its misery by your favourite method of destruction. (best I heard was as a clay pigeon substitute)
It's more humane than actually using it for its BT anointed job.
To be able to fly solo on network management duties in several large city financial institutions, it is rumoured that you have to complete the challenge of visiting every station on the tube network within a single 18 hour operating period. Only those who can devise a successful travel plan can claim to have "The Knowledge", and be let loose on the insanely complicated layers of networking tech that have built up over aeons.
Ahem.
> "But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter a group of Vegan Crossfit enthusiasts who are in a piano accordion ensemble. After consulting the internet and not being able to find a local gun shop
James Purdey and Sons, bespoke shotguns and hunting rifles; South Audley Street, less than one mile from Oxford Street.
There may be - lesser - establishments closer to hand, but if a gentleman is not willing to take a stroll past Mayfair...
Although, given the details of this sordid tale, one may find Mr Purdey (senior) a tad reluctant to serve at such an hour, at least not without a proper appointment being agreed beforehand.
> Although, given the details of this sordid tale, one may find Mr Purdey (senior) a tad reluctant to serve at such an hour
Mr Purdey (senior) retired in 1858, and his son James (junior) in 1900, so it seems unlikely that either still serves customers of any social standing or degree of intoxication...
A friend was taking the last train home from Brussels Midi to Waterloo, but misread the platform number and caught the wrong train. He woke up in Paris. <LOL> He didn't have his Passport but luckily the French Transport Police believed his story and accepted his Belgian ID card so he just had to sleep 4 hours on a bench in Gare du Nord before they put him on a train back to Brussels Midi from where he could catch the correct train home. Originally left Midi at 00:30 and arrived home at 11:30. After that night he swore off beers over 7.5%.
As for slow networks, I know of a company that after years of investigation discovered that their "cheap" network installers had fitted CAT3 cable behind the wall sockets. You get what you pay for.
Prior to leaving for work this morning & putting out the bin, I noticed what appears to be my usual curry order on the doorstep.
I wasn't that drunk 4 small cans over 5.5 hours, nothing shows up on CC or food delivery service & my phone was quietly charging all nigh (Or so I thought).
Guess I'm eating Vindaloo tonight.
BoFH
If you cant blind them with science, baffle them with bulshit.
As for PFY's with traffic cones..... I've heard stories from last week about our one and her last weekend of freedom... whatever happens folks.. never go anywhere a hen party is going....
And the wedding is tommorrow at 3pm* so I'll be there in a mourning suit and black tie** and hope Mrs Roach does not catch me chatting up PFY's mom....
*stupid day for a wedding... shortest night of the year
**although turning up in a wedding dress and proclaiming loudly "But Lunk(PFY's beloved)... you promised yourself to me" could be a good laugh...... briefly
Yes, flapping is legitimate telecom term. When it became one I have no idea. Used to just be bouncing, but now there's both bouncing and flapping. It's even used as a symptom when tickets are opened, and this is at multiple companies and not just Level 3.