Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project The instructions on what to do at 5:00PM Friday are clear: down tools and prepare to have fun for two days. But as many Register readers are required to remain available to fix things all weekend, our team is commanded to use Fridays for a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that describes dodging danger and …
Barcode readers typically are accepted in areas where cameras and cellphones are forbidden for security reasons.
I've not carried a barcode reader as part of my toolkit, but will starting today! I already have a no-cost-to-me barcode reader - a modified "Cue:Cat".
A large Government organisation commissioned a new, multi-storey building. It had several thousand ethernet sockets and umpteen telephone sockets. The contractor (not BT) for ethernet socket installation labelled every socket with a clear label (produced from a small hand-held printer). The contractor for the telephone sockets was BT who labelled all the sockets with hieroglyphics written with a stubby HB pencil...
I take your XYZZY, and raise you Plugh
and of course
Blast (in the 500 point extended version with the repository).
But make sure you've put the rod with a mark down at the right end of the the repository (not the hot end), and that you've gone to the other end first! (I hope this is not a spoiler for anybody).
I still don't know whether me squandering my computing budget at Uni. after the exams in the summer of '80 to get a perfect 500 out of 500 was the reason for it becoming unavailable on the S370!
At that point it's more (VPN) Tunnels and ( Internet ) Trolls than D&D.
But that's from an era when exploring Internet only required being adventurous... The full plate was not mandatory as it only helped locally, and the rest of the -Internet adventurer kit- wasn't even dreamed. (and pointless)
This is why the gawd/ess(es) invented multicolo(u)r fine-point Sharpies.
Or, in the case of my small server fleet upstairs [1] (two Dell rackmounts and one Supermicro plus 1 Dell tower plus misc networking/UPS/Internet gubbins) a whole packet of small sticky paper labels folded round the cables with the connection details written on the stick-out tab [Proxmox-1, [TrueNAS] etc etc)
And labels on all the mains plugs so that something doesn't get turned off that really should be on!
[1] The one room in the house that has aircon. Also, by complete coincidence, the room my wife uses when working from home..
This is an excellent rule, but one that would have been inapplicable for the part of my tech career that involved pulling cables around--this was the years BCE (Before Cellphone Era). To be fair, a Polaroid camera would have worked, but I never saw one used.
I do remember a long-distance conversation with a customer who had unplugged, then re-plugged wrong. Well, I drew a picture, the customer said. I guess that she could have faxed it to me, but I don't see how that would have helped.
who had unplugged, then re-plugged wrong
Always entertaining to get a call where the first words are "It doesn't work!"
(Customer had 1 PC with an ethernet card so he could print on his home network and a modem card for diallup).
Much unpicking later, turns out that he had unplugged the ethernet and phone cables in order to move the PC and had jammed the phone lead into the ethernet socket and vice-versa (destroying the modem card socket in the process - it didn't fit so he just pushed it harder).
In pushing harder, he'd also cracked the tracks on the motherboard and bent the modem card metal guide so had to replace both of them. He hadn't called me to do it because he know I'd charge for it but instead ended up paying me to set up his new PC and migrate his data across.
>2) No cameras in the datacentres.
"Boss, do we have any Burnt Umber, Carmine Red, or Titanium White gouache paint anywhere? I need to add the finishing touches to my latest masterpiece, 'Still Life With Apples And SGI Irix Rear Panel', and I just can't seem to capture the exciting play of light on the SCSI terminator block..."
Always take a photograph before you start.
Good advice today, but not very practical prior to everyone carrying a camera with them everyone they go. I suppose there were people who brought one of those cameras that spit out the photo and you had to shake it develop, but probably not many.
Back to our story, given that they both knew the WAN was important to the point where the boss was the one who unplugged it, how did neither of them write down what port it was plugged into? Or stuffed a wad of paper the port to 'mark' it? Or simply looked at each other and said "Ok remember the WAN is port 13"
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Or simply looked at each other and said "Ok remember the WAN is port 13"
Or forgotten that the switch that they'd just put in to replace a faulty one had port twinning was set between the socket that the LAN was plugged into and the (fairly slow) internet link..
So, when the LAN crawled to a halt because all the LAN traffic was also trying to go out through the Internet link, no-one gave it a second thought until we went back to see what had happened on the morning when the LAN went on slowdown.
Someone got a rocket for not clearing the switch config when they put it back into stores (not me! I was on servers at that point).
I now use the camera on my phone to take photos of everything before and during any disassembly/disconnection of anything (even the "simple" things). Thankfully I don't have these automatically uploading to a social media account as it would probably only reinforce my family's opinion of me.......
I do the same ... Google automatically copies the photos to the cloud and every so often on my phone I get a "remember the day" alert from photos reminding me of what I was doing the previous year, "on a random Thursday", etc ... their AI hasn't yet managed to collate them in to a "plugs and cables" slideshow yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually did!
Google Photos did once actually make me a slideshow of pictures of my gas meter. (It's in an awkward location, so the easiest way to read it is to take a picture. Also, it seems to record more m³ of gas than the old one recorded ft³ -- I'm really not quite sure how that works, what with a metre being bigger than a foot, but I know better than to ask questions that might wind up costing me more .....)
Umm!
Actually; fewer lines of code, fewer people, fewer cars ... all 'countable'.
Less milk, less sugar, less water ... all 'uncountable'.
Sorry, English teacher in Deutschland for ten years in retirement! (Vee haf vays of making you get it right!)
I'll get my coat.
Hmmm... so, fewer integers, fewer rational fractions, less real numbers, less transcendental numbers?
Countable/uncountable is definitely wrong. Plural/singular at least makes some sense.
But...
English only has one rule: your usage is correct if it leads the people you are attempting to communicate with to understand what you intended them to understand. Fewer/less is a difference manufactured by prescriptivists, which has become somewhat established over many, many years - mainly as a form of elitism. Can anyone suggest any example(s) where using one word or the other actually makes something ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand?
Countables and countables most definitely do exist and are in no way 'elitist'. You and I both use them every day usually without being aware of their usage.
At least, I wasn't aware until, in order to teach English in Germany, I read from cover to cover an extremely sound book by Raymond Murphy. (IMV the English teacher's bible. (Note without a capital letter.))
Simple example: you can use 'a/an' before countables but not (usually) before uncountables. e.g. 'I want an apple' (banana, orange, walnut), but not 'I want a milk' or a rice or a water.
A glass of milk, a bowl of rice, etc.
Unusually, "I'd like a beer." "Pint or half?"
Much too long to to transfer the contetnts here, but may I refer you to the 'English Grammar in Use" 3rd edition (first published in 2004) Units 69 to 71, where all is made clear.
An example I was frequently asked about in Deutschland was the use of the Englsih word 'billion'.
Common usage gives it as 10^9, but I was taught that it means a million millions or 10^12, my dictionary agrees with me.
In Germany a thousand million translates to Milliarde but Millionen is a million millions.
Hence confusion.
My answer was therefore "it depends who you're talking to!"
I think you've misunderstood my comment - which is ironic, given the definition I presented of 'correct English' - if you think I said countable/uncountable nouns don't exist. I said that the distinction between fewer and less is not countable v uncountable. And that the distinction is language-elitist nonsense, which I'll stand by unless anyone can present an example of somewhere ambiguity would be introduced by using one instead of the other.
Incidentally, you aren't wrong about billions. When I was a kid there were still plenty of older books around which said it was 10^12. But it was already being superseded by the common-sense international standard version.
International standard "billion" is 10^12. Do not confuse cultural colonialism with standards.
The rule is really very simple, it's N*6 zeros. Billion is 12, trillion is 18, quadrillion is 24 and so on, NO EXCEPTIONS. (Granted, "million" has the "one" bit very truncated.)
the use of the Englsih word 'billion'.
Common usage gives it as 10^9, but I was taught that it means a million millions or 10^12, my dictionary agrees with me.
It used to be that in English 10⁹ was a milliard and 10¹² a billion, but US usage considers 10⁹ to be a billion and with the general Americanization[sic] of everything even the UK press now uses Billion for 10⁹ .
The short scale (10⁹ = billion) is French, not American. The Americans started using it in the 1700s. The British Government formally adopted it in 1974, making the long scale obsolete in Blighty, despite cries to the contrary. Strangely, the French changed back to the long scale in the early 1960s.
Wiki "Long and short scales" for more than you ever wanted to know on the subject.
"Common usage gives it as 10^9, but I was taught that it means a million millions or 10^12, my dictionary agrees with me.
In Germany a thousand million translates to Milliarde but Millionen is a million millions.
Hence confusion."
Yes, a billion was a million millions until 1974(?) when it was decided the UK should adopt the US definition of a billion, a 1000 millions. I think it was related to the stock markets where billions were being used more and more frequently and having the two largest stock markets in the world (at least at the time) both using the same terminology might reduce any misunderstandings :-) Or it was [in|de]-flation related :-)
Had to do one of these new fangled computer-based training courses on Health & Safety. I was doing fine until I got to the Pedantry section... 'Is this a Risk or Hazard?'
I could see the dangers but, no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't get the necessary 100% pass mark to move on to the next section because I couldn't see the difference between the words (even checking the office dictionary, remember them, didn't help!). I gave up, despite this being a mandatory course and complained about the craziness.
Strangely, the next time I had to take it, that section wasn't included... guess I had been one of many to complain
(English is my native language and, no, I don't need the definitions)
This is your resident pedant speaking.
"Is this a Risk or Hazard?"
Hazard: what can go wrong (fire, electric shock, etc.) and the magnitude/impact of that.
Risk: hazard x probability of the hazard occurring.
So a meteor strike poses an extreme hazard x extremely low probability = low risk
Working on a tall ladder in a gale after imbibing a pint or two poses a high hazard x high probability = very high risk
You can go back to imbibing now -->
(yes, I did get an embarrassingly high mark for my last health and safety exam)
Seriously, understanding hazard, probability and risk does help us think about safety and protecting people. And gives you a tool to explain to box-ticking folk that there is usually no need to wear high-vis inside a building where there aren't any vehicles operating.
Ah, but what if that low risk meteor does strike and search and rescue are trying to find you?
On a more serious note, I know of a case where a charity were giving away a new car as a prize at an outdoor event.
H&S person came over and asked "where is the risk assessment for this car" (that was on display)? They then went
on to claim it was a high risk to the event and would have to have all the fuel and oil drained if it were to stay.
At that point, someone asked a couple of critical questions:
1) Are you going to insist on the same for all of the cars in the car park?
2) Have you ever tried to set fire to a tank of diesel?
We had an unannounced visit by the local council H&S brigade. They arrived fully booted and suited and asked (demanded) to look around the premises.
I was the senior person on site so I took them into our reception area and advised them that if they were to visit our works they would have to go through a safety induction to be aware of the local hazards. I gave them the set documents etc. (we get a lot of visitors so this process is well organised) and went through the potential hazards in some detail.... They were stifled in their kit (boots, high-viz trousers and jacket, glasses, hard-hats, gloves) but didn't want to lose face by relaxing.
Finally, I gave them 'Visitors' badges which they had difficulty hanging around the neck..... Just before walking around, I advised them that their hard-hats had been superseded by a more recent design and they should consider updating.....
Anyway, we had a good walk around and as they were about to leave they demanded to see our 'Waste Disposal Certificates'. You could see their glee, thinking "We've got them here". So we went to the person who dealt with that sort of thing and presented the full certification.
We later received a letter from the Council saying that "On this occasion we found no infringements". Miserable gits. You would think they might have said "Well done. Keep it up."
It was a Friday ---->
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Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.
I was more surprised that I had to go on to explain what the Greater-then and Less-than symbols were and how to find them on the keyboard! Clearly the person on the other end of the phone did not remember school and had never found a use for them or even wondered what those funny looking "almost arrow" symbols were for.
Hmmm I created a motley collection of scripts running of a simple menu.
I called it BATMAN (Bat File Manager).
We had an infected machine come in (Not the one I was working on), team lead comes bursting in saying there's malware on the network on our subnet & there's something called Batman running.
I stated it wasn't malware, just & half my colleagues had been using it for months to ease the setup of machines for certain departments, the true source of the infection was a machine that someone else had plugged in for diagnostics.
Icon - Getting me cape!
There was a shareware program of that name too. It was basically a command.com extension and collection of tiny tools for improving the functionality of .BAT files and general command line usage. I forget exactly what it did, but at least part of it was for easy handling of coloured output and use of the graphics symbols, box drawing etc. A version of Unix curses I guess. Thinking about it, I think a number of the small tools were probably ported or adapted from Unix, but Unix wasn't on my radar back then.
That was Batchman, Shirley?
There were all kinds of small batchfile enhancement programs, ranging from COMMAND.COM replacements (4DOS being perhaps the best) to things like Peter Norton's Batch Enhancer (BE).
Yes, there were a bunch of tools "ported"[0] over from UNIX back then. Probably the best (and best known) is the FOSS Cygwin. MKS Tools, although payware, was also a pretty good option. Most of the rest were written by individuals who had a need for a particular UNIX tool under DOS, wrote it, and then released it as shareware.
The Internet Archive has dozens of ISO images of collections of these utilities, if anyone is interested.
[0] Most weren't strictly ported, they were more semi-functional re-writes, given DOS's limitations.
Back in the days I was working on VME bus hardware, I hated my boss for making me go through the entire chassis, noting down the position of every single DIL switch, jumper & board position before we shipped the kit out.
When we had to swap out a dual port SCSI interface at nearly midnight on the client site, under time pressure and whilst not entirely sure it was a card fault anyway, I was extremely grateful for being able to do a like-for-like, confident that I wasn't introducing an unknown.
Documentation: the hallmark of civilised society ;)
If only everyone had your common sense. When you are back to trying combinations of things to bring back someone else's systems (especially if that someone else was a younger version of yourself) always remember that in real life stressful situations there is always at least one more combination of things you can plug in then is mathematically possible - all the theoretical combinations plus the final one that works (think USB-A superposition).
"That's when the USB fits snugly into the ethernet port, right?"
I had something similar the other day. One of the very few current Lenovo models to still use the rectangular power plugs the look like a thicker USB-A plug. They also fit neatly if a little loosely into the adjacent RJ45 socket on the back. Luckily, designed in a way that there is no way for the contacts to come into any form of congruence :-)
I resent that remark!
When I build a new system to run an application, I write down the steps taken. When it finally works, I do it again. When I can follow the instructions twice in a row, successfully, only then will I save the instructions to my how-to library and consider the server ready for production. Snapshots are lovely, backups are useful, but the ability to recreate an application server from scratch has saved my ass more than once.
> what to do at 5:00PM Friday
In my experience working for a *nix systems supplier, 4:55 on a Friday was the time the phone would ring. On the other end would be panicking techy from one of our OEMs who had spent most of the week trying to set up a system for a client demonstration first thing on Monday morning.
They would alway expect us to bail them out, after a week of failure and demands (from their sales rep - sorry: account manager, as they continually reminded us) that we do everything possible to get them working. Including spending the weekend fixing the mess they had got into. Whether we had plans of our own, or not.
Needless to say, none of the management, nor the sales droid (who stood to gain a substantial commission) felt the need for their presence while we toiled. Nor the need to even acknowledge the personal sacrifices made.
As a consequence, all our team would often find themselves engaged in a conference call from about 4p.m. onwards. Discussing the weather, what we were doing on Saturday, where to go for Friday evening drinks and all the other burning issues of the day, that are necessary for a well balanced working experience.
> pay for the pizza* at two hour intervals until its fixed..
The problem is that sets the upper limit on the value of a person's leisure time. One that is a long, long, way below what I was prepared to give up my weekend for. Especially at five minutes notice!
A minimum should be pizza AND the same number of working hours off, in lieu. Plus costs of "relationship management" with partners, family, pets and anyone else that might possibly be inconvenienced or disappointed by a cancelled weekend.
> My other half finds it annoying that I use a sharpie to write on the back of all the mains plugs to identify what's connected to the other end.
See, another reason why the UK 3-pin plug is so much better - plenty of space for a label!
https://www.fastcompany.com/3032807/why-england-has-the-best-wall-sockets-on-earth
That's one, rather dismissive, way of looking at them. You might want to however consider all of the other design features of said plug that aren't related at all to the particular way in which UK homes are wired, because when you look at the design as a complete package and understand just how bloody good it is, then you'll understand why there's so much love for it...
They also solve the problem of preventing a cable of carrying more load than they were designed for (assuming the plug has the correct fuse in it), a bit like the modern USB-C cable which does this with an embedded chip (an idea that Apple started with its Lighting cable for pretty much the same reason).
The good reason was what preceded them: Three different sizes of round-pinned plugs, depending on the current rating. No fuses. That led to rooms having different types of sockets scattered everywhere, often resulting in horribly overloaded circuits with multiple adaptors. We even had pugs (and Y-shaped adaptors) to power appliances from the lighting circuit. Whach an old B&W film and you might spot the lady of the house* doing the ironing with the cable dropping from above.
I am old enough, and lived in a lot of very old houses, to know all of this first hand.
So yes, the square-pinned plug revolutionised our lives and made everything so much safer. Feeling smug for a reason.
* I know. That's just how it was, back in the day.
sockets scattered everywhere
That's a bit of an overstatement - you were lucky if every room had one socket. You might have 15A in a couple of rooms, and a handful of 5A, and that would probably be it - at least in older houses.
Of course, the plugs being unfused meant that each circuit had to have one socket and be wired to it's own fuse. So a lot of cable and fuses if you wanted more than the bare minimum of sockets. With the number of sockets generally provided (or more correctly, required but often not provided by cheapskate builders), the number of point-point radial circuits, and associated MCBs would get "quite significant" - there's a reason you can get triple desk distribution panels, it's because over on the continent they need massive panels with many dozens of breakers.
And while it's "traditional" to use a ring final circuit (RFC) with BS1363 (a.k.a. 13A sockets), it's not essential. These days, there's a bit of a move back to radials - but with each having multiple sockets.
To properly understand, you need to go back to the original "typical" installation. The ideas was that you'd run an RFC round the core of the house - this made it short. Then you would run a spur from some of those sockets to allow you to put a socket at the outer end of a room - the cable for that would be shorter than a run from the fuse board. Thus you got more sockets for less cable.
And all this at a time when copper was in short supply - there was a war on you know !
As mentioned, these days you see more radial circuits. Two radials on a 20A (or better still, 25A) MCB will provide more load capability than one RFC on a 32A MCB. And if you choose sensible routes, will use a tiny bit less cable than the equivalent RFC. There is no correct answer - just different permutations of what factors indicate "best" for a given situation.
And of course, every now and then someone suggests we (all of Europe) converge on just one design of plug & socket. Goes very well until you find multiple countries unwilling to give up a feature they love - we won't give up fused plugs, the French won't give up ..., the Germans won't give up ..., and so you never find a practical design everyone can agree on.
"manages to spill their sippycup onto it."
"sippycups" (as used by supposed adults should be banned. Nothing that comes in a "sippycup" is intended to be sipped! First thing I do is take that stupid bloody lid off the cup! Only spirits are sipped, and they are normally sipped by mature people who know how to sip without using a babies cup to force you to sip it. If you need a baby cup to stop your drink spilling, you are either doing it wrong and need a training course on how to use a cup, mug or glass, or you are in too much of a hurry to stop walking or running while you drink, in which case you need to learn how to prioritise the task of living your life.
</rant> :-D
The form over function battle with the Sharpie..........
Many years ago, a group of us were overnighting at a friend's house. One was looking for a socket to plug in his cassette player (yes, it was that long ago).
Finding a seemingly "useless" plug, he removed it, and left it out overnight.
It was the greenhouse heater (other side of wall) , supposedly protecting a crop of that year's geraniums from a very chilly night.
A very glum look was on the face of the friend's mum later the next day.
Better yet, the actual kettle lead has been stolen to use with a PC or printer and you have to try to find it.
And for out younger readers who may have only experienced modern kettles with leads attached to bases, "old style" kettle leads have similar IEC plug at one end, just like the PC power lead except for one crucial difference. An actual kettle lead is rated for a much higher current and the IEC plug has a notch cut out. It will fit into a PC, and being higher rated, is not an issue. But a PC or printer lead does NOT have the notch so it can't be used in a higher rated appliance such as a kettle. If it's been stolen for another use, you will need to buy a new one or unplug every device using an IEC lead to check for that notch until you find the correct one before making that cup of tea :-) (and no, boiling a mug or cup of water in the microwave is not just cheating, it's gauche!
When I get a device with a wall-wart (plug-mounted power converter), I always label said wall-wart with the name or model number of the device it supplies. Makes it easy when, 5 years later, you're looking for the wart in a box of tangled cables and wall-warts. Also easier when you're looking at the power strip in the wiring closet and trying to figure out which of the seemingly identical black cubes you need to unplug.
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Such was the importance of that WAN that Nina's boss came into the hot aisle and did the deed.
Which was what the job required – but also a problem. Because neither Nina nor the boss noted which port the WAN cable had been connected to.
Very important job! takes two people to ensure done correctly - like a code commit needing approval.
Not important enough to note basic shit like where you unplugged the wire from though?
And now tell me that you REMOVED THE OLD STICKER, labelled the new location, and documented this centrally somewhere OTHER than on the rack?
You did, right?
Also, yes, the suggestion to reprogram the router is dumb. It was working before, it was in one of those ports, it wouldn't take more than a minute or two to find it.
God knows how many routing, etc. rules, port settings, etc. would be affected moving things from one port to another in the heat of the moment.
The label must have meant something - although it is now apparently wrong.
For instance: The WAN was plugged in there; Either the port is faulty, or an unrelated fault arose; The plug was put in a different port, and the router was reconfigured accordingly - and this wasn't documented. In that case, the port labelled WAN may or may not be working, or dead, or even fatal to other equipment.
to do such an operation is to DOCUMENT EVERYTHING FIRST!
Map out the network. Find out what is connected to every d*mn port in every switch. This can be done digitally.
Now, go check every switch physically, and find every cable connected that isn't on the map.
Track those down to where they end (empty office, places where there used to be a printer and so on)
Get rid of those. That should clear out a good chunk of the rats nest, without even requiring a service window.
"It can also e done before the maintenance window so doesn't take any time (except billed time, of course)."
In this case it was the clients data centre. They may not want to pay to have that done and the rats nest may have been inherited for the last lot of contractors. So it will never get done. And we've seen man y stories related on these forums of many miles of redundant copper in building, walls, shafts, under floors and over ceilings, sometimes going back decades. No one will spend the money to remove it partly because "out of site, out of mind", partly because of the risk that a vital cable will be disconnected, but mostly because no one has ever done the calculations to see if the copper value in the cable is more than the cost/risk of removing it :-)
It's for this reason that I like to keep a bunch of non-wired Ethernet couplers handy.
If you pull the cable out... put it into the coupler, plug the coupler where it used to be plugged into.
It's now "disconnected". If you have to move it, because you're rewiring, then... there's a coupler where it used to be. Which you can label.
You can do the same with fibre but it's more tricky - you have to use a fibre coupler AND put a bit of tape over it so that it can't connect.
Similar, but larger scale version from our network manager, when replacing a switch or stack of switches, having spare patch panels with the same number of ports as the switches means you can transpose them off the switch into the panels for safe keeping then replace them in the new switches confident you know which ones go where
A friend told me that they had to dismantle something, replace a component, and rebuild it within a tight time window. Their manager said he would come along and watch the team at work.
They got it all done, but found there were a four screws, and a jumper lead remaining. This caused a major panic as they had 10 minutes to power it on etc.
After a minute the manager said "Good joke - I thought it would be funny to see your reaction when I added four extra screws and a jumper lead"
My friend quietly palmed a screw and said "four - there are only three - we'll need to strip it down and remove that extra screw"
The manager panicked - till my friend said - oh here it is.
They banned the manager from the machine room during maintenance periods
> This sounds like the boss needed educating that plugging ethernet cables into the wrong port is not going to cause explosions (or other less spectacular types of physical damage).
Unless someone was using an "unconventional" PoE implementation (not impossible if analog CCTV, telephony, or the coffee maker was also being patched through the structured cabling).
Changing the configuration to use a different port instead of figuring out which port to use in the known good configuration is stupid. Depending on the environment it might be preferable to get a dump of the working configuration to identify the correct port to use and that might just what the boss was trying to do on the CLI.
Plug and pray will not lead to explosions nor physical damage but it might cause an Intrusion Detection System to raise the alarm and lock down the port or parts of the network. Of course in a setup like that you should notice the team in charge of the IDS of the ongoing maintenance and arrange for someone to be on call to fix any issues with the IDS that might be caused by the maintenance.
"Plug and pray will not lead to explosions nor physical damage but it might cause an Intrusion Detection System to raise the alarm and lock down the port or parts of the network."
One of the universitys I supported had all the switch ports locked down to the MAC address of the device plugged into it in each classroom. The first time I went there to replace a motherboard which naturally had a different MAC address, it locked the port out when I booted up. So I tracked down one of the local techs who explained the "system" to me. I needed to phone their networks people, wait up to 15 mins to get through, identify myself, the PC by serial number and give them the old MAC address and the new MAC address. Except I couldn't always get the old MAC address if the motherboard was dead and labelling wasn't always up to scratch and anyway, it added up to half an hour onto the job, which would be chargeable as "outside of the free warranty terms". So the techs were forced into doing their jobs properly and replaced faulty PCs and took them back to their lab where I could fix and test them on "open" ports.
As an ex-field engineer, anytime I was required to unplug cables on a switch or even worse a shop checkout till base unit that hasn't seen daylight since install, covered in crap and a rats nest of cables, I used decorators masking tape, easy to write on, tough enough for the job. Many times I returned to see it still on some tills years later.
I was escorting an engineer to fix a large IBM system, only to find that the back of the rack it was in was effectively a knitted knot made out of the Fibrechannel, Ethernet, power and KVM console cables.
This was a real problem as the planar that needed to be replaced pulled directly out of the back of the system after removing the PCIe hot-swap cassettes and the Service processor, and was nearly the complete width of the rack enclosure.
I had to sweet talk the engineer down from his initial "I can't work on that!" stance by offering to help him part the cables enough to replace the planar. Credit to him, he did complete the work in adverse conditions. I did offer to take the blame if anything came unplugged, though.
Not sure what to do about properly sorting out the mess! I am actually horrified at what has happened to get the cables into that state. I'm sure it wasn't quite that bad last time I looked at it a few years back.
I blame the management for getting rid of the machine room manager, who would have torn strips off anyone who left that sort of mess after some planned work, but cost reduction seems to be everything nowadays.
all sorts and shapes.
From the good old days of spinning rust (HDDs) not liking industrial sites..
Finally getting p' off with the bosses refusual to give me enough time to do a backup of a dying HDD to sneak back during lunch, plug the laptop into the network port and make a complete copy of the HDD(well our files anyway)
And then the HDD dies the next day and the boss is like "backups backups wheres the backups?"
Now do you think I*
A. was honest about it and said "its ok... I got a snapshot yesterday" or
B. Kept quiet while he went into meltdown mode.
The maintainence guy was ok when he asked for a copy of our files and order was restored to our world............. until the next thing went wrong/blew up/failed/robots went into terminator mode.
*if you picked A , you're a PFY, if you picked B , theres hope for you yet at BoFH training school
One day I saw a tester do a bsod. Not good. Mentioned to it and asked for a USB disk.
I booted to Linux and backed up the whole disk.
The following day a dead hard disk.
Ate company replace the disk.
I mentioned I had a backup.
The operations test manager was very happy
To re-calibrate an ate takes 24 hours.
When I was a cable monkey doing CCTV/Door/Network runs, I used to use masking tape, a sharpie, and cellphone photos.
Saved a lot of time and heartache.
Icon because I was usually able to scoot to the pub after the cleaning crew was done and first (third?) shift was just getting the sheeting lines and VEMAG ballers up.
My solution is to crimp a cable tie in a pair of RJ45 connectors then label them the same number & cut the tie.
you do that for about 10 or so pairs. then as you unplug the first cable, you plug in marker 1 & ditto at the other end. you can then carry on until you run out of pairs, do your tidying/re-cabling for each pair as you go. Then rinse & repeat until done.
DO NOT DISOBEY YOUR BOSS!!
What a great reason to be paid less / overlooked for a promotion / layed off / etc etc etc all the things that women complain about.
I mean, all she's doing is what women always do to men: ignore them, do whatever else anyway, No Means No but Not To Me, etc etc etc.
DO NOT DISOBEY ORDERS. This isn't a military thing, this is: your boss has the authority. You do not. You are expected to do your job: what your boss tells you to do. Suggest might to them, again and again, until they agree, but DO NOT DO IT without their lack-of-objection. (If they haven't told you no, then it's just doing your job and getting things done; if they've said No, like women like to repeat except it's said to them, then No Means No.)
A great example from a higher reply to this article,
"I had to sweet talk the engineer down from his initial "I can't work on that!" stance by offering to help him part the cables enough to replace the planar. Credit to him, he did complete the work in adverse conditions. I did offer to take the blame if anything came unplugged, though."
Neither of them did do anything that he was denied. Great working together, great team-work, great getting things done, great responsibility.
Comparatively, do not idolize this Reg article worker - they did things _wrong_.
I've had two bosses of note.
One boss was very good. He trusted me to do my job and let me get on with it. He would not question my technical knowlegde, but would ask questions like. "What's the impact of this going wrong", or "I wont understand it - but if you explain the problem to me - it may help you solve it"
The other boss was, in my eyes, worse than useless. He thought he was technical (he used to be in tech sales), but knew very little about my area. I was higher level than him. Once he asked me to explain in detail what I was going to do... so I old him. His eyes glazed over. He said I should do what he suggested. I said no, and did not have time to explain, and said I would explain later. He was not happy.
Afterwards my bosses boss came round and said "good job for solving the customer's problem". I explained what happened and my boss said he had heard, but I did the right thing.
It's possible that Nina's boss was being overly concerned with following a correct process for doing service rack maintenance. While it's not a life critical issue, just trying a few plugs until the correct LEDs light up rises to the same level as a Boeing mechanic saying, "Hey! We found a few spare bolts in the bottom of the parts box. Let's see where they fit."
Having the correct process in place provides for the means for some future not-so-smart tech to restore service if they don't know what the lights mean.
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