back to article Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Welcome once again to Monday morning at the coalface, which as Reg readers know is when we publish reader-submitted tales of tech support gone awry under the banner of Who, Me? This week our hero, if that is the appropriate term, is a reader we'll Regomize as "Erik" who works as a network engineer and was once asked to install …

  1. UCAP Silver badge

    Once I was over in Japan witnessing factory acceptance testing on behalf of a client; the testing was for equipment that would provide an inter-site connection across a world-wide set of ground stations (never actually deployed, but that's another story). The testing was scheduled to be conducted over about 1.5 days, with another half day as contingency (I had insisted on that - in my experience, Murphy's Law *loves* acceptance tests).

    Everything went well until about halfway through the afternoon when one of the critical test had failed, badly. Repeated attempts resulted in the same wrong behaviour. As it stood I would have to fail the entire test campaign which would have left the project team with a major loss of face (this is Japan, so loss of face is treated very seriously). I discussed things with the test manager and suggested that I just settle myself into a chair in the corner of the room out of the way while his team tried to sort the problem out. This offer was gratefully received since it would allow them to at least avoid the official black mark that was heading their way.

    By the end of the day the problem had not been resolved and I headed back to the hotel. The next day I came back to site and was greeted with a beaming and still very grateful) test manager; they had found and fixed the problem at about 2:00 am in the morning (it turned out that they had fumbled reconfiguring routers from one mode for testing to another mode, resulting in the router having some form of weird hybrid configuration that could not do anything sensibly). The downside is that the factory doors had been locked at 19:00 so the staff fixing the problem had been locked in and had to sleep on the floor.

    Testing was successfully finished that day using some of the contingency time I had insisted on.

    1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

      Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

      Our university ICT team once proudly wanted to demo the shiny new system they had for keeping track of ALL publications of the university, along with a shiny new search facility. Loads of dignitaries were invited for the event, and a seasoned professor volunteered to be the guinea pig for the demo of the search facility. Search result turned up with about two publications, for a career spanning decades. Cue red faces all round.

      As a rule of thumb, the more people watch, the more likely a demo will fail (dignitaries count double).

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

        Well, the search worked . . .

        1. UCAP Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

          ... for a given definition of "worked"

      2. HorseflySteve

        Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

        This is also as known as Cohen's law:

        "If it can go wrong, it will at the demonstration"

      3. find users who cut cat tail
        Coat

        Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

        > Search result turned up with about two publications, for a career spanning decades.

        I've also met such professors…

      4. NXM

        Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

        That's the Tomorrow's World effect. "Oh. It worked in rehearsals!"

        1. Someone Else Silver badge

          Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

          Demonstrator: "It worked on my machine..."

          Tester: "Yeah, but we're not shipping your machine."

          1. Ribfeast

            Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

            And this is how Docker was born lol

    2. WanderingHaggis
      Coat

      N.B. Aways remember

      Murphy was an optimist

    3. DS999 Silver badge

      Testing was successfully finished that day using some of the contingency time I had insisted on

      The mark of someone experienced in Murphy's Law to ask for, and the mark of someone who has some clout with his boss or client to actually receive.

  2. IanRS

    Firewall configuration

    A long time ago, back when I was a techie instead of an architect, and so doing more interesting work, I had to fix a firewall problem. After investigating, I found that two commands would fix it - the first to remove the problem and the second to configure it correctly. The first also happened to remove remote access.

    Fortunately, I happened to be in the same building at the time.

    1. Flightmode

      Re: Firewall configuration

      Many employers ago, we were having issues with a serial link between two offices (the same link that eventually had a hotel built in the line-of-sight that I've mentioned in a comment here before). The issues usually cleared up after a quick shut/no shut on the router ports, something we had to do every other week or so.

      We'd recently moved the technical staff to new office on the other side of that link. As the link started to act up again, one of our senior hotshots did what he usually did when this happened: He logged on to the router, typed the shutdown command, hit Enter ...and then his face turned from healthy pink to pale to puce in a few seconds. He of course didn't factor into the equation that we'd moved, so he'd shut down the INSIDE of the link, the way he usually did. Though, of course, since we were now on the OUTSIDE of said link, he'd cut himself (and all the rest of the office) off from the network. It wasn't too far (it was line-of-sight, after all) but long enough that he'd have to drive between the sites. That's when I flipped open my Nokia 9000 Communicator, logged onto the Cisco AS5300 via the Nokia's built-in modem, hopped to the router terminating the link and opened the interface back up for him.

      About a month later, I was promoted to senior myself. Not sure that that situation was the triggering factor, but I'm sure it helped.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: Firewall configuration

        The Nokia Communicator. Great piece of kit. On one gig, working on-site, I'd log in in the morning and pick up the local email - it's easy these days to forget that Unix boxes had email between users entirely locally - to review the logs from the overnight jobs.

        I took a day off to attend a meeting to set up a UK user group. A couple of the US group had come over to help sort things out. After the days events we went for an icon. As I hadn't had been in the office to check the emails I did so now. I happened to be setting next to one of the US guys who was greatly interested and shouted to his mate the immortal line "Hey, come and look, he's DBAing his box on his phone!" It's nice to be on the leading edge now and then.

      2. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: Firewall configuration

        My boss tried to get a Nokia 9000 for about a year. They weren't available in the US at all. I remember he wanted one so bad.

    2. Mike007 Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Firewall configuration

      You need to earn at least 10 "oops" badges without needing to explain what happened to become fully qualified to tinker unsupervised.

      I have a warehouse to store my badge collection...

      1. tip pc Silver badge
        Go

        Re: Firewall configuration

        You need to earn at least 10 "oops" badges without needing to explain what happened to become fully qualified to tinker unsupervised.

        if i had a £1k for every one of those moments i'd be able to retire!!

    3. Little Mouse

      Re: Firewall configuration

      A very long time ago - back before I had graduated Uni and my IT career had even begun, I was earning beer money doing evening & night-shifts at a Mobil petrol station across town.

      During my day-time induction no-one had thought to show me how me how to turn the outside lights on when it got dark (I mean, obvious, right?) In hindsight, moving a big lever switch to the "Off" position was never going to be the correct choice. In my defence, I was young, stressed, feeling a little bit out of my depth, and the big switch was very compelling...

      I had to wake my boss up at home (No idea why he was asleep - it can't have been later than 22:00), and he did a sterling job of stepping me through the site power-up process from memory. Apparently if I'd left it 5 more minutes before ringing him, the pumps would have lost their internal config and needed re-programming.

      Somehow I kept my job - I even got a reputation for being one of the more reliable members of staff, which might go some way to explaining why you don't see Mobil around any more...

      1. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: Firewall configuration

        > Somehow I kept my job

        Well you DID call and ask for help. That seems to be beyond about 75%[1] of folks these days.

        [1] I think I'm being too optimistic there

    4. Tom 38

      Re: Firewall configuration

      I leave the routers to the professionals, I'm just a bit flipper, but I recall being told a story about a particular (cisco?) router that for certain commands you needed to type multiple commands on the CLI, hit return and know that the first command will lock you out, and hopefully the final command will let you back in. It seemed terrifying!

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Firewall configuration

      >"The first also happened to remove remote access."

      I take any opportunity to point out my favorite Cisco commands:

      #rel in 10

      (Substitute appropriate delay, longer if you'll be faffing around a while, shorter if your shenanigans will attract lots of attention).

      After issuing the command, do the needful.

      Verify life is good (ideally, open a separate connection to the router to verify you can still log on).

      #rel can

      #wri mem

      1. Excused Boots Silver badge

        Re: Firewall configuration

        "Verify life is good (ideally, open a separate connection to the router to verify you can still log on).

        #rel can

        #wri mem”

        In fact you might want to skip the write mem command, just for now - give it a day or two to be (possibly) sure that it all works, and then commit it!

    6. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Firewall configuration

      There's always a way to maintain your access with a temporary "backstop" rule you put in first, then make the changes that would otherwise block your access, then remove your backstop rule.

      So after you do your fix, there's that moment of uncertainty around whether your "fix" really worked. Ideally you have some other way to check that first, but if not you'll find out when you remove your backstop based on whether you get a prompt back!

  3. Tim99 Silver badge
    Facepalm

    As I get older, this sort of thing is happening more often. I have noticed that the "onosecond" : [wordsense] is now more like an onominute.

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Especially in those fast cloud(s) it is never a second, always a minute.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Ely

      See "Ely"

      (Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams / John Lloyd)

      https://liff.hivemind.net/#E

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    keys

    Years of working in downtown Belfast in the 1980s taught me to always keep my keys on me. There's nothing worse than popping out of the office for a piss, only to hear the evacuation message over the tannoy, and realising that you won't be able to get your car or house keys until whatever it was is resolved.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: keys

      I have that habit too, but once I walked off with the keys to the rack containing all the site's off site routers, some "do not touch under penalty of death" encryption devices (this was an international bank) and other stuff, because I needed to touch the central fibre channel router/switches for the entire datacenter (they were located there because the fiber channel network was extended over OC3 to another datacenter about 50 miles away, so I guess they wanted them close to the off site router) Basically it was the most secure rack in probably the most secure datacenter in Toronto.

      I noticed I still had the keys in my pocket once I got back to my corporate apartment, and I considered whether I really wanted to do a 20+ minute drive back to the site (us consultants on this project had chosen this particular apartment building for its location relative to its proximity to good restaurants, not proximity to the site) just to return the keys that I was told I should absolutely not under any circumstances leave the site with. I figured that since it is almost midnight and I'll be back there in the morning anyway it could probably wait. What are the chances someone else will need access to that rack that night, and that there are no other sets of keys?

      It turned out no one needed access to that rack, and there are other sets of keys, but my taking the keys off site resulted in them having to re-key that cabinet. Something to do with the security requirements around those super secret encryption devices, apparently. I didn't figure that was the time to ask too many questions about exactly what those things did or if they were so important why they didn't rate their own cabinet.

    2. dr.k

      Re: keys

      Undergrad dorm in the 80s in the US -- It was a fact of life that the fire alarm would go off pretty much every Friday night around the time the bars closed. The foreign students were taught to take our passport and keys when running to the nearest exit.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: keys

      "Years of working in downtown Belfast in the 1980s taught me to always keep my keys on me."

      I never understand why people don't keep their keys (and phones) on them when they're not at home but rather set them down somewhere. In particular I've noticed over the years people out in bars putting their phone down on the bar/table in front of themselves and have on not-infrequent occasions watched as their excessive hand gestures have fired their phone onto the floor or they've split coffee/beer on the phone.

      In a related matter, I hate people at work who leave their mobile at their desk and then disappear off for a while - that combined with a partner/parent/stalker who rings them until the phone goes to voicemail and then repeatedly hangs up and tries again is extremely annoying (how annoying depends on the irritation multiplier of the chosen ringtone).

      My solution to repeat offenders has been to place their mobile in an empty mug with a post-it note on the side that says "next time the mug won't be empty!"

      1. Bebu sa Ware
        Coat

        Re: keys

        "next time the mug won't be empty!"

        Perhaps more accurately "next time the mug won't be as empty!"

        When you have lived alone as a stranger in a large city you learn very quickly indeed to keep your crucial keys on your person.

      2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

        Re: keys

        I think if you're in a relationship, then either you or a partner who is in the bar with you, may need to take your keys. Especially car keys if you're more drunk than you should be.

        If you're single, then maybe the hope is that a colleague or other bar customer will ostentatiously pick your keys up and give you a meaningful look and... how often does that ever happen to people like us?

  5. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

    Reminds me of the time I was in the high security part of our offices when our access control server went titsup, so all the fail-secure doors locked, effectively trapping me in a windowless corridor until the server came back online.

    To make matters worse, security at this place went as far as banning mobile phones, so I had no way to communicate with anyone to call for help.

    Still, I got a lot of exercise pacing that corridor for two hours...

    1. KittenHuffer Silver badge

      Did you not get eaten by a Grue?

      1. collinsl Silver badge

        Well as long as it wasn't dark then the Grue shouldn't come out.

    2. Hazmoid
      Stop

      getting stuck with no way out.

      I used to work the early shift for a Stockbrokers based in Perth WA, and we worked East Coast hours, so during summer we needed to be in the office 3 hours before normal people, i.e. the market opened at 10am AEDST so we needed to be in the office before 7am WA time. I would usually get there about 5am, have a shower and catch the elevator to our floor before 5.30 to answer calls from the Eastern States offices if there were any issues.

      One morning, the lift broke down between floors. Fortunately the security staff were on call, and answered the telephone quickly but could not get anyone from the lift company until 8 am so I was stuck in the lift for a few hours. That was ok, I laid down and tried to get some sleep which would have been fine except security kept checking every 15 minutes that I was still ok :( After the first couple of times I told them that I was going nowhere, so they could just call me when the lift maintenance people got there.

      As with any IT person, getting on with building security and maintenance is essential to ensuring that things go well, so we had a running joke about shutting down lifts so that we could have a catnap during the day.

    3. I could be a dog really Silver badge

      In reality, such places should not exist without some means of escape - such as an alarmed emergency exit.

      Think about it, the network has gone due because <something> is on fire, and now you can't escape from the conflagrating building. I imagine that being stuck in such a place while the temperature rises and the air slowly fills with smoke is not a pleasant way to die ... over a period of perhaps an hour or two to contemplate your demise.

      1. rcxb Silver badge

        being stuck in such a place while the temperature rises and the air slowly fills with smoke is not a pleasant way to die

        Is anyone that helpless? I'd have my keys in one hand and large coins in the other, quickly disassembling the door locks, gouging around the latch, hinges, or similar. Even just kicking a wall panel for a couple hours is likely to cause it to fail.

        Besides, fail-secure rooms have standards to meet, such that anything remotely flammable is kept far away, and smoke alarms are actively monitored and will release the locks.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I admire your optimism about the ability to escape. I've worked in places where the result of such efforts would be ... to die tired. Plenty of people die in fires who were not locked in but weren't able to get out, adding locked doors is not going to magically improve those odds. "Fortunately" I think most people in building fires succumb to the effects of smoke before the heat - i.e. they are no longer conscious as their flesh is cooked.

          1. rcxb Silver badge

            Plenty of people die in fires who were not locked in but weren't able to get out

            Yes, but we're specifically talking about the GP's scenario of being aware of a slowly smoldering fire "over a period of perhaps an hour or two". That is not the kind of fire that kills people, except perhaps those with existing severe health or mobility issues.

      2. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

        The doors at the end of the corridors were on maglocks, a shoulder charge would open them in emergency, I thought about it but decided it wasn't a big enough emergency to be worth damaging my shoulder...

  6. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Speaking of losing keys

    While I was eating lunch I watched a woman having an animated phone conversation while she was standing on a sewer grate in the parking lot.

    She was holding her car keys in the other hand... until she shook her fist in anger.

    1. logicalextreme

      Re: Speaking of losing keys

      Ouch. Did that with my mum's car keys once as a bairn. They went down well, but it didn't go down well.

    2. David Hicklin Silver badge

      Re: Speaking of losing keys

      In office one day overhearing a call with a gut to his wife, she had locked the keys in the house....

      "which would be the best window to break to get back in ?!

  7. AustinTX
    Facepalm

    Illuminati Online, Austin TX

    I was on the evening shift with one co-worker, and gone outside for a walk on my break. When I got back to the building I realized I'd left my key card inside. Cell phones were still luxuries, and I didn't own one. There was no security guard (or cameras) so I had no way of getting ahold of anyone.

    Willing to try anything, I hiked about a block to the other side of the complex where there was a 1-story strip mall which physically attached to the side of our 3-story building. Our offices were on the 2nd floor, but the company was mostly in windowless rooms inside. Except that the building had originally been normal offices and they'd decided to put the servers in a room that had once been a nice windowed office.

    I managed to get access to the roof by climbing up a hot, buzzing transformer, and made my way back to the office's server room window. I started making irregular rapping sounds on the glass with my car keys, knowing that even if my co-worker was wearing his headset and couldn't hear me, eventually he would go into the server room to do tape swaps and checklists. Fortunately, he heard me and saw me at the window. He gestured in the direction of the building entrance to let me know he would meet me at the door.

    5 minutes later I was chatting with him while he took the opportunity to have a quick smoke break.

    Guess who ALSO forgot his key?

    He didn't have a phone either. With another 3-4 hours until anyone arrived to relieve our shift, we sort of panicked for a while there. We both had our car keys and thought about driving to another employee's house for help getting back in.

    Fortunately, my co-worker had some knowledge of breaking into offices that I didn't know about. Our building's door was the type where you push a bar to exit, and just touching the bar released the magnetic lock. With a scrap of thin metal stuck through the crack between the doors, we touched the bar, and the door was open! The rest of the evening was quiet, and we hadn't even missed a call.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Illuminati Online, Austin TX

      Well, just because, all of our doors had motion sensors on the inside that unlocked them. And with the gaps in all the doors a slip of paper waving around gained access to everywhere.

    2. Shooter
      Thumb Up

      Re: Illuminati Online, Austin TX

      That legitimately made me laugh out loud!

      1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: Illuminati Online, Austin TX

        Some of the sites I've been recently working on I've needed to regularly go to the front of the counter and back to the back of the counter. You enter the back office area via Star Trek "shwup!" doors that only open one way. Unless you toss something over the top of the door to activate the sensors. Saves a trek all the way through ther store to the exit and back around to the entrance.

  8. chivo243 Silver badge
    Go

    Just locked in

    Not me, but a colleague at a school where I worked long ago got locked in one night. He was a counsellor, and was doing his masters. One afternoon, he took a nap, a long nap, and slept past the announcement that the building was closing 9pm. He was forced to exit via a window, shimmy a few meters on a ledge and down one story on a drain pipe. He also picked the path of least embarrassment...

  9. dave 76

    late night operator

    I was working as a night shift operator and running backups on a Sunday night. I went into the Data Centre to change a tape and realised that I had left my card on the desk outside.

    This particular DC required the swipe card to exit, there was an emergency button but using that would have been difficult to explain.

    Fortunately the "designer" of the DC room hadn't done a complete job, and I was able to climb over the wall as it it only went up to the false ceiling!

  10. Julian Bradfield

    credit card key

    A perfect opportunity to repost a comment from a few years ago:

    A while ago I was at a conference on a Californian university campus, staying in shared dorms, the apartments of which had hotel style card door locks. Late at night, I went out to look for Perseids. As I shut the door, I realized I had the cafeteria card in my hand, not the door card. My roommates were all drinking the night away with their buddies in other rooms.

    Just before resigning myself to a night on the doorstep, I thought, ok, why just try the old credit card trick. Five seconds with the nice flexible cafeteria card, and I was back in...

    Can't imagine how any lock can yield to that these days!

  11. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

    ISDN saved the day..

    Just after Y2K, the company I Orked for was moving to a new premises. All the Right Stuff had been ordered (drinks for the fridges, racks for the computer room and a shiny new packet-switched 2M link).

    Come moving in day, I got a call from BT: "Sorry, our engineer got deployed to another job so he won't be arriving today. But we have turned on the already-installed ISDN30!"

    So we had a choice - tell everyone in the company to unpack their stuff, cancel the (very expensive) moving service, persuade our old landlord to let us stay in for the next two weeks or figure out something really quick with the ISDN.

    The landlord was amenable to leaving the ISDN 30 in our old place (he was renovating the property but wasn't touching the comms room and a fistfull of cash was persuasive) so I dug out my Cisco manuals and connected the ISDN30 at the new place to our main router.

    Then worked out how to configure dial-on-demand on the ISDN30 so that it merely bled money, didn't gush it. Drove back to the old place and connected the old ISDN30 to the old router. Defined static routes on each router so that all outbound traffic went through the ISDN30 in the new office, to the ISDN 30 in the old office and out of the packet-switch circuit there.

    And it worked which is remarkable for two reasons: I had a migraine and was (slightly) high on a combination of sumatriptan and co-codamol and seconde, one of my more irritating European colleagues (several came over to assist with the move) kept asking me whether things were ready yet.. To which my response was "no, and the more you ask me, the later it'll be". mI think he had pretensions of "being a manager" [1] and wanted to show how he "could get stuff delivered"

    My manager (reading the situation well because he was a *good* manager) managed to get said irritating colleague to go to the old site to do a final check to ensure that we had not left anything behind.

    By the time he got back, the ISDN30 was live and I could ping the servers in our Paris office (which was where the packet-switch circuit terminated) and the NIS updates were working again.

    At which point my boss sent me home and told me he didn't expect me in the next day (Monday).

    [1] An event that would have seen the rest of the team resign en-masse. Something our managers were well aware of!

  12. Emjay111

    Had a similar cardlock fsck up myself back in 1999 at a well known (4 letter) consumer modem and satellite TV manufacturers site in the North of England. Was asked to work a Saturday, when the place was empty. Between the engineering block and factory floor there was a long interconnecting corridor with swipe access on both ends. During the week, I used this route multiple times without issue, and thought it would be the same on a weekend.

    Not so. Whilst I was able to swipe the door to enter the corridor, I couldn't release the exit door at the other end. Going back to where I came from, the card swipe wouldn't open the door I'd just walked through. I was now trapped in a windowless corridor, on a weekend when the place was deserted. I didn't have a phone on me, so there was no way to call for help. I resorted to banging loudly on the doors at both ends. After some considerable time, a cleaner set me free!

    I did report this as a H&S concern, but I don't think anything was done about it. Presumably whomever programmed the access control system messed up?

  13. jscott69

    Once had a client who on a weekend was having their incoming power upgraded so took the whole building offline for the day. We had UPS's for our kit, but not enough for the whole day.

    The Friday evening I went down on site, got everything powered down, and decided that as I was going to be there all day, with no power and limited connectivity I'd jerry-rig it so the core switch, a single AP and firewall stayed up. Meaning I'd still have connectivity outside.

    Great, so I give the all-clear to the guys the next morning to turn it off and get ready for a long slog of boredom. I fire up Youtube and burn a few hours watching cat videos. Feeling hungry I remember I'd left lunch in the car, so went to try and exit the building. Only to realise that the access control system was down, and wasn't unlocking the doors anymore.....so I'm stuck.

    I gave it till 5PM hoping the power would have been restored again, but still nothing. I can't even make contact with the engineers doing the work anymore either. So am I going to be stuck here all weekend?

    Ended up smashing the emergency button, which just disabled the power to the locks, leaving the site now entirely unprotected!

    Had to fix it all up again by using copious amounts of tape and a plastic card. Meaning the emergency "GTFO" button is now un-usable too.

    Reported it to H&S, and the last time I visited that site over 6 months later, my handy-work was still holding it all together...

  14. my farts clear the room

    There was this one time ......

    I was manager on call and the London NHS trust I worked for was in a partnership with two other much larger NHS trusts.

    We had premises in one of the other trusts' campuses.

    There was a saturday morning generator test which caused a switch to latch. That switch (theirs, not ours) serviced the door access controllers for our floor in their building.

    None of the doors would respond to swipe cards. Every door had a 500 kg pull force maglock. Some doors had emergency overrides that cut the power to the mag locks (the terms "fail safe", "fail secure" and "fail open" are all relevant here) Rooms that didn't normally have human occupants were typically 'fail secure'. Everything that could be poked to gain access was on the secure side of the door.

    To fix the issue, the switch needed to be rebooted or replaced. However the switch was on a UPS which was on a generator backed circuit that also fed critical stuff that could not be shut off by yanking the power.

    The latching event happened at around midday and my on-call engineer had attended site then and was released because we could not fix it and there was nothing he could do.

    The situation was resolved at 6pm by representatives from each affected trust - i.e. all 3 trusts - attending to secure their own equipment whilst a man with an axe fought his way through a fat, hefty, fire door.

    Switch had power yanked and replaced, booted normally. My guy took some photos to show that our kit was not affected and everyone else went home, leaving the estates people for that Trust to reinstate some sort of door.

    Moral of the story is to plan your infrastructure so that you have a way to release imnportant doors - using a key switch above the ceiling tiles that requests a door release (thats logged by the controller) and lets the doors be opened and closed again afterwards.

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